Nick

@winlundn@infosec.exchange
22 Followers
35 Following
207 Posts

Creative writer living in the PNW, part time hacker, and once-every-so-often a tinkerer.

https://loser-in-chief.com/

pronounshe and him

I'm wondering if it's possible for other people to break through their own molds or self-perceptions that lead them to think they are unable to achieve more than the sum of their active lifestyles -- because of boss restrictions and economic constraints.

What's holding us back? Is it these geriatric Republican senators from the south who are doing their best to appease Donald J. Trump while making sure millions are screwed out of their _right_ to healthcare? <-- I'm calling it that and not looking back. We have arrived, further than what happened during the 1990s with HMO's.

I want to know, now. I really do. What else could it be that's wrong with American society besides only people taking off at 7:15 in the morning to go to work.

My pro-environment mission statement thought up as question is this: Anyone want to tell me why doing that for around forty or so years could be a short term or medium term challenge for every other living thing on the planet while tens of millions do the same driving everyday in the USA on a planet with the finite resource called fossil fuels?

Is work their motivation? Or is it money? I was raised in a family that fit in with the American lifestyle during my childhood. My Dad had a few friends he could turn to for moral and spiritual support and he tried to get out with both me and my Mom.

The problem I found later was that the way in which I was treated by both my guardians was unevenly disproportionate to how I learned to finally get along with others - first by being independent and the second was doing things that I liked when I was able to.

@TheConversationUS

Except that right now, this isn't really an energy crisis. You guys are looking from back in time: October 2023 to the present.

Despite whatever Wikipedia's authors have written on their page, Gaza/Palestine/whatever they call themselves now did not have a sovereign state nor did they ever have this. That culture with its religion could not come together on time to agree on statehood. How they got to that point is up for debate, sure. What the left-wing is arguing about is whether they still have a chance to achieve statehood. The problem is that they've been obliterated as a territory by Israel, whether the West wants to openly admit that or not.

The left-wing in the US are overreacting to Israel vs. Palestine. And others, maybe, are overreacting to Iran vs. Israel vs. the US. I feel that Trump's dubious bombing of Iran's nuclear sites does not significantly affect oil prices. Though the conflict between Israel and Iran may impact oil prices more now since Iran is a larger country and they like financing terrorism. For example, Ansar Allah or the Houthi navy from northern #Yemen are partly financed by Iran's military. They are as bad as Somali pirates or worse than the pirates.

"See them fighting for power..."

I hear Bob Marley's words just a little when I read about techbros such as Zuck throwing hundreds of millions at developers so they can assist Meta.

Meta makes up 7-13% of this country's IT/ICT annual revenue.

Meta is not important in the larger scheme of things, apart from making money from advertising and Facebook. This fact is not in dispute, especially as it relates to the development of #AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_bro

I'm glad the U.K. public is staying on top of this, even if their court system now stinks since they have ideologues sitting on the bench[1]. The U.K. Supreme Court sat in judgement and interpreted only through negative and arbitrary fashion on the subject of trans rights[2]. Their decision is perhaps similar to what America's Department of Defense did here in my own country with regard to how our military processes its recruits for future military service. Our now-biased DoD banned trans enlistees from all of US military's branches when the two-time rapist, former Fox News commentator, and drunken oaf, Secretary of Defense Pete #Hegseth, took charge.

Time will tell.

Here we have rich people and Boomers who engage in #whataboutism. I'm personally all too familiar with them trying to turn the argument around online by making everything about what the other side is doing improperly or "wrong." This is, of course, nothing new. We are going to forever have disagreements with conservatives. The problem is that the American right-wing has been bestowed all three branches of government. They are really mashing it up or stomping all over our shared right to be free. So, many of us are fighting back against their policies in government. We are resisting against the system, and winning in the process.

That is just Trumpian whataboutism. The glorious thing is that #whataboutism is already dying on its own sword. #Smart people such as you and me who write toots such as this one don't go for that, ever. Even when our psychologies (psyches?) are being tested or challenged by others -- the intelligent folks among us do know how to tell apart fiction from reality at all times. I'm not a parent myself but I know several parents from my generation (#GenX) and they are good at doing this with their children. It's because young adults lack the emotional and mental maturity to think like real adults. So, parents help guide their kids toward recognizing their own strengths and weaknesses; or their allowances and constraints, as it were.

#Transphobic hate and anti-gay behaviors are nasty habits which rich people such as Briton J.K. Rowling and most financially poorer MAGA types here in America all have in common. Uber-conservatives always make statements where they put themselves and their needs first, as if that precedence alone is the single condition which makes the whole world revolve on its axis.

The certifiable losers who support Donald J. Trump both think and feel in their own hearts that their individual right to hate someone else over who that other person loves supersedes any other's wisdom and logic.

