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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • There’s no way hippos have the long-distance endurance of humans. Pretty much everything is faster than humans at sprinting, but for endurance running, humans are next level. (Not me of course, I’m not really fit enough to be called human in this context.)






  • Using full names like that might be fine for explaining a physical rule, or stating the final result of some calculation - but it certainly would be cumbersome and difficult for actually carrying out the calculations. In many cases we already fill pages with algebra showing how things can be related and rearranged to arrive at new results. That kind of work would be intractable with full word names for the variables, partially because you’d be constantly spilling off the end of the page trying to write the steps; but also because having all that stuff would actually obfuscate what you are trying to do - which is algebra. And during that process, the meanings and values of the pronumerals is not as important has how they interact with each other. So the names are just a distraction.

    For setting up an equation, and for stating the final result, the meanings of the variables are very important; but during the process of manipulating the equations to get the result you want the meanings of the letters are often ignored. You only need to know that it is something that can be multiplied, or inverted, or subtracted, or whatever. Eg. suppose I want to rearrange to get the velocity. I don’t care that I’m dividing both sides by the air density times the drag coefficient and the area… I’m just dividing ρCA, which is an algebraic blob whose interpretation can be saved for some other time.


  • We aren’t talking about security though. We’re talking about what information should be presented on lemmy.

    Let me put it this way: have you personally ever tried to see who upvoted or downvoted a particular lemmy post? And if you did, did you talk about what you saw?

    My point is that currently basically no one sees the data. The expectation is that no one is looking. And it is not socially acceptable to discuss who is voting for what. But if the votes were changed to public then everyone would see it, the expectation would be that it is common knowledge, and so obviously it will be discussed. Is that what we want on lemmy?


  • I’m seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.

    But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to view votes; that argument sounds to me like “don’t bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools.”

    And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it ‘normal’ thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won’t look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.



  • blind3rdeye@lemm.eetomemes@lemmy.worldRule
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    2 months ago

    Hey man, keep fighting the good fight. But know that you are among friends here. You are unlikely to find any Musk fans in this thread. And posts that smell of fascism will be downvoted if mild, and flat out deleted if strong.

    And I think a lot of people here would also agree with you that continuing to use X is tacit support of some bad people and ideals. It’s just a matter of how hard-line you want to go with your guilt-by-association. Posting a screenshot of something that was posted on X is several steps removed from the source. It doesn’t link to the site, or give engagement to the site. So although your chain of reasoning to being against such posts is valid, I think perhaps attacking people for posting such screenshots risks a bit of ‘friendly fire’. I reckon your anti-fascist efforts are better spent elsewhere, where the actions are a bit more clear cut.



  • Thanks for the info. That sounds like a decent system. The idea of unpacking into a place of my choosing, and running without an additional launcher kind of appeals to me from a software-simplicity point of view - even if installing the game is slightly more hands on. But I don’t think I’ll do it that way myself, mostly because I don’t really want to further entrench Steam. Valve does a lot of good stuff … but their dominance in this space still makes me uncomfortable. (And the fact that they don’t let you disable the “what’s new” advertising bar on the library page is a big red flag for me.)


  • When I was first getting started, I briefly tried Lutris - but was put off by two things. The first was that it felt very complicated. I was new to Linux at the time, and I’m being asked helps of config questions about how to install which-and-what components in order to use such-and-such runners or launcher or whatever… basically just a heap of stuff that I didn’t really understand. And when I tried using a recommend ‘gold rated’ auto-setup to install something, it just froze. So that was disappointing. I decided that maybe I’d try something else.

    I’ve seen Lutris recommended in a lot of places; so apparently it’s pretty good. But at the time I used it, it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I think a lot of people praise Lutris for the way it lets you have case-by-case special configurations for all sorts of things, which might allow you get some stubborn stuff working. But for me, it felt like more things I could break. I’ve got enough games that I’m happy enough to just say that if it doesn’t work then I won’t play it. So I guess Lutris wasn’t for me. [edit - Bottles also had a lot of config choices to get started; but I was lucky enough that what I picked worked first time; and I haven’t looked at the config since.]



  • Heroic does seem to have jumped in popularity recently. I’d never heard of it when I first started installing games on Linux.)

    Does the comet support mean that it can also do Galaxy cloud-saves and achievements? I wouldn’t say those things are super important to me, but it would make switching between launches easier - since I wouldn’t have to stuff around trying to move save files to the right place after switching.


  • I’m more than happy to just download the installers, and only manually update. That’s how I use to do it when I was using Windows. But the installers don’t run natively on linux, I’m just not sure how best to use them. My first attempt was to use bottles to run an installer, then again to run the game after it installed. That worked - but after doing it once I decided that it would be easier to just install Galaxy instead so that I don’t have to setting things up over and over.

    I’m curious about how Steam responds to you adding a non-steam game like that. Are you using innoextract to unpack the files from the installer into some personal directory, and then telling Steam to run the game from there? Or do you tell steam directly to run the installer? … And when you add a non-steam game to steam is that an entirely local thing? (I don’t really want to be reporting to Valve about what GOG games I’m playing.)

    I see one advantage of using Steam is that if I already have Steam, then it saves me installing another tool. But some disadvantages is that it presumably won’t do save syncing, or Galaxy achievement tracking - and the installation process for each game might be a bit fiddly by the sounds of it.