Yeah that’s the one, it didn’t recognize my TV 😖

I don’t want Chrome on my Linux system but I almost installed it last night. Why? Because apparently half the internet says that that is what is necessary if you want to screen share or mirror your monitor to a smart TV on the same network because “the linux implementation of Miracast is fucked”. Oh, don’t worry, you can try Brave or Chromium too, except they don’t work because while the TV shows up as an option you can cast to, you can’t actually cast because the option is grayed out due to some “specific media sites” error. Don’t worry, this option can be changed in the //flags and if that doesn’t work then try changing this other flag, except that other flag doesn’t exist on Brave and Chromium and it must be assumed it only exists on Chrome.

But wait, there’s a utility called MKchromecast, it mimics the ability without needing to install chrome, but doesn’t recognize the TV. Oh it has all of these dependencies that need to be downloaded. It still doesn’t work. There’s always Gnome Displays, which has the exact same pattern of missing a bunch dependencies that must be hunted down and then not seeing the TV. While searching for dependencies on my software manager I find Jubii, a nice little media caster with a tidy, intuitive UI that happily connects to my TV immediately and cheerfully shows me all of media libraries but as soon as I ask it to play a mirror of my screen it loads for 2 minutes and times out with an error.

Then I realized it was 4:30am and I had to go to bed.

I don’t have much time to respond so I’m going to just hit one bullet for now:

Are you going to try to argue that Khan and Gul Dukat weren’t given nuance and development? Some of the things that made them such compelling antagonists is that we were given insight into their motives and backgrounds and perspectives. Khan absolutely was nuanced and the persecution and illegality of genetically enhanced humans was a great stepping off point for him. Just about every antagonist that pops up in Star Trek gets some kind of explanation why they are doing the things they are doing, and the crew takes a moment to acknowledge their inherent worth as living beings and, if they’re sentient, discuss possibilities for negotiations or nonviolence. I haven’t forgotten that Klingons, Ferengi, Borg, Cardassians and many others start off as villains, but we are given many opportunities for them to be “humanized” through characters like Worf, Quark, Hugh/Seven, Garak and others. There are no “good” or “bad” aliens in Star Trek.

So keeping that in mind, how did things go with the Ba’Ul? How did they handle Control? What nuance was Lorca given? In Discovery, your first impression of a bad guy being bad is always correct.

I have an intense distaste for Discovery, and wouldn’t recommend it.

I could rant about it a la Angela Collier for 4 hours but here’s my main issues boiled down to a bulleted list:

Some things I like about Star Trek:

• Optimistic future, humans can create greatness and beauty if they continue to check and overcome their faults
• No black and white villains. All antagonists are given nuance and development and many become favored allies
• Themes of teamwork, a functional ensemble, core crew are all valid and valued, no one star of the show.
• No such thing as magic or gods, everything is in the realm of human understanding if we have sufficient knowledge

Guess what Disovery has?

• Nihilistic, apocalyptic future
• Bad guys that are just bad, they’re evil, don’t ask questions
• One principal star of the show that is the focus of nearly every episode
• No attempt to explain things with any veneer of science

Then add on some blatant examples of total ignorance for the universe it’s set in, attempts at ham handed fan service by shoe horning in clumsy references to characters from other series, you have a show that is farther from Star Trek than a 14 year old’s submission on IO9. When it actually let the supporting cast do things, they were charming and likable, but Stamets, Saru and Tilly weren’t enough to keep me from getting mad at just about every episode.

If you don’t really care about or know anything about Star Trek it can be entertaining I guess, but why watch it when there’s Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks and The Orville?

First thing I would look into is how water is getting into those cracks in the first place. Check your gutters and make sure they’re cleaned out and at appropriate angles, and check the downspouts. Water should be draining away from your home, not into it. You might need to put up some sort of awning or tarp, and fix the angles of those pavers/concrete. If there’s water flowing into the foundation then it’s going to be a reoccurring problem.

This reminds me of Althea Chrome, the artist who made all of the knit accessories for Coraline.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NQCf8fjgoJQ&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD

Sounds great, Photuris for supreme dictator!

A humble farm boy’s guardians and village are burned, leading to him leaving his home and finding refuge with a wise old man who has special powers. He tells him he knew his father, that he was a knight and they fought together. He gives him his father’s sword, and teaches him to use his own special powers. They receive a message from a princess in distress, who tells them she’s being held hostage by the evil emperor. They travel to save her with the help of a roguish anti-hero and free the princess. Once freed, they learn of a crucial weakness in the emperor’s fortress, and together they lead a raid to siege it. They succeed with the help of a rag tag bunch of rebels and the princess awards them with medals in her throne room.

