R*dd*t refugee

Fuck /u/Spez

  • 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle

  • I settled on two.

    1. Arch for my desktop, because there I like having an always up-to-date system with the latest drivers and libraries so that I can always try the latest versions of whatever it is I want to play with next. Pacman is also a pretty good package manager, and almost any piece of software that is not in the default repos can be found in the AUR. For the rest, I also like that Arch just gets out of your way and lets you configure your system how you want.

    2. Debian for anything that runs unattended, like all my homelab services. It’s well tested, offers feature stability, has long-enough support, and doesn’t do weird things every other release like forcing snaps or netplan or cloud-init on you. Those “boring” qualities make it the perfect base to run something for a long time that doesn’t scream for attention all the time.





  • The original meaning of the word as I first heard it back in the late 1990s was to refer to the vast majority of “normal” people who don’t have an interest in or deep understanding of technology and internet culture.

    I don’t think it was originally meant as an insult, but more as an acknowledgement and reminder to ourselves that the things we were into and cared about were a niche thing and not exactly the norm.

    Nowadays, I’ve heard it applied to just about any niche interest or hobby, for example: people who are not into mechanical keyboards would also be “normies”, and worse it’s being thrown around as a direct insult to people, in the same vein as calling someone “basic”.




  • ssh tunneling can be very useful for testing or one-shot things where you quickly need access to a service that’s not directly reachable, but I wouldn’t use it as a permanent solution for anything. You quickly run into problems like:

    • TLS certificates don’t work, so you get into the habit of clicking through security warnings or turning of TLS validation altogether.
    • Virtual hosts don’t work
    • Port conflicts when you want to access the same type of service on different remote machines, so you have to remap them and remember things like: localhost:8080 is foo:80 and localhost:8081 is bar:80
    • If it’s not your infrastructure (i.e. you are an employee in a larger company), you are probably bypassing all kinds of security rules by exposing a service and your security guys will not be too happy about it if they find out.


  • I general why does there have to be static sidebars that are rarely used. It causes the content body to be squeezed into tiny space.

    I think the rationale is that most people use widescreen monitors nowadays, so if you allow the content part to run across the entire width of the screen, it becomes ugly and hard to read. Therefore the middle section gets a limited or fixed width, which in turn then creates two empty columns to the sides that designers are then tempted to fill up with “useful” stuff.

    You can try this yourself: paste a long line of text into a notepad window and maximize the window. It is much harder on your eyes to read and focus on the text than if you resized the window to a more reasonable width where the text gets broken up into several lines.

    I’m not against this design paradigm per se, but the content width reduction is often overdone, leading to a squeezed feeling like you say. It can also create problems if you have a habit of not using maximized browser windows, but for example a window tiled to one half of the screen. Some of the better sites work around this by having a reactive design that reduces, collapses or removes the sidebars when the window is narrower than a certain width, but many sites don’t.


  • I’m about your age (48) and game. I don’t think there’s a cut-off date as such, but it’s a little bit of several things.

    There is certainly a generational angle. When we were growing up in the 80s and early 90s, playing computer games was definitely not an activity targeted at adults, and gamers were generally seen as geeks and nerds. This changed of course, but other people who grew up at the same time as us but never got into games may still hang onto that image.

    Gender also plays a role, women our age are a lot less likely to have ever been into games. My girlfriend for example has no problems with it but she never gamed herself and doesn’t really understand it. If I think of female friends and acquaintances, I know only one woman who games as well, but she’s already 8 years younger.

    There’s also the fact that many men do in fact grow out of gaming as they get older, start to have more responsibilities and less free time and when other interests and hobbies start to compete for that limited free time. I notice that in myself too, it’s a lot less important to me now than it was 25 years ago.

    Then there’s the slightly uncomfortable fact that many women simply find it unattractive when a man lists gaming as a hobby, and see it as a red flag, perhaps because they associate it with certain stereotypes of people who are obsessive about it and whose whole personality revolves around gaming, perhaps because they have previous bad experiences with it, or perhaps because it’s something they simply can’t relate with. Maybe gamers are to women what “horse girls” are to men? :)

    I think the best way to handle it on the dating scene is to show that you’re a functioning adult with a well rounded personality and a variety of interests, who just happens to game as well. At the end of the day, you have to have enough common ground to start a relationship with someone.