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

I generally go with trans woman/girl (I refuse to acknowledge that I'm getting older), but mostly because I feel like that broad classification covers a fair amount of what other people would classify as demigirl or transfemme enby. Admittedly I also take the view that gender can be described as a zone of 3-d grid, with axes "femme", "masc" and "other" (although what "other" really is depends on the individual in question), and my own goes 80-90 femme, ~10 masc, 20-30 other (each out of 100)

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

"Sure, the planet is unfit for human habitation now, but at least we got to have lawns in front of our houses and meat every day until the world ended"

Stopping climate change requires drastic action, rethinking how we live every aspect of our lives, and the wastefulness of suburbs means they must go, just like the internal combustion engine and the animal agriculture industry. How will you justify to future generations that you left them with a ruined world, all because you and those like you were too selfish to give up your current style of living?

Additionally, they are provably a blight on cities. They cost far more to maintain than they produce, since they lack any serious commercial activity, so no taxes, and the spread-out nature of them means that any infrastructure is far more expensive per person. You wouldn't even need to actively demolish them, just cut off all maintenance, and watch them rot. Plus, they keep literally bankrupting cities, so often there is no choice, the money is no longer there to maintain them.

I mean, step 1 would be forcing the suburbs to pay the actual cost for their own power lines, plumbing and sewage, roads, phone lines, etc. Since as it stands, most of that cost is subsidised by the highly productive inner city, and that infrastructure is far cheaper per-person in dense neighbourhoods than it is in suburban tumours (sure, live out there if you want, but accept that you will either be paying a fortune for the infrastructure upkeep that supports you, or accept lower-class, cheaper infrastructure. I have a great aunt and uncle who live out in the countryside, and they have a dirt road, a septic tank and a rainwater tank, only their electricity and phone lines are comparable to what you get in cities, because it literally does not make economic sense to run paved roads or plumbing out to where they live).

Once people have realised that single-family housing with paved roads, sewage, plumbing and reliable electricity is well outside the economic reach of the vast majority of people, UPZONE. Demolish suburbs to replace them with far denser urban neighbourhoods, ones made up of townhouses, apartment blocks and mixed residential/commercial buildings. Change the zoning laws so that anyone can start a commercial business out of the front yard. Designate parks and other community areas in between your blocks of apartments and townhouses so that nobody is ever more than 15 minutes' walk away from one. And for those who still want to live out in suburban sprawl, make the transition to being more self-sufficient easier.

Then, you have a city dense enough that you can start running vast amounts of public transport through it. Not just busses, but trains and trams as well. A train is more or less the ideal form of fast transportation along a known, unchanging transport corridor, with far more energy efficiency than anything that runs on tarmac, the ability to hit highway speeds inside city limits, and the ability to be extended almost infinitely. They can also be run from overhead power lines, no need for batteries or internal combustion engines. Oh, and the same lines you run urban rail along can also be used for freight trains, so they can replace both car journeys and freight truck journeys.

When you have dense cities with well-designed and extensive public transport, you can get almost anywhere with just one transfer, your bus/train/tram comes often enough that you're never at the stop for more than 10 minutes, and even a trip from one edge of the city to the other will rarely be more than an hour. Plus, you don't have to pay attention to the road, nor pay for fuel and maintenance.

Source: I live in a city where you can sharply draw a divide between the pre-car and post-car zones, and the pre-car zones are mostly like how I describe, while the post-car zones are suburban sprawl shitholes that might have a train station if they're lucky

I’m not religious in the slightest and I barely see myself as part of the Jewish nation - but I do, just barely. It is unfortunately true that anti-semitism is alive and well, and will be for the foreseeable future. Even if I don’t view myself as Jewish, some anti-semites will, and we all know where that could lead. So Israel is the only country in the world where we can know for a fact that the government (police) will protect us from anti-semitism, not to mention won’t take part in it.

Which is the chicken-and-egg problem of ethno/theostates, isn't it? If most/all of a group are isolated to one geographical location, and largely absent from the rest of the world, it becomes easier for hate to spread in that rest of the world, because nobody there has lived experience, can have that moment of "but I know Elsa/Ahmed/Luna/whoever, and they're decent person" to challenge propaganda when they hear it (and anyone who's a minority where they live has at least one story of being the cause of such a realisation). But if you're a group that lives in those little geographical pockets, it becomes that much harder to move out, because you give up your support network and move into an area of potentially hostile people.

And of course, bigots know about this and weaponise it. Speaking as a trans person and noticing the current wave of vile legislation against us in the shit parts of the US, it sure as hell feels like the objective there is to force anyone who can leave to do so, and punish those who can't, specifically to prevent a sufficient mass of trans people building up that those same deradicalising experiences can happen (hence why the use of a stereotypical trans name in above example). But in a way it's both better and worse for us, because we aren't just born into certain bloodlines or cultures, we emerge almost everywhere, so and have to fight to make the whole world queer-friendly, rather than just being able to set up somewhere in a small pocket and let the whole world slowly become most hostile to us in response.

I see

I'm debating getting a 3440x1440 monitor for coding and because I hear they work well with tiling window managers (hence the question), it's just annoying that I have almost no chances to try them out for free, and also the cost is enough that I wouldn't get one without serious consideration first. Although you have nudged me a bit closer to "maybe I could get one without testing them first, if it's second hand and cheap(er)".

Also I'd be replacing my existing 27 inch LCD with it, and keeping the 4:3, 21 inch CRT, for a highly cursed monitor setup, where everything gets letterboxed or pillarboxed. And then to make things worse, I could grab a 16:10 monitor to put in portrait besides one of the other two, for maximum "what is 16:9 and why do I have black bars on everything".

Okay, but why should it be acceptable to induct a child into a religion from the moment of birth, spend their formative years being taught a belief system that they have no ability to think critically about, while isolating them from alternative systems of belief? Why shouldn't it be the norm to raise your children on the idea of all religious beliefs or lack thereof being equally valid and plausible, that we can't prove one or another definitively true so it becomes a matter of "what do you chose to have blind faith in?", and let them decide as an adult?

My 980ti still holds up pretty well at 1920x1440 (high-end CRT monitors were beautiful things, restart production you cowards) for most 3d games I play on Linux, but it is starting to have performance issues in some games, and I'm getting real sick and tired of the dumb shit Nvidia keeps pulling with their Linux drivers. The current driver gives me horrible black flickering in a lot of games, and of course they arbitrarily lock me out maxing out my CRT monitor (which don't have a fixed resolution, only a balance of resolution vs refresh rate, and it keeps blocking me from a whole range of refresh rate/resolution combinations). So I confess I am starting to eye the higher-end AMD 6xxx GPUs, and I would definitely try and grab one as cheaply as I could if I ever got a 3440x1440 ultrawide.

Incidentally, how are ultrawides for having two or three windows open side-by-side at the same time?

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")