Badabinski

Badabinski , 20 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Having a frank and vulnerable discussion of your trauma with someone you have emotional intimacy and trust with is incredibly important and can help the healing process. I'd highly encourage people to do that.

However, I think the term "trauma dumping" often refers to the practice of sharing your trauma with people who you don't have a close relationship with, or with people who you haven't interacted with long enough to generate trust.

I am a former trauma dumper, and I dumped my trauma all over a person who I should not have. That person turned out to be a very untrustworthy person. Their knowledge of my wounds allowed them to do some incredibly harmful things to me over the course of an eleven months relationship. I managed to escape, but it was a bad move, and I learned to become more careful about who I shared that information with.

Plus, there is always more to you than your trauma. It certainly doesn't feel that way when you're really stuck in it. Hell, me saying that may have just made some people very, very angry. I got really angry when my therapist said that to me, because it felt like she was minimizing what I went through.

I came to understand that she meant I was an adult with passions and a whole life, and that adult is what I should share with people. By letting my adult self live in the present, I became more able to take care of my trauma using the inner child metaphor. My wounded inner child is precious and deserves care, and I share that with people who will appreciate that. The adult that I am also deserves to live and see the world, and deserves to be recognized by friends and family. Trauma dumping inverts that.

People stop getting to see the awesome person you grew into because humans are wired to pay attention to wounded children, be they physical or metaphorical. Some people will be tender, some will be dismissive, and a few people will take advantage.

So yeah, please share your trauma when it makes sense to, with people you love and trust. If there's a mutual understanding, then any sadness they feel will likely be offset by the warm knowledge that they've helped you make it through another day and maybe heal a bit more. That's what is shown in this meme. Let your adult self live your life the rest of the time, and use that adult to give the kid the care they needed but didn't get.

(Wow, now that I'm rereading this post, I feel a strong sense of irony. Like, it's not a trauma dump, but also nobody asked for me to write a fucking essay about a meme lol)

Badabinski , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

Yep, sharing your trauma should be an exercise in trust and intimacy. People should not share their trauma with others just to provoke a specific emotional reaction. I also have some second-hand experience with what you mention. One of my SO's parents is a hideously narcissistic person who would trauma dump all over my SO to invalidate any feelings or concerns my SO might have. That, combined with gaslighting and other forms of emotional abuse and neglect, plus some physical and sexual abuse set my SO up with a fuckton of trauma to process. They also had a hard time with hearing of other people's traumas, although for them it was in more specific circumstances, rather than generally.

I like to think that most people trauma dumping are victims who aren't creating another iteration of the victim/abuser cycle (I base that off of nothing but my own hopes, I have no numbers), but there are definitely people who have weaponized it. I'm sorry to hear that you went through that :/ hopefully you're free from those toxic people. After my SO's parent kicked my SO out (a horrible night, but one of the best nights of their life in retrospect), my SO moved in with me, did a whole lot of EMDR therapy, and has managed to heal from the damage caused by their parent. Hopefully you can find a treatment, process, or mindstate to help you, since it sounds like you still have some wounds from what was done to you.

Badabinski , 24 days ago

People who eat Dayton-style pizza are like the city of Dayton itself—smelly inside and bereft of true purpose. Those of us in the US who haven't been so psychically damaged wouldn't eat that shit.

(I'm only just learning about the disgusting gutter pizza. I don't like Dayton because my last company was slowly destroyed over several years by a company that was headquartered in Dayton. I associate the city with the asshole who was CEO. Fuck you, Chris! I've heard Dayton is, at worst, not great, so take my comment as the joke it is.)

Badabinski , 24 days ago

There are many of these where I live. The lights are usually timed so that you just go straight through without having to stop. They're much better than the traditional intersections that came before.

I will absolutely concede that they're shitty for pedestrians or cyclists, however.

Badabinski , 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

I think you may be mixing up Project Orion (let's chuck bombs out of the back to make us go zoom) with NERVA (a nuclear thermal rocket engine where the heat from chemical reactions is replaced with heat from a nuclear reactor to generate gas expansion out of a nozzle). Something like NERVA is actually a great idea. Let me tell you why!

• It's completely clean (unlike Orion and fission-fragment rockets)
  • the reactor and fuel never touch, the fuel goes through a heat exchanger and is not radioactive
• it provides extremely high efficiency
  • chemical rockets top out at ~400-500 isp in vacuum
  • NERVA tests in 1978 gave a vacuum isp of 841
  • ion thrusters like NEXT has an isp of 4170
• it provides lots of thrust
  • NERVA had 246kN of thrust
  • NEXT (which was used on the DART mission) is 237 millinewtons
  • That's 6 orders of magnitude more thrust!
• No oxidizer is needed
  • All you need is reaction mass, just like ion thrusters

For automated probes, the extreme efficiency and low thrust of ion thrusters makes perfect sense. If we ever want to send squishy humans further afield, we need something with more thrust so we can have shorter transit times (radiation is a bastard). Musk is supposedly going to Mars with Starship, and the Raptor engine is a marvel of engineering. I don't like the man and I'm not confident that he'll actually follow through with his plan, but the engineers at SpaceX are doing some crazy shit that might make it happen.

