From my own impression as a member of a small political party in my own country who joined not out of tribalism but simply because they seemed to mostly want the same things as I do, party members live in a bubble of people who are heavilly into politics and understand the importance of politics, whilst the leadership specifically in addition to this are also mostly surrounded by generally unquestioningly hero worship from the common party members plus they tend to have quite limited life experience outside the party as they’ve joined it as young adults (maybe when they were at university and involved in student movements) and it and its internal environment have always been a large part of their lives.

Those people usually see the supporters of their political adversaries in the same way as fans of a sports club see fans of other clubs, and don’t really “get” the point of view of people who don’t vote at all.

I think people are mainly driver by the tabu against eating human meat rather than any kind of proper thinking about it, but the tabu itself probably came to be because people kept getting sick when they ate human meat but not when they ate other meats.

You see a lot of that kind of thing in other tabus, for example the ones against incest (inbreeding tends to produce offspring with health problems) or handling feces (because the bacteria in feces tend to cause disease much more than the bacteria in things like dirt).

I read it as meaning:

• “Just because two sides are fighting doesn’t mean you have to pick one”.

Every single disease that might be present in human meat is 100% capable of infecting humans, which is not at all the case for non-human meat.

Even if you properly cook the meat, things like prions can still remain.

I suspect that’s probably one of the reasons why the tabu against cannibalism is so widespread: from a health point of view human meat is a lot more likely to make you sick than non-human meat.

I think at the root of it all is a far broader phenomenon than that which is far from gender specific.

In simple terms: quiet confidence doesn’t stand-out in “loud” environments were people’s attention is being sought by countless other people, especially for people who aren’t sophisticated and lived enough to recognize and value it, and the vast majority young people are such people as are (or so it seems to me at times) a large minority or even a majority of supposedly adults.

Putting it in another way, both quiet confident people are nowhere as invested into shaping the opinions of others as to spend most of their time “shouting” (and by “shouting” I mean all the ways people try and project and impression onto others, not just speaking loudly, so for example how some people always dress to impress rather than dress for themselves) and unsophisticated people are drawn to “loudness” rather than more subtle elements of how others talk, dress, make choices and act.

This stuff is behind phenomenons like Influencers, Celebrity Culture, Populist Politicians and so on, which has been pushed very hard in Western Culture for decades now.

So loud toxic masculinity posers with lots of exposure in the News Media (with the well known “Halo Effect” that people who are talked about a lot are perceived by others as important even when most of the talking about them is saying negative things) will get the attention of and influence emotional, social and/or intellectual simpletons.

Time to start live streaming a lettuce again to as the traditional Liz Truss standard for how long her projects last…

I think that in the database space MS-SQL was never the best option at any level or at least not for long.

Oracle could be said to still be the best amongst databases for high performance and very large datasets, but in my experience in the smaller and mid-sized databases space things like Postegres and even No-SQL databases surprassed MS-SQL already back in the late 90s, early 00s.

The Apache Web Server

You can configure launchers such as Lutris to run your games inside a proper sandboxing application such as “firejail”.

Just look into “Command Prefix” under Global Options in Lutris: a sandboxing app like firejail is used by really just running the sandbox app with the original command as a parameter of it, so that means you “prefix” the original command with the sandbox app and its parameters.

You can go as crazy as you want if you do sandboxing like that (down to only allowing access to whitelisted directories). In my case I’ve actually limited networking inside the sandbox to localhost-only.

I’m running the games in Linux, using Lutris as a launcher with a default configuration that wraps them in a firejail sandbox (for anybody interested, you add firejail as the “command prefix” under Global Options or in the System Options of the game) which amongst other things blocks networking.

In fact I went and figure out how to do all that exactly because I wanted to run pirated games in Linux in a safe way and you can’t just rely on the lower probability of Windows games of having code that tries to determine if it’s being run with Wine and accesses Linux-specific functionality and files if it is.

PS: That firejail stuff also works for Linux native games (it just wraps whatever you’re running to start the game, be it Wine or directly the game Linux binary).

Basically, EMP but directed.

Well, the “magical” Steam config was that stuff others pointed out that you need to in Steam actually under Settings -> Compatibility enable use of Steam Play with Proton for all titles since that’s not enabled by default.

I don’t know.

The whole thing sounds like it will lead into fights amongst true book clubs because the members of each will think theirs is the true book, not the other ones, and the fights might even be worse between the true book clubs that were originally the same. I all sounds kinda dangerous.

Plus, how would I know if the book of your true book club is in fact the one and only true book if there are other true book clubs which like you book also claim to have the one and only true book and its a different book?

First thing: the blinkers are for your own safety, but they’re also for other people’s safety and to help improve the flow of traffic (for example, if somebody waiting at a T-junction to go into your lane sees in a timely fashion that you’re going to exit at the junction, they’ll know earlier they can come in rather than have to wait to see what you actually do and this kind of thing times many such situations adds up to better traffic flow).

