Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

  • 0 Posts
  • 90 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I apologize, I was rushed and didn’t adequately explain myself. I want to restate the premise on which I made my comment. Israel has a large military and is using it to kill Palestinians right now. I absolutely agree with that. Israel is using weapons provided by the United States, and the transfer of those weapons was authorized by the current Democratic administration. No disagreements there.

    My fear is that the military of the United States will become directly involved in the Palestinian genocide. I am afraid of the much larger and better armed US military actively leveling grid squares filled with Palestinian civilians with missiles. What is happening right now is already monstrous. I want the United States to divest and cease its involvement in this genocide at the bare minimum. I want the United States to directly oppose Israel and stop the genocide, using force if necessary. I very much do not want the United States’ involvement to increase. If Donald Trump is elected, an increase in the use of force against Palestine may happen. That is my argument. I absolutely do not believe that the current administration is doing the right thing here. I hate it, and I want it to stop. I just also don’t want it to get worse.


  • So I’m going to preface this by saying how I feel about the situation. I’m furious that Biden and the Democrats aren’t just… y’know, fucking stopping this shit. I’m furious that the administration isn’t doing more to end the goddamned genocide. It makes me feel sick to think that the executive branch of my country isn’t denouncing what’s happening. The Democrats are supposed to be the party for compassionate people. I consider myself to be a compassionate person, and the Democrats are absolutely failing to represent me.

    I’m sure there’s some realpolitik going on there, but like, realpolitik can suck my asshole when my taxes are paying for bombs and missiles that are being used by a different country in an unjust war to kill innocent people in a genocide.

    Make no mistake, I want this shit to end right the fuck now. I want Israel to fuck off back to their borders. I want the hostages to be traded, I want Palestine to be a full state in the UN with defensive treaties. I want Bibi and the people who enabled him to be tried for crimes against humanity. I want Israel and the United States to pay reparations and to foot the bill for the rebuilding of Palestinian infrastructure.

    I want change. I am tired of the Democrats. Shit, I think there are a lot of people tired of the Republicans. Nobody is happy with the way out system works. I look at other countries with coalition governments and a large number of specific parties and I wish that I could have that. I would absolute love to have a party that represents my values and desires.

    With all that said, I just don’t think that we will be able to enact meaningful change in 30ish days. To enact change within the confines our current system, we would need to convince tens of millions of people to vote for a candidate that truly represents them in that timeframe. Given the constricting nature of our two-party system, I think many people wouldn’t know who that is. I certainly don’t know who would represent me. It certainly wouldn’t be Jill Stein, to provide an example of a third party candidate. I’d vote for Bernie Sanders, but he’s not running for president. His election would require tens of millions to write his name on their ballots.

    Many of the people who don’t feel represented by our government with regards to Palestine currently vote for the Democrats. If we were to all switch in unison and vote for someone who would truly stop this shit, then we could enact our change. I believe that there’s just no way to do that in a month.

    If we try to enact change right now and fail, then we will likely end up with a violent, narcissistic rapist as the head of our government who will continue to implement blatantly christo-fascist policies. Christo-fascists do not like people of the Islamic faith, and Donald Trump has promised to wipe out Palestine if he is elected. He cannot be trusted to act according to what he has previously said (which, speaking from experience, is the fashion of all malignant narcissists who are not being treated for their PD), but there is a chance that he will follow through on his word and will speed up the genocide of the people of Palestine.

    There are two primary candidates. One candidate will likely maintain the monstrous, awful, status quo. The other candidate may or may not direct the most powerful military force in the world to level Palestine and order the destruction of every man, woman, and child within its borders. The former gives the people of Palestine more time while to survive while we try to unfuck our system. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a chance.

    Earlier, I said that realpolitik can suck my asshole, and that’s what this feels like. It’s shit and I hate it and it makes me feel gross. None of this brings back the lives of those who have already died, and my choice probably wouldn’t really be appreciated by a Palestinian who is trying to survive the bombs I’m paying for. I won’t shame anyone who cannot live with themselves if they vote for Kamala Harris. People are entitled to their beliefs, and living out of compliance with them can be very harmful. However, I feel compelled to at least present an emotional argument against a vote for a 3rd party candidate (or no vote at all) in this specific situation.



  • It very definitely was 😅 The way that company used the satellite network was cool, don’t get me wrong. They would use it to push content out to all their stores with multicast which was really efficient with bandwidth. I loved it for that, but I hated interacting with it over unicast in any way, shape, or form. Horses for courses, as they say.




  • My pain tolerance for shitty input methods has been permanently warped after experiencing psychic damage from using Teamviewer to connect to a system over a very flaky HughesNet satellite link. I was working for a vendor that supplied a hardware networking box to a stupid retail company that sells food and shit. I just wanted to ssh to our boxen on a specific network so I could troubleshoot something, but the only way I could get to it was via putty installed on an ancient Windows XP desktop on the same network as our box that could only be accessed with Teamviewer. My favorite part of that was that the locale or something was fucked up, so my qwerty keyboard inputs were, like, fucking transformed into azerty somehow?? The Windows desktop was locked down and monitored to a tremendous degree, so I couldn’t change anything. The resolution was terrible, the latency was over a second, and half of my keyboard inputs turned into gibberish on the other side.

