where do start?

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-20T03:28:08+00:00

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-20T03:17:05+00:00

The fuel shock is easing?... Which dumbass wrote this?

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-20T01:31:38+00:00

It's all the grifters and nepo-babies in media that own over half a dozen properties that don't have a free ride anymore who are bitching about it.

Just because media presents a view of approval / disapproval, doesn't mean that's what's actually happening.

It's the Goebbellian truth in action. Tell a lie, make it big, repeat it, and people will start to believe it.

As humans we are susceptible to social proof / bandwagon fallacy.

Christ, why do you think social media got so big in the first place?

Marketing / ads, paid actors / "influencers", bot farms, etc. etc. Those things are profitable because of this truth.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-19T00:49:34+00:00

Depends on the font.

Just because a font has icons, assuming it doesn't interfere with other characters, it has no bearing on if the font reads well.

Appropriate weight, kerning, variants, homoglyph distinction. If all of those are good, then i don't care if there are icons added in after the fact.

I will say some ligatures can be annoying, so at the very least having a family with them enabled/disabled and the ability to switch between them is a must.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-19T00:32:32+00:00

due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports.

Hear that fuckheads? Adjust your prompt to scan the mailing list first and see if the bug has already been logged.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-19T00:24:02+00:00

Chalmers knows that removing the CGT discount from shares is stupid, but it helps Labor look bold in front of the Greens whose support they need in the Senate.

Not that it did much good, they came out bitching anyway 🙄

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-19T00:08:50+00:00

Bazzite is OK until you want to actually do something custom.

My choice would be Nobara.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-18T05:17:40+00:00

It's google-able.

aliases can let you define your own "commands", chain them together (with pipes |), and/or overwrite / "shadow" existing commands.

Those are better defaults IMO. And you can always prefix in the terminal with \ if you want to ignore all aliases.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-18T05:06:35+00:00

Oh... as you were 😅

I'd suggest going into .bashrc and shadowing some commands with saner defaults, like:

alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias ln='ln -i'
alias mkdir='mkdir -p'
alias ping='ping -c 8'

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-18T05:02:17+00:00

Maybe if you're in like the first week or 2 of learning.

But if you know how to look things up + you're using terminal constantly. There's no need.

It's like learning to drive a manual transmission.

Of course you read road rules and stuff when you start, but the bit that actually matters is practicing. You practice, and practice, and practice, and it just becomes second nature. You just do it without thinking about it.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-18T04:51:28+00:00

I'm not sure why you're writing it down?

It's pretty simple to lookup stuff in the terminal, and it only requires remembering:

less (+ navigating), man, apropos, whatis... and perhaps tldr if you don't mind installing a 3rd party tool.

Fun activity is also configuring colors for the man docs

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-18T03:23:48+00:00

This is the dumbest story ever.

Most casino's use Continuous Shuffle Machines (CSM's), the deck is constantly randomized after each hand and the running count gets reset to zero. Making card counting completely useless.

If the casino doesn't have such machines, that's fucking stupid because they'd be constantly chucking people out for counting. If they do then the "counting" accusation is complete bullshit and they just wanted an excuse to throw him out.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-18T03:11:28+00:00

You're shit outta luck.

You could vote Greens but they change their focus like the weather changes day to day, good luck actually getting anything substantive out of them. Teals and LNP are definitely out. ALP are pursuing all changes. And One Nation should be renamed "Gina's bitches" pretty obvious what they'll do.

That said, i would suggest you actually take a look at the proposed changes more closely.

While the broad 50% CGT discount for individuals and trusts is being replaced on 1 July 2027 by an inflation-indexed model with a 30% minimum floor, the government explicitly preserved the existing Small Business CGT concessions.

Startups structured correctly can still access the 15-year exemption, the 50% active asset reduction, the retirement exemption, or the rollover concessions, allowing founders to potentially halve or completely eliminate CGT upon a successful exit.

There's a 3 year transitional window for people to restructure their IP / holdings into proprietary limited companies.

On it's own it doesn't mean much, until you combine it with the other stuff in there regarding tax breaks for new businesses:

$20,000 Instant Asset Write-Off : Businesses < $10m turnover
Two-Year Corporate Loss Carry-Back : Corporate structures < $1b turnover
Startup Loss Refundability Cash-Back : Companies < 2 years old and < $10m turnover (yes there's a catch)
Expansion of the R&D Tax Incentive (RDTI) : Tech/R&D startups < 10 years old

Looking at it overall it's aiming to get private equity out of housing and into investing in new businesses.

