I love this comment.

My related anecdote is that I studied Aikido for many years, and there’s a lot of woo-woo in it. Energy, and Ki and whatnot. At one point (I was taking physics at the time) I realized that Aikido of all about directing momentum and force, and force as levers on body parts, and that you could probably calculate all of the various ideal angles for maximum conservation of momentum, and angles for balance points… and I realized that all of the woo-woo was a simplification of all of this that allows people to think about all of these things in real time and intuitively, rather than getting locked up in the theory.

I doubt that was the process and intention of the inventor, and a lot of practitioners believed in Ki or Chi or magic juice… but it’s all just physics boiled down to something people can easily visualize. And, yes, the problems start when people begin believing the magic juice, and start proclaiming that they can influence someone’s chi from a distance, or some shit. That’s a far cry from: if I bend your wrist this way, it’s incredibly painful and you’re going to fall over to stop it, or break your wrist.

Already done.

I mean, you have to use it to get software; and if you’re submitting patches to other people’s software; and I have inherited maintenance of a popular project that would just confuse a ton of people, including several distros, if I moved it. But I never create projects in github anymore. Sourcehut has been great.

Yes! Hyphens and “+” are also legal, and while most will accept a dash, many don’t allow ‘+’. But it’s explicitly allowed in the spec!

God, the French. My friend has two first names, two middle, and thankfully only one surname.

So she writes 4 names? Does she put her maiden and married names both in the “surname” field? Or middle and maiden together in the “middle name” field?

All of the silos are in rural areas; those are mostly known and definitely first-strike targets. Cities need very few nukes to take out individually. Nowhere will anyone be rebuilding from the ashes. If the war is limited and nuclear winter doesn’t make the entire planet uninhabitable, the only places with a chance of surviving are the undeveloped countries. No developed country will be habitable.

Nuclear fallout is a bitch.

As Linux is a multi-user system, stuff you install can either run a system process, or a user process. Most other comments are assuming you installed a process that’s running as a user. On Arch, this could either be an autostart process (which is desktop agnostic) or something attached to Gnome or KDE’s startup.

On Arch,systemd controls system services. There are two key CLI commands for working with systemd (and some GUIs, but you’ll have to find those). The first is systemctl, and the second is journalctl. The second gets you logs. The first controls services.

systemctl status will give you an overview of all the services on your system.

sudo systemctl stop <service name> will temporarily stop a service; ... start ... starts it again. ... disable ... will stop it from starting when you reboot – this does not stop the service, it only prevents it from being started again in reboot. As you’ve guessed, ... enable ... re-enables the service. ... status ... gives you a status for the process, and the last few lines of the log for it.

systemd services can also be run at the user level; the commands are all the same, but you add --user every time to control the user services.

journalctl -xe gives you a system log since boot. You can also look at logs for previous boots, look at logs only for a single process (-u <servicename>), look at user processes (same --user argument), tail a log to watch new messages roll in (--tail) and a bunch of other stuff.

Systemd also controls scheduled jobs (that used to be handled by cron) with timers. Really, most Linux distros these days should be known as systemd/Linux.

I suspect what you’re looking for is sudo systemd disable <service>, but if it’s a user processes, check ~/.config/autostart and your desktop config tool section for auto-start settings.

It will help if you can say which desktop you’re using (Gnome? KDE? LXDE? Or just a window manager?) and what the package is. If you give the package name, we can explain exactly how to disable it. Otherwise, you have the hodge-podge of answers below.

This is fantastic. Was not expecting the punchline.

Young me would have missed the personal interaction. Older, less hormonally-motivated me would be fine if the accommodations were nice, reasonably large, and contained a good, Linux-based, powerful computer, a copy of the entire Library of Congress archives, and deep clones of Github and Sourcehut. A decent, fast, current generation AI setup would go a long way to filling any gaps. I think I could probably live for several decades - maybe centuries - left to my own devices. Until the literature and media ran out.

I’d like to be able to work with AI systems to generate movies from my favorite sci-fi books. Just, throw literature at it, give it some direction, tweak the output, have a ton of dedicated processing power and a lot of free time, and no copyrights to worry about.