Just think though, if the engine was literally twice as efficient and they didn't need to lug around a tank of oxidizer, how much time could they shave off their transit? How much more could they send to Mars? Plus, they could potentially reduce the number of big-ass rockets they have to launch from Earth to refuel. If you can ISRU methane, then I imagine you could probably get hydrogen.

There are problems that still need to be resolved (the first that comes to mind is how to deal with cryogenic hydrogen boiling off), but like, the US had a nuclear thermal engine in the 70s. It was approved for use in space, but congress cut funding after the space race concluded so it never flew.

I'm happy to see that NASA is once again researching nuclear thermal rockets. Maybe we'll get somewhere this time.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

I just kinda vaguely name them after what they do and how big they are:

smol: my tiny little 2 bay Synology NAS that I'm no longer using
medium: my R620 with 4x 18TB drives that is my current NAS (medium, because it's larger than my previous NAS). Is also a k3s worker and provides NFS PVCs.
big: my old full-tower gaming rig that's a k3s worker and runs my Home Assistant VM
molecule: my current mini-ITX gaming rig and primary computer, also serves as the k3s master node and runs a lot of my home automation stuff. I think I picked molecule because it's REALLY tiny (it's in a Dan Cases A4v4.1, I think?) and it has a bunch of small stuff running on it (containers and pods)
monolith: my old T440p laptop. It's a large, black, featureless slab that doesn't do much
slab: my new Framework 13 laptop. I just kinda looked at it and said, "that's a nice slab of metal"

All of the above running Linux. I tinkered with Ubuntu for the NAS (because I heard Ubuntu was good at ZFS), but I still absolutely hate Ubuntu, so it's all Arch Linux.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

As others have said, the inner child is an incredibly useful metaphor for trauma/therapy. The way your brain reacts to trauma is to basically create a bookmark of you at that time. If you manage to live through the trauma, then clearly, the emotions you felt and the actions you took worked perfectly!

Well, that was probably true in prehistory, but nowadays it's a big fucking stupid liability. Like, for example, say I'm doing my adult job at $company and my coworker Todd Fuckwit (esq.) says something shitty about suicide that reminds my brain of an old bookmark. All of the sudden, my emotional state is transported back to when Young Badabinski saw the results of a parental suicide attempt and thought it was entirely their fault and Badabinski deserved it (Important note, this is not regular PTSD with vivid hallucinations/flashbacks, this is more about emotions). Now I'm freaking out in the meeting room and abruptly leave because I feel like a 12 year old who has just had their world ended, and escaping us what I did back then.

The way you heal this is to try to create a connection with that bookmark of yourself and then give yourself what you needed back then. Over many therapy sessions, I was able to help young Badabinski realize that none of that was their fault, that they didn't deserve to see that, and that they should have had the warm and loving care of both of their parents. And you know what? It really fucking worked.

For more chronic cases (like a lot of emotional neglect), your inner child is just kinda... There? Like, the bookmark part of the metaphor breaks down a bit. Your inner child represents the tender emotions that were left unhandled and childhood needs that were left unmet. A lot of my therapy nowadays is helping my inner child feel less deprived and more loved on a day-to-day basis, because if I don't take care of myself enough in the ways I need, then my brain will pull up the chronic inner child and I'll be miserable for days/weeks/months. In contrast, the parts of my life where I've permanently changed my day-to-day behavior feel so much more fulfilling and wonderful. It's not just about avoiding the negatives, you end up focusing more on achieving the positive.

I personally like describing it as a metaphor. I was a bit of an angry skeptic when I was younger (due to the aforementioned parent moving to a bunch of new-age crystal healing shit after their recovery and then trying to push it on me when I absolutely did not believe in the validity of those methods), so I didn't like how metaphysical and "touchy-feely" an inner child felt. I'm no longer skeptical of this idea am a much more emotionally liberated person. I often think of my inner child as if it were an active presence in my mind (it feels more effective to do so for me). It took a lot of time time for me to reach that place. I believe that explaining it as a metaphor will get through to people who would otherwise spurn the concept. Metaphor or not, I still want to help the little human that is past me, and I'd love to be able to drink a potion that would let me talk to that twelve year old.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

For Linux applications that respect XDG? Sure. There are plenty that don't because they either predate that specification, or they just don't care. Linux filesystems are generally much faster at executing reads on many small files, meaning fast search tools like ripgrep and fd make it so I don't really have to care. They'll run through my whole $HOME in 5 seconds flat. There's also stuff like locate, although I don't like maintaining an index. SSDs are so damn fast that I can just rg --hidden --glob '*.toml' 'the_setting_i_want_to_change' ~/ whenever I want.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as FTP is, in fact, smelly hot garbage.

For context, I wrote this while waiting for a migraine to pass. I was angry at my brain for ruining my morning, and I like to shit on FTP. It's fun to be hyperbolic. I don't intend for this to be an attack on you, I was just bored and decided to write this ridiculous rant to pass the time.

