DarthYoshiBoy

So this is neat. Potentially life changing for some type 2 diabetics, but that depends because some t2 diabetics are not failing to make enough insulin, they’re just no longer sensitive to it at a level that makes it functional for them. I suppose it’s possible that this therapy could cause them to grow enough islet β cells to overcome their lack of sensitivity, but (and I’m a type 1, not a type 2, so maybe my info is incorrect here) that lack of sensitivity can grow with further exposure to insulin making this a stop-gap at best for those cases absent other therapies.

…and with all of that said, being able to regrow islet β cells has never really been the problem for type 1 diabetes. You can regrow all the islet β cells you’d like and it’s not going to cure the underlying immune disease that has caused your immune system to kill off all of your islet β cells to begin with. Unless you can figure out why t1 diabetes causes one’s own immune system to go psycho killer on their islet β cells, you’ve done nothing to “cure” diabetes. Without being able to suppress that impulse for your immune system to murder your own cells, any ability to replace the islet β cells is going to be temporary at best, and probably a waste on the whole.

My brother in law is a “cured” type 1 diabetic, by virtue of his having had a kidney replacement and being on immune suppressing drugs for that. Since they were already replacing the kidney and he was going to have to take immune system suppression medications for that, they also just replaced his pancreas at the same time and the suppression of his immune system has allowed the new pancreas to thrive and continue to make insulin. Easy-peasy. The only trade-off is that he is super immunocompromised and can be killed by common colds, so not a great strategy in general.

Attributes only apply to the directory’s own allocation table and child directories have their own tables.

Thanks. It has been a while, but I was fairly certain that this was the case, glad to have the confirmation. 👍

If you’d like to look into it further. the +i flag in chattr is setting an attribute making the file (everything in Linux is a file, so yes this even means directories) immutable. When a file is immutable, it isn’t possible to change the ownership, group, name, or permissions of the file, nor will you be able to write, append, or truncate the file.

It’s been a while since I’ve used it, but I don’t believe it’s possible to have an immutable directory where you can still modify the contents therein, but I may be misremembering that. It would seem unlikely since adding content to the directory should require that you modify the links for the directory, which shouldn’t be allowable with an immutable object?

It’s possible that the +a chattr attribute may achieve what you’d prefer. I believe that flag will make it so that files (and again, everything in Linux is a file) can be created and modified, but never deleted. I’ve actually never used this one, but I can foresee how this still may not be ideal for your wishes since updates to games may expect to be able to delete old content which would be thwarted here. 🤷

The Nissan Connect stuff doesn’t work anymore for any of the 2016 Leafs, they used a form of cell service that is no longer in operation.

I swapped a nice Kenwood head unit into my Leaf for a couple hundred dollars. It maintains the backup camera, steering wheel controls, and the built in USB port while offering a larger screen and touch screen controls for Android Auto or Apple Car Play if you want them. It’s awesome and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a short range commuter car.

I’m now deeply curious if it works for your use case. Hit me back if you give it a go and let me know if it works out or not.

If gaming with Nvidia hardware is your primary concern, then maybe Bazzite would suit you. It’s based on Immutable Fedora, with tweaks to give it a SteamOS like experience. It offers Gnome or KDE for the desktop, and supposedly has everything dialed in for gaming. I’ve heard a bunch about it doing great with Nvidia cards and gaming in general, I suspect that you’d be able to do everything else you might need via the desktop it provides, but I have no knowledge of how it handles multiple monitors so maybe therein lies the fatal flaw.

I assume this is a Stargate thing and that there aren’t actually that many Skeptical Guide podcasts out there.

I haven’t got any dog in the Stargate fight, I’ve seen the original movie (good) and watched the Richard Dean Anderson TV series (better than the movie) for a while before it just fell off my radar? I’ll take your word for it that Stargate Universe is the lesser of the Stargate properties.

SGU in my comment obviously is referring to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe aka, the linked podcast.

If you use a fancy official VPN client from Mullvad, PIA, etc, you won’t need this since most clients already have a kill switch built in (also called Lockdown Mode in Mullvad).

According to the researchers…

The result of this is the user transmits packets that are never encrypted by a VPN, and an attacker can snoop their traffic. We are using the term decloaking to refer to this effect. Importantly, the VPN control channel is maintained so features such as kill switches are never tripped, and users continue to show as connected to a VPN in all the cases we’ve observed.

Killswitches are insufficient protection since the TunnelVision attack never disables the VPN tunnel. The TunnelVision attackers are instructing your physical layer connection to route everything through a node of their choosing rather than killing your VPN connection, and since the VPN connection never drops, a killswitch will never engage. The VPN stays up, thinking it is doing a good job, but in the meantime your network interface has been instructed to route no traffic through the VPN and instead route everything to the location of the attacker’s choosing. I have heard that a couple of VPNs think their clients are not vulnerable here, but I haven’t seen independent conclusive proof one way or the other yet.

