smh drawing the noble ground hawk without her feathers

Ironically, as a Linux user, I have a special Windows VM setup that borrows a GPU from my host and so can run games just fine, but with regards to anticheat-protected games (a major reason it exists in the first place), it sees far more use testing games for other people than playing games I actually like. Most of which don’t work, incidentally, as anticheat that blocks Proton tends to also be pretty bad about VMs as well.

Whether this changes with the revelation that Destiny 2 knows when it’s being run in a VM and does not give a shit, we’ll see.

I am not sure how you ethically kill someone who doesn’t want to die.

On principle I don’t object to scavenging, I find it repulsive but just like how if you ate your parents when they died nobody would be hurt per se collecting road kill or something is not unusually cruel. Just creepy and gross given the lack of necessity.

How do you feel about “this animal has to be culled for the good of the ecosystem, and incidentally makes good eating”?

Where I live, Australia, we have the issue that kangaroos have few predators (dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles have to attack in groups to even bring down one (plus both are rare nowadays and prefer to poach farm animals now anyway) and the predators who could have soloed a kangaroo, like thylacoleo, megalania, and quinkana, are all 40000 years extinct, give or take), but they still breed like animals expecting to meet their end to some manner of predator. So in place of the predators that would usually keep their numbers down, hunting quotas are used to keep their numbers at an appropriate level. And as a side effect of this, a large amount of kangaroo meat enters the market, because they’re not exactly small animals and they’re perfectly edible.

We also have issues with feral pigs, rabbits, cats, camels and horses (among other animals, most of which are either too small to eat and/or have horrible fucking toxins in their flesh) that should not be here at all, given the horrific amount of damage they do to the native ecosystem on account of evolving in a far more competitive environment. The end goal is that they all fucking die, so it’s not a totally sustainable business to hunt them for meat, plus the pigs and rabbits are disease-ridden (some of which we gave them in order to achieve the objective of total eradication) and the public has issues with eating cat meat, but we could totally do the same with the camels and horses, at least until the feral populations cease existing.

Okay, source I used was a little out of date (was looking at 2015 numbers, oops), but even the 2022 numbers disagree somewhat. OECD claims 77, CIA claims 78.

That’s very interesting, thank you

Maths understander here, in 2042 they’ll be 60, not 62. Also the average life expectancy in the US is around 77-78 years, i.e. enough of a difference compared to 60 that you could more or less fit (and live to see) a grandkid/great-grandkid’s entire childhood in there.

Although that 79 years figure is Life Expectancy at Birth, in practice it tends to be longer for most surviving adults older than a certain point, mostly because the lower ranges of the chart hit their allotted moment and pass on for whatever reason, leaving the remaining average higher still

Of course, with calculus living rent free in my head rn thanks to the uni course of the same name, I’m wondering what that chart of “current age vs expected remaining age” looks like, and where the point of “ageing faster than your remaining likely time grows” lies

Edit: source turned out to be a little out of date (although they always tend to bicker a little on the exact number), corrected for it

Too much evidence for that, thanks to how many almost complete t. rex skeletons we have + the fact that almost all giant carnivorous dinosaurs had tiny arms. However, there’s a non-zero chance they were fluffy in at least some places, and a high chance they were incredibly fluffy as chicks, given how fluffy one of their close relatives is known to be.

Also they weren’t even the most extreme example of tiny arms

1. not all of us live in countries that have any political influence over Israel, only the US holds their leash, and protesting anywhere else can’t really affect that clusterfuck

2. plenty of awful shit is still going on around the world that needs to be fought, and that doesn’t change just because a worse thing is going on in a very specific part of the world. Climate change, for example, is still happening, still an existential threat to all of humanity, and still needs public protesting to do something about.

Which, living in a country that can’t help Palestine in any diplomatic way, gets a bit annoying when people are regularly protesting about that (and before that, the invasion of Ukraine), while a huge percentage of our country’s electricity still comes from burning fucking coal, we still export large amount of it to the global market, our CO2 emissions per capita manage to be some of the highest in the world, and protests about that could actually do some tangible good, but are a blip in the ocean compared to foreign wars of late. I get the anger at the injustices going on right now, but it’s not anger that can get anything done here

But the more relevant part is that since your Win10 install is on a VM, it can’t do shit on the rest of your system, and the GPU access is just there so that it won’t run as slow as shit when gaming, right?

Pretty much

I tried to look it up, and as far as I understood it, it’s a technique that allows a virtual machine to access a physical GPU directly. I guess that means that even if your VM is elsewhere (a server or wherever) it can still use the GPU you have.

So, to get more technical, there’s a motherboard technology called IOMMU, which was developed for containing malware that has infected device firmware. What Linux has is a kernel module that allows an IOMMU group to be isolated from the host operating system, and connected up to a virtual machine as if it were real hardware. On an expensive motherboard, you get a different IOMMU group for each PCIe lane, each M.2 socket, each cluster of USB ports, etc. On a cheap one, you get one that for each type of device, maybe the PCIe lanes are divided into two groups.