I must once again rant about FTP. I've no idea if you're serious about liking it or you're just taking the piss, but seeing those three letters surrounded by whitespace reminds me of all the bad things in the world.

FTP is, as I've said, smelly hot garbage, and the infrastructure built to support FTP is even worse. Why? Well, one reason is that FTP has the most idiotic networking model conceivable. To see how crazy it is, let's compare to a more sane protocol, like HTTP (for simplicity's sake, I'll do HTTP/1.1). First, you get the underlying transport protocol stuff and probably SSL. The HTTP client opens a connection from some local ephemeral port to the destination server on port 80/443/whatever and does all the normal protocol things (so syn->synack->ack and Client Hello -> Server Hello+server cert -> client kex+change cipher -> change cipher -> encrypted data). FTP does TCP too! Same same so far (minus SSL, unless you're using FTPS). Next, the HTTP client goes like this:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.whatever.the.fuck
# a bunch of other headers

and you know what fucking happens here? The fucking server responds with the data and a response code on the same goddamn TCP connection. You get a big, glorious response over the nice connection you established:

200 OK
# a bunch of headers and shit

HERE'S YOUR DAMN DATA NERD

So that's nice, and the client you're using to read this used that flow (or an evolution of that flow if you're using HTTP/2 or HTTP/3). So what does FTP do? It does one of two really stupid things depending on whether you're using active or passive mode. Active mode is the default for the protocol (although not the default for most clients), so let's analyze that! First, your FTP client initiates a TCP connection to your server on port 21 (by default), and then the server just sends this:

<--- 220 Rebex FTP Server ready.

ok, that kinda came out of nowhere. You're probably using a modern client that saves you from all of the godawful footguns, so it then asks the server what it supports:

---> FEAT
<--- 211-Supported extensions:
<---  AUTH TLS;SSL;
<---  CDUP
<---  CLNT
# A whole bunch of other 4 letter acronyms. If I was writing an FTP server, I'd make it swear at the user since there are a lot of fun 4 letter words

There's some other bullshit we don't care about right now, although highlights include sending the username and password in plain text. There's also ASCII vs binary mode. WE'LL GET BACK TO THAT. :|

So then we want to do a LIST. You know what happens in active mode? Your computer opens up some random fucking TCP port. It then instructs the FTP server to CONNECT TO YOUR GODDAMN COMPUTER. Your computer is the server, and the other side is now the client. I would post a more detailed overview of the FTP commands, but most servers on the internet disable active mode because it's a goddamn liability. All of the sudden, your computer has to be internet facing with open firewall ports, and that's just a whole heap of shit.

I'm probably not blowing many minds right now because people know about this shit. I just want to mention that this is how FTP was built. The data plane and control plane are separate, and back in 19XX when this shit was invented, you could trust your fellows on ARPANET and NAT didn't exist and sure HAM radio operators here's the entire goddamn 44.0.0.0/8 block for you to do packet switched radio. A simple protocol for simple times, back before we knew what was good and what was bad.

So, active mode sucks! PASV is the future, and is the default on basically all modern clients and servers! Passive mode works exactly the same as the above, except when the client goes to LIST, the server opens some random TCP port (I've often seen something like 44000-44010) and tells the client, "hey you, connect to 1.2.3.4:44000 to get you your tasty data." Sounds great, right? Well, there's a problem that I actually touched on in my last paragraph. Back when this dogshit was first squeezed out in the 70s, everyone had a public address. There were SO MANY addresses! 4 billion addresses? We'll never use all of those! That is clearly not the case anymore. We don't have enough addresses, and now we have this wonderful thing called NAT.

Continued in part 2.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

PART 2.

NAT, much like the city of Phoenix, is a monument to man's arrogance. Fuck NAT and fuck FTP. If your FTP server is listening directly on a public IP address hooked up directly to a proper router, then none of this applies. If you're anything like me, the last company I worked for (a small startup), or my current company (many many thousands of employees making software you know and may or may not hate, making many billions of dollars a year), then the majority of your servers are living in RFC1918 space. Traffic from the internet is making it to them via NAT (or NAT with extra steps, i.e. L4 load balancers).

A request comes in for $PUBLIC_IP TCP port 21 and is forwarded to your failure of a boxen at 10.0.54.187. Your FTP server is a big stupid idiot and doesn't know this. It thinks that it's king shit and has its own public IP address. Therefore, when it's deciding what ADDR:PORT it's going to tell the stupid FTP client to connect to, it just looks at one of the adapters on the box and says "oh, I'll tell this client on the internet to connect to 10.0.54.187:44007" and then I fucking cry. The FTP client is an idiot, but the IP stack on the client's home/business router is not and says "oh, that's an address living in RFC1918 space, I shouldn't send that out over the internet" and they don't get the results of their LIST.