It's one thing for both haters and people in general having the right to express their feelings to others within a democratic society. In the US (but not if you're serving in the US military) we are all protected by something called the First Amendment. It is really quite another thing for our feeble legal system to be lenient towards those voices who hold political office and who also channel hate publicly, online, or on TV.

https://www.comicsands.com/pascal-explains-rowling-loser?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=infeed&utm_campaign=linkprogram

[1] - https://uollb.com/blogs/uol/hierarchy-of-the-courts-of-england-and-wales

[2] - https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/09/uk-court-ruling-threatens-trans-people

Pedro Pascal Explains Calling Rowling 'Heinous Loser'

We totally get it, Pedro.

Comic Sands
Pedro Pascal Explains Calling Rowling 'Heinous Loser'

We totally get it, Pedro.

Comic Sands

I used to actively think in terms of #chiptunes a lot in my mind during my teens and mid-twenties. What I imagined sounded just like this (purposefully slowed down) song by FM-84 called Arcade Summer.

Later on, I became a lot more autistic. I'm more of a writer and part time coder now than a composer. I always thought of music as math.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v0SDAId_BY

Here's the regular version of Arcade Summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssdA6IiP3r4

Arcade Summer - FM-84 (Slowed)

YouTube

Had a very surprising ChatGPT experience: asked it to generate a quick summary of the WannaCry ransomware, and instead of referencing the person who stopped it by name, it simply put "(you)". When I asked it how it was able to identify that it was me, it citied its own message as something I'd said.

After pointing out I didn't say that, it did, ChatGPT replied that it was able to infer it by my account username and what it'd learned from my skillset across various chats. Not 100% sure if that's how it actually did it. Either way, pretty cool, but also a little bit scary.

It's pretty widely known that many tech companies, especially advertising ones build comprehensive profiles on their users, but it's rare that you get to talk to said profile and figure out what it knows about you.

Finally, we all now have found peace in letting go of "the specter of the Spectre" vulnerability, once and for all! The Intel Corporation was kind of holding their cards close to their chest after side-channel attacks were discovered back in 2018.

Now, Ubuntu's engineers are just dumping their Spectre mitigations in favor of #GPU performance.

"Ultimately, cryptography engineer Sophie Schmieg said, the benefit of the mitigations isn't worth the performance costs to GPU performance, where predicting instruction branches is more critical than for CPU performance."

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/ubuntu-disables-intel-gpu-security-mitigations-promises-20-performance-boost/

Ubuntu disables Intel GPU security mitigations, promises 20% performance boost

Overtime defenses for Spectre-based attacks have taken their toll.

Ars Technica

@pitrh

You would know, sir. You were using BSD long before I ever did.

I won't touch BSD anymore. I'm somewhere between being versatile and generally experienced when it comes to understanding how non-Windows installations work.

I just don't want to get caught in those loops anymore. It's too frustrating.

I think now is the time to say my peace with #freebsd.

I have found through my own experience that using UFS (not zfs) to attempt to install as a dual-boot alongside Windows 11 is pretty much a non-starter.

Whoever is in charge of FreeBSD's installer is living in a virtual setting that is 20 or 30 years in the past.

Never mind the modern garbage such as Windows 11's BitLocker. That must be turned off before trying any type of dual boot scenario with any non-Windows OS. When BitLocker is on, it creates a nightmare as it locks everything down. ANYTIME YOU RUN A USB-BASED NON-WINDOWS INSTALLER, IT ALERTS #BITLOCKER; EVEN AFTER YOU'VE ALREADY SUPPLIED THE KEY ONCE DURING BOOT UP. IT MUST BE TURNED OFF!

I used Windows 11 drive formatter. That also isn't the problem as far as I can tell.

It's when I assign a mount point in the FreeBSD 14.3 installer to the newly created partition. When I try to commit those changes in the FreeBSD installer I then get an unknown error and I cannot go further.

I hate fdisk. It's a UNIX holdover and I won't mess with it. They'd just tell me to use fdisk. No.

Help. I'm somewhere between modern and "old school." I know many UNIX-based conventions but I like some of the cutting edge.

FreeBSD has a real problem interpreting the logic of certain NVME drives.

FreeBSD is really only meant for back-end corporate servers handling large volumes of I/O using very large SSD's or hard drives. Such as 3 TB SSD's or larger...

No matter what they say, FreeBSD is not designed specifically to be a PC or laptop system -- no matter what. I won't listen to them if one of them maybe sees this toot and tries to start a debate with me.

I've given FreeBSD the benefit of the doubt way too many times. I quit.

I know more than enough to know what I'm doing.

What I like about #Debian and Ubuntu Linux is that they passed the hurdle which I was writing about many moons ago. Nobody in the Linux community worries about the internal tags or labels contained in a freshly formatted drive. Only FreeBSD would care if the non-encrypted drive was exFAT or NTFS. See where I'm going with that? The fact I hit a roadblock just right there with FreeBSD is totally absurd.

Sorry, FreeBSD. #SystemV was better in many ways. You guys were always niche.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V

UNIX System V - Wikipedia