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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I work in individual support under the NDIS in Australia. The NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) is a system that disabled people can access to fund various needs not covered by our medical system. I help one client who has had a stroke with eating and massage, another client with woodworking and metalworking, another with cleaning and organising their house, and really anything else they need.

    It is really flexible and allows us to meet their needs, not what someone else thinks their needs must be.




  • 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.


  • Indeed, it was a really clear case of election interference through the falsification of business records. It is a good result and now we just have to wait and see how people react. Will he beat Biden in the election? Will he be clearly rejected? I hope things end with him not being in office, but no matter what happens he cannot pardon himself for state crimes and if he wins the election and New York sentences him to prison time then there will be a novel set of issues to resolve from there. Ideally he loses, is sentenced to prison, and spends the remainder of his life offline.


  • To be fair, it would only have taken one jury to hang it and worrying about that makes sense. Happily thus has worked out in favour of justice, but it was not a given and people were right to fear that outcome. Hopefully we will see the predicted change in likely voting outcomes from unaffiliated voters and thus can be the end of MAGA over the next couple of election cycles.


  • My understanding is you make fewer but more replicable mistakes. If you use a wire you have to trace it, keep the length consistent for timing reasons, use very consistent soldering technique, and ultimately you have a hard time tracing issues. With a homemade PCB you generally do get what you ask for in terms of circuitry. Traces are the right length, right thickness, right spacing, and if not then the whole board is similarly impacted, so it is obviously broken or not broken. If you mess up your design then you have a problem, but if you did the process right and you have a valid design then it works.

    That all said, homemade PCB is a large time sink and modern PCB manufacture is so cheap and fast it doesn’t make sense to do at home for the most part. You can literally get a complex board faster by ordering it from halfway around the world and having it posted than making it yourself. I would say it is a good learning exercise, not a good manufacturing or prototyping practice.


  • Unfortunately all of the march of evolution images make a really fundamental simplification that most biologists really find annoying. All of these steps along the way are not part of a linear path towards humans, they are organisms in their own right with many descendants and they radiated into many forms at every step along the way. If you replaced just the last little bit with the branches of very close relatives to modern humans you would have a whole bunch of lineages that coexisted and interbred. We didn’t come from Neanderthals, most humans from the African continent have far less Neanderthal than those from Europe, and the same can be said of East Asia with respect to homo erectus and denisovans. It is all a big messy mix and there is no more or less evolved form of human, just different individuals that we group by similarity and time. The current remaining human species is very large and has sufficient mixing that we are compatible but if a population were to get cut off for a few hundred years they would likely drift to the point of being a new species, but we would still be here, so they wouldn’t get a new step, they would be a new branch off our lineage.


  • The payment of hush money would have counted as a campaign contribution regardless of the source. If he paid it personally it would have been reportable. If Cohen paid it it would have been reportable. If a third party paid it it would have been reportable.

    The reason it would have been reportable is because it provided benefit to the campaign. Covering up negative news is a benefit to the campaign, so if he paid it himself it would still have been a campaign contribution he would have to report.

    By covering up the payment he is taking or making a campaign contribution in violation of FEC rules. By suppressing the story of his affair with Stormy Daniels he is contributing to his campaign and failure to disclose makes this a crime.

    The fact that he committed a crime by failing to report a campaign contribution is what makes the payment itself part of a felony rather than a misdemeanor. In New York law they do not have to prove the specific electoral crime itself for this set of falsifications of business records to be related to a felony level crime and therefore felonious. The jury instructions approved by the judge specifically say that the jurors can find that he violated one of several options of law for raising this to a felony.





  • The circular dial in the top middle of your picture adjusts the tension. Some of these require you to push it in to allow movement, others just need more force to turn. Once you have the helmet on your head you reach back and twist the dial FCE one direction to loosen and the other to tighten. It is the same as a welding mask and I prefer to actually hold the helmet very slightly off my head in the middle so it floats using the headband, allowing more air flow. It is much cooler and also the weight is more even around your head rather than rubbing in one place the whole time.



  • I agree with many of these points, but have two thoughts here. First, the same was true of many items being produced in China in the past, but quality control got better and honestly most of the products you can buy for a reasonable price are partly or wholly made in China. Second, Tesla is a good example of a US based company with many of the same issues. Loose panels, door handles that fall off, accelerators that get stuck, and so on. Bad engineering is not only available in Mandarin.

    I hope they can produce a good quality electric car and help accelerate the transition.


  • So I may not be representative of your use case, but I got the steel cap boots for work. I have had bunions before which are caused by pressing in on the side of the big toe, forcing the joint at the side of the ball of the foot to get messed up. When I switched it was a little painful as the toe straightened over time, but it was already sore using other barefoot shoes (Joto soft shoes), so I don’t think it was the shoes making the pain.

    As for weight, for steel caps absolutely not. The rubber on the bottom is less dense and heavy than other boots so they move more freely and weight less. They are also quite soft for all the top parts so it really is up to you how you tie them and how that applies pressure to your foot. Make them tight and it will feel tight, rerun the laces and you can change where it is tight. I tried using elasticated lace replacements for a while on the lower two pairs of holes and it was good, I ended up using the laces to make it more stable but for normal day comfort I would recommend using elastic lace replacements, much less pressure and no tying of laces.



  • I had a psychiatrist for my ADHD who went off the deep end on Q and Trump. It is entirely possible to get a high end degree without critical thinking skills, so seeing someone with at least 10 years of university, medical school, and specialisation in psychiatry going off the deep end is not impossible, just a bit odd to process.

    That said, I think Australians tend to be a little more up front than North Americans, so when someone seems to just spew whatever they are thinking they seem more familiar. That said, someone spewing garbage should not be seen as normal but here we find ourselves I guess.