So, how do you fix this? Well, you fix it by not using FTP. Use SFTP USE SFTP USE SFTP FOR GOD'S SAKE. But since this world is a shit fucking place, you have two options. The best option is to configure your FTP server to lie about its IP address. Rather than being honest about what a fool it is, you can tell it to send your public IP address to the client rather than the network adapter IP address. Does your public IP address change? Fuck you, you get to write a daemon that checks for that shit, rewrites your FTP server config, and HUPs the bastard (or SIGTERMs it if your server sucks and can't do a live config reload).

Let's say that you don't want to do that. Let's say you work at a small company with a small business internet plan that gives you static IPs but a shitty modem. Let's say that you don't know what FTP is or how it works and your boss told you to get it set up ASAP and it's not working (because the client over in Bendoverville Arkansas is being told to connect to a 10.x.x.x address) and it surely must be your ISP's fault. So you call up Comcast Business/AT&T/Verizon/Whoeverthefuck and you complain at their technicians for hours and hours, and eventually you get connected to a human that knows what the problem is and tells you how to configure your stupid FTP server to lie like a little sinner. The big telco megacorps don't like that. They don't want to waste all those hours, and they don't want to hire too many people who can figure that shit out because it's expensive. You wanna know what those fucking asshole companies did?

Continued in part 3.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

PART 3.
They made their STUPID MODEMS FUCK WITH THE FTP PACKETS. I have personally experienced this with Comcast Business. The stupid piece of shit DOCSIS modem they provide intercepts the FTP packet from your server saying "oh, connect to this address: x.x.x.x:44010" and they rewrite the fucking address to the public IP. There is no way to turn just this horse piss off. Now, for average business customers, this probably saved Comcast a bunch of money in support calls. However, if you're using the so-called bridge mode on that degenerate piece of shit-wrapped-silicon (where rather than allowing the modem to give you a DHCP address, you just configure your system to have one of the addresses in the /29 space and the modem detects that and says oh okay don't NAT traffic when it's going to this address, just rewrite the MAC and shunt it over the right interface), then something funny happens. The modem still rewrites the contents of the packet, but it uses the wrong fucking IP address! Because the public IP that your server is running on is no longer available to the modem, the modem just chooses another fucking address. Then, the client tries to connect to 1.2.3.5 instead of 1.2.3.4 where your server is listening, the modem says "hey I'm 1.2.3.5 and you can fuck off, I'm dropping your SYN for port 44010", and I get an angry call from the client asking why they can't download their files using this worthless protocol. I remember having a conversation like this:

Me: "Just use SFTP on port 22!"
Client: "No! FTP is faster/more secure/good enough for my grandfather good enough for me/corporate won't allow port 22."
Me: "Comcast is fucking me right now. What if we lied and served SFTP over port 21?"
# we try it
Client: "It's not working! I can't even connect!"

I couldn't connect either. I couldn't connect to anything. Trying to do SFTP over port 21 caused the stupid fucking modem to CRASH.

Are you starting to see what the problem is? It's like Microsoft preserving bugs in Windows APIs so that shitty software doesn't break, and then they end up doing crazy gymnastics to accomodate old shit like the Windows 8 -> Windows 10 thing where they couldn't use "Windows 9" because that would confuse software into thinking it was running "Windows 95" or "Windows 98". FTP has some bugfuck crazy design decisions that we've collectively decided to just "work around," and it leads to fucking gymnastics.

Speaking of bugfuck crazy design decisions, FTP's default file transfer mode intentionally mangles data!

Continued in part 4.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

PART 4.

You expect a file transfer program to reliably and faithfully transfer your files, byte-for-byte, from one system to another. FTP spits in your face and shits on your chest. You know how Linux uses LF (i.e. n) for newlines and Windows uses CRLF (i.e. rn) for newlines? Pretty annoying, right? Well, FTP's ASCII mode will automatically rip off those r characters for you! Sounds pretty sweet, right? Fuck no it's not. All of the sudden, your file checksums have changed. If you pass the same file back to a Windows user with a different and more sane file transfer system, then they get a broken file because FTP didn't mind its own fucking business. If you have a CRLF file and need an LF file, just explicitly use dos2unix. Wanna go the other way? unix2dos. The tool has been around since 1989 and it's great.

Now, what if you're not transferring text, but instead are transferring a picture of a cute cat? What if your binary data happens to have 0x0D0x0A somewhere in it? Well, ASCII mode will happily translate that to 0x0A and fucking ruin your adorable cat picture that you were going to share with your depressed significant other in an attempt to cheer them up. Now the ruined JPEG will remind them of the futility of their situation and they'll slide even deeper into cold emptiness. Thanks, FTP.

You can tell your client to use binary mode and this problem goes away! In fact, modern clients do this automatically so your SO gets to see the adorable fuzzy cat picture. But let's just stop and think about this. Why use a protocol that is dangerous by default? Why use a protocol that supports no form of security (unless you're using fucking godawful FTPS or FTP over SSH)? Why use a protocol that is so broken by design that small business hardware has been designed to try to unfuck it? Is it faster? I mean, not really. SFTP has encryption/decryption overhead, but your CPU is so fast that you'd need to transfer at 25+ Gb/s to notice it. Is it easier? Fuck no it's not easier, look at all of the stupid footguns I've just mentioned. Is it simpler? The line protocol is simple, but so is HTTP, and HTTP has a much simpler control flow path (merging the data and control planes is objectively the right thing to do in this context). And shit, you want a simple protocol for cases where you don't have a lot of CPU power? Use fucking TFTP. It's dogshit, but it was intentionally designed to be dogshit so that a fucking potato could receive data with it.

