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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.

    If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.


  • If everyone has the same amount of starting capital it is a fair game assuming both can opt out at any time.

    That said, the house appears to not be able to opt out (they definitely can, you just don’t think about that part), and the house has more capital. For them each time someone plays a round there are only 3 possible outcomes. Half are the player loses, then a quarter are the player wins and plays another round, and lastly a quarter are the player wins and ends the game. The only case where the player wins is option 3, in all other cases, so 75%, the house wins because the next round has another chance to make the player lose directly at a 50/50 chance or play another round.


  • OK, so good, a clear starting point.

    First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.

    The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.

    So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.

    So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.

    Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.

    Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.

    Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.


  • You’ll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.

    1. There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.

    2. Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.

    For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.

    So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.

    Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.

    That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.

    Can you give more detail about your goals?


  • First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.

    After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.

    If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.


  • I have tried both and a bunch of others with a laptop with nVidia and Intel and have had a range of experiences.

    Anything Ubuntu based worked out of the box but any significant deviation from the exact current standard made things less stable. Changing WM/DE was not really possible and troubleshooting was opaque. Snap was also a nightmare of broken packages and bad update processes.

    Manjaro looked really nice and had that lovely Arch flavour, but it is not really Arch, more Arch adjacent. Lots of things work similarly but lots of things break in bad ways. They have had numerous issues with security, bad updates, and general poor practice.

    Pop is cool, I like it, but just not a good fit for me. Cosmic is a great environment but I like to tinker too much and while the team is great and do good work it is just not the same kind of defaults I like.

    EndeavourOS is my current pick. It is Arch with sane defaults. It comes prebuilt with a DE configured, backups using BTRFS snapshots, a handy updater and package management config, some cool apps built in, and it is very performant. The guides for hardware video acceleration worked first time for me which has never happened before, normally that is a major pain and takes a few days to get sorted on a fresh install. Graphics performance is awesome, same with built in OOM protection. That said, make sure you have enough RAM. I had 8gb in my laptop and ended upgrading to 32gb after a number of failed builds and messing around with swap to get things to finish. If you have less than 16gb RAM I would recommend upgrading.

    Whatever you choose, I would recommend trying a few things before settling down. The right fit is right for today and may change, so try things again in the future if you feel uncomfortable. Also do what works for you, not for anyone else. If you don’t like Arch you are not obligated to use it, same with Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. Keep the fun of it and play around, maybe just boot up a few live environments and see if something tickles you. I hear good things about Hannah Montana Linux.


  • Something worth noting is that this is yet another example of how the patriarchy hurts people. She felt that her image on Instagram was so important that she took risks which ultimately lead to her death. She doesn’t have to be an idiot to have this happen, I’ve done tonnes of stupid dangerous stuff in my life and I’m fairly sure everyone else here can think of a few things that could have gone wrong.

    The algorithm of something like Instagram is built around enhancing use of the platform. This is the same fundamental motivation as tobacco companies or gambling companies. Your continued use of the product is essential, even if it is harmful to your health. So they design their product to enhance it’s addictiveness and market to people who are vulnerable, say younger women for example, and boom, revenue.

    Meta has a meaningful hand in this type of situation. The same goes for all the other attention economy companies. Their product doesn’t have to be harmful but it is way more profitable if harm is not a consideration.


  • Root your phone and you can manage which APN is used by tethering. If you can’t do this consider trying a connecting to a VPN before enabling tethering, the connection will on some devices remain active on the normal APN because changing would disconnect the VPN and keeping connected is higher priority than updating the APN. Also USB tethering and WIFI tethering may behave differently.

    In the end this is a good argument for better regulation. When you buy a car they don’t get to extract more money from you because you drive out of state or use it for business. The fact that telecommunications companies have so much power and access to basically monitor what you are doing and bill accordingly is insane. You should pay for a service with a simple and clear contract and all this crap should be made illegal.


  • In the early days the data was fairly clear. We have a new virus which could be of natural origin or lab origin, but the early spread data basically showed two different strains at first jump to humans, suggesting a fairly large number of infected animals in the same area around Wuhan. This is much more consistent with a natural spillover than a lab leak because the differences would take time to accumulate. If you have a virus in a new host it adapts to that host rapidly and changes, so if two separate animals of different species were both infected that would make two different strains with two different spillovers into humans and it happening at almost the same time is not crazy, both animals may have been in the same place and gotten infected at similar times.

    If it were a lab origin it would be identical virus when it jumped over to humans. It would also have been better adapted to humans and not had as much change in humans in the first few months.

    So is it possible it was a lab leak? Yes. Is it more likely than a natural spillover? No, not more likely. Possible, but no specific evidence that makes it reasonable to conclude either than we know for sure what happened or that it was a lab leak. The correct answer here is we don’t know for sure now but regardless of what happened this time we know another event will happen in time and natural spillovers are just as dangerous as lab leaks. We need to have a One Health approach, taking care of humans and also the natural environment and the interplay between them. Having humans living on the edge of wild areas is a recipe for disaster.


  • UBI will cycle in the bottom of the economy.

    When you give a rich person more money they buy assets and increase their wealth, it does not impact their spending activity and has no measurable impact on economic activity.

    When you give a middle income person more money they buy something new or pay down debts. Buying something new stimulates economic activity, but paying down debts is really just another wealth transfer to the banks which are owned by rich people.

    When you give money to low income people they spend it. They have unmet needs and always have something they can spend that money on. That money then generates economic activity.

    Increasing economic activity is what all of the interest rate and inflation talk is about. If you get people spending money that generates activity which increases wages, increases income, and decreases wealth inequality.