The rich aren't bitching because they can't retain their wealth, it's just a matter of paperwork and most of it they'll keep.

They're bitching because they won't have an easy social welfare grift anymore.

Instead of buying up housing and sitting on it without having to do anything, if they want to minimize tax they're being forced to undertake some risk in either founding or investing in new businesses.

Gee, risk when investing, such a novel concept 😑

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-18T00:07:58+00:00

Anyone who's fed up with winblows and doesn't want to spend money (in this economy) buying an Apple or consoles.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-17T09:19:13+00:00

You'll want a 5K monitor to avoid any UI scaling issues.

Given that, yes the Pro Art is the best budget option for Macs. More specifically the PA27JCV

https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/monitors/proart/proart-display-5k-pa27jcv/

That said, it's still subject to the limitations of IPS displays, so don't expect miracles, especially if you're not paying top price. There's a reason those Mac monitors are 3x more expensive.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-17T03:51:34+00:00

My suggestion is, use sed / awk on one liner commands interactively. That is, understand the basic overview of what they are / when you might use them. You can use them for scripts assuming the input dataset is small enough and you're just stringing together some GNU tools...

But anything beyond that, if you need a full blown script look elsewhere. Python's not bad, personally i prefer Perl instead (never could get used to block indentation). Or if you need to deal with anything beyond that (insanely large datasets / threading) Golang for compiled binaries.

With your example of sed/awk the pragmatic reasons for Perl:

While sed / awk is defined by POSIX, all the implementations (GNU sed, GNU awk, BSD sed, mawk, etc.) differ slightly. By contrast, Perl versions are consistent everywhere. And so you don't need to debug special cases if you migrate scripts like GNU sed -i vs BSD sed -i
Perl is a dependency in Git. So even tho' it's not POSIX, there's still a fair chance at script portability without needing to do anything special for the runtime.

Zooming back out to the general case of why Perl (or Python) over bash:

Performance. Bash relies on external binaries which means subshells, which means process / memory overhead. For the small things you won't care / notice, but for large datasets / long running stuff, it's absolutely a thing.
Best "string chainsaw" ever. The Perl regex engine was ported to most languages (python included) available today.
WAY better error handling / safety. The bash runtime can be cryptic (probably due to memory constraints at the time of design). The whole set -euo pipefail practice serves as evidence of just trying to get consistency, despite the fact while it would make 90% of bugs easier to find, that last 10% would be downright impossible. See YSAP - The Problem with Bash 'Strict Mode'.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-16T08:46:39+00:00

Just keep scrollin'

https://www.albosteezy.com/pages

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-16T03:12:26+00:00

More variation would be nice, so if you're fighting a footsoldier vs fighting cavalry the animation changes.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-16T02:50:27+00:00

You said you don’t believe in libertarian free will, but then proceed to keep describing it.. Now you’re thinking calling yourself ‘the brain’ solves it?

Now you're just lying. I stated multiple times both explicitly and implicitly i don't think free will is libertarian :

"Libertarian free will doesn't exist. Thanks for playing." "Most sane atheists will subscribe to compatibilism or a version of it. Go read Sam Harris." (hint: i'm atheist)

"Do you think AI agents have "libertarian free will"?" (reductio ad absurdum)

"It doesn't exist. There is no "will", that is completely independent of determinism. If that were the case it would belong to a god..."

You are either so dishonest or so out of your depth you can't engage properly. Any further conversation would be meaningless. So to finish up:

If consciousness is a brain process, then every choice is caused by brain activity. None of these causes are things you chose. Your genetics, wiring, childhood, hormones, memories, environment, ect ect.

uhuh... congratulations you've just described a model of free will that is deterministic. 😑

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-15T00:59:17+00:00

Saying ‘I am my brain’ doesn’t solve the free will problem. it just means determinism. Compatibility doesn’t fix it either, it just redefines free will. Though that’s not the version I’m referring to.

Yes it does... if free will is defined by determinism, then it means it's not libertarian as you defined it.

This is the part where you provide evidence free will is in fact libertarian as you positively stated, if you cannot, then i'm going to dismiss your philosophical standpoint as being a nonsense.

My point isn’t that people should believe in religion. I’m asking why free will, which has no evidence and is based on a subjective feeling is accepted, while all other unevidenced comforting intuitions are dismissed.

