דגל שכור 🏴 @thufie@pixie.town

If it is women's day then why do I have to derefernce pointers instead of touching grass?

I found some docs for how to enable a specific third-party library's debug tags for gdb and there is a typo in the example command that says "localhork" instead of localhost.

I would have gone with localhonk personally.

You know technically Donald Trump never counteracted or cancelled out Joe Biden executive order 69420: "All the chapstick is free now you can take as much at checkout without paying. It's all on me."

The disabling of adblock is finally rolling out, so I thought maybe I could highlight some Chrome forks which are somewhat more trustworthy than random untrustworthy crap like Brave and Vivaldi.

If you aren't on an Apple OS, the number one choice is Cromite https://github.com/uazo/cromite which just builds-in ublock origin by default making it a moot point. It also tries to disable lots of opt-out model crap in default Chrome that phones home while not breaking anything too severely. I've used it for MS Teams for example (have mercy on my poor soul). If you are on an Apple device you aren't supported by cromite yet, but you have brew.sh installed, you can run 'brew install --cask eloston-chromium' in a terminal to get a copy of ungoogled-chromium which is almost as good. Those should all work for webapps and whatever else you do online out of the box, as they don't deviate wildly from enabled defaults like some privacy forks of firefox do.

If you are feeling open-saucy about it, and want to try something a little less explicitly Google Chrome, that is still based on the same browser engine and has its own extensions and ad-blocker, then Falkon browser is also an option. The "old big icons QT" aesthetic might be too much for some people though, and there are of course far fewer accessible settings or niceities since it is after all an underdog browser.

Whatever you do though, don't go online without an ad blocker! Don't listen to anyone who tells you to disable adblocker, that is more sacred than your antivirus!

bark.video hasn't unblocked my new video from last month yet, which makes me think the admin has been gone for a while and may not get to it for a long time. I may have to move my PeerTube channel. Still don't know a good server.

Naming your pet "peeve"

Science fiction authors just need to be told "it is okay, you can have ideas." to be saved from the "hard-scifi" vicious cycle of making some object of popular science at the time of writing save the galaxy or stop the evil aliens or whatever. You can have ideas about society and miraculous technology and also write gritty stuff, you are allowed to be creative. It is okay! Pick your own balance instead of selecting the current preset of what is "realistic", because that only ages. Whatever seems 'realistic' to you is all it is. Realistic to the you of the now. It is such an arbitrary goal of writing style to be defined by "hard scifi" that the only giveaway something is "hard scifi" work is just when it seems incredibly dated and unoriginal. "Oh I see, it is like that because the British guy thought like this in the 90s" is all I get from it, not realism, or even much of a sense of "grittiness" (media is