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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume what you said was simply confusing, but not wrong.

    So just to be clear if your raid array fails, and you’re using software raid, you can plug all of the disks into a new machine and use it there. But you can’t just take a single disk out of a raid 5 array, for example, and plug it in and use it as a normal USB hard drive that just had some of the files on it, or something. Even if you built the array using soft-raid.


  • I don’t want to sound like I’m just correcting you for the sake of it, but it’s actually important. Mastodon is the most popular right now, but Mastodon actually wasn’t around at the beginning! Before that was StatusNet, and before that was identi.ca and laconi.ca

    So those services already existed, they were the ones built for federation, and so Mastodon was started as another compatible implementation of an existing network protocol. All of that is to say that Mastodon didn’t need to make the right choices at the beginning, and they have already benefitted from this kind of network dynamic! The system has already worked once!







  • I’m not the person you’re replying to, and I don’t have any videos, but I do love dumping explanation on people! So here’s some terms:

    File System: This is the way data is laid out in terms of actual bytes on the drive. It’s in charge of things like where to look to find the name of this file, or how to “last modified” date is stored, or how do I find out which files are in this folder. NTFS is a filesystem, whereas ext4 is probably the file system your linux machine is using. FAT is the older Windows one that’s still used on, like, SD Cards and stuff. That having been said File System is sometimes also used to refer to the particular data on a particular partition of a disk, like “the filesystem will allow” which really means the data on your NTFS partition. Filesystem is often abbreviated “fs”, and is in fact the “FS” of “NTFS”

    Mounting: In unix systems, such as Linux, file systems are “mounted” to a place in the folder hierarchy. Everything in unix lives somewhere under the “root” folder /, so mounting is basically saying “Okay, you want to see the files in this filesystem. Where should I put them?”, and if you say /home/user/stuff then the file “one.txt” at the root of your filesystem will now be visible at /home/user/stuff/one.txt", and if you mounted it at /mnt/things it would be /mnt/things/one.txt. The term mount is used like “attach” to mean “where do you want me to hang this new directory hierarchy on your existing one”.

    fstab: There are a few ways to mount things in modern linux. The classic is the mount command which looks something like mount /dev/sda1 /home/user/stuff which would take the device with the name /dev/sda1 and mounts it to the given path. Devices in linux usually live in /dev, and in this case are often given names like sda1 to represent the first hard drive (a), and the first partition of that drive (1). But, there are other ways! You can also click on the partition in your file browser and it will mount the disk for you, often auto-creating a mount path and cleaning it up when you’re done, so you don’t even have to think about it. Another way is fstab, which is a kind of config file that controls mounting devices. In here you can give default options for how you want drives to be mounted, and can even specify that you’d like some devices to be automatically mounted by the system on startup. This is actually an important part of how unix systems start, and how the root filesystem and other important ones get going. If you wanted your NTFS drive to always be available at a permanent location, you would edit this file to set that up. If this is something you wanted only periodically, then just clicking may be fine.

    Permissions: Virtually all unix filesystems store the permissions of files and directories as a “user” and “group” that owns the files, and then a set of whether or not the owner can “read” “write” and “execute” the file, whether other members of the group can, and then whether everyone else can. If two people were on the same computer, these would allow a person to be able to see their own documents, but not see the documents by other users. Or maybe they can see them but can’t make changes. And it also prevents random users of a system from changing important system configuration, when those config files are owned by the administrative user (called root by convention). Some config files will be read-only to normal users, and some contain secrets and so are permissioned so normal users can’t even see them. But! NFTS doesn’t follow these same conventions, so when mounting an NTFS drive on unix the driver has to produce a set of permissions that are unix-compatible, but it doesn’t have anything to work off on the disk. So the person above was saying by default it assumes the safest option is to make all files owned by the user root, and so if the permissions are the only the owner can write the files, and the owner is root, this will mean it’s effectively “read-only” to you. The terms uid and gid stand for “user ID” and “group ID”, which are the numbers that represent a user in the data. User names are basically a convenience that allows us to give a name to a uid, but it’s more efficient to store one number everywhere on disk for owner rather than a name.