    Oh, and I was onsite at that same company’s HQ doing a sales engineering call while I was trying to figure out what was wrong. I spent 5 days sitting in spare offices with shitty chairs, away from my family, living that fucking nightmare before I finally figured out what was wrong. God damn, what a fucking mess that was. For anyone reading this, NEVER WORK FOR GROCERY/DRUG STORE IT. They are worse than fucking banks in some ways. Fuck.

    EDIT: also, I asked ‘why Teamviewer’ and the answer was always shrugs. This was before the big TeamViewer security incidents, so maybe they thought it was more secure? Like, at least they didn’t expose RDP on the internet…


  • Having been in this situation (the only binary I could use was bash, although cd was a bash builtin for me), echo * is your friend. Even better is something like this:

    get_path_type() {
        local item
        item="$1"
        [[ -z "$item" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to get_path_type'; return 1; }
        if [[ -d "$item" ]]; then
            echo 'dir'
        elif [[ -f "$item" ]]; then
            echo 'file'
        elif [[ -h "$item" ]]; then
            echo 'link'  # not accurate, but symlink is too long
        else
            echo '????'
        fi
    }
    
    print_path_listing() {
        local path path_type
        path="$1"
        [[ -z "$path" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to print_path_listing'; return 1; }
        path_type="$(get_path_type "$path")"
        printf '%s\t%s\n' "$path_type" "$path"
    }
    
    ls() {
        local path paths item symlink_regex
        paths=("$@")
        if ((${#paths[@]} == 0)); then
            paths=("$(pwd)")
        fi
        shopt -s dotglob
        for path in "${paths[@]}"; do
            if [[ -d "$path" ]]; then
                printf '%s\n' "$path"
                for item in "$path"/*; do
                    print_path_listing "$item"
                done
            elif [[ -e "$path" ]]; then
                print_path_listing "$path"
            printf '\n'
            fi
        done
    }
    

    This is recreated from memory and will likely have several nasty bugs. I also wrote it and quickly tested it entirely on my phone which was a bit painful. It should be pure bash, so it’ll work in this type of situation.

    EDIT: I’m bored and sleep deprived and wanted to do something, hence this nonsense. I’ve taken the joke entirely too seriously.



  • Yeah, hypercapnia is fucked. I’m actually testing a small CO2 gas generator (literally just citric acid added dropwise to sodium bicarb with an acid trap and a dehumidifying stage) as a means to kill pests on houseplants and did some reading on the symptoms to be safe. It is unpleasant. It’s not the worst death I could imagine, but it’s shit.

    As an aside, the way that CO2 kills bugs is interesting. Basically, the excess CO2 (in the range of 10-80,000 ppm) causes their spiracules (i.e. the little holes in their exoskeletons they use to breath) to stay open. This causes them to lose moisture until they die of dehydration (usually in a matter of hours). All this happens long before they asphyxiate or suffer from any sort of acidification from the CO2. It’s a bit fucked up, but all other means of getting rid of the pests on my partner’s houseplants have failed.


  • It’s a shame that nobody has produced a molecular test cheaply enough for free distribution yet. The fact that you can get PCR quality tests entirely at home makes the antigen tests a non-option for me and mine. They’re too expensive to recommend to most people, however. The ones I’ve been using are $25 per test, and you also have to pay $50 for the reusable test reader. That’s way cheaper than they used to be (Lucira COVID tests were like $75 a pop, and the fact that the entire unit was single use was terrible from a waste perspective), but it’s still just not good enough.

    EDIT: lmao, Pfizer bought Lucira and is now selling combo COVID+flu tests with the same single-use tester. I wish they had converted to a reusable central unit with disposable tests like most other molecular COVID testers…

    EDIT: yikes, the Lucira combo tester might be giving false positive results for the flu. Dunno if this Amazon review is accurate, but it’s certainly concerning:

    Here is said Amazon review

    This is one of the first combo tests for flu and COVID-19. By training, I am a microbiologist and infectious disease epidemiologist. Thus, I ordered some of these new tests to see how well they worked and how easy they were. As additional background, I have run infectious disease laboratories and have designed diagnostic assays. Thus, having an at-home test is always a nice luxury.

    The instructions were easy to use. I will note that when you put the vial in the reader, do not push it all the way down, as that is when the test will actually start. So be sure to mix your swab in the buffer (purple liquid) for the appropriate time and then cap the viral and push down.

    I ran the first test (far left in the picture) and within 10 minutes it came up as positive for influenza B. Currently, in the US, in my age bracket, flu B makes up about 17% of diagnosed cases, so the biological rationale is that this could be real. However, I was asymptomatic and was only running the test to see how easy it was to run. I then retested on a rapid antigen test that included SARS-CoV-2, Flu A, Flu B, and RSV. These unfortunately are not available in the US but I had some left over from a trip to Europe. That was negative for all of those pathogens. Since these molecular tests have a lower limit of detection (meaning they can detect small amounts of viral nucleic acid compared to rapid antigen tests). However I did buy four of the Lucira tests, so I ran another one (far right in the photo). That came back negative for all of the pathogens.