I suspect that your “Solution” also fails to mitigate the issues in TunnelVision because it allows LAN access to the physical interface. In a TunnelVision attack the hostile has to be on your LAN (or rather the same LAN you are on since I suspect that “The coffee shop wi-fi” is the more likely network for an attack like this) already, so if they’re going to tell your interface to route traffic somewhere else, in all likelihood that somewhere else will already be in the same LAN you are and their exfiltration will be allowed under your configuration.

I’ve never listened to Rogan*, but I think https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts does an excellent job of talking about current news and science items in an easily digestible format that mostly avoids bullshit while probably filling the same gee-whiz niche that people expect from Rogan? It’s a panel, so not a single muscular male host, but I think if your sibling is pursuing Rogan because they think it’s helping expose them to new interesting ideas, SGU is a vastly superior route to that end.

*I actually think my only Rogan exposure has been the SGU talking about how he more or less just believes the last thing anyone told him, whatever that might be, which seems… less good?

https://www.patreon.com/Orioto

Might just be a me thing, but this guy puts out a new wallpaper almost every week and they’re all amazing. The higher tiers allow you to participate in choosing the next wallpaper, but they’re mostly for 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p. Buying in once gets you the whole lot of everything he’s done until now.

Bluetooth headphones are not modernity, they should of course be an option, but increasingly they are the only game in town. Wired is still king for loads of things, not the least of which is reliability.

You wanna know how many times my wired Sennheiser’s have been unable to put music in my ear holes? Never. They always work. Care to guess how many wireless headphones have been able to provide sound every time I’ve wanted it without delay or failure? None. I’ve owned more than 2 dozen wireless this, that, and the other, headphones & earbuds, and none of them have been even a shadow of the reliability offered by my old wired headphones. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the wired experience usually sounds better (Still don’t think you can get any comfortable phat 600ohm monster cans that don’t have a wire) and has no issues with making sound when you’re in a space that is saturating the 2.4Ghz band (my Costco is usually so full of idiots on Bluetooth that you can’t get a reliable experience for anything from any wireless audio device.)

You seem to think it’s “backwards rhetoric” to want a feature that will never be offered in a wireless setup, and that’s just fucked man. There are a wealth of reasons why wireless does not fully replace wired. It’s why anything that doesn’t have to move generally gets a fixed connection, it’s just more reliable and often more efficient. That’s not backwards, it’s just a priority that you don’t value above others. If landlines or floppy disks offered any advantages over anything else they’d still be around today (and arguably they are in some limited niches,) but the replacements for those technologies have had no downsides against their replacements while wireless tech still has some significant downsides (again, maybe you don’t weight the pros and cons the same, so this may not apply to you) against the technology they are meant to replace, and will likely never see 100% capture of their role as a result.

TL;DR: Stop trying to frame this as some sort of crusade against the future, there are legit cases where wired is just better than wireless.

I’ve dabbled with Linux on Mac hardware a couple of times and I’ve got to say that Linux DEs generally hew closer to Windows conventions than Mac ones and I found using the Mac keyboard with Linux to be a dreadful experience without the fact that the chiclet keyboards are the worst shit I’ve ever put my fingers on.

I very quickly snagged a standard mechanical qwerty 104 key with brown switches and cursed every moment that I had to use that abominable keyboard built into the stupid MacBook. Apple seems determined to do things different for the sake of different as much as they possibly can and trying to adapt all their nonsense to the Win/Lin way of doing things made my life worse in numerous ways (most DEs have great remapping for keys and such, but it gets messy fast if you’ve got apps from different paradigms.)

I’d very much recommend against going out of your way to get a Mac keyboard for using Linux unless you enjoy fighting against things. But hey, if that’s your kink, then a Mac keyboard with Linux would be my recommended way to go.

I’d recommend that you get these ones, but you can pick them up plenty of places that aren’t Amazon too, just make certain you get the ones made by Gulikit, any others are probably as cheap as your originals and you’ll have to come back and replace them again in short order. The Gulikit ones use Hall Effect sensing rather than resistive contact pads that will eventually scrape down and break.

That kit at Amazon comes with all the tools to do the job and as the sticks are Hall Effect based, they’ll theoretically never drift unlike the ones that ship with Joy-Cons straight from Nintendo.

iFixIt has the process for doing the work: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Left+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113182 and https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Right+Joy-Con+Joystick+Replacement/113185

They had to have seen the writing on the wall at least a year or two before they brought this to market.