That doesn’t sound like a story about how technology, science or knowledge effects people or society to me.

Removed by mod

Yes, because context matters. Exceptions don’t make the rule, and speaking generally about things is allowed when they are related.

So what is the exception here? You said, and I quote, “science is by nature unethical”. So you’re saying any experimental methodology in any school of science exploring any number of completely benign things is somehow unethical.

This isn’t debate club.

I see you’re new to the internet.

Ah yes, everyone knows how famously unethical astronomers are, they should respect the privacy and consent of supernovas. Filthy perverts peeping on those innocent stars!

You said “science”, not any specific type or category of study, so if you mean a specific school of science is unethical you should make that distinction.

Why do you think that asking questions, making a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis and writing down the results is unethical?

I’ve been tinkering with my Linux machine for the past 8 months or so, and having random issues like the ones I listed and more besides that I’ve already solved. Meanwhile my old Windows 7 machine has been working flawlessly for about 8 years, no regedits or crap software issues. I think I had a driver issue with my mouse a couple years ago that I clicked a button and it fixed it. My laptop running Windows 7 also has been working flawlessly since about 2016 beyond prompting me to format media that I connect to it, but I press a button and that goes away. Recently I’ve been having compatibility issues with software because it’s such an old OS but as you said, that’s a 3rd party software issue, not a problem with Windows 7.

Glad your Linux experience is so smooth though. Must be nice!

I think there’s a difference in personal interpretation of what a “Linux issue” is, here. It sounds like you might be interpreting “Linux issue” as problems with the software itself, or its capabilities, features and processes etc. Personally, I am using “issues with Linux” to mean the entire user experience from start up to using the GUI and whether or not I can do the things I want and need to do on a daily basis easily and intuitively. Certainly, Linux as a software plays into it, but the things you are brushing off as 3rd party incompatibilities are absolutely part of the Linux experience in my opinion. I’m not trying to throw blame, but when introducing new people to Linux it’s best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.

Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don’t have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.

I’ve been trying to adapt to Linux Mint/Cinnamon as my daily driver and yes, stuff breaks. My sata and nvme connected drives kept disappearing every time I started my computer so I had to learn about mounting and auto mount (they are just there on Windows). My game and program installs on Bottles and Lutris kept going “missing” and losing their .exe’s. I downloaded 70gb of Guild Wars 2 files at least 8 times because I thought each time I had fixed the “files missing” problem only to have them disappear on reboot. I still didn’t figure out what was happening and am only able to play now because I found out how to use the provider portal on Steam. I can’t make launcher short cuts from the actual executable, I have to go to the desktop and do it and when I do, it won’t let me drag it to my panel for some reason. When I thought I had found a solution, I reactivated some launcher applets and ended up with three different instances of my panel launcher icons and still no ability to add new ones. My systems connected to the same ethernet used to show up in my network panel and I was able to access my shared folders and media files but they all stopped showing up a few days ago and I had to learn all about Samba share and minimum and maximum server protocols and still am trying to find a solution.

Yes, Windows breaks stuff too, but Linux is NOT a perfect product that works flawlessly for everyone and [@[email protected] is right. All of their points are things I’ve been struggling with and would warn a Linux noob about. I personally would rather trust those random forum posts than LLM summaries (and have solved some issues that way) but otherwise I agree with each of their bullet points.

What you say is mostly true, but we don’t all have the same circadian rhythms. There is such a thing as night owls, and while you might not sleep well in the daylight I genuinely sleep better in a sunbeam. The times in my life that I have been the most exhausted and chronically sleep deprived were when my circumstances demanded that I be up and active before 10am. I have struggled for years against the constraints of others schedules while my body screamed at me that it wanted to do everything later. The simple fact is your body will tell you what schedule works for you or not. If you are not energized or at your best at midnight, fine, but humans come in all sorts of variations and some of us evolved to guard the tribe while others slept.

As a night owl, this is some daywalker shit. Night shift means an easy commute, cooler temps, no need for sunscreen, quieter working environment, usually higher pay, fewer distractions, sleeping in, the list goes on. Night shift and second shift have their perks.

Why would you need a 100% success rate? Meanwhile, not asking has something like a greater than 90% failure rate in the current western dating paradigm.

I mentioned it because I’ve personally chatted up someone wearing one before, so it does totally work at certain nerdy conventions, as does carrying a Horga’hn.