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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • You know, it’s now occuring to me that I have absolutely no clue what Roblox actually is. It’s been around forever, I’ve been seeing gift cards for it in stores for I’m pretty sure well over a decade, I hear lots of talk about all of the dangers and how addictive it is for kids, etc.

    But I haven’t the foggiest idea what the game is actually like. To the best of my knowledge I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single screenshot of it, at least not one that was clearly labeled as being from Roblox.

    And while I’m a childfree curmudgeon in my 30s, I do have a few friends with kids that I see with some regularity, and I’ve never heard any of them mention Roblox even in passing.

    I feel like I’m in a really weird bubble of roblox-ignorance, I’m not exactly mad about it, but it feels weird that for as big as Roblox is supposed to be that I’ve never seen anyone talk about the actual game, just how big of a problem it is.



  • It’s possible I missed it, but I didn’t see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.

    Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.

    As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it’s a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn’t gone horribly wrong yet. It’s certainly worth being cautious about, and I’m certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it’s probably a pretty low likelihood.


  • There’s a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing

    He’s created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine

    You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine

    But there’s a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won’t want to eat powdered yeast

    But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.

    It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.

    And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker’s hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.

    And if they’re able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you’ve potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.

    You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It’s not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it’s “just” a beer.

    And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don’t need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.

    Hell, I’m pro vaccine, but I know I’d probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.

    Again, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this

    There’s also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it’s likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)

    I definitely think it’s something worth exploring.


  • My computer is basically the same computer my wife built around 12 years ago, as she did upgrades over the last decade or so I just saved her old components and eventually stuffed them into a new box. It was a beefy rig when she built it, and still runs most of what I throw at it with (what I think is) pretty acceptable performance and settings.

    So that old motherboard and processor aren’t windows 11 compliant and with the windows 10 end of life I decided it was time to make the switch. Don’t quite have the wiggle room in the budget for a major upgrade right now.

    And truth be told, even if I were to do a major upgrade, I probably was looking at Linux anyway. I don’t like the AI bullshit and a lot of the other dumb crap Microsoft has been pulling with 11. I want to get away from the corporate overlords in general. I’ve always been pretty big on FOSS, so really it was just gaming that’s been holding me back and I felt like proton and such the state of gaming on Linux has finally reached a place I can be happy with.

    And not for nothing, it’s free, and I’ve always felt like MS charges too much for windows. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, if I can save a buck I’m going to. The F in FOSS is a huge draw for me.

    And I’ve had half-baked plans to turn this current rig into a home server/NAS whenever I get around to building a new rig, so that meant Linux was in the cards for it at some point anyway, and I might as well start getting my hands dirty with that now in preparation.


  • I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

    But a couple things jumping out at me

    The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

    They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

    And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

    So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

    It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

    Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

    Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

    Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

    *fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.




  • As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I’ve found is LabEx, but I feel like it’s lacking in a lot of ways.

    First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn’t too terrible, it’s more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

    Second I’ve mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it’s probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it’s probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

    And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it’s spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.


  • Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as “obvious.”

    I’m a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

    I’m a reasonable tech-literate person, I’m no sys admin but I’m the family “guy who’s good with computers” I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

    And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I’m in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I’m back to being a kid with my family’s first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there’s more cool stuff I can make it do but I don’t know how yet.

    I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don’t have that for Linux yet, and it’s not exactly a great feeling.

    And I feel like there’s sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

    Like there’s a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

    And then a big gap

    And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

    And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

    And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

    And I’m slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that’s a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

    Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there’s a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through “this is your start menu,” “here’s what click/double-check/right click/etc” means," “here’s how you turn your computer off” kind of stuff.

    And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who’s going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

    Also don’t get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don’t want it to go anywhere, when I know what I’m doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

    Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven’t found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don’t exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.









  • I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking

    Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam

    Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice

    And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.


  • Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

    There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

    And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.