There is no task that is currently being done with FTP that couldn't be done more easily, more securely, and more quickly with some other protocol (like fucking SSH and SFTP, which is now built into fucking Windows for god's sake). Fuck FTP.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

You should be able to just use ssh/sftp. There are lots of great clients, and you can absolutely still use usernames and passwords, no public/private key stuff required. You can even use ssh and scp right from powershell on Windows boxen if you're so inclined. There's winscp, and if you want filesystem mounting, there's this: https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win
For macos and Linux, the options are far more plentiful.

Edit: there's also file pizza, which is a file transfer thingy with no middle man that's open source, although it's not copyleft AFAICT: https://github.com/kern/filepizza
and similar tools. Not really what you're after, I just think it's neat.

Badabinski , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

There are definitely a lot of good options out there. What are you using right now for regular old FTP? The odds are actually pretty good that it already supports SFTP. A lot of file management applications do both and lump them together, even though they're completely different protocols (sftp is from the late nineties).

If it doesn't, then I don't know what OS you're using, so I'll just recommend options for the big 3. For Windows, there's WinSCP. For MacOS there's Cyberduck. Most file managers on Linux distros let you just type sftp://me@wherever in the navigation bar, meaning you get a totally seamless experience with the rest of your FS.

EDIT: or, you can use sshfs-win on Windows and have your remote filesystem show up as a regular ol' drive, just like SMB. MacOS and Linux have sshfs, and I know there are GUIs wrapping sshfs on those platforms. I personally use sshfs at home and it's great (although no GUI wrapper, I'm a weirdo who doesn't use a graphical file manager at all).

Badabinski , 1 month ago

:( I'm sorry to hear that. Well, for Android there's MaterialFiles, which is fully FLOSS and supports FTP, SFTP, and SMB. Not sure about iOS, but I imagine there are options there.

I hope that your journey through life becomes a little less rocky.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

I'm glad that my grumpy migraine ramblings brought someone some joy!

Badabinski , 1 month ago

There's always Termux and whatever you can install there. That sounds silly, but when I download from my phone, I do it using aria2c in Termux. It works great, and everything (AFAIK) is FOSS. zsh + fzf history completion/file finding (<c-T> is a godsend) makes it possible to use a CLI on a phone without going crazy. Only really works well if you're already comfortable with the command line, which is definitely a big if. It works really well for me, but I'm one of those weirdos that doesn't have a graphical file manager installed on their computers.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

Huh, interesting! Sounds like it'll be perfect for OP.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

So I'd like to chime in. It looks the the two primary ingredients for ZEP-o-zorb are Fuller's earth and powdered quartz.

First, Fuller's earth. This is good stuff! It's actually often used as an industrial absorbent for chemical spills (the purpose of ZEP-o-zorb), as well as in some types of cat litter. It totally makes sense why this stuff would work well for you, and I understand why you've been using it for a year. It's perfect for the task and has basically no downsides.

Now, about the powdered quartz... Chemically known as silicon dioxide. It's often refered to as silica. Silica is also good stuff! It's in concrete, it's the main component of glass, and of particular interest for your application, it's very good at absorbing volatile organic smelly stuff. Seems perfect, right?

Unfortunately, powdered quartz has a downside. When it's in a very fine powder, it produces a lot of dust. This silicon dioxide dust is incredibly harmful to your lungs. Long-term exposure to silicon dioxide dust results in silicosis, which is a really serious illness that kills tens of thousands of people every year. Inhaling that dust can also give you lung cancer, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or other autoimmune disorders.

I totally understand why you felt that this product was a great option! I don't doubt that it serves as an absolutely excellent cat litter. I had two kitties that took the smelliest shits, and I was always searching for ways to fix that (either through diet, litter, stress reduction, or other things). I also understand how upsetting it can be to share something with people and be met with disbelief, denial, and accusations. However, I really want to urge you to look past all of that and reconsider your use of this product. The silica dust is practically invisible and tasteless, and it had the chance to cause you many years of problems. You and your cat deserve to be healthy.

Badabinski , 1 month ago

Eating this stuff would be about as bad as eating any regular cat litter that uses Fuller's earth as the primary absorbent. The extra special ingredient (powdered quartz) is effectively nontoxic when ingested. The real issue is the chronic exposure to very fine silica dust.

Edit: to clarify, I do not believe that it would be safe for humans or animals to use this as cat litter. Just realized that this comment might have been taken as a "well akshually it's fine." It is not fine, silicosis is a dreadful condition.

Badabinski , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I'm really glad to hear that you're alright. Several skin conditions are effectively autoimmune disorders, so I'm absolutely not surprised that the treatment is rough—anything that affects your immune system is probably going to make you feel like shit. I have no idea if that's the case, but it seems likely. I hope that your procedure goes well, your treatment is effective, and your condition ceases to be a problem for you. Health and wellness always come first.

