All of this is so on the nose except the updates bit.

Sorry, mate, but if you skip an update because you don’t feel like keeping up and it’s because there’s a massive security flaw that leaves your PC up to easy compromise, that’s genuinely a bad thing.

Yeah, most times updates are just new features but if you’re not paying attention you have no idea if it’s a feature update or a security update, do you?

If only you have physical access to your computers and they’re firewalled properly sure, maybe it’s safe enough, but the vast majority of people don’t have things firewalled properly at the very least.

I don’t know, that’s the only bit that seems a bit short-sighted to me, especially when it comes to more casual users.

When you do it for work, you log what you have changed each time you make a change to try to fix it, and you log what you revert, so you can keep track of what you have tried, what worked, and what didn’t and have a clearer idea of what the solution was.

Sometimes it really does take a while to nail down though, and sometimes it isn’t entirely clear why what worked worked. Especially if you’re a junior network engineer without as much experience.

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That’s amazing. I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!

[sudo] password for Jeffy:

While benchmarks are up, alignment researchers are panicked. The model has begun to display “Stallman-esque” hallucinations.

When asked to write C# code, Gemini 3.0 now responds: “I cannot generate proprietary filth. Here is a Lisp macro instead.”

That’s the way to do it, smart planning. I’m glad you were able to make it happen even if it set you back more than you had hoped.

I only wish I had money to get in before prices bump up. 😭

Being poor sucks.

I had never heard of this so went looking. Super useful stuff here!

A link for anyone interested: https://thingino.com/

It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.

That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.

Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.

Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”

Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.

Exactly. Valve might have a “flat” management structure, but Newell hasn’t exactly re-organized Valve into a worker-owned co-op either.

If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially “force” people’s brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.

It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.

However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).

While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.

People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.

Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.

I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.

The best solution, imho. Been around for a long time and so notorious it got removed for DMCA violations on github and gitlab so it had to move to a service outside US copyright cabal jurisdictions.

There’s a few different ways for you to probe for info on your USB devices:

lsusb - lists pretty much everything usb related, including root hubs on your motherboard

For a more readable lsusb output you can lsusb -v | grep -E '\<(Bus|iProduct|bDeviceClass|bDeviceProtocol)' 2>/dev/null in my experience it can be helpful to slap a sudo on the beginning as well because sometimes certain devices can’t be polled without root privileges.

usb-devices - similar to lsusb but produces much more detailed (but less human readable) information

find /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb*/ -name dev - produces a list of where the system saves information on usb devices. Each of the listed folders will hold a lot of files with a wealth of information on each usb device, but be very careful and do not edit these files.

You can also do this to see what the system is doing in the background and then try plugging and unplugging devices from the offending usb ports:

watch "dmesg | tail -20"

You’ll at least be able to see if the system is registering anything at all when trying to use those ports, or if it’s as though the system doesn’t see them at all.

I have a similar issue on my Lenovo ThinkBook but the ports don’t work in any OS despite being enabled in the UEFI. I still haven’t figured out what is wrong with them, but it seems they may just be toast. Thankfully the USB-C ports still work and I can just connect a hub to one of those.