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

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  • No idea, but I put it together from ideas around algorithmic decision making and anarchistic thought. Design a society where you would be happy to be dropped in as a random person and you can’t have massive power and wealth imbalances. As soon as you get rid of the idea that you will be on top you gain the drive for equality and fairness.

    If nobody wants to do a job then people will pay more to not have to do it. In that way people getting paid to do shitty jobs at least get well compensated and that makes the job more attractive, leading to it being less shitty.


  • First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.

    After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.

    If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.


  • There are a bunch of approaches but one I like is to have everyone vote on the relative pay for each role except their own, so customer service doesn’t vote on customer service pay ratio but votes on everything else. Once you have agreed upon relative pay you then take the total budget for pay and divide it among the whole staff according to those ratios. Nobody will vote for the CEO to make 300 times what someone else makes but they will vote for higher pay for jobs they don’t want to have to hire again for, say shitty jobs or complex jobs. This means the hardest to hire for are retained, the ones who make work easier for others are retained, and the ones who are making life hard for others get reduced. It also means nobody will have to feel that they didn’t have a fair shake, they got to vote and voice their opinion but the group has voted. Also, who really feels OK paying someone a pittance? Exactly the type of people who will be pushed out of this type of structure.



  • 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.


  • 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.




  • 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.




  • Australian healthcare is actually pretty amazing. I had endocarditis last year and had two collapsed lungs with my blood oxygen plummeting and no clear reason for the infection. The bacteria ate one of my heart valves so my heart had to do 4 pumps to have the effect of one, pushing my heart rate up to around 140 bpm while sleeping. I was flown from my regional town to the best hospital for the job and had an emergency valve replacement. I was up and walking 2 days later and I was flown home a couple of weeks later. I now take Warfarin and will for the rest of my life, along with a beta blocker. My biggest healthcare costs involved with this whole thing is my monthly medication cost of about $30 from 5 prescriptions including ADHD medications.

    That all said, mental health care is not as good here as it used to be nor as it should be. We had a conservative government for 12 years and they absolutely gutted the mental health care system. They cut funding for extremely effective programs and did some real harm to vulnerable people (if interested look up robodebt). So yes, mental health is not great here. It is way better than in the US or in the UK but it is not in line with best practice research.

    The fact that we can do better does not eliminate how we we do. I didn’t die from something that should have killed me, and this is the second time I have had a really major injury that required surgeries and so on. Well, third technically. Still, I have never paid a cent at the time of use for any medical care and I have paid for the medical care of others with my taxes. Am I coming out ahead of my costs? I hope not to be honest. I hope I have contributed more than I have cost the system because I care what happens to other people. I hope I have paid my way but I will be sure to honestly file my taxes every year knowing the system I am paying in to is the same one that has saved my life. Again. Man I am stupid.