My imperfect solution of downloading on PC over time and using the network transfer feature might still be better suited for the way my internet speed and quota works, but this is great for small updates and that kind of thing.

Everyone who has looked up useful stuff to print knows about Gridfinity, but boxes.py looks so cool! Reminds me a lot of an earlier era of computer software, when it seemed like half of all programs were made to help you do things off-screen, a lot more printing and scanning. Maybe that’s just me, I don’t know.

The open source stuff aren’t as polished but they don’t want me dead so I guess that’s an easy decision to stop looking at Prusas for me.

For the future: File Lockpick, from PowerToys. The only thing the Windows product managers haven’t ruined, and only because it’s on Microsoft’s GitHub and not built into the OS. Or in Winget, since this is Lemmy.

You can just right click the drive that won’t eject or the file that won’t cut and it’ll list everything that had a handle open, without digging through the SysInternals programs.

I wonder where my computing would be if I spent all this time scaling the Linux learning curve instead of the Windows one. Probably more friction at my work-issued Windows machine. Probably increasingly many hours saved on “fixing” every successive Windows install.

For me it ends up being SpaceSniffer a solid 20% of the time.

For what it’s worth Windows 10 is/was perfectly usable after setting it up properly. A bit of customization needed but nothing crazy. Honestly I liked the OS and its design, it felt very clean and utility oriented.

I’ve set up a new Windows 11 install from scratch this past month and it has been a real pulling-teeth experience. It’s not completely unfixable (yet) but even the annoyances that are not sinister are perplexing. There’s a new context menu that has a cut down layout and takes a few milliseconds to load - I get the design decision to keep it short, and have a button for more options, but it lags - so I’m out. It’s just a little hidden config to automatically skip to the full (more cluttered but no lag) menu (which you could do by holding shift every single time). There’s a few dozen little annoyances like that. A few are bigger than others, like the need to drive Copilot out to the desert and double tap it in the head unceremoniously. They’ve put it in Paint. They’ve put it in fucking Notepad.

That’s not even getting into how desperately they want every user signing away the rights to their bone marrow to the Microsoft Corporation. The computer I’ve set up is more or less where I want it to be, but I’m wary of things breaking with an update.

I’m not big on quotes but I’ve been coming back to Ed Zitron’s words a lot lately:

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer.

I find it funny how the tables turned. Used to be that Linux was the one that needed unintuitive setup and Windows was the one that just worked. I don’t think I’ve used a single Linux image that didn’t just drop me into a desktop environment no questions asked upon boot, and that’s a world away from the awful, awful new Windows experience. Unless Microsoft conspires to make the next decade of Linux hardware drivers absolutely abhorrent, I think this will have to be my last Windows machine. That or the entire executive suite of Microsoft’s OS division has an epiphany about not wanting to spend eternity in hell.

For all the Just Use Linux people: I’ve got more machines running Linux in my house than Windows. I’ll get there, Microsoft is just doing everything they can to push everyone off their OS.

IIRC I played it a little and it was just mobile microtransaction hell after a certain point, no?

I think I’m subconsciously holding back going back into Skyrim until Inigo V3 is released.

At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.

Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.

AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.

I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the missile crow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.

The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.

I think I should have been more clear, this is exactly what I’m asking about. I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction this post got, this seems like a very normal thing to want to host.

Doesn’t help that some people here are replying as if I was asking to locally host the “trick” that is feeding a chatbot text and asking it whether it’s machine-generated. Ideally the software I think I’m looking for would be something that has a bank of LLM models and can kind of do some sort of statistical magic to see how likely a block of tokens is to be generated by them. Would probably need to have quantized models just to make it run at a reasonable speed. So it would, for example, feed the first x tokens in, take stock of how the probability table looks for the next token, compare it to the actual next token in the block, and so on.

Maybe this is already a thing and I just don’t know the jargon for it. I’m pretty sure I’m more informed about how these transformer algorithms work than the average user of them, but only just.

Thing is, even with how bafflingly evil Google is, the one corporate service I could see myself paying for is the YouTube subscription. I use the phone app a lot, it would make sense for me.

The problem is that they’re notoriously ban-happy with paying VPN users, due to some of them using their exit countries to pay less for a service. Thing is, if I tried to pay for premium from a country I’d exit from, I’d be paying more compared to where I am. I’m perfectly content overpaying slightly for a few things online with this situation, I don’t buy much, I’m fine. I also don’t know where the line is. If I pay for my account with a card from my IRL location, using the pricing for said location, will I get my account suspended after I jump back on the VPN? It’s not like they’ll publicly announce a clear breakdown of what is and isn’t okay.

Google knowing I use a public VPN on Google services is not an issue for me. I don’t do anything sketchy, I really just want an uncensored internet out of the eye of my ISP.

