It typically doesn’t. Most countries don’t care about where your ancestors came from. Being fluent in the local language and culture will generally give you a leg up if you already qualify for immigration so I hope your family kept those alive (and not Americanized versions like Irish-Americans wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day). But your ancestry is usually completely irrelevant.

Those genetic test results absolutely don’t mean anything. If you’re culturally American with an American passport, you’re American and that’s it.

Steam tends to have massive issues with permissions for games on NTFS partitions. You might’ve run into that.

And due to social media dominance, the far-right party (AfD) is set to become the strongest power with the next election if things don’t change.

Mind you, that party has been confirmed to be radical by the constitutional protection agency; that assessment has only been temporarily retracted because they got an injunction against it that now needs to be resolved. Court procedure is the only thing keeping them from being recognized as a threat to the democratic order.

The other major parties see no reason to comment on this, especially not the conservatives. Those same conservatives refuse to rule out a cooperation with the AfD, instead wanting to “face them on content”. That means parroting their talking points and then acting surprised when this doesn’t drive voters away from them.

In previous elections I voted for the pan-Europeans who, in a saner world, would be steadily on track towards beating the 5% cutoff. Unfortunately, right now the far-right threat is too big for me not to hold my nose and vote strategically. I’m not happy about that.

But hey, who knows how long that’ll even matter? Like always in such a situation, I expect the AfD to use bullshit delay tactics to stretch that injunction until after the next election, get voted into power, and then kill the investigation. Because rules don’t apply when you have enough backing. And I’m deeply afraid of what they’ll do to the country as the governing party with a conservative lapdog rubber-stamping everything they say.

That’s what happens when you get distracted while posting. Thanks for the correction.

To put in context how much they are driving up demand: OpenAI just bought 40% of the global wafer production from two of the three major RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix. SK Hynix Micron (best known for their Crucial brand) decided to drop out of the consumer market entirely.

Of course the other AI companies are going to try to nail down supply as well. If they get similar deals, 10 € per GB of DDR5 will look cheap.

This will increase the cost of computers, phones, and laptops, both directly and indirectly (e.g. GPUs will also become more expensive; VRAM doesn’t grow on trees). We’re already at a point where Samsung Semiconductors reportedly refused to sell RAM to Samsung Electronics. I fear we might enter into an age of 2000 € basic office PCs and 1000 € mid-tier phones if the AI bubble won’t pop first. Even when it does, the repercussions will be felt for some time.

Not really; mine was eventually too expensive and I only got that model because a) I could get it for cheaper through a leasing arrangement and b) I don’t need to pay for a car.

I must admit, though, that having a belt drive is extremely nice and worth the money. 10/10, top tier bike component.

I read that there are two “waves” of rapid biomolecular aging in the mid-40s and early 60s. Still affects everyone differently and of course a worn-out body will feel that much worse.

In general, though, our bodies start wearing out in our mid-teens, about a decade before we’re even fully grown! High-frequency hearing is one of the first things to suffer. Bodily decline is really a constant companion in our lives; it only becomes noticeable when it starts accelerating.

And don’t feel bad for getting an e-bike. Riding that is still a good workout if you get into the habit of going fast. E-bikes usually have a hard speed cutoff (25 km/h by law where I live); if you want to go faster it’s all you and the motor is just there to give you better acceleration and take the pain out of things like hills or opposing wind.

If you don’t want to go fast, the bike still expects you to put in a certain amount of work. Low-intensity training is still training. Most crucially, getting that bit of assistance might get you to use the bike when you otherwise wouldn’t, turning no exercise into some exercise.

People underestimate the benefits of light exercise. Even brisk walks or relatively leisurely motor-assisted bike rides can absolutely be beneficial if done regularly.

Our brain generally relies on the first system way more than the second, to the point where what we think of as logical decisions are often actually intuitive ones that we then rationalize after the fact using system 2.

This is basically a power saving trick: Rational thinking uses way more energy than intuition.

GUI disk space analyzers are absolutely amazing.

For those who prefer KDE and/or donut graphs, Filelight has you covered.

More specifically, “absolute” refers to being above the law or other oversight. An absolute ruler is not bound by the laws that govern everyone else; being able to rule by decree is a consequence of that as there can be no laws that prevent this.

A good foam pillow under my head, a bit of my blanket between my knees. Sometimes I think about getting one of those knee pillows but so far I haven’t bothered.

I won’t go back to a down-filled pillow. Those will inevitably stop supporting my head during the night.

I wouldn’t say pure rage… They were certainly high energy but not super focused on being angry. This may in part be due to Fred Durst adding major frat boy vibes.

I have no idea what they’re like these days.

Of course it’s more normie. As more people from more diverse communities join, the average becomes more, well, average.

For instance, not everyone who moved over from Reddit is a communist trans furry cybersecurity expert in a chastity belt – some people even somehow manage to be none of those things.

I think there is room for them and there’s even room for them thinking the original crowd is weird. We need to maintain that “weird” is good, though, and that people can just look away if a topic makes then uncomfortable.

It works with .ml and friends – they can spend all day living their understanding of communism and everyone who doesn’t share that understanding can just block them and move on with their lives.

Well, your scenario is about as likely as Cybertrucks becoming the standard platform for technicals…

(My weaksauce scenario is unrealistic but still the best explanation for why the army would need to train shooting at Cybertrucks. Other than, you know, obvious grift.)

Of course realistically this serves no purpose other than transferring some money from the DOD to Musk. But we can try to make up some slightly less depressing explanation…

What if a civil war breaks out and the army isn’t on the side of the fascists?

While moving away from IPv4 isn’t really pressing anymore, there are still avoidable annoyances in v4 land.

Just yesterday a friend and I had a lot of fun getting our laptops to connect to a public network. Why? Because IPv4 doesn’t have many private ranges and not only did the address of their captive portal conflict with the address space of a VPN we’re both in, the address of their DNS server also conflicted with the default address space my friend’s Docker setup operated in.

Figuring that out was a riot.

I run Garuda because it’s a more convenient Arch with most relevant things preinstalled. I wanted a rolling release distro because in my experience traditional distros are stable until you have to do a version upgrade, at which point everything breaks and you’re better off just nuking the root partition and reinstalling from scratch. Rolling release distros have minor breakage all the time but don’t have those situations where you have to fix everything at the same time with a barely working emergency shell.

The AUR is kinda nice as well. It certainly beats having to manually configure/make obscure software myself.

For the desktop I use KDE. I like the traditional desktop approach and I like being able to customize my environment. Also, I disagree with just about every decision the Gnome team has made since GTK3 so sticking to Qt programs where possible suits me fine. I prefer Wayland over X11; it works perfectly fine for me and has shiny new features X11 will never have.

I also have to admit I’m happy with systemd as an init system. I do have hangups over the massive scope creep of the project but the init component is pleasant to work with.

Given that after a long spell of using almost exclusively Windows I came back to desktop Linux only after windows 11 was announced, I’m quite happy with how well everything works. Sure, it’s not without issues but neither is Windows (or macOS for that matter).

I also have Linux running on my home server but that’s just a fire-and-forget CoreNAS installation that I tell to self-update every couple months. It does what it has to with no hassle.

Shared IPv4 addresses are not to deter hosting but because there aren’t enough v4 addresses to go around. Most ISPs will happily give you an entire block of persistent IPv6 addresses but won’t give you a v4 because of address space exhaustion.