    So putting it all together, what they’re suggesting is that you can use the /etc/fstab file, which has a very particular format, to specify default options when mounting your drive. These options include setting the uid option and gid option to your user’s uid and gid, so that when the filesystem is mounted, it will appear that all the files are owned by you, so you’ll have full permissions on them. They’ve assumed your uid and gid will be 1000 because that’s a common convention, but if you’re comfortable you can run the id command on the command line to output your actual uid and gid (you can ignore all the other groups your user is in for now)

    They also mentioned that when mounting you can specify if you want to mount the filesystem as “read-only” or “read-write”, etc. If you mount the whole filesystem read-only, then the write permissions stored on the individual files are ignored, basically. So if you were mounting with a command, or through fstab, you should make sure the rw option is present to clarify that you’re looking for “read write” permissions on your mount.

    That having been said, it’s possible none of that is relevant to you if you’re mounting the fs by just clicking in your file browser. One way to tell is if you right-click on some file you aren’t allowed to edit and look at the properties there should be a Permissions tab thing. And it will list the owner of the file and what access you have. If those permissions are already set to be owned by you, then this uid thing is already taken care of for you by the file browser. In that case it might be something more fundamental to the NTFS filesystem, like the locks other people are talking about.

    So those are some words and their meanings! Probably more than you wanted to know, but that’s okay. I liked typing it


  • I think I may have contracted some kind of brain worm, because the other day I needed to do some photo manipulation and couldn’t get krita to do what I wanted, but I went into gimp and just knocked it out. I’ve hated gimp for years, but I guess I’ve used it enough that I’ve figured out how it works… and now I don’t hate it anymore…

    I think I may need help.

    Oh, but I always use it in single window mode ever since that came out. The multiple windows floating panel thing drove me nuts!


  • I don’t know about this particular title, but I feel like Kickstarter games get a bit of a bad rap for taking a long time or not making it to release. But that’s because the whole point of a Kickstarter game is that we, the public, are acting as the publisher. Putting up money in advance, making an investment, hoping for a great game.

    And just like with traditional publishers, sometimes games take years and years to make, and some of your investments crumble and don’t make it.

    It’s just that we the public rarely hear about a traditionally published game until it’s already been in development for a while. Until it seems likely to succeed. We’re not used to taking pitches while a game studio figures their shit out. And even then, some traditionally published games crash and burn too!

    And that’s all ignoring the fact that a bunch of crowdfunded games are typically by greener devs who maybe don’t know how things are done. But what I’m saying is that even the normal game industry has long lead times and has some burn outs, it’s just that normally an entire community hasn’t built up around them, because they haven’t even been announced yet.

    I guess is what I’m saying is that publishing is hard and risky, and crowdfunding is collective publishing, not advanced purchasing. That doesn’t immediately mean that anyone who tries and fails is a scam artist. Most of them probably spent that money trying their best for as long as they could, and nothing great came out the other side. That’s just what business ventures look like, unfortunately.




  • I already responded somewhere else, but I have more response that doesn’t make sense in that context.

    First, about deepening conversation. I don’t know about this guy, so I’ll talk about myself. I have things I’m interested in, let’s call them “interests”, and I like to talk about them. And the only thing that stops me from talking about them constantly to everyone is the social understanding that they don’t want to hear about my interests.

    So all it takes to have me talk about stuff is enough questions to demonstrate you really want to know.

    “What do you like about blah blah blah?” will probably get a short answer because he’s used to people not really wanting to know more, so he’s giving the smallest answer that answers the question. But then, you ask a question about his answer. “Huh, how is that different than blah blah?”

    Now maybe longer answer, you listen and ask based on that, and if you can manage it you could also circle back to a previous answer to connect some dots. That’s now a discussion! Now, of course, you do have to listen. Unsure if that’s a skill of yours or not.

    As for the asking out, I think you should do it. But if you don’t trust yourself to deliver the speech live, you could write it down / print it out. Just make sure it contains escape hatches for him that assure him it’s okay if he doesn’t share your feelings, and that he can just tell you if that’s the case, and probably ends by saying he doesn’t need to necessarily give you an answer now and you’re just happy you could get it off your chest. I think going for something casual is better than something heartfelt and romantic, but I don’t know the two of you. The most important thing is that he knows, and the second most important thing is that you don’t want it to wreck things if feelings aren’t mutual.

    And if you don’t want to awkwardly read it, you could just hand it to him and let him read it at his own pace. This lets you watch his face while reading, if he makes facial expressions and if you can read them.

