Debian still supports Pentium IIs. They axed support for the i586 architecture (original Pentium) a few years back, but Debian 12 (current stable, AKA Bookworm) still supports i686 chips like the P2.

Not sure how the rest of the hardware in that Compaq will work.

See: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s01.en.html

Probably ~15TB through file-level syncing tools (rsync or similar; I forget exactly what I used), just copying my internal RAID array to an external HDD. I’ve done this a few times, either for backup purposes or to prepare to reformat my array. I originally used ZFS on the array, but converted it to something with built-in kernel support a while back because it got troublesome when switching distros. Might switch it to bcachefs at some point.

With dd specifically, maybe 1TB? I’ve used it to temporarily back up my boot drive on occasion, on the assumption that restoring my entire system that way would be simpler in case whatever I was planning blew up in my face. Fortunately never needed to restore it that way.

For sure. It’ll never be enforced completely, but it gives teeth to go after some big offenders.

When you claim a game from Amazon, is tied to an active subscription, or can you download it and install it later regardless of subscription status?

The power cord on those had a weird round dongle on the end that plugged into the computer

FUCK THOSE CHARGERS.

I mean yeah, the entire industry was riddled with shitty chargers at that time, but these were the worst.

They’re big and scary enough today, and in the past they were even bigger and scarier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast's_eagle

Relationship with humans

Some believe that these birds are described in many legends of the Māori mythology, under the names pouākai, Hakawai (or Hōkioi in the North Island).[52][53] According to an account given to Sir George Grey—an early governor of New Zealand—Hōkioi were huge black-and-white birds with yellow-green tinged wings and a red crest. In Māori mythology, Pouākai would prey and kill humans along with moa,[54][55][56] which scientists believe could have been possible if the name relates to the eagle, given the massive size and strength of the bird.[52][57] However, it has also been argued that the “hakawai” and “hōkioi” legends refer to the Austral snipe—in particular the extinct South Island species.[58]

For context, Haast’s eagle was about twice the size of today’s Harpy eagle, which itself looks like it came out of a nightmare. See photos at https://www.demilked.com/giant-bird-harpy-eagle/

Hopefully they have better defenses against legal action from Nvidia than ZLUDA did.

In the past, re-implementing APIs has been deemed fair use in court (for example, Oracle v Google a few years back). I’m not entirely sure why ZLUDA was taken down; maybe just to avoid the trouble of a legal battle, even if they could win. I’m not a lawyer so I can only guess.

Validity aside, I expect Nvidia will try to throw their weight around.

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

I don’t think there’s any way to count years without rooting it somewhere arbitrary. We cannot calculate the age of the planet, the sun, or the universe to the accuracy of a year (much less a second or nanosecond). We cannot define what “modern man” is to a meaningful level of accuracy, either, or pin down the age of historical artifacts.

Most computers use a system called “epoch time” or “UNIX time”, which counts the seconds from January 1, 1970. Converting this into a human-friendly date representation is surprisingly non-trivial, since the human timekeeping systems in common use are messy and not rooted in hard math or in the scientific definition of a second, which was only standardized in 1967.

Tom Scott has an amusing video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

There is also International Atomic Time, which, like Unix Time, counts seconds from an arbitrary date that aligns with the Gregorian calendar. Atomic Time is rooted at the beginning of 1958.

ISO 8601 also aligns with the Gregorian calendar, but only as far back as 1582. The official standard does not allow expressing dates before that without explicit agreement of definitions by both parties. Go figure.

The core problem here is that a year, as defined by Earth’s revolution around the sun, is not consistent across broad time periods. The length of a day changes, as well. Humans all around the world have traditionally tracked time by looking at the sun and the moon, which simply do not give us the precision and consistency we need over long time periods. So it’s really difficult to make a system that is simple, logical, and also aligns with everyday usage going back centuries. And I don’t think it is possible to find any zero point that is truly meaningful and independent of wishy-washy human culture.

Interesting. I’m not sure that’s a Lemmy thing per se, maybe specific to your client, or some extension or something altering CSS?

I just checked in my browser’s inspector, and the italicized text’s <em> tag has the same calculated font setting as the main comment’s <div> tag.

FWIW, I’m using Firefox with my instance’s default Lemmy web UI.

YES.

And not just the cloud, but internet connectivity and automatic updates on local machines, too. There are basically a hundred “arbitrary code execution” mechanisms built into every production machine.

If it doesn’t truly need to be online, it probably shouldn’t be. Figure out another way to install security patches. If it’s offline, you won’t need to worry about them half as much anyway.

Hospitals and airports typically have their own backup generators, yeah. Not entirely sure how long they’re prepared to operate off-grid.

The linked article focuses on Mastodon. I’d be interested to hear more about how this relates to Lemmy in your experience.

If you can accept the possibility of making contact, you should be able to accept the possibility of a hit. The difference between a hit and a foul is, like, centimeters or milliseconds. Why do you think a difference of that size is literally impossible?

