• 2 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I think I could find it in me to justify geocide of the Jem’Hadar.

    (Since this is not a Star Trek board: The Jem’Hadar are a genetically engineered race, made by the Dominion. Their purpose is to be ruthless soldiers. They are engineered without emotions, or any care for human-like values, and so they inevitably have no sense of ethics. They are managed in two ways: first, the need for a drug-like protein that only the Dominion can synthesize; and second, a predisposition to recognize the Founders of the Dominion as their slavemasters.)

    But any race, even a race with a proven tendency to be assholes, like the Cardassians, deserves a chance.

    As for Palestinians, it’s not even close. They should obviously be considered innocent civilians. If I were to make inferences about who was the more evil race based on the current war, I would be much more likely to pick Israelis because of their current kill count of civilians.

    But we don’t make such inferences. They’re all humans. They’re way more closely related than Bajorans vs Cardassians. They all evolved on the same planet, are the same species, with a very recent common ancestor. It’s due to their upbringing, education, and circumstances that Hamas and IDF both wish to commit genocide, and it’s due to external funding that IDF has been more successful at it.


  • I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.

    Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.

    I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.

    Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).







  • What do you expect them to say? That they’re proud of this guy? Even though he’s clearly a madman?

    I know IRL gun nuts, and none of them would identify with this person. Also, none of them subscribe to the fallacy/straw-man of a “good guy with a gun”. The ones who carry concealed would remind you that they are carrying for themselves, not for you. If you find an active shooter in a mall, you can count on them… to run away.

    Skillful gun nuts know that shooting defensively is never worth the legal hassle unless it saves your life (or a family member’s life).

    The shooter in this article is nothing like any of the gun nuts I’ve ever met. This shooter is another Kyle Rittenhouse, someone anxious for a chance to kill a person and get away with it under the excuse of defense.







  • Remember that voltage is measured across a pair of wires, so you can’t power the chime with only a single wire. That’s part of what makes this difficult – these doorbell systems only have the bare minimum of wiring in them. Powering the camera and the chime in series with each other is quite difficult. I think a lot of these things just accept the short circuit, and use a battery to power the camera while the button is being held.

    Here is what I was proposing, and I think what ch00f was also proposing. Replace “5VDC power supply” in this diagram with “a full bridge rectifier and a bunch of caps” in their description, and also note that your camera probably requires a well regulated 5VDC supply.


  • The easy way: take your existing wiring. Put an 18VAC to 5VDC power supply in parallel with the pushbutton. Then, the output of that power supply goes to the 5V USB input of your camera setup.

    The downside is that it will reboot the camera every time someone rings the doorbell, because you are shorting across the camera’s power supply.

    You can put a resistor in series with the button to fix this. You will need to find a resistance that’s low enough to still cause the chime to ring, but high enough not to disrupt the camera’s power supply. Maybe start around 20 ohms. If you can’t find a working resistor value, you can change the transformer to a 24V or 36V transformer, but make sure to keep that resistor high enough not to burn out the chime, and make sure your 5VDC power supply can handle the increase in input voltage.


  • This is false. X is not less secure than Wayland. It does have a different security model, which can become insecure if you misuse it. I don’t think people really care about situations where multiple user accounts access the same display.

    In my opinion, the benefits of xdotool far outweigh any benefits gained by Wayland’s security model. It’s impossible to make xdotool in Wayland, because of its security model.




  • This post was kind of a pain to read, with all the reddit links. I had to convert them to old.reddit.com to get them to display properly.

    I think Steam was in the right to remove that one game. “Looks = age” is true for cartoon characters, since they have no biological age. It seems the character was described as 19 in lore, but in Steam’s opinion, they looked like a prepubescent child. Since cartoon child pornography is illegal, they were right to remove it.

    But that other stuff seems to be legal. Cartoon rape porn games are appalling to me, but are probably legal, and should be legal. I agree that people being unable to pay for legal (even if appalling) content is a form of undesirable censorship.

    It’s probably Visa’s fault. They seem like a complete monopoly. I rarely see anyone with a non-Visa credit card. I myself have a Discover card, but I have to have a Visa card too because some merchants don’t accept Discover. Every merchant accepts Visa, and every customer has to have a Visa card. Merchants today are more likely to refuse cash than to refuse Visa.

    Possible solutions:

    1. The libertarian approach: The government needs to remove barriers to entry in making new payment systems. Loosen BSA requirements for smaller payment systems. Require existing banks to interoperate with the design of new payment systems, if their customer requests it.

    2. The socialist approach: The US government could create a payment system. It would be protected by constitutional free speech rules, so legal content couldn’t be blocked.

    3. The moderate approach: Treat Visa like the monopoly that it is. Treat it as a defacto commons, where people are forced to go even if they don’t want to be there. As long as it remains a monopoly, it should be required to carry all legal customers. Even customers selling appalling content, like cartoon rape porn games.