    I would recommend against an email or a text, though. It feels like, from the bits of your personality I’ve picked up here, the time between when you send it to whenever he responds is going to be absolute torture for you. Whereas he might just be busy and not have even seen it yet, you’ll already be inventing bad scenarios and deciding which new city you should move to since you obviously can’t stay here, etc, etc 😉

    So probably best to deliver it in person, maybe at the end of a hangout, so you can be sure he received it and read it. And I know you may be scared, but don’t tell him to read it after you’re gone, because that’s now email territory where you can’t ever know if he’s read it yet! Just have him read it, assure him it’s okay if he doesn’t agree, and let him respond. And even if he doesn’t have an answer now, you know it’s done.

    Good luck!


  • I’m a man, my wife made the first move, and I’m very glad she did! Taking the step from friend (or even just acquaintances) to more is risky for anyone. But, and maybe I’m biased here, I think it’s currently even more risky for guys. Word can get around, and you’re more likely to not just lose the one friendship, but to be labeled “creepy” generally if you’re wrong. Of course it’s possible for that to happen to a woman, but it’s way less likely for a woman to be perceived as a creep in general, and also men don’t talk amongst themselves the way women tend to.

    Anyway, I knew my wife from a social space, and I didn’t want to be the guy who poisoned the environment and made it an uncomfortable location for women by pursuing any of them. So I was friendly and tried to be as non threatening as possible, which meant no asking out. So I was very relieved when she made a move!

    Don’t know if your situation is anything like that, I’m just unsure of your source that says “active woman means short term”. I mean, think of all the dudes hitting on strangers in bars which either turns into a one night stand or a short fling. The averages have got to be better than that, right?



  • To be fair, we don’t see like reverse engineered printing. Printing is reverse engineered seeing. If we saw like this post is claiming shrimp see, and blue was blue and green was green and yellow was yellow, we wouldn’t be able to print by mixing three colours. We’d need one pigment per photoreceptor, same as we do now.


  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzIt's true
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    9 months ago

    Small extra rant:

    minor spoilers

    And just to be clear, ten thousand years is a long time. Ancient Egypt was, like 5 - 6 thousand years ago. So almost double that. The last ice age was about 12 thousand years ago. 10 thousand years ago was, like, the invention of farming as a concept. No culture on Earth has history that far back.

    So to be making references to today’s pop culture that far in the future just feels nuts. I mean, sure, it’s the same one guy. And I know he’s not supposed to feel like God. But still, when humans as a species first planted seeds in the ground you heard a song, and now today you’re going to casually bring it up to a room full of babies? Whatever.

    But it just so happens that it’s a reference that’s relevant to us the reader in my personal nostalgia? My eyes rolled so hard I fell straight out of the narrative…


  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzIt's true
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    9 months ago

    I read it a while ago, let’s see if I remember…

    Hopefully I’ve hidden this behind a spoiler tag properly, but if not, please don’t read this unless you’ve read the books!

    hopefully spoiler tag

    I liked the mystery of what truly happened, and I liked the alternative memory around the time in the first house. Seeing that alternative and opposite version of events was neat, and then having that actually be even more impactful when it become clear what’s going on was great. The bits with True Ortis being actually really emotional at the end were good. I was onboard up until that.

    I was quite happy until we all confront John at the end, because this is where it’s going to coming together. There’s a few things I remember disliking here. The first thing, and most trivial, is that John says a few things here that feel like very now memes, and that took me way out of the tone the chapters otherwise were in. I think one was a “hi blank I’m dad” line or something. I get it, he’s not very Godly, and later it seems like he’s even alive during our present day. But I still feel like that format is a bit tired already, and this is ten thousand years from now. I think the other was a reference to a song that was all the rage in, like, 2005 or something. Which again, I don’t feel like even the youth of today would pull that reference, so John is I guess exactly my age. And ten thousand years from now is quoting a thing that no one else in the room would get; that’s meaningless to the person he’s talking to, but also his other lyctors. I dunno, it just felt like John was talking to me, the reader, and it felt very cheap. So that kinda put me in a mood already.

