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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • As someone who’s built his own PCs for years, I’ve never really bothered with a BIOS update.

    Then again, one of the main reasons to update BIOS is to gain support for new CPUs, but I’ve been using Intel which switches to a new socket or chipset every other generation anyway. I’ve almost always had to buy a new motherboard alongside a new CPU.






  • I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the recyclability of plastic. I have several stacks of plastic drink cups from various fast food joints in my kitchen; as much as possible, I try to save up and bundle together similar types of plastic before I throw it in the recycling bin, to try to save some sorting effort. And in doing so, I noticed something.

    The thing is, a lot of single-use plastics have very similar properties. PETE, HDPE, Polypropylene, solid polystyrene, they’re all used to package similar or identical products. I think they’re more or less interchangeable, and the choice of a given plastic for a given application has more to do with cost, availability and the preferences of the product engineer than any specific material properties of the plastic itself. There’s obviously going to be some exceptions, but I think those are going to be few and far between, and a lot of them could be addressed by switching to other materials.

    I think a great first step would be for regulators to encourage/force industries to standardize on one or two types of plastic at most, and eliminate plastics that aren’t worth recycling, like polystyrene. That should reduce the manual labor required by a significant amount once the other plastics are eliminated from the waste stream, and make it feasible to recycle plastics locally instead of shipping them off to a third world country.

    I think companies should be taxed or otherwise penalized for the plastic waste they foist on consumers, because often there’s little choice involved unless you want to boycott a company entirely. If I wanted to eliminate plastic cups from my life, I’d pretty much have to stop getting fast food altogether (yes I know I should probably do that anyway, but that’s beside the point). A tax on bulk purchases of plastic may end up being passed down to consumers, but the revenue could be put towards subsidizing production of more renewable materials.

    I think food stamp programs could be a strong driver for change on this, as they could refuse to cover products that generate excessive waste. With enough warning, there should be enough time for companies to switch their products to be compliant with little disruption to the consumer.


  • Wanting to and actually doing it are two different things.

    The problem is that open source devs also have to be their own project managers, but those two jobs have very different skillsets.

    In regular software development, it’s the PM’s job to deal with the drama, filter the idiocy out and collect concise and actionable user stories, and let the developers just write code.

    In open source, you tend to deal with a lot of entitlement. All kinds of people, who never gave you a dime, come out out of the woodwork to yell at you over every little change. The bigger and farther reaching a project is, the more this happens, and it wears you down. I can only imagine what it’s like working on a huge project like GNOME.

    And the toxicity feeds into itself. Be kurt with one person, and suddenly it gets out that you’re an asshole to users. Then people come in expecting hostility and react defensively to every little comment. And that puts you in the same mindset.

    At the end of the day, you can’t satisfy everyone. Sometimes you gotta figure out how to tell someone their feature request is stupid and you’re not gonna work on it, especially not for free. And a lot of people need to learn to try to fix problems themselves before opening an issue. That’s kind of the whole point of open source.



  • At this point, no. But it’s still incredibly annoying and a little spooky when I’m laying in bed and I see my computer screen light up in the next room when it’s not supposed to.

    It’ll even wake itself from sleep when it wants to update, but it won’t start it automatically, I think because it hits the lock screen.

    I’ll probably try Linux on ir when Windows 10 hits EOL.



  • This only happens when both network connection on the host are active.

    I’m not a networking expert by any means but this seems like a pretty strong hint that it’s a routing issue.

    Check the routing tables on the host? I’d bet that the internet is only reachable on the LAN interface (again, not an expert but one of them has to take priority, right?). I’m guessing that disconnecting the LAN interface changes the routing to go through the WLAN interface instead.

    You could possibly add a static route to work around this: https://libvirt.org/formatnetwork.html#static-routes