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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • “In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council at the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their industry would help the state’s overtaxed energy grid; that during energy crises, miners would be one of the few energy customers able to shut off upon request, provided that they were paid in exchange.”

    Incredible. Driving up energy needs to make their fake currency will help the state’s energy grid, because we can then hold the grid hostage until we’re paid.




  • Not really, and no. This shouldn’t affect your already-running system. This change means that the iso will offer plasma by default and will run plasma in the live environment.

    And I wouldn’t say it’s particularly hard to switch from any desktop environment to another. It takes some relearning where stuff is, keyboard shortcuts, etc, but any desktop environment can run any Linux program, provided the necessary libraries are installed (which your package manager takes care of). You can install kde programs on your xfce desktop, and they will run fine (and vice versa). They’ll just pull in a bunch of kde libraries when you install.





  • I haven’t had time to build up a big city, but so far I’ve enjoyed it. I’m running on Linux with a 5600X + 6600XT, and 1080p at medium gets me 30-40 fps.

    I LOVE that roads transmit power and water. Money is way more available early game than in 1. The only annoyance for me so far has been the terrain overlay that comes up when you select a zoning tool (similar to how selecting water pipes switches to underground. You can make it go back to normal by hitting i after selecting the tool. It’s minor, but its an annoying difference from 1.





  • There will be things to learn and unlearn, but modern Linux distros are fairly smooth sailing for basic tasks if your hardware supports Linux well. Laptop support is a little more spotty, where there may be issues with suspend, or the Wi-Fi needing 3rd party drivers, but desktops will probably work without much fuss (and there are plenty of laptops with no issues).

    Gaming has been made much easier thanks to wine and proton, particularly valve’s contributions. For steam games, many of them will just work out of the box or after ticking a checkbox. ProtonDB is invaluable for quickly seeing how well a game will run on Linux.

    But as you’ll see as you read some of the reports on ProtonDB, there will likely be a more troubleshooting than you’re used to on windows. As long as you know how to Google the name of your distro + the problem you’re seeing, you’ll usually find a solution.

    You don’t need to be a terminal master to use Linux nowadays. But most things are easier to explain with terminal commands than with step by step gui instructions, so many guides online will have you use the terminal to some degree.

    Honestly, the best advice I can give is just try it. If you have a spare drive (internal or usb), just go ahead and install Linux to it. If you want to be extra sure you won’t do anything to your existing windows install, remove the windows drive first (or disable it in bios). Then play around with things and see how it feels.



  • It’s possible that a nuclear response would have prevented the ground warfare that dragged on in the war on terror. Possible, in the way that it’s possible that a meteor will land on my head tonight.

    One of the reasons the wars in the Middle East dragged on for so long is that for every terrorist we took out in an attack, multiple more civilians were killed. And every dead civilian potentially creates another person with nothing to lose to turn to terrorism.

    Nuclear weapons are even more indiscriminate, and they have the additional problem of risking alienating basically all of our allies. Plus it drastically changes the nuclear calculus for near peer enemies.

    If we’re willing to launch a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear nation with no ability to threaten us militarily, then why wouldn’t we launch against Russia, China, etc the second we see an opportunity to take them out? That’s what they’d be thinking, anyway, and so their motivation for launching a first strike against us if the opportunity arises goes up dramatically.

    There’s a reason Russia has only talked about nukes in their invasion of Ukraine. They know that actually pulling the nuclear trigger is crossing a line that sets them on a dangerous and irreversible course.




  • Account passwords have never had the purpose of protecting data from physical access - on Linux or any other operating system that I’m aware of. Physical access means an attacker can pull your drive and plug it into their computer, and no operating system can do anything to block access in that scenario, because the os on disk is not running.

    You need disk encryption to protect your data. The trade off is that if you forget the encryption password, your data is unrecoverable by you. But that’s what password managers are for (or just writing it down and putting it in a safe).


  • Depending on what games you played, mac was a decent alternative for gaming. Blizzard treated mac as a first class platform for many years, indie games using multi platform engines often targeted it, and porting studios like aspyr would bring over a few big titles here and there.

    Linux was in a similar boat before proton really opened things up, but with even less support than mac from game devs.