    The second thing that bothered me is the revelations at that point are all a bunch of things all the lyctors think are big news, but that our protagonist, and thus we, don’t know anything about. Like being a kid at a family reunion and listening to the adults talk, they’re having their minds blown talking about schemes and plans and shit that we don’t know anything about. I’m not saying the answers had to be handed to me necessarily, but it just felt like all the meat was coming fully out of left field, and there’s no way any of the things I’ve learned so far this book could possibly have lead me to these discoveries. Isn’t this, like, a mystery book? You don’t want to find out at the end that the murder was actually committed by Richard the repairman we didn’t introduce to you, but anyway let me tell you how this guy you’ve never heard of did the thing you’ve been wondering about.

    Which leads me into the third and biggest thing I didn’t like, which was that throughout the entire climax of the story, our protagonist is passive bordering on insignificant. Gideon wakes up and fights her way to the exposition room, Harrow (our protagonist up until this) is obviously gone. So that’s a bit weird, but we love Gideon so it’s okay. So what does our protagonist do? They hide behind a door and listen to the grown ups talk at each other. Just spilling answers and tying up ends, and having revelations. And our protagonist isn’t even in the room, they’re not talking to her. They’re just chatting amongst themselves, unaware we’re even listening, while they wrap everything up for us. Then even when our protagonist does enter the room, she still just stands there while people talk around her and about her, but she does nothing.

    And then finally Mercy puts her plan into action, John responds, Augustine responds, River, etc. But here’s the thing; this plan is, like, a hundred years old or whatever. The plan was hatched before either of our protagonists were born, and doesn’t involve them at all. Nothing we’re been party to in either book has anything to do with Mercy’s plan, John’s response, Augustine, etc. None of it. It happens around Gideon, but if Gideon and Harrow had never gone to the first house, and none of these books had happened, the plan would have gone exactly the same way. Mercy would have taken her shot. John would have survived. Augustine would have taken his shot. Ianthe changed history by saving John, but Gideon watched that part while being trapped a long way away behind glass, and neither John nor Ianthe knew or cared we were even there. And Ianthe is close to us, but is not our protagonist. So basically nothing in either this book nor the first mattered at all to the big climax. Gideon was just confused, ineffectual, and out of the way for all of it. So that was kind of a let down.

    The closest thing we had to being involved in the climax was that Gideon has John’s eyes. Mercy seems to say something that makes it seem like she was pretty sure anyway, so she was probably going to do her plan that she started before Gideon was conceived in either case, but it did give her confidence. But she even says something like “damn, if only I’d looked at the body’s eyes earlier” or something, making it clear that if she’d done that one thing, even Gideon’s eyes at the end wouldn’t have been a surprise or relevant.

    So that was the biggest sin, in my opinion. But one more thing that annoyed me while I was annoyed anyway, was the stack of twists. Mercy kills God, holy shit! Nevermind, no she didn’t. He’s back. They’re talking. Now Mercy is dead. John wants Augustine to pledge to him. He seems like he might. Now Augustine tries to kill God. Oh, he seems like he’s going to do it. Nope, that didn’t happen either. Augustine is dead. In the end none of their long plan mattered in the slightest, and if they’d been killed by a beast a hundred years ago we’d be in nearly the same place. But the whiplash of attempts and failure back to back to back was just tiring when all my suspension of disbelief had already been spent by the last three issues. I was just like “please let someone kill God so we can move on”

    So at this point I just felt like: given this outcome, what was the point of any of this? There was a plan constructed long before our protagonist was born that did not involve her at all. And we had various struggles. But then the culmination of this plan we didn’t know about has arrived, and it has nothing to do with us or our struggles we’ve just spent hours and hours reading about. And on top of that the plan doesn’t even work or accomplish much of anything. So this big long plan that we didn’t know about and doesn’t involve us also didn’t change the status quo from where it would have been had it not been hatched and executed.

    Cool…that was… fulfilling…


  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzIt's true
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    9 months ago

    I loved the first one. I liked 7/8th of the second one. It was a tricky puzzle, trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t, and what’s truly going on. But I trusted the author because of how much I liked the first one.

    Then the ending of the book was terrible and made me angry at the entire second book as a result.

    But I read the third anyway, just in case. I didn’t much care for it. It was okay enough to keep reading. But it was very different in tone from the first two, for plot reasons. I dunno, maybe 6 out of 10?

    I know I have to read the 4th for sunk cost reasons, but I’m not excited about it…


  • Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.

    BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

    And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.

    So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

    This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

    The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.