Badabinski , 2 months ago

This is excellent news! I've been installing from GitHub for a while and have been really pleased with how fluid the app is.

Badabinski , 3 months ago

You joke, but using air dropped bombs to put out fires is a tactic that's been used for quite a while. probably not the best thing to do next to a site with nuclear materials on-hand, but it's absolutely been done before.

Badabinski , 3 months ago

I'm much less worried about human piloted craft. It's very difficult to program complex decision making and discernment. The astronauts present in the first landers will have been intensively trained in how to avoid catastrophe and will likely be able to come up with solutions on the fly if unanticipated things happen. Still dangerous, but hopefully less so.

It will be much easier to land completely automatically once we have landing pads, radar tracking, and other infrastructure present on the surface. It's just hard to land a robot on an airless moon with a bunch of rocks and hills and shit everywhere.

Badabinski , 3 months ago

I tip 20% or $5 on takeout orders, whatever is larger (provided nothing goes terribly wrong). I have the means, and I remember how much I fucking hated working in retail. I depend on these people to feed me and I appreciate that they're willing to do it (especially with how poorly they get treated at times). If I can make someone's day better then it's worth it to me.

That being said, I hate tip culture and wish that the laws in my country around tipping would change. This is getting off topic now (since I think that the people doing takeout orders aren't subject to this), but it's absurd that we let restraunts pay $3.50 an hour if someone is making the rest of the minimum wage in tips. If I tip someone, I want it to be because I really appreciate what they did. I don't want to be paying their wages, they should be receiving a livable wage no matter what. I know that refusing to tip won't change that, so I just go along with it.

Badabinski , 3 months ago

I've also said nice things about it, and it's just because I'm happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don't get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.

Badabinski , 3 months ago

I didn't downvote those posts, but I did feel like the thread was aggressive when it didn't need to be. I'd guess that a flippant/passive aggressive remark like "New to US civil law?" was (rightfully) upsetting to the user who clearly has an understanding of the law here. That user responded in kind and defended their original comment. However, they then kept responding to other users in a fairly aggressive fashion, even when those other users were communicating in alright way.

I totally get it. I'd be pissed if, after posting a well reasoned and researched comment on Kubernetes, someone responded saying "new to container orchestration?" I try (and sometimes fail) to express the more vulnerable feelings underneath anger online after dealing with my anger in meatspace. I find it results in more productive conversations. It's hard to do that, so I'm not casting aspersions. I think that's probably why people downvoted in this case though. People try to suppress and avoid aggression and conflict because those things are uncomfortable and used to be precursors to actual physical danger. It's just biology and emotions at work.

Badabinski , 3 months ago

This is the second time I've seen someone incorrectly refer to chlormequat as a pesticide. It's not a pesticide, it's a chemical that encourages plants to grow thicker stems, which in turn makes harvesting easier.

I don't say this to defend its use. I just feel that it's important to call it what it is.

Badabinski , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Chlormequat is a "plant growth regulator." It prevents the plant from creating a hormone that would otherwise cause the plant's stems to elongate and thin. Falls into the "something else" category, imo.

Edit: I think that some plant growth regulators are hormones, but not all. I should note that I'm not an expert, I just like to look chemicals up on Wikipedia (and the linked sources) and noticed that a lot of journalists were getting this wrong.

Badabinski , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Because greedy investors are gullible and want to make money from the jobs they think AI will displace. They don't know that this shit doesn't work like they've been promised. The C-levels at Gitlab want their money (gotta love publicly traded companies), and nobody is listening to the devs who are shouting that AI is great at writing security vulnerabilities or just like, totally nonfunctioning code.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

I hate righty-tighty lefty-loosy. Depending on whether you're looking at the top or bottom of the screw, you can see movement to the right or the left. I hate whoever came up with it, and I wish I had been taught the right hand method. It works exactly the same as the electromagnetic right hand rule:
an example of the right hand rule as it relates to a screw thread

Basically, you take your right hand, stick your thumb out, and curl your fingers like you're grabbing a broom handle. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to move to. Want to screw something in? Point your thumb towards the thing. Want to unscrew? Point your thumb away from the object the screw is currently in. Then, just look at the way your fingers are pointing! If it helps, squeeze your fingers into a fist and see which way they move. Alternatively, bend your wrist in, and observe which way your fingers are moving. Works every time.

It sounds complicated, but there are plenty of people who are unable to intuitively differentiate from right and left the way they can differentiate up and down. I am one of those people. Thanks to this method, I've been able to develop the muscle memory/intuition to know which way to turn a screw.

It's important to note that this only works for screws that are "right hand threaded." If the screw is only getting tighter when you're using this method, then it's likely reverse threaded, or left hand threaded. If that's the case, just use your left hand instead of your right hand.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.

