I am a person online.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t find that this adage applies that well in politics. Yeah, I’ll assume whoever almost hit me with his car the other day was stupid/irresponsible/distracted rather than that they were attempting to murder me. Or that someone who gave me wrong directions to somewhere was mistaken rather than deceitful. That is because stupidity can explain these things, but stupidity on its own doesn’t explain becoming president.

    Beside, if you assume he was being used by dickcheneys, you’re still assuming malice, just not from the same person.

    As for which case his behavior would make most sense in, I won’t try to contradict you since I’m not good at analysing people and don’t enjoy trying.

    I just tend to think of Trump+close collaborators as a system and assume the purpose of a system is what it does, and I don’t make too many assumptions of Trump’s exact place in this.


  • With people in power it’s always hard to say whether a bad thing they do is due to stupidity or ill-intent, tho I tend to favor the second hypothesis.

    All of their actions did benefit a group. For Trump, most obviously, himself; but he also advanced the power of the American far-right and probably some companies thanks to lose regulations. For Bush, he clearly aimed to give more power to companies over things formerly done by the state, like hurricane relief or even the military. His vice president Dick Cheney famously profited from the Iraq war through the company Halliburton.

    Many of Bush’s policies had a disastrous human cost, but they were very efficient at filling the pockets of a few shareholders. So was he an incompetent buffoon playing into the hands of the capitalists, or was he himself an evil schemer who willingly enriched those he deemed worthy allies at the expense of the rest of the world?

    Same question applies to Trump. A narrative people like is that of the out of control puppet. An idiot that the Republican Party tried to use because he was attractive to their target demographic, but who ended up turning against his puppeteers and giving full reign to his folly.

    But it’s also possible that he is a smart and evil man who’s particularly talented at playing the role of a madman and who saw it was working.

    So basically, I have no definite knowledge of the intelligence of either man.



  • I would not recommend Arch for beginners. I like it, but it’s best for someone a bit familiar with Linux already. Yeah, the install is pretty simple now that Archinstall is a thing, but it’s not the method recommended in the Arch Wiki and if there’s something wrong with your install and you complain on the Arch Forum they might not be super helpful.

    More generally, the mood on the Arch forum and Arch communities at large isn’t super beginner friendly, and thay’s understandable: In a distro meant to be user friendly and aimed at general user, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system break, the community will feel a responsibility towards them, because the system wasn’t stable and user-friendly enough. In a distro primarily aimed at power users and devs, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system breaks, then the user is a fool and should’ve read the wiki.

    Because it is a very fast rolling release, some updates can break stuff. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen at a bad time and be a big problem for someone who doesn’t know how to deal with it.

    Debian is more stable, and easier if you go with a D.E, but you still have to make several choices during the install, which might be a bit complicated for a beginner who doesn’t know what any of these options mean… Tho of course, it’s possible to go with all the defaults and it’ll be alright.

    But my prime recommendation would be Linux Mint.



  • There’s that, and also their short lifespan (1 to 5 years). And the fact that the mother only cares for their offspring while they’re in eggs.

    Forms of transmission of behaviors by imitation or communication mostly emerge in species that care for their young, like birds or mammals, because the young learns from their parents, which complements instinct. It gets stronger when they’re a social species, because they also learn from every other individual. That’s when culture begins to emerge (like how some “accents” or “dialects” can be identified in the songs of birds or whales of a same species). But a specie that isn’t social and doesn’t care for it’s young, whatever an individual learnt in its lifetime dies with it, behaviors can only be transmitted genetically edit: inexact, see below , so they’re slower to evolve.

    [EDIT : I looked up some things online to make sure I wasn’t spreading disinformation (should’ve been the other way around, sorry…) and it seems some nuance needs to be added to two things;

    1. Despite being usually asocial and sometimes confrontational, octopuses can occasionally display social behaviors such as signal, so they’re not devoid of inter-individual communication source

    2. They seem to be able to learn from each-other to a certain extent. Source

    I still think my point mostly stands, but it’s a bit shakier than I thought.]



  • I still haven’t found the solution, have you had any luck with yours?

    I tried switching every UEFI setting that seemed to have something to do with booting or gpus, reinstalled gpu bios, upgrading mobo bios, getting a monitor I could plug without a switch… All to no avail.

    Well, I think before upgrading the BIOS, one thing had a slightly different result: Setting the boot mode to UEFI and disabling CSM made it display “no gop (graphic output protocol)” after a few minutes, and it offered to either take me to the uefi settings or loading defaults (which implied going back to CSM), after which it boot this time go back to doing the same thing.

    I don’t think I’ve had this error since the mobo bios upgrade, but still no display unless I reboot, unless the computer had been turned in until recently. I’m kinda out of ideas…





  • Would depend how it’s achieved. The most realistic way would be through mass automation, but the question is now “who owns the machines that produce everything?” A minority controlling these means of production would mean the rest of the world is at their mercy. If they manage to maintain their ownership (though a fully automated defense force, I guess), they can have the rest of the world doing whatever they want… But what do they need these people for then? All they are is a threat, as they are prone to revolt. Genocide seems like a handy option if the elites are sufficiently ruthless, but it would be hard to put in place; there are many people in the world and they can be inventive when fighting for their lives. Beside, there would probably be several such elite groups, still divided in different country; one who starts building large armies and stacking weapons might attract hostility from their neighbors. Providing the people with their needs to pacify them? Sure, but what if they want more? Or what if they make their own automated armies with the free time they have not worrying about starvation? Keeping them occupied seems safer. Why not invent some bogus job that doesn’t actually need to be done and have them believe they still need to earn their living? That could solve the problem from the elite’s point of view. So basically, no change for the people.

    With collective ownership of the means of production and an egalitarian spread of wealth, it could be cool tho. People would just do whatever they want, many would still probably undertake collective project, either to further better life of for the fun of it. There could still be forms of conflicts about how some things are managed and by whom, tho…



  • The forces within an atom are very strong and complex. We can create fission chain reactions in some very radioactive elements, and we can fuse some small elements, but the amounts of such reactions we can produce is pretty restricted. Beside, a particule that exits an atom will leave at a high speed, and it’s impossible to reliably know where it goes because of the rules of quantum physics, so it’s not like you can just take a proton and leave it in a box to reuse later. What we can use is the energy produced by the fission, and that’s what nuclear plants do.


  • That’s why nuclear fusion uses deuterium and tricium, isotopes of hydrogen with respectively one and two neutrons. These are much rarer than regular hydrogen, but can be found in some water molecules known as “heavy water”. They can be separated from the other molecules with a centrifuge since they’re heavier. Two deuterium atoms would produce Helium 4, but that’s not the most efficient fusion, and thus not the one that they plan to use in fusion reactors. Instead, they fuse a deuterium and a tricium, resulting in an Helium 5 atom. Unlike regular helium(4), helium 5 is radioactive, but it’s got a relatively short half-life and will soon expell it’s extra neutron, creating the helium we know and love.