The Mona Lisa was underwhelming, too. :-P

Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse’s last name.

More commonly, places that don’t take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.

Programmers can be really dumb.

I haven’t tried it yet, and I haven’t had a reason to look into it. My experience with Fi was that you pay $10 per Gb - it didn’t come out of your normal bank - and per-minute charges. When I was traveling, I used my company phone, or if on vacation, purely data with heavy up front-caching as much as I could at the hotel. I really don’t like surprise bill sizes.

But to be honest, I haven’t tried Mint internationally, so I can’t say.

Not so bad. I use gmail as a backup for some accounts in case something happens to my VPS or domain, and my Amazon account is still linked to it out of laziness, but otherwise I never use it.

Oh. Except that I have an Android phone, and that’s linked to my gmail, although I don’t use any Google apps or services beyond Play. So I suppose my phone would stop working. Everything’s backed up, though, so maybe it’d be a good thing; maybe it’d motivate me to pull the trigger on a Light Phone. I kinda want a Minimal Phone because my F&F uses Jami, but that’d still be an Android phone, so it wouldn’t work either.

Fi isn’t that great. We were on Fi for years; I switched to Mint, my wife stayed on Fi until I was sure it was going to work. So far, I pay less for more, no gotchas.

It was amazing when it first came out; now it has a lot of competition that beats it.

Man, I wish. I love my Fujifilm, but I hate the damned batteries.

There are a frightening number of systems that don’t allow “-”, which isn’t even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, “I paid for money for my name; I’m not letting it go.” (Note: I wasn’t pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It’s not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

I do this all the time, so yes, it exists. Usually, though, I’m trying to accomplish something specific for which I haven’t found a solution, or existing solutions don’t work for me.

What I’m saying is that maintaining a project that other people use becomes a commitment, and IME that’s where the fun ends. It’s one thing if I’m writing something for myself, because I’m the main user and I can be cavalier about requests and tickets.

But, I write throw-away stuff all the time, and it all goes into public repos. I doubt anyone is using most of them.

Why does it bug me that the pencil lines disappear in the last panel?

I don’t know. They haven’t just fucked themselves; they fucked a bunch of Palestinians in Palestine who didn’t get to vote. They fucked every US woman. They fucked every LGBTQ person. They fucked Ukraine. I’m having a hard time feeling sympathy or common ground. It was clear to anyone paying any attention Trump was pro-genocide.

TBF, this isn’t all in their shoulders. Kamala lost the popular vote by 2 million votes. America fucked itself. But these folks contributed, and you know what? I don’t need them as allies, because they can keep fucking themselves like this until there are no more left that are stupid enough to make these mistakes again.

All those blue collar fucks who are losing their Christmas bonuses to tarrifs, whose unions will be castrated until they’re living in company towns again? Good. Don’t need them, either. They’re doing it to themselves, despite our best efforts. In tired of fighting for them just to have them fight back. Let them rot in their own filth. At this point, the only reason I care is because of the innocents who are getting fucked with them for their shit-brain decisions.

Honestly, find an existing project in your language of choice with an active maintainer and start fixing tickets.

You start a new project, odds are you’re stuck maintaining it for years, and it becomes a job, or it dies. IME, it’s far better to find a project you yourself use and like, that you’re capable of contributing to, and doing that. Start popping stuff off the bug list, if you’re a hero, or implement that missing feature in the backlog that you want. Your commitment to the project is a patch. Or, maybe you like working with the project and you become a long term contributor.

That’s just my recommendation. I’m not saying don’t start something new; just, if you’re looking around for things to do, and aren’t passionately trying to scratch an itch you haven’t found a solution for, you’re most likely just going to create a throw-away project.

Just my opinion.

Yah, you’re right. Like I said, when you say “Metaverse” most people (on the street) are going to think of Meta’s. I doubt most people in even developed countries even remember Sony’s failed VR world.

Is there another networked VR world that is anywhere near as big as Meta’s today? With nearly as many users (even with as much of a ghost town as it purportedly is)?

I think you were talking about a hypothetical metaverse, whereas I was thinking about the only one that I know that has any traction - tenuous though it may be - at all, which is Meta’s.