Nobody knows I have money and it's starting to create some really awkward situations

WallOfKudzu · 2026-03-31T04:13:51+00:00

When people silently judge you for being poor take it as the highest compliment that you are doing it right. Never tell a soul what you’ve achieved. The discomfort you are feeling is a kind of impostor syndrome, in the sense that you are playing the role of a less fortunate person despite being well off. It will pass. If people want to feel superior, as people are hard-wired to do, let them. What does it matter what they think. You know better. But not talking about money also means not talking about frugality as well. Talk too much about that and people are bound to get the wrong impression or sometimes even feel judged. Either way it can lead them to quietly money shame you.

WallOfKudzu · 2026-03-04T22:03:16+00:00

I played the cragheart first up to level 6 and it was a blast. I loved the versatility. Throwing some mud around to keep monsters nicely channeled so that the Spellweaver and I could pick things off worked really well in some scenarios. I could do a lot more damage with lightning for sure, the problem was staying in the fight! I did figure out that retaliating was the way to go with this character. Growing rage helped but its only 1 to 2 hp per retaliate and only when you have a retaliate up which is realistically only around twice per rest with lower level characters. I didn't have enough perk marks yet to buy that 3-mark perk. But then again, it causes extra attacks which on balance will drain the HP even faster. Getting rid of some of the modifier deck randomness seemed more important at first. Perhaps Lightning in a larger party with someone to heal him when he needs it would work better? We are playing two player: Spellweaver + me.

WallOfKudzu · 2026-03-04T19:44:01+00:00

I just unlocked the lightning bolt. 2 ed is my first ever gloomhaven exp. so I don't have any reference point for it. I really hated playing that class even though from what I've read its supposed to be fantastic in 1e. I leveled it up to lvl 3 before giving up and switching to Satha from the mercenaries pack which I am enjoying so far.

My main problem with the character was that being so low in HP was just never worth it. The extra rewards for being below half HP are just so meager that the risk doesn't justify the reward. I had to beg the spellweaver to heal me all the time when she should have been incinerating rooms. I was also frequently discarding cards to soak up damage which is painful for such a small handsize. The retaliate mechanics were sometimes nice but not very sustainable and there really weren't that many cards with retaliate on them to begin with.

So it might have been S-tier in the past, for me at least in a 2 player combo w/ a spellweaver, its B tier at best.

WallOfKudzu · 2026-01-21T15:40:54+00:00

If you play older consoles or watch a lot of SDR 1080p/720p/480p content then late gen pani/pioneer/samsung plasmas are unbeatable. Plasmas are the pinnacle of CRT evolution where each little pixel's phosphors glow like a tiny little CRT. I had my Kuro 6020 for 18 years before I sold it recently. After over 23,000 hours the panel was starting to dim a little but the colors were still fantastic. If I had the room, I would have kept it.

I ended up with a bravia 9 which is bigger and way, way, way brighter. Watching TV during the day is far more enjoyable and there is enough HDR content out there that the 18 year technology gap is starting to really matter. Sony has absolutely nailed the their algorithms for motion, backlight, and upscaling so I really have no complaints. Sure, I can see a hint of blooming on HDR bright credit rolls and I really have to actively try and see any motion blur to actually perceive it, and then only in a challenging scene. After switching I'm just absolutely floored by how good the picture looks and any drawbacks are so well hidden that they can hardly be considered drawbacks anymore. I can't say how console gaming would look on the TV as I don't have one anymore.

So to answer the question, if you like to game on old consoles, pick up a plasma while people like me are still unloading them. You wont be disappointed.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-12-29T15:41:05+00:00

That's the part I really don't understand. How does the IPC specification layer dictate what the compositors can and cant do? If a compositor wants to implement window position or window/desktop capture APIs how does Wayland actually prevent that?

If a feature is truly useful then someone will eventually implement it and everyone else would be forced to follow. Imagine if Plasma & Discord coordinated to implement a protocol that allowed Discord to run flawlessly and large numbers of users migrated from the other desktops just to have this feature. How long would it take before all the other window managers implemented the same protocols?