I seem to remember that at about a year before launch there was some reporter (Jason Schreier?) who had an inside tip that they were changing some stuff in the face of the realization that GaaS were not the money maker they were thought to be once upon a time, but the tipper also said that they were too locked into the GaaS paradigm to make the sort of meaningful changes that would salvage the experience. I don’t think there’s any rescuing this one if they knew they were in trouble a full year before delivery and still couldn’t shape it up into a product worthy of attention.

I’m on the other side, why use either?

Microblogging is a great format for following creators. I don’t need your life story to know that you’ve got a new album, a new software release, a new security vulnerability, a new video, a new tour, or a new comic. The shortform communication forced by Mastodon or Bluesky is perfect for that. It gives enough room to share those quick updates, and that’s about it. Replies are also kept succinct which makes parsing those for relevant context or side info similarly simple.

I originally got into Twitter because it was the update channel for when new Cyanogenmod releases dropped and I stuck around because following the right security professionals made it so that I could learn about a new CVE within seconds of its filing rather than having to wait for a news site I visit to catch wind of it and write something up. Which in turn made my job easier because I knew what systems we’d need to be patching well before that info bubbled up to my bosses so I could already have a head start on the work before the ask reached me officially.

These days, microblogging (at least with a straight chronological follow feed) more or less achieves what RSS used to back before everyone suddenly decided about a decade back that it wasn’t worth maintaining an RSS feed without Google running Reader or some crap. By way of example, ~20 years ago I had 13 comics that I followed via my RSS reader, today only 5 of those creators still have RSS feeds and a couple of those seem like they’re on life support for how they seem to infrequently pause updates for a few days at a time. All of the RSS feeds that are gone have moved to microblogging of some sort for updates, and I’d rather they use something open than the likes of Twitter (which I left at the first whiff that Musk was buying the place) or Instagram (which I have never used because it’s Facebook and I don’t do Facebook.)

Let’s not even get started on how stupid people sound when they talk about skeets and toots.

Yeah, I’ll agree there. I call them posts wherever they reside. It’s what they’ve always been, it’s what they’ll always be.

My suggestion would be to reframe your thesis. Rather than consuming content, change your perspective to one where you are appreciating art.

The world is vast and full of amazing things, you don’t need to feel like you’re wasting time when you dedicate that time to appreciating art that you love. There are books, games, movies, short form video essays, podcasts, and all sorts of things that are real expressions of the human experience from different angles, which is what art is, and there’s nothing wrong with appreciating that art, learning something from it, and growing your understanding.

Unless you’re harming yourself or others by enjoying the art you enjoy, just keep on doing it.

That said, if you really want something else, gaming is (IMO) a great way to spend some time, tabletop or video. Learning a programming language is another one and can lead to very fulfilling paths where you can make things that you enjoy and easily share them with others.

For everyone wondering why anyone would use Bluesky when Mastodon and/or the Fediverse is around.

I have to ask why not use both? All the tech people I followed on Twitter went to Mastodon almost immediately when Musk bought the site, while most of my personal friends on Twitter were not willing to leave because they thought Mastodon was too techy and Bluesky couldn’t replicate the network of people they valued from Twitter. That said, slowly over time as the invites came rolling in for Bluesky, my personal friend circle has been willing to move to Bluesky while they still wont touch Mastodon and honestly it hasn’t harmed me in the least to use both. It’s actually sorta nice to have the tech stuff in a separate bucket from my personal connections.

I’m not super hopeful that the AT protocol ever expands beyond the single site it is now, but I will be fully happy to launch my own instance and keep my personal contacts if that day ever comes, and if it doesn’t, I’ve still got Mastodon to fall back to where I’m pretty happily established but for the lack of the people I know IRL.

Yeah, this is the real rub here. Without the co-op it’s not really anything special, there are even games out there doing Action RPG better these days so I can’t imagine why you’d choose to not embrace the couch/online co-op crowd that’d put this back at the head of the pack.

Yeah, I own Collection of Mana and Trials of Mana and played it both ways. Trials in particular has got me very excited for Visions, but I really hope that they’re doing multiplayer and ideally 3 player to throw back to the greatest aspect of Secret.

So much talk about “what makes a Mana game” in there, and yet for me the one thing that made Secret of Mana a game that I cared about was the 3 player co-op that absolutely ruled. Still no indication that this game even has 2 player action. I was super disappointed when I could finally play a fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 on PC back in the day and it was only 2 player, and lately I’ve been increasingly disappointed as everything since has been a single player affair.

Call me crazy, but the series hasn’t been great (it’s still been good, just shy of great) since the SNES outings and I am really wish they’d get the game back to the multiplayer that made it great.