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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Absolutely. A lot of the time the biggest difficulty with researching something is not even knowing the right terms to search for. Asking a few questions can give you a starting point to know where and how to look.

    And the thing is, I personally hate asking questions on forums and the like. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve done it. I’m very good at digging up answers by myself, and I generally do work better with essays than I do with conversations. But my experience should not be seen as the default, and people shouldn’t be shit on for trying to learn through community rather than through textbooks.


  • So, when you create a virtual machine in KVM, you have the ability to attach a Spice or VNC display to the VM.

    Unlike running VNC inside the virtual machine, what this does it is runs VNC on the host, at a port that you designate (or a randomly assigned port if you don’t designate) and then you can view that by connecting to the host through VNC. For Spice its exactly the same, except you use something like the Remote Viewer application to connect to it.

    As others have mentioned, the easiest way of handling all of this is with Virtual Machine Manager, which integrates its own Spice console and makes everything happen automagically. You can also install Cockpit with the Cockpit-Machines plugin on the host, which gives you a web interface for controlling virtual machines, just like vmware esxi. The display manager on cockpit is pretty rough at the moment though.

    KVM is a very “build it yourself” virtualization solution. I use it extensively, and I love it, but you’ll need to be prepared for a lot of “Oh, KVM doesn’t do that, that’s handled by this program/library/whatever”. It’s definitely not a user friendly toolkit. If you’re looking for a Workstation Player alternative, you may be better off with something like Virtbox (although do try out Virtual Machine Manager first, it’s really slick and for your use case probably solves all the problems I’ve mentioned). If you’re looking for an esxi alternative, maybe look into Proxmox.


  • I’ve been looking for documentation on this but Google search is now so bad that technical documents are completely hidden behind marketing blurbs or LLM generated rubbish.

    Its honestly tragic that people feel the need to put these disclaimers. “Just google it” was always a shitty response to people asking legitimate questions (some people learn better from conversational interaction rather than just reading an essay), but with the slow death of search engines we’re now experiencing, at this point anyone who yells “Just google it” needs to be ejected into the fucking sun.









  • The problem is that his payout, like the rest of his fortune, is in exceedingly overvalued Tesla stock. So using that to finance Twitter means selling, and every time he sells the price takes a hard dip because Tesla investors know they’re standing on a soap bubble and they are extremely nervous about it bursting. Any sudden uptick in sales pressure is liable to cause a small avalanche of investors abandoning ship.

    The process of buying Twitter alone cut his net worth by half because of how much it cratered the Tesla stock price.





  • I’m not sure I fully agree there. I think it’s absolutely accurate to say that Andor didn’t need to be Star Wars. Like, you absolutely could file all the serial numbers off and get a show that works in more or less exactly the same way.

    With that said, I think Andor absolutely benefits from being Star Wars, in a couple of a ways.

    The first is that they can skip all the broad strokes world building. We don’t need the concept of the galactic empire explained to us, or the general structure of how the senate works, and so on. The big pieces are all in place, so they can get straight to the small scale world building instead. This would be a solvable problem if you were creating something new, but its definitely nice that they get to skip straight to the important bits this way.

    The second, bigger benefit (IMO) is the juxtaposition created by the tonal shift. Something that’s very notable about Star Wars is that the tone and the content are often rather at odds with each other. George Lucas is on record as saying that in his mind the Rebellion were the Viet-Cong (with the obvious implication that the Empire is the USA). That’s some fucking heavy shit. Luke’s adoptive parents get brutally murdered by agents of the state, for absolutely no crime at all, and this inspires him to take up with a group of, well, terrorists. I mean, this is literally the same as a young Palestinian joining up with Hamas. Star Wars is about some really, really heavy shit, but it also starts with the line “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” This is a fairy-tale about magic space wizards, but also a story about insurgents blowing up a massive military installation, and eventually performing a coup and assassinating the head of state.

    Over the years, the story around Star Wars has leaned increasingly into the “magic space wizards” side of things. It’s seen as a family friendly property, something for kids to enjoy at Disneyland. The creators of Andor set out to intentionally shock the audience by creating something that leans hard away from that family friendly image. Andor is a fucking dark story, about desperate people adopting brutal methods in the face of brutal oppression.

    And they’re not just doing that for shock value. The point of this is to tell a story about the ways in which we idealise “rebels” in one breath and condemn “terrorists” in another. To many people, Luke is a hero, but that young man who joins up with Hamas is a monster. Reality is complicated and messy. Hamas are a real political group, with a real ideology, and despite the monstrous oppression they face, some of that ideology really sucks. Their targets aren’t “Storm Troopers”, they’re often civilians, or conscripts. On the other hand, many of those conscripts behave in ways far more monstrous than anything the empire is ever depicted as doing.

    Andor is a story about fascism, about the absolute necessity of resisting it, and about the monstrous personal cost that resistance can demand of us. By setting that story against the backdrop of a “family friendly” property I think it really does a lot to drive home the disconnect between our ideals of resistance and the cold, hard reality.




  • Andor is the kind of show where I would literally recommend it to someone who hates Star Wars. It’s just such an incredibly raw, powerful, and vital piece of media. One of the finest works of anti-fascist art I’ve seen in a long time.

    Anyone who hasn’t watched that show is robbing themselves. Moments like “one way out” and Luthen’s “sacrifice” monologue are going to live with me for a long time. Season 2 can’t come soon enough.

    Also B2EMO is the best droid in all of Star Wars (Fun fact; his voice is the puppeteer’s, but it wasn’t supposed to be. They were planning to overdub, but then the guy did such an amazing job on the set that they just gave him the role).


  • In order to buy out Paradox, EA would have to make an offer for their entire existing share float, which would then have to be accepted by the shareholders. This means that they would almost certainly sell their stock at over market value (because why would they accept less?).

    From their point of view, this would be a good thing. So why then would the shareholders allow this project to be cancelled if it was about to net them a huge payout, according to your theory?