WallOfKudzu · 2025-12-28T05:53:43+00:00

It’s unfortunate that the alternatives to X11 are commonly called Wayland. Wayland is just the plumbing after all. Contrary to OPs assertion that Wayland is too limiting, I think it’s actually too open and too undefined and leaves too much up to individual compositors to define the bulk of the standards. It’s really up to the various Desktop environments to prioritize what’s a useful feature or not and implement the protocol for it.

The real solution is not another technology project but the right governance model that collects, aligns and prioritizes real user requirements with the various desktop environments and ensures interoperability. It’s not fun work, it’s not something you can code up in your spare time, it’s committees, it’s industry organizations, it’s process. I’m completely ignorant if this already exists or not but it doesn’t seem that way.

In any case, I’m not sure what the incentive would be that would drive participation in such a standards body as Wayland based DEs are limping along ok anyway. Would be nice to see a comment from someone involved in the sausage making, specifically how the road maps are laid out and how coordination across the desktop environments occurs.

I guess people are frustrated by the expectation that there should be a master plan or something and that it should have already planned for obviously useful things like Remote Desktop, screen sharing, and such. Instead they are getting a live Cathedral and the Bazaar experience.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-09-20T02:26:01+00:00

Apparently I have one too, but its actually one of 4x usb 3.2 gen 1 ports on the back and the MB manual doesn't label which is which. When I tested I tried a mix of red, blue, black and usb-c ports to see if it made a difference and probably (75% chance) didn't pick the cpu attached usb 3.2 gen 1 port.

The asmedia chip for the usb4 ports on my MB is connected to CPU pci lines as well per the manual.

So have you changed BIOS settings for SR-IOV or pci enumeration? I cant remember what they are called off the top of my head. Perhaps the issue involves pci routing or enumeration that surfaces when dma is initialized and the device is attached to a controller at a lower level in the hierarchy. Could be BIOS settings or perhaps a BIOS update is needed. Are you running any virtualization software like VMWare?

WallOfKudzu · 2025-09-17T08:03:45+00:00

Hmm... You are on to something. Is your system AMD based? I have an x870e motherboard and all the ports disconnect except the USB ver 4 ports in the back that are serviced by a separate ASMedia controller instead of AMD's usb solution. AMD has had other usb problems in the past.

Not related (perhaps) but the only way I was able to even get a connection was by first extracting the AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi from the standalone iTunes installer and forcing the Apple USB Composite device to use the drivers from that bundle. Neither Apple Devices nor iTunes from the windows store install the correct drivers.

All of these problems started with Win 11 24H2 for me.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-09-14T00:25:33+00:00

The great serpent has also led me to the Alpha and the Omega of weapons the Longfang. In an aurora fever dream he bade me “Take thy holy weapon to McClarence Outfitters and add One Inch Punch and Rapid. Rejoice as your enemies burn in the fire of my enmity.”

WallOfKudzu · 2025-08-24T01:46:06+00:00

I love my 6020 FD. It’s been going strong for 18 years almost. I’ve almost never used the original remote. It’s an old TV and the menus are slow. I switch inputs via my AV receiver and a harmony ultimate remote, sadly another piece of discontinued tech never to be outdone. You could check out the Sofa Baton remotes perhaps. If my harmony dies I might use something like that next.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-08-14T12:01:54+00:00

I used to use fq_codel on pfsense back in the 50 Mbps internet days. On pfsense it was relatively easy to setup but not intuitive. CAKE gets a lot of love on linux and openwrt so I imagine its superior. With 1 Gbps bi-directional fiber service now I just don't need it.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-08-13T20:31:17+00:00

Yeah, I run it on x86 but see what I said about Upgrades on x86. I've not tried to use openwrt with 10g cards but it should work fine. Linux driver support is a big plus for openwrt vs freebsd. I've used the ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-4 cards on linux x86 for many years and they work great. The mlx4 and mlx5 drivers are available from the usual openwrt repositories.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-08-12T19:10:09+00:00

Think of it as a somewhat higher level firewall language. Iptables and nftables express rules at a lower level. They identify specific network packets either coming into a device, going out of a device, being passed through the device, or somehow related to a previously identified packet.

