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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t think that purity testing people is an attractive method of talking about free software? We should meet people where they are, and besides, if games are good, they’re good. Doom started out as proprietary software and got GPL’d. It’s also cool to think that reverse engineering software, like in the case of OpenMorrowwind, is a thing. Besides, I pirate proprietary software all the time with cracked DRM. The harm is in the restriction of user freedom, not necessarily in the existence of the laws if you view the laws as fake and don’t adhere to them. Let’s talk about cracking DRM and decompiling these games. Let’s talk about modding them. Let’s talk about making servers and playing them online together.







  • Well I look at it like this: I don’t really care that much personally about my friends mundane things, but I do care about mine. I think that there isn’t a reason for them to care about my mundane things, but I enjoy having my mundane things listened to. I like that reciprocity, so I made an effort to listen and ask questions that show I’m engaged in the conversation. I try to express empathy by saying when a situation sounds tough or fun. I have noticed that “showing up” for the conversation is what our friends want a lot of the time, and that’s what we want as well a lot of the time. I have also noticed that after a few sessions of “showing up”, I can actually get engaged and move beyond just showing up. I have a buddy who has a sick grandma, and the first few mentions of her I kinda had the same thoughts, like, I don’t care about this lady, why should I listen. I showed up anyways and it led to some interesting conversation about the nature of mental illness because she was remembering very vivid details from her past and that led to some interesting convos about all that. I think that being able to find the enjoyment in a small talk conversation is definitely a skill, but it is rewarding in both your interpersonal relationships and in learning new things through unexpected exposure to new concepts. As a fellow autist, I’m pretty information driven, but neurotypical people, I think, are more feelings driven. The small talk stuff is super important to them and they put that up front first, I guess to judge your character? I’m not sure why, but I have noticed better interactions after I have engaged in small talk. It really is a trainable skill and when you get good at small talk, it can be enjoyable!








  • What I do is sort the directories and files by size and go largest to smallest. Based on the likely distribution of files sizes, 20% of your files and/or directories will account for 80% of the hard drive space. I usually then choose candidates for deletion and evaluate them, deleting them on the spot or skipping them for this time. I do this until I get the space reduction I want or until I’m sure that I want to keep what is in the largest 20%. After I reach one of the two states: top 20% of files/directories are keepers or I deleted down X GB. This method can be done with any sorting method. For example, by play count or by date added, old to new. Keep going until the top 20% are keepers. The same distribution is likely to apply across all vertical data labels so the filter is generically usable in lots of situations. For example, 20% of car drivers likely get 80% of speeding tickets. We could reduce speeding by 80% by speed limiting these drivers’ cars or by revoking their drivers licenses. Another example is memory hogs in a computer system. The top 20% of memory hogging programs likely account for 80% of used memory in a system. This distribution is called the Pareto principle. The principle is an example of a power law.







  • if is short for input file if is short for output file

    This dd command from the command line is what I use because it is built in and perfectly bare bones for my needs. I like to use the command flag --status=progress to show a status bar while duplicating the data. A word of caution: the dd, or ‘data duplicator’ program is sometimes known as the ‘destroy disk’ program because if you flash the iso file to the wrong disk/drive you can mess up the drive. Use the appropriate level of caution because there is no undo button. You can use the lsblk command to list the block devices on your machine and use the correct device. Quick instructions: use lsblk to list your block devices and locate your flash drive. If the flash drive is mounted (the /sdb/ will have something like /media/files if it is) you can unmount with $umount /path/to/sdb. Once the drive is unmounted you can use the dd program to duplicate the data (iso file) to your drive.