Second thing: it’s a lot easier and cognitively simpler to just do it without thinking rather than considering the situation to see if you should do it or not and a good mental trigger point to train that as an instinctive movement is “if I’m going to turn out of my lane, I’ll turn the blinker on for the side I’m turning to” - so, turning of the road -> blinker on that side; changing lane -> blinker on the side I’m moving to; going to stop and park on a side of the road -> blinker on that side.

Personally I just use the blinkers for all such situations and don’t even have to think about it, and as for the first point I made, that just informs how early I do it (I’ve trained myself to do it quite a bit before I turn in order to help with traffic flow). This does mean that at times I’ll use the blinkers when there is nobody else around to actually use that information, simply because I’m not actually thinking about “should I do it or should I not?” I’m just unthinkingly executing a trained impulse. Never had any problems with excessive wear and tear of blinker lights and since I don’t need to think about the “should I turn the blinker” decision I can focus on more important things, so as I see it, even at the cost of at times using the blinkers when there is nobody to see it so there is really no point, I’m still better of having trained myself to do it like this.

That said blinker usage amongst drivers massively depends on the country and the general driving culture there. For example were I come from, Portugal, most people only use the blinkers in situations were they stand to gain from it themselves (for example when exiting a road to the left, crossing a lane, were others might give you way, out of good manners if they know your intentions), then of the rest most will use it for the safety of other cars but almost none will do it for the safety of pedestrians, whilst in The Netherlands (were I picked up my current habits on this) they’re generally pretty thorough on using blinkers in all situations they should quite independently of seeing or not people who might use that information (possibly because of all the bicycles around, as they’re often hard to spot using the mirrors when in certain positions relative to a car which are exactly the positions were knowing that the car wants to turn is important for the safety of the cyclist)

Do you guys have a new true book per week or is it more of a true book a month club?

God works in mysterious ways…

Elves, trolls, orcs, dwarves, ents and hobbits are real! It says so on the holy book: The Lord Of The Rings.

Could it be the phenomenon we also see in areas such as Engineering were as people get more senior most transit into more managerial positions, where the mindset is a lot more about managing appearances and stakeholders, and saying the right things at the right time to the right people rather than the far more “it is as it is” mindset of those on the technical side?

I actually started by going into Science at Uni but ended up switching to Engineering half way on my Degree (not many jobs for Experimentalist Physicists in my homeland) so never actually saw the actual Science career track from the inside through the eyes of somebody with enough professional experience to see the more subtle things about it, so I am genuinely curious if the Science career too has the phenomenon I see in Engineering of Senior people tending to be more Administrator/Manager and less Technical hence with more tendency to manage the subjective perception of reality of others to achieve personal and career goals and less of a desire for things to be as clear and as objective as possible.

Because if it is so, it would explain how many such well established older Scientists seem to be less Scientist in the sense of this meme - because they are less Scientist and have become more Administrator, and the latter has a whole different mindset.

I had quite a lot of the same frustration because, although I was never a sysadmin (more like a senior dev who has done a lot of software systems development and design for software systems where the back and middle tier are running on Linux servers, which involved amongst other things managing development servers), I was used to the Linux structure of a decade and more ago (i.e. runtime levels and the old style commands for things like network info) and the whole SystemD stuff and this whole raft of new fashionable command line info and admin tools that replaced the old (and perfectly fine) ones was quite frustrating to get to grips with.

That said, I’ve persevered and have by now been using Linux on my gaming rig for 8 months with very few problems and a pretty high success rate at running games (most of which require no tweaking) not just Steam games but also GOG games using Lutris as launcher.

That said, I only figured out the “magical” Steam config settings to get most games to run on Linux when I was desperately googling how to do it.

Oh, and by the way, Pop!OS is a branch of Ubuntu, so at least when it comes to command line tools and locations of files in the filesystem, most help for Ubuntu out there also works with Pop!OS.

I moved to Linux on my gaming rid (this last time around, as I’ve had it as dual boot on and off since the 90s, but this time I moved to it for good after confirming that gaming works way better in it than ever before) when I had a GTX1050 Ti, and I had no problems ¹

Updated it to an RTX3050 and still no problems ²

Then again I went with Pop!OS because it’s a gaming oriented distro with a version that already comes with NVIDIA drivers so they sort out whatever needs sorting out on that front, plus I’m sticking with X and staying the hell away from Wayland on NVIDIA hardware since there are a lot more problems for NVIDIA hardware with Wayland than X.

Currently on driver 565.77

I reckon a lot of people with NVIDIA driver problems in Linux are trying to run it with Wayland rather than X or going for the Open Source drivers rather than the binary ones.

¹ Actually I do have a single problem: when graphics mode starts, often all I get is a black screen and I have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again to solve it. I guess it’s something to do with the HDMI side of things.

² I have exactly the same problem with the new graphics board.