    This is highly concerning. Given no diagnostic test is perfect, had I only had one test on hand and no way to corroborate the first test result I would have been isolating thinking that I had influenza B. When in actuality, it seems most likely that the first test was a false positive result. Looking at the Instructions for Use on the FDA website, it shows for Flu B, that in 364 PCR negative samples, 1 was positive on the Lucira test. So there is always a possibility that you test results may not be accurate. However, it was curious that this happened the first time I used this assay.

    I would personally avoid this product. I have been using many of the at-home tests for the past few years and have NEVER had a false positive. Thus, this has put much doubt into the results and the technology behind this product. This is the only molecular combo assay for SARS-CoV-2 and Flu on the market at this point, but others will be released shortly and I would interpret these results carefully. Really, I would love if they refunded me the cost of one test, but I won’t hold my breath there


  • Badabinski@kbin.earthtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSmart
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    7 days ago

    The article says that he refused the prize because he felt that he hadn’t earned it. He felt that the prize should be awarded to Richard Hamilton who developed the theory Perelman used to fully solve the Poincaré Conjecture. I’m not saying it was the wisest or easiest solution. I was only trying to express my opinion that I find his adherence to his strong principles admirable.

    I’m absolutely not advocating for anyone to turn down a million dollars. For anyone in a position where they can just, like, get a million bucks, take that shit and live a happier life!


  • Badabinski@kbin.earthtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSmart
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    7 days ago

    Also from the article:

    The writer Brett Forrest briefly interacted with Perelman in 2012. A reporter who had called him was told: “You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms.”

    I enjoy this man’s focus and determination. I feel like the world probably missed out on good things when he left academia, but I can’t blame the dude when I saw why he refused a million dollars for solving the Poincaré Conjecture. He seems like a person with very strong principles.


  • I used Google maps to get these values. I’m using Google’s estimated walking distance and will also include Google’s estimated walking time.

    • Convenience store
      • Distance: 800 m
      • Time: 11 minutes
    • Chain supermarket
      • Distance: 1.1 km
      • Time: 15 minutes
    • Bus stop
      • Distance: 230 m
      • Time: 3 minutes
    • Park:
      • Distance: 450 m
      • Time: 7 minutes
    • Big supermarket (Walmart)
      • Distance: 1.7 km
      • Time: 23 minutes
    • Library
      • Distance: 2.7 km
      • Time: 37 minutes
    • Train station (local light rail)
      • Distance: 3.1 km
      • Time: 43 minutes

    I’m in Utah somewhere south of Salt Lake City (the state capitol). The numbers aren’t great, but they’re far better than some places I’ve lived here. As a kid, I remember biking for 20+ minutes to make it to a small supermarket.

    EDIT: as others have said, my paths can be quite bendy at times, but it’s different than many suburbs in the US. Salt Lake City (and, by extension, most of the valley that it’s in) is built on a fairly rigorous grid system. We have lots of straight roads with large blocks (in some cases, it can be 1-2 km between lights and crosswalks). We don’t have too many ratfucked suburban mazes, so the walkability problem here is primarily due to sprawl and a dearth of crosswalks.



  • Ugh, I hate ChatGPT. If this is Bash (which it is, because it’s literally looking for files in a directory called ~/.bashrc.d), then it should god damned well be using syntax and language features that we’ve had for at least twenty fucking years. Specifically, if you’re writing for Bash (and not POSIX shell), you better be using [[ ]] rather than [ ]. This wiki is my holy book I use to keep the demons away when writing Bash, and it does a simply fantastic job of explaining why you should use God damned double square brackets.

    ChatGPT writes shitty, horrible, buggy ass Bash. This is relatively decent for ChatGPT (it even makes sure the files are real files and not symlinks), but I’ve had to fix enough terrible fucking shitty AI Bash to have no tolerance for even the smallest misstep from it.

    Sincerely, A senior developer who is known as the Bash wizard at work.

    EDIT: Sorry, OP. ChatGPT did not, in fact, write this code, and I am going to leave my comment here as a testament to what a big smelly dick I was here.


  • My partner and I have this thing where we ask each other if we are the other person’s x, where x is something ridiculous, cute, grotesque, or profane. For example, I once asked my partner if I was her gutter-bloated corpse, to which she, of course, answered in the affirmative.

    I’ll soon find out if I am actually a tasselled wobbegong carpet shark in the eyes of my partner.

    As an aside, I asked the corpse thing after reading this delightful line from one of my very favorite books:

    “Body found floating by the docks,” Glokta breathed, “bloated by seawater and horribly mutilated… far… far beyond recognition.”



  • I’m guessing it’s nostalgia. The bananas in the original game had stickers on them, but the newer games didn’t. There are a lot of people who love the old SMB games and are happy when anything is done to make the new ones like the old ones.

    I don’t get being so excited about it, but these games weren’t a core part of my childhood. I played the party games in SMB 1 once and those were fun, but I don’t think I ever actually played the main game.