It’s the most popular sporting event on the planet in a country with 300 million people, this is nothing like the Club World Cup that was held this year. The lack of tourists might not be a problem, save for maybe atmosphere.

This chart, with the huge ticket prices, is why the US was chosen.

DankPods my beloved as well. He’s not very technical with software so it’s quite interesting to hear him talk about it.

The Italian food thing is pretty common in many cultures, I’ve seen it in a few countries myself and it’s big deal here in Lebanon. My own parents used to be livid about me bringing friends over and not offering anything to eat when I was younger. It’s a part of my culture I’m a bit resistant to doing, I don’t know, it’s pretty intuitive if it’s time to eat or not, and if someone’s dropping by between meals I am totally fine not setting the whole ass table. Maybe a beer or coffee (the good stuff, it’s a nice thing to share) nowadays.

The Dutch food thing has zero resemblance to my culture but it is in line with something I’ve read before about western (at least the description I read was western) food habits. Going completely off the top of my head here. As far as I remember, historically you had one heavy meal and everything else was a smaller meal. I think I was looking up “dinner” vs “supper”. The impression was that the word “dinner” was originally for the big meal of the day, and that “supper” was for a light meal at the very end of the day. “Breakfast” is more of literally breaking a fast than it is a whole meal and lunch referred to a small mid-workday meal.

So I think the idea of temperature might be connected to the size or heaviness of the meal in your Dutch thing.

Or maybe my nerves are completely cooked after work and this is more word salad than word coherent comment.

I love my city (Beirut) it is full of trams (Kia Picanto 2013 base model w/ automatic transmission)

I’ve read the entire profile and it seems to me more like satire than an actual serious summary (quite some hyperbole in there), tho it’s worrying that your entire reddit history can be analyzed so quickly.

Punched in my old profile. I don’t think any of the actual pieces of info it are inaccurate, but the dull, gummy gleam of “quirky” corpo speak that LLMs love to imprint on all of their output makes it much yuckier for me. The roast section is especially silly, my commenting ramped up before the API broke in 2019-2022 during a genuine phase of societal chaos in my home country and this tool makes it sound like my exasperated rants over my society beginning to crumble are obscure rants about modern Star Wars.

I’m not as familiar as many people now with LLM tone, and more precisely tonal dissonance, so I guess this is a lesson. But I can’t say I enjoyed that.

Did someone just print out the list from the photo that’s been doing the rounds for a month now and post it to TikTok as a copy-and-paste joke?

I think reposting jokes is the lifeblood of the internet but being a meme cover artist seems kind of… hm. Sharing a joke reveals a good (or bad!) sense of humor. Copying it beat for beat reveals something a bit different, but I can’t place it.

The original had an Arabic keyboard in the background. Gotta look out for one of our own.

I didn’t know about this. That’s kind of disgusting.

I think that’s a Y510p. This was the machine that made me think Lenovo knew what they were doing and were the true successors to IBM, for laptops at least.

This machine was released right before the gaming laptop age really kicked off, so its paltry GT750(M! Sometimes two of them) was about as good as it got outside of a sketchy DTR from a company you’ve never heard of. Only a few years later did the standard go way up for gaming laptop performance, with everyone and their dog getting an Nvidia 1050/1060/1070 machine.

But I really liked the Y500/Y510. Serious design that made it look like a thick business laptop with polished black surfaces and cool red key edges vs gaudy RGB sludge with LOOK AT ME I AM EPICLY GAMERING all over it. I kind of wish they kept this design style.

Oh well. Tongfang has my back now.

So, there are other peers, some of which gave me all of the data that I have so far, a small number of them. They can connect just fine to me, so their ports are open.

There are other peers with only a small percentage of the total torrent that are permanently connected, which might mean that they only wanted to download some of the files, but looking at the file list availability when they were the only connected peers, they had scattered chunks of data and not one continuous folder.

Now the convoluted part that I feel needs its own post:

In my quest to get the data, I’ve done some digging on BTdig, and added a few torrents with what seemed to be almost identical content. Most of these were completely inactive, but it seems like my client figured out that there’s overlap with this torrent, somehow. It now shows one of these inactive torrents as having a small % completion, despite also showing that 0 bytes were downloaded. I suspect it was able to match some of the data.

I wish I better understood that part of torrenting, a lot of what I want is relatively obscure and I love nothing more than seeding files that took months to complete. Being able to stitch together torrents and make rarities a bit less rare is exactly what I want to do.

The interesting thing is that the flags that show during these brief connections show the peer is from DHT/PeX, not from the dozen general purpose trackers I slapped on there. If I got this from a public tracker, I’d think your explanation was the best one, but this makes it more mysterious.