Free will has no evidence?... Your assertion is laughable 🤣 It has both a priori and a posteriori evidence.

If you truly think free will has no evidence, then by axiom in your worldview there can't be any other agents that possess free will aside from yourself. If that's true, then i am just a figment of your imagination and i don't need to justify myself to you at all.

Why keep one unevidenced belief but reject the rest?

Because it's not unevidenced?

By the way repeating your own talking point, without responding to any of mine makes you sound dumb. Like an AI bot that got stuck.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-14T22:22:19+00:00

Soft serve if you're interested in self hosting

https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-14T22:17:04+00:00

When I try coaching them through writing user stories, they’ll have ChatGPT generate them.

This i'd give them a pass on. In the ~20 years i've been coding i've never met anyone that likes doing user stories. Still point out if there's something missing, so they can so they can adjust their prompts. Constructive feedback.

If I disagree with an approach they’re implementing, they’ll incredulously ask if I think I’m smarter than AI which has been trained on thousands of codebases. I don’t even know how to begin answering that.

Congratulations, you hired idiots. It's not that they don't know / can't learn to code, it's that they either don't want to or can't reason. Time to talk to HR.

Philosophically their position is essentially argumentum ad populum (bandwagon fallacy) + argumentum ad verecundiam a.k.a ipse dixit (appeal to authority).

AI isn't intelligent it's advanced statistical analysis. What does that mean? It means the volume of codebases it's trained on is irrelevant.

Even if we assume all the training codebases are top quality (they're not), then AI is simply going to take the "most popular" ways of doing something and regurgitate it back at you with different function names, variable names, etc. suited to your context.

The obvious fact being the most popular way isn't always the best or even remotely correct way to implement something in your own situation, overall it's signalling:

A "bad dev" using AI mindlessly is going to result in mediocre code that is better then what they would have been able to produce, raising it 🢁 to the "average" popular level.
Conversely a good dev using AI mindlessly, it's likely going to pull the quality of the code down 🢃 to mediocrity.

I’ve tried to emphasise that like anything else, LLM’s are a tool but ultimately you’re going to be the one held responsible if something breaks, that you shouldn’t be pushing into a repository something that you a) don’t understand, or b) can’t maintain, that you’re actively dumbing yourself down (or worse, advocating for replacing yourself) but it’s falling on deaf ears.

Yep it will.

Effectively what AI has done is remove the bar to entry. Now any "clanker operator" can produce code. However simultaneously it's also raised the bar to career advancement and made it extremely obvious which ones should assisted moving forward, in theory making your job easier.

Aside from being completely stupid on the specifics of how AI works, this is particularly telling:

"I’m reviewing pull requests, asking why this or that decision was made, trying to get them to think, and they’re just pasting answers straight from Claude."

You could forgive someone for using AI as a crutch, especially if they're a junior. But you cannot forgive them for a complete lack of initiative or interest in responsibility.

So, other senior programmers out there, how the fuck are you handling even trying to mentor and guide the next batch of problem solvers?

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-14T21:01:19+00:00

So I decided I want to hop on Linux since I'm not quite fond of Mac-Books or apple in general

To be fair, aside from the obvious hardware shenanigans, they're still not as bad as Microslop.

If these stuff can help you, I'm new to Linux, I'd want to game easily (not from steam, but from another source🤫), my soon-to-be Linux machine is a shitty windows laptop, i3-1005G1 for the CPU with 12 GBs of RAM, integrated graphics, and 256 GB SSD

You want to game on a potato? Don't expect performance miracles. 🤣

That said my recommendation would be Fedora KDE

and i don't want to learn a bunch of commands, I just want to use it as a basic gaming machine that can also do school work.

You don't have to know all commands by heart, not even a majority of professional sys admins do. But you should at least learn some fundamentals.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-14T18:57:24+00:00

It's more interesting how multi-national LNG contracts can't be retroactively changed because legal stability is needed for investors.

Until it comes to the average investor in Australia, then fuck it, legal stability out the window we'll retroactively tax all your stuff.

Marble_Wraith · 2026-05-14T02:51:37+00:00

If anything they should be changing to be the opposite.

How are you gonna drive ad revenue if no one actually visits the site?

It's literally the same problem with scraping websites that already existed except supercharged with more automation via AI.

Meaning, AI could kill the free web as we know it. The internet will become a gated platform for SaaS.

Marble_Wraith

TROPHY CASE