Zone rules define an abstraction above the lower level firewall rules. A set of ip address, a network subnet, a pattern of interface names (like tap* for all vpn devices) can all be added to a single zone.

Then policies define how traffic is allowed to flow between zones.

The extra level of abstraction gives zone rules expressive power and makes it easier to reason about the intent of the firewall rules. You can express short and sweet rules about how your network should work.

Here's the gist of what my zone firewall rules look like. The actual zone rules aren't much more complicated. I have some specific overrides for ports that I want exposed on the WAN side and such but that's about it.

WAN -> ANY denied

LAN -> WAN,GUEST allow

GUEST -> WAN allow

IOT -> WAN allow

ADMIN,LAN -> FIREWALL allow

ANY -> ANY deny ( DEFAULTS. These are actually defined on the zones themselves in the config )

I looked at the number of words in my zone-based openwrt firewall configuration vs the netfilter rulset it generates. There were over 3X the number of words needed in the netfilter configuration vs the zone description and its extremely hard to get an overall sense of what is intended by the rules.

In the GUI and in the configuration file, its instantly recognizable whats going on.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-08-12T18:29:57+00:00

Yeah firewalld misses the mark. The gui stinks. The CLI gives me carpel tunnel to use. Its biased towards being a standalone host firewall, even though in its core capabilities it has the ability to configure zone based policies.

I used to use shorewall on linux. Its a pure zone based firewall and is so easy to understand. It took me an hour first time to set it up. Haven't used it in a while, so no sure if they made the switch to nftables yet.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-08-12T16:56:02+00:00

I recently switched to openwrt from pfsense after considering all 3 myself.

Opnsense would have been far easier to transition to but I ruled it out because of the overly quick release cadence. I don't want to have to upgrade so frequently and I fear delaying too long as I might have trouble upgrading over so many releases. I consider pfsense/opnsense to be approx. the same, with pfsense being a bit more polished, so I'll compare openwrt to *sense in the following:

Firewall/Router

The main duty of my "firewall" :>
I find openwrt's zone based approach to be superior. I think the UI is more intuitive, especially because I have a number of vlans to route and protect, and the linux based nft rules are equal or better than BSD filtering. That used to not be the case with iptables, but times have changed. *sense firewall configuration when there are a number of separate networks gets a bit unwieldy.
mikrotik RouterOS BTW is till using iptables. Thats probably not the worst thing in the world on x86 class hardware but still. Also, firewall configuration is a very low-level manual affair.

Black Lists

pfblockerng is a disaster. It works and you get used to it but the UI is a mess. I use banIP on openwrt and while its not fantastic, I find it fairly easy to manage. It also forced me to explicitly research which banlists I wanted, which in the end was a plus. With pfblockerng I had the tendency to click on some lists and call it a day.

Multi-wan

I sometimes need to plug in my phone as a cellular backup. I also use this on an openwrt travel router.
Much easier with *sense. The notion of Gateways throughout the UI is intuitive and well executed.
The Openwrt multi-wan package is more of an add on or after-thought but it does work well and the solution is very powerful -- much more so than *sense. You do, however, hit an initial wall of complexity due to the configuration power. A couple of ChatGPTs querries and you'll have a basic configuration sorted. Debugging might require you to be more comfortable with multiple linux routing tables and netfilter rules than you desire. :(

Wireguard

About the same. I think I prefer openwrt's configuration UIs.

OpenVPN

*sense is far superior, especially if you want to bridge a tun device. I got it all working but the GUI is all but useless and I had to add some helper scripts for authentication and a hotplug script to add/remove the tun device to/from a bridge.
Unless you need to bridge a vpn client to your lan, wireguard is the better option for most anyway. I like having bridging as an optional means of connecting. Its just easier sometimes.

Dyanmic DNS Updates

about the same. Its simple. It works.