    A good example is during the GFC the Australian government gave low income people $750AUD, about $350USD. The prime minister asked people to spend this money rather than save it. People bought a bunch of things, in the people I knew it was mostly TVs and new clothes, things you can put off for ages but benefit from whenever you buy them. All of this purchasing stimulated the economy, leading to Australia being less impacted than almost any other G7 nation. We recovered very quickly and boomed from there.

    If you want a more long term example look at any welfare. If you have extremely poor people they just die. They are underfed, have weak immune systems, and they face imminent death. They can’t access housing so they end up on the street. They have tonnes of inteactions with police and end up in the criminal justice system. They end up having their lives ruined and being purely a drain economically. They suffer.

    If you give them enough money to have housing and food they are not going to be as costly to manage. They won’t require policing, they won’t get sick as often, and they will suffer less. Will this increase the competition for the lowest cost housing? Yes, but the answer to that is to build more housing. Even with the impact to housing cost this will not result in 100% of that payment going to landlords. People don’t pay their whole income for rent, they will buy food and other needs first, so if they are faced with too high a rent cost they will remain unhoused but at least tbey will eat.


  • I have some experience with mental health in Australia and it is pretty dire honestly. There is a constant sense that the staff are concerned first with making sure you don’t hurt yourself because that would be a breach of their duty of care. This unfortunaty made much of the interaction between staff and patients adversarial.

    I am currently entering the individual suppory industry and we have a concept called dignity of risk. You have to remember that people are entitled to take risks that they consider worthwhile regardless of what you think. This means if someone wants to smoke weed that is their choice, I can’t stop them. If they want to drink that is their choice and I have to respect that. This is because they are their own people and have their own autonomy.




  • Yes, it is possible, though fairly prohibitive. You can get modules for connecting a Sim card to your laptop to make and receive calls and SMS, so all the third party authentication messages and calls can be done. Apps can often be run through an emulation layer for Android, not so much for iOS, but yeah, it can mostly be done.

    That said, there are devices like the Pinephone which run a mainline Linux distribution like Arch or Alpine and can also do calls, SMS, and if you are brave use some android apps. If you can use a Pinephone for it then you can use another Linux laptop with a phone module to handle everything else.

    I am much more worried about things like banking now. A bank that allows use of an app on your phone with NFC is great but when they take away using anything else I would become a little more worried. If they can keep an option open, say having standard cards along side phone NFC, then the lock in is much less profound. If we get to a point where they cannot operate without Google or Apple giving the go ahead then they cannot move away if things get bad, so those monopolistic companies can extract more value from those banks and that gets passed down. This applies to tonnes of other services like taxis, food delivery, booking doctors appointments, and so on.


  • Option 1, the vast majority of STI transmission is between m/f sexual partners.

    Option 2, plenty of m/f couples have anal sex so it is either immoral for both or for neither.

    Option 3, not all gay couples have anal sex, plenty just do oral and some don’t even have sex, plenty of ace people out there.

    Option 4, condoms work well and really do prevent the spread of STIs.

    Option 5, what about lesbian sex? They are also homosexual but don’t have penises, so is anal sex not an option for them?

    Option 6, what right do we have to judge other people’s sexual preferences and activities? You are allowed to drink, smoke, and eat unhealthy foods, not to mention people refusing the vaccines for covid and influenza, so even with things that kill a lot of people every year we let you do it, so what makes anal sex for men different?

    Option 7, what about pegging? Can anal in an m/f relationship involve penetration of the male? Is that the same or different to the gay men situation?

    And lastly, option 8, if they get to say gay anal sex is immoral then what stops gay men from saying exercising power over a community based on unsupported claims is immoral? If their specific religion is correct then all others must be someone scamming or lying, so that must be immoral, right? If not, how and why?



  • Before the more modern definition took hold propaganda was not a term that held any real negative connotations. It was really just like marketing or evangelising, a behavior or product which uses various methods to change opinions. The big problem is when you have political or corporate powers using these tools to change opinion about something in a way that degrades democracy or causes harm.

    For example, oil companies stand to benefit from people being uncertain about the science, so when they engage in propaganda they are trying to inject doubt where there is none and to do so in a way that will benefit them in the short term. This will cause massive harm in the future, potentially leading to a significant number of wars and a staggerig death toll, but that is not part of their consideration.

    Another example is alt med. When someone claims that their pill can make your brain work better and will also boost your sexual performance all while protecting you from the dangers they just told you about they obviously stand to benefit from you believing them. They create the need and then offer the solution. Alex Jones is a good example of this. He tells you that the global elite are planning nuclear war, then in the next ad break tells you about iodine for radiation exposure.

    So why is propaganda frowned on? It is more like propaganda is the label we give to marketing or evangelising that we consider worthy of frowning. Someone in another countries may sort different things into evangelising, marketing, and propaganda categories but they will do so based on their understanding of the world and you will likely agree with most of their sorting. Almost everyone thinks that Nazis are bad and put their marketing in the propaganda bucket.


  • It looks like it is downsampling the video or streaming after converting to another codec. Some codecs are fine for decoding on the server but the app may not support them so the server converts them. Some files are of higher quality than what the server is configured to deliver so it downsamples to stream it.

    Check the configuration and look for anything to do with codecs, hardware decoding, streaming quality, and so on. It may also be on the app, so if you can access a different interface then test that to narrow down the issue.


  • Something I have found is missing from both of these suggestions as well as every podcast app on device is transcoding to speed up so it is not sped up on the fly. For a lot of phones and other devices the task of playing back at 2x speed is enough to demand a higher power state than what is required to play a sped up file. For efficiency doing a single pass of speeding up the audio then playing back at that speed would use less power during the playback phase, allowing you to download and speed up all of your podcasts at home while on charge then listen for long periods without completely killing the battery. I have checked with a few if the open source devs and this is not a feature they see utility for so nobody intends to make it.