Badabinski , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I'm not making this comment to disagree with your point, but the failure of the SL-1 reactor strikes me as an engineering and process failure more than anything else. The reactor was not designed in a safe fashion, probably because it was designed as a test bed for reactors that could be deployed via airplanes to the Arctic circle. The fact that an engineer was even able to fully remove a control rod, and the fact that removing that control rod lead to a fatal steam explosion make me think that they really tried too hard when they removed weight and volume from the reactor design.

In well designed safety-critical systems, human error should not be able to cause any form of bodily harm. I don't think it's a great idea for a private company to be running nuclear reactors on Earth to power something as trivial as a data center (investing in storage + local solar/wind/geothermal/hamster wheel velodrome seems like a more efficient use of resources for one thing), but I also don't think that SL-1 is the best example to cite here.

As an aside, my high school Physics teacher went on a long diatribe about how the three SL-1 casualties were the only humans ever killed as the direct result of nuclear fission in the context of a nuclear reactor. Looking back on it, I think she was splitting hairs a bit, but it is an interesting point to make.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

I'm sorry you had such a poor experience with men and relationships. It's not my place to speculate, but it sounds like you may have had some really harrowing experiences. It's good that you've found a lifestyle that makes you happy. Your first comment in this thread is really painful to read and makes me very sad. It's also not my place to debate with you about whether or not your comment is right/good, so instead I'll just share some of my background and why I feel pain when I read it.

I was absolutely raised to be "manly." My father, the Boy Scouts, popular media—all of it seemed like it was encouraging me to just "toughen up" and be strong. Nobody ever talked to me about feelings except anger. My dad was a great role model for anger. However, I was small. I was weak. I had allergies and asthma. I was sensitive and scared of violence. I cried easily. I was cuddly. It was very difficult for me to square what was expected of me with the reality of who I was, so for a long time I was just angry and numb and tried to hide.

I had a series of relationships where I failed to be emotionally present with my partner and rather than fixing it, I just emotionally whipped myself raw in front of them. I thought that punishment was the only way to be accepted. I finally met someone who showed me what it was to feel and helped me see a therapist. I was able to unpick a lot of the "manly" crap, and nowadays I'm pretty happy in my skin. I crochet with my partner. We talk freely and openly about our feelings. We call each other disgustingly cute pet names. We hold each other and cry when bad things happen. We both continue to go to therapy, and we're always looking for ways to improve and deepen our relationship.

For all of that, there's still the old raw spot in my mind. Inside of me, I'll always have that kid who just wanted a hug and instead got contempt and judgement. He was so lonely and miserable and felt like there wasn't anything nice in the world for him. He felt so confused and broken and wrong, because why couldn't he just be manly? Why couldn't he be a rock? That's the raw spot that your comment pokes for me. I suspect I'm not alone in that.

Having typed all that out, I guess I'll make one request. I don't know what exactly you went through, and I sure as hell won't invalidate it, whatever it was. All I'd ask is that you consider that there may be more than just sex and hate in the heart of the men you walk by. You don't have to be in a relationship or like men or want to be around them, but the world might seem like a bit better of a place for you.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

I immediately thought of this video when I saw "tr3n" https://youtu.be/7msoqnz2bcY

It's a very grumpy Scottish man responding to being told that he says the word "train" like he's saying "tren."

Badabinski , 4 months ago

The only thing that comes to me is that someone who was really into tuning/spiffing up Japanese cars was involved in the community early on. I've always found it weird, and I'd honestly kinda prefer to just use "theme" or "spiff" or one of the many other words that the Godfucked curse of the Earth that is the English language provides for the purpose.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

Yeah, that's why I wish the community would just use a different term. I'm not a fan of where it came from (Asian people bad asian motorcycle bad), and the arguments where one person says "I've been saying it for years," versus "bro it's been fucking racist for years," have gone past the point of a beaten and dead horse and into the realm of a fine mist of blood, fat, muscle, and viscera. Like, I just don't understand why people are attached to it, it's such a weird hill to die on. If it's a matter of having a term that people outside of the community wouldn't immediately understand, then I'm sure a different word could be found.

Edit: christ, I was not familiar with its usage in the 1930s. What a mess... Also, really loving the section on its Korean war usage, that's just great. Thanks for the link, it reaffirms my desire for the community to just use a different goddamned word.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

I think my initial read of your comment was wrong (I thought you were saying that the term was fine, which didn't hold up on my second read where I was paying attention), so I want to clarify by saying what I think you mean. You're making the point that I should be saying that the statement is racist and that they should consider whether or not they want to use it, not that they are being racist by using it in ignorance.

Is that right? Because if so, that's a fair point. More flies with honey than vinegar and all that. I'm normally better about giving people a chance to consider rather than just dictate my beliefs, but I'm sleep deprived and cranky and I think it's making me act in ways that aren't aligned with my usual values.

Edit: and it's a sign that I need to get off of the Internet for now, since I'm being waaaay more negative than I want to be.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

People ought to be careful with the going outside thing. Like, if you're just going out into your yard or apartment complex then it's fine. If you're commuting and there's the possibility that you might end up stranded where there's no climate control, then please at least stick that extra layer in your backpack or something.