So the fun part, and why we do this, is that when you have two GPUs, in different IOMMU groups, one can remain on host and allow graphics drivers, desktop environment, etc. to remain loaded, while the other can be connected to the VM and used entirely for gaming (theoretically, if you wanted to you could game on both systems at once). Thankfully, cheap, shit secondary GPUs aren’t expensive (was once on a 710, ditched that and its many driver issues for a 1050, and my main remains a 980ti), but setting up the main GPU to switch between proper drivers and “vfio-pci”, the drivers that have to be loaded before the passthrough can occur, can be a pain.

Believing that the moon landing was a hoax, or that dark matter doesn’t exist, is ultimately harmless. The same cannot be said of disagreeing with proven, helpful medical knowledge, in favour of a gut-feeling based alternative that only makes things worse. It is a moral imperative to make you realise you are wrong, or failing that, thoroughly demonstrate it to everyone watching, so your harmful ideas do not spread.

There is something to be said for using squat toilets instead of sitting toilets in public bathrooms, so long as there are properly cleaned sitting toilets for the elderly and disabled (I have seen some shocking disabled public bathrooms over the years)

So, unpacking your worldview here, how do you feel about cancer brought about by smoking, or by prolonged exposure to materials that you know are radioactive and/or carcinogenic? Does that change with the knowledge that processed meat and plastics, things that are impossible to avoid unless you structure your life around limiting exposure to them, are most likely mild carcinogens?

Also, please tell me, regardless of how you classify addiction, that you at least understand that the only evidence-based approach to drugs is decriminalisation. Almost all of the societal ills associated with them are entirely the fault of their possession and sale being crimes. You can’t find safe environments to use them in if they’re illegal, nor can you feel safe seeking medical aid if you’ve taken too high a dose without realising it. If you’re a dealer, you have no regulatory bodies to answer to, and pay no taxes on the money you make. If you’re running organised crime, you’re already sitting on enough of a supply to land you in jail for the rest of your life, and that makes murdering competitors seem like a much more palatable option. And then there’s the developing world. Most of the money this makes ends up back in the hands of rebels, warlords and cartels in the developing world, where they cause untold misery and suffering.

But if you legalise them, that nips most of those problems in the bud. You can publicly admit to using them, feel safe seeking medical aid when you mistakenly take too much, get help from programs designed to end your dependence. The dealers go out of business, replaced by actual stores that pay taxes and follow regulations, like not being able to sell to minors or water down your product to sell more of it. Organised crime loses one of its biggest sources of money overnight, given that their expensive material of unknown origin and purity is suddenly replaced by cheaper material of known origin and purity. The cross-border smuggling also ceases, because what else are you going to find that is illegal, compact, and high in value? Oh, and the developing world can actually benefit from drug production, since the criminal groups will be greatly weakened from the loss of profits, and developed world importers would rather deal with legitimate businesses than violent criminals and rebels.

We learnt this shit a century ago with alcohol, one of the most destructive drugs (even meth would not be as destructive if legalised), why are we still doing it?

So you don’t care that the majority of people who abuse drugs are doing it to self-medicate something, be that pain, depression from the state of their life, or an undiagnosed neurological condition?

(Adderall is just a dilute relative of meth, and so has similar effects on ADHD brains, i.e. makes us more functional. Also, there is research showing that cannabis has a positive effect on autistic brains, which would explain why so many autistic people I know love their greenery. Plus, anecdotes from fellow ADHDers of “I microdose weed because it helps me focus better, and it’s easier to get than legal adderall”)

I’m one of those maniacs who went to the trouble of setting up a GPU passthrough VM instead of dual booting, and I have no intention of switching it from Win10 to Win11. If it gets infected, it can’t do jack or shit to the important parts of my system, and I can either roll back to a snapshot or nuke it.

Once again we see the abled throwing tantrums over the idea of having to suffer a mild discomfort so as to protect the lives of the disabled, especially the immunocompromised.

I have an aunt whose immune system has to be medicated into nonexistence at all times so it doesn’t wreck her body, and she is still fucked up from covid, months after “getting over” it and with multiple vaccine shots beforehand. How many people have you killed or left permanently ill, and never realised, in your selfish ignorance?

If there were any divine justice in this world, idiots like you would be smote with horrible autoimmune diseases or total organ failure, forced to go on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your lives, and live with the same fear you force on others, the fear that any “harmless” disease could be the death of you.

Trans? Tick

Programmer? Tick

Furry? That depends on your definition, does wanting to be a giant snake from the waist down but basically human with some cosmetic additions above the waist make me a furry? (or more specifically a scaly?)

One where the average rent has now eclipsed the average mortgage repayment, and where all we export to the rest of the world is raw resources that are less in demand than ever

I get by fine with Duckduckgo and Ecosia, thank you very much.

Hope you enjoy being laid off when your company eats itself to keep the growth going for just a little longer to please the capitalist parasites known as “shareholders”. You can’t much money from ads when the economy is utterly, utterly in the shitter like it is right now, not nearly as much as you used to. You really think that the average person has the financial leeway to buy luxury goods or pricier options shown in ads when the budget barely covers food, bills, rent and transport costs, and everything they do buy must be the cheapest thing they can get their hands on? Your company, and all other internet companies supported by ads, made a pact with the devil, and now he has come to collect his due. I will enjoy seeing you all go hard into the red.

Still haven’t gotten around to setting one up but I plan to. Speaking of which, recommendations for Wayland screen lockers that can also act as a screensaver?