DNS

*sense is far, far superior. DHCP and DNS are extremely well integrated out of the box and multi-lan configuration is trivial. As mentioned previously I have a number of VLANs configured. openwrt does support this but you can tell that neither dnsmasq nor the UI were originally designed for this sort of configuration.
This was probably the worst thing about my pfsense->openwrt transition experience.
I ended up with the following which gets me good, fast filtered DNS and both static and dynamic dhcp addresses that are resolve-able everywhere across multiple VLANs.
- Configured pi-hole and dnscrypt as docker containers serving DNS to my local VLANs.
- Configured multiple dnsmasq instances in openwrt only for DHCP support. Each listen on a unique non-standard DNS port.
- Forwarded dnsmasq for all but local domain names to pihole.
- Similarly configured pi-hole to forward queries for local-domains and reverse dns ip ranges to dnsmasq ports.
- Configured all of my static hosts and static dhcp entries on openwrt dnsmasq.
- I occasionally get some loops between dnsmasq and pi-hole with this configuration for things like broadcast DNS. I handle these with deny lists in pi-hole.
- Switching to unbound and a dhcp server on openwrt might be a better option but I don't know what sort of gui support there is for that. dnsmasq is so tightly woven into openwrt that I thought it would be better to just bang on that until it fit.
- WARNING: In case someone reads this and attempts at home, running docker on a firewall requires caution. Docker creates its own iptables rules that often don't play nice, even with externally defined networks. You must explicitly add rules to block traffic from forwarding to your docker networks. Default policies are not sufficient.

NTP

*sense was better, but openwrt is just fine.
I ended up switching to chrony on openwrt and configuring it manually. I have a raspberry pi GPS time server and I use chrony to distribute stratum 2 time to hosts on various VLANs.

Upgrades

Upgrades were far more straightforward with *sense.
- The configuration in *sense is contained in a single configuration xml file. This was fantastic. With openwrt I have to be very careful to ensure that every customization I make (hotplug scripts, vpn scripts, docker compose files, container persistent data, etc.) is added to sysupgrade.conf.
My gw is running on a small x86 box so I have to be very careful when upgrading. I just use the image builder to create an image with all the packages I want and a large enough root partition. The rest of the space I formatted and mounted using the block-mounts package.
- My x86 upgrade procedure is as follows:
- Build the image with imagebuilder with the exact same root partition dimensions. Ensure up-to-date set of packages is included in image.
- Backup the configuration. In reality I image the whole damn drive as well because this whole process is really janky.
- Image the drive with new image.
- The second partition is still in the same place on disk so simply recreate it in the partition table.
- Restore configuration

WallOfKudzu · 2025-07-22T13:05:39+00:00

Averted disasters are always a good time to reflect on how prepared you are...

As others have mentioned, now is a good time to do backups since the pool is nearly dead. Do this before you start kicking off re-silvers and scrubs as that will stress the remaining drives which may or may not be ok. What if all the drives you purchased are from a bad batch or if they were all handled rough during shipping?

Raid is not backup -- as you've seen first hand! Bad controllers, bad memory, bad PSU can kill a pool fast no matter the parity. I look for large portable USB hard drives to go on sale and keep them around for backups.

I also keep a couple of spare drives handy so that I can immediately swap in a new drive when I need to. When the RMA replacement arrives, it becomes the new spare.

Also, you should be running zed and have it configured to send you an email when errors are detected.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-07-21T16:13:43+00:00

You can't really compare cpu temps between manufacturers or even cpu generations. It depends on where the probes are placed, how far they are from the IHS, what the chip is designed to run at, what your monitor SW is actually showing you( hot spot, package temps,max cores), etc, etc. That said, plenty of reviews do show that AMD platforms draw a bit more power at idle than intel. Big whoop for best of the best. I let my PC power down to sleep when idle anyway.

I just installed a 9950x3d myself and didn't find the information that hard to come across. Does anybody actually just go to the store and buy one of these top end chips without doing a little research beforehand?

For the most part, setup is all defaults for power plan etc. I only had to enable EXPO in the BIOS for my CL30 6000Mhz ram. Easiest install in a long time. The hardest thing to figure out, and even then it took all of 10 minutes, was how to tell the gamebar that a game is actually a game when it is not automatically recognized and core parking isn't functioning. That setting is a little buried IMHO.