I had somewhat severe hypothermia once, and it's an insidious thing. I got colder and colder until I just stopped noticing it, and then I stopped noticing most things. I didn't realize what was happening to me, and I would have died if I had been alone. I had others who saw my slack, dumb face and my kinda blue lips and helped me, but I'm not going to risk ever going through that again, and I'd encourage everyone to please be careful. Keeping a coat or hat or whatever with you is worth the hassle.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

Also, the congressman has his fucking finger on the trigger like the big stupid idiot that he is. Like, if you're going to be a "gun person," can't you at least follow the rules? There's so much wrong with this person and this photo.

People like this are the reason I got out of target shooting, which was the only sport I was ever any good at (which turned out to be really great for me, because I was able to explore machining and electronics stuff which I like more). Like, I was just there for the engineering challenge and precision, when it seemed like a bunch of the people I was competing with were there for the "2nd amendment fuck yeah fuck the libs fuck the poor my gun is an extension of my big floppy weiner" shit. I have such contempt for people like this, and I've grown to feel horrified at the violence that this type of behavior leads to.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

I live in Utah, so it's pretty red 😅

Badabinski , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

In addition to the fact that it's not just English via hand gestures, I believe it's done because sign language is speech, with all of the benefits that comes with. There are extra channels of communication present in sign language beyond just the words. There's equivalents of tone and inflection, and (I beleive) even accents. Like, this video of this lady performing "Fuck You" in ASL is what made it click for me when I first saw it many years ago. She's just so fucking expressive, in a way that subtitles could never be.

EDIT: changed my wording to be more accurate, since sign language literally is speech through a different medium. There's no need to draw an unnecessary boundary.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

Thanks for pointing this out, I've updated my comment to get rid of the unnecessary distinction.

Badabinski , 4 months ago

Thank you for blessing me with this video. It's perfect! It's short, specific, and well produced.

Badabinski , 5 months ago

I have an AKiTiO Node Titan eGPU enclosure with a GTX 1070 hooked up to an Ubuntu 22.04 laptop and it's working pretty well. I'm doing PCI passthrough to an Arch Linux VM, since my company mandated that all Linux users must use Ubuntu. To stave off comments about this, I'll say that it's not just that I dislike Ubuntu. They're requiring me to lock down so much stuff that I can't do my job. Plus, the endpoint security sensor on the host plays absolute hell with anything that uses heavy multiprocessing. The GPU (with external monitors), second NVMe drive, mouse, keyboard, audio interface, microphone, webcam, 30 gigs of RAM, and 11 CPU cores are passed to the VM, and the host OS gets the laptop GPU + monitor and my continuing disdain.

I've been using this setup for a month. My experience thus far has been positive. I start the computer up with or without the GPU connected, connect the GPU if I haven't yet, launch my VM via libvirt, and things just work. I really thought I'd have more problems with the GPU, but the USB passthrough stuff has been the truly problematic part (I can't just pass the whole PCI USB controller for IOMMU reasons). It's important to note that the GPU displays directly to external monitors. I think it's possible to like, send the data back to your laptop screen? But I really didn't want that.

(As an aside, the security people at my company have no problems with VMs lol. They know what I've done and they don't seem to care).

Badabinski , 5 months ago

I think the OP clearly doesn't like that they have this reaction (as someone else pointed out, and as you acknowledged). I think I understand why you might think this came from a lack of empathy. You like kids, what could be wrong with them acting like kids do? Sure, they're loud, but it's not that big of a deal! This person must have no empathy, because if they did, they'd be fine with it. People with no empathy are psychopaths, so OP must be a psychopath.

I think you're already starting to see what's wrong with that line of reasoning, which I really appreciate. Just to restate it here, the OP probably doesn't hate children, they just have problems with overstimulation (possibly misophonia or autism spectrum stuff). Not everyone has experienced overstimulation, but I can assure you that at best, it makes you reaaally cranky. Feelings of rage aren't surprising to me. If the OP wants, there are coping strategies and things they can do to help themselves in certain circumstances, but they're not wrong or bad. Their brain just works differently from other folks, and this is one of the effects of that.

It's not society's job to fix this (because kids have the right to be kids, and kids are kinda loud sometimes, even if you're trying to teach them to be mindful of their volume), but I think that it's generally good to try and show some empathy, or at least ask questions in good faith if you don't understand well enough to empathize.

I'd implore you to communicate with a bit more intent. Calling someone a psychopath is a pretty serious thing to do! Did you intend to hurt someone's feelings that much? Or were you just confused and a bit angry, and came to that conclusion in haste? There's a person on the other side of this conversation who has feelings, and they're asking here for help. They're trying to improve themselves, and I don't think you'd want to say that type of thing to someone who's just trying to live a better life.

Badabinski , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

Badabinski , 5 months ago

I'm convinced that Orson Scott Card suffered a traumatic head injury at some point. I don't know how you could go from writing something as beautiful and intimate as Ender's Game to shit like Hidden Empire, which is creepy right wing Christian disaster porn (from what I can remember of that trainwreck).