We’re taking about a chance, so it’s fair to ignore the worst-case scenario and consider the best-case scenario. Forget about 100mph heat; that’s the exception even in pro play. And we’re not going for consistency, so you can forget about reaction time. Feel free to start swinging way earlier than a real pro would. Close your eyes and pray to your deity of choice. There’s a chance.

A pitcher does not respond to small-scale movements of the hitter once the wind-up begins, so this is not a 100% head-to-head skill issue. There is plenty of time for a reasonably-athletic layman to get the bat through the strike zone in a time frame that overlaps with the range of probability of a pitch. Not with any consistency, because that would require precise reaction and control that are not possible without a ton of experience. But again, we’re not talking about consistency. We’re talking about a single stroke of luck. A single hit is within the realm of luck. Skill simply tightens up that probability distribution in your favor.

As for football, yeah, I concede your point. The the kind of play I’m describing happens every season, but you’re absolutely right that a layman wouldn’t actually be able to get in position to make that catch in the first place. My scenario was assuming a miracle position for a good runner to take off, which puts it outside the range of a single stroke of luck. My bad.

That’s because golf and pool aren’t head-to-head sports (per se); the other golfer(s) or pool player can’t interfere with your ball as you hit it.

Excellent point! That’s also basically the scenario I mentioned with football and baseball. In football, you’d need to have a clear shot and be a good runner (like in Forrest Gump). Unlikely, but within the realm of possibility for an athletic non-football-player. In baseball, once the ball is in the air it’s anyone’s game. Anyone who can swing a bat has a chance to get a lucky hit. Not a good chance, but a chance. Especially a professional athlete from a different sport. I mean, we kind of saw that when Michael Jordan played baseball. He had a very respectable batting average…for a basketball player. :)

If you put me in the majors, I’d bet I could manage a .001 batting average!

“Some people who don’t play table tennis actually think they have a chance to win a single point,” said Anders Lind, 25, of Denmark, the No. 62-ranked player in the world. “It’s cute. But it’s not true.”

The idea isn’t crazy, depending on what sport you have as a frame of reference.

I mean, I’d have a chance to win a single hole against a pro golfer with a lucky shot. I’d have a chance to score a single hit against a major-league pitcher. I’d have a decent chance to at least sink a single ball against a professional pool player. I’d surely capture a few pieces in a game of chess against Magnus Carlsen (though not any he didn’t intend to lose, so bad example). I might even be able to Forrest-Gump my way to a touchdown against a pro football team if someone sent me a perfect pass.

Of course I’d have no chance to win an entire game in any of those cases, but in many sports, a competent amateur has a chance to at least get a point against a pro.

That said, I’ve seen pro table tennis and I know for sure I’m not getting a point unless they are struck by well-timed lightning. We are not playing the same game. It’d be like going to a motorcycle rally with my bicycle.

Yep, totally agree. Borg supports encryption, so I have the backup encrypted locally, independently of my end-to-end encrypted cloud service. I guess I could store it on a non-e2ee cloud drive and save a little money, but I prefer to keep it simple with an “E2EE or bust” mentality, even for data that’s already encrypted.

For anyone who finds Borg intimidating, take a look at Vorta, an easy-to-use GUI frontend: https://github.com/borgbase/vorta

I think it’s important to distinguish between social media in general and specific platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Don’t say things like “social media is designed to <blank>” when you really mean “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit are designed to <blank>”.

The first step to fixing a problem is to identify it clearly and accurately.

The problems with social media in practice have little to do with the general concept of social media. There are ways we could regulate our way to a better internet, by heavily disincentivizing dark patterns, and still have thriving social media platforms.

IMHO, there are a couple things to focus on:

1. Restrict or outright ban data collection, sale, and sharing. Targeted advertising is not necessary for a healthy internet. It’s gotten completely out of control. Fuck you and your 872 closest partners.

2. Mandate transparency in algorithms. Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. have all manipulated their users by gaming their algorithms to maximize engagement, promote political ideas, or even outright conduct psychological experiments on unwitting users. There’s no need for a sorting algorithm to be opaque to the user. It’s feasible for it to be user-customizable to one degree or another.

Ah, that makes sense! I probably should have split my /home off to its own subvolume. I’ll add that my list of things to think about next time I hop distros or rebuild (which I’m considering once again, because I have Plasma envy).

And yes, snapshots should NOT be treated as backups. A real backup saves your butt if your drive dies, while a snapshot goes down with that ship. I should really set up a better backup system, but for now I just periodically use Borg to back up to an external HD, and then copy that into an encrypted cloud drive.

I love btrfs+snapper. I have automatic snapshots taken before and after every apt install, so if anything ever goes belly-up, no problem, I just roll back.

It’s a little weird sometimes when I’m running out of disk space, so I delete some big downloads and…I get no disk space back, because those files still exist in old snapshots! I suspect there’s some way to finetune it to ignore certain directories (like ~/Downloads) in snapshots but I haven’t taken the time to dig into it. Anyway, it’s not a huge problem because the automatic snapshots are limited to a certain number, so they eventually get bumped out (or I can delete them manually if needed).

I haven’t tried bcachefs yet. Perhaps on my next build.