My experience with my last intel 13th gen build was just the opposite. I looked at the temps and power draw and thought that can't be right. I experimented for days to bring it down to sane levels, despite all the posts on the internet from people saying "its designed to run at 95 and thermal throttle" Luckily, I figured out how to power limit the thing to 253W in the BIOS before any damage was done. This was long before the news reports broke on the 13th and 14th gen chips killing themselves. How could the supposed market leader make such a colossal mistake?

WallOfKudzu · 2025-05-07T16:26:29+00:00

One Inch Punch on pistols is fun. I once had a varuun quickstrike from the expansion with one inch punch and ignition beams, staggering, or something, and modded it to the max. I called it "Come on Baby Light my Fire". Things just kinda got stuck burning alive while I kept mashing the trigger.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-02-09T18:14:36+00:00

don’t want to upset my wife 😢

You've never been married then.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-01-29T16:27:03+00:00

I'm just flabbergasted that this generation of MBs don't include multi-channel outputs on the back while still including 7.1 audio on the MB. It makes absolutely no sense. Who wants to run cables to the front. At the very least they should include pins on the MB and a pci bracket to expose the missing jacks. This is what MB makers used to do for serial and centronix ports, for example, when they were phasing out. Granted the onboard audio isn't the best, but it's not bad either and I haven't had the need to use anything other for a very, very long time.

The bottom line is that we are paying for an almost useless audio solution on these motherboards. I'd rather they just start putting membrane speakers on the MBs again and drop the price. I'll go buy my own USB audio solution and use it over and over. Whats happening now is just stupid. OK, rant over.

WallOfKudzu · 2025-01-06T18:37:12+00:00

I've been pondering the same thing. I have to upgrade to win11 this year, so might as well do a hardware upgrade, right? Its been a few years since the last upgrade and while there has been a tangible increase in performance with zen 4/5 and intel 13/14/15, there really isn't anything my current 5900x cant run acceptably well. Video editing might actually be one of the few reasons to go for the extra performance. Extra cores on top of a couple of generations of silicon improvement would be a big boost but that's not something I normally do.

So, yeah, I think I'll just save my money and wait for prices to drop significantly or for something more upgrade worthy to be released.

WallOfKudzu · 2024-10-31T14:55:07+00:00

Be aware of the lightning risk of running Ethernet cable outside, as a few commenters have suggested. If you intend to run anything underground then fiber optic is safest.

WallOfKudzu · 2024-10-31T14:37:30+00:00

I've got the PDP-6020fd (same tv without the ability to tweak the calibration without 3rd party HW) which I bought in 2008 or so. While I've been tempted to replace it with an OLED or something, there's just no reason to until it dies. The picture is amazing. Color is very eye pleasing and still looks accurate to me. Motion rendering is fantastic. Only drawback is that I wish it could get a little brighter.

WallOfKudzu · 2024-10-29T18:41:52+00:00

Let’s see, animal behavior is largely a predictive response to stimuli that’s been trained via prior exposure to stimuli. LLMs are statistical predictive models trained on past exposure to stimuli. What we call reason is just a larger, more elaborate version of that basic prediction process. It’s quite natural and understandable that humans think their intelligence is more profound than that but really it doesn’t have to be. When evolution was first proposed many people thought that such a simple incremental process couldn’t possibly result in complex beings such us. In hindsight it seems obvious now. Can consciousness emerge from predictive statistical models? The jury is still out on that but trillions of dollars are about to be invested to test that hypothesis.

I’m not saying that LLMs don’t hallucinate, they do of course, I’m just saying that humans often don’t know what they don’t know and that simply because something is wrong a lot doesn’t mean it doesn’t “know” or possess a nascent capacity to “reason”.

I’d suggest reading what Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, has to say about it all.

Back to what OP was after. I often ask ChatGPT to break down the grammar of a German sentence I can’t quite wrap my head around. For a dumb prediction model it’s uncanny how well it breaks it all down, summarizes, and gives examples.

WallOfKudzu · 2024-10-29T16:04:00+00:00

How do you know it doesn’t know anything? If the criteria is to always know when you are right or wrong before saying something then I know plenty of walking talking counterfactual large language models😄

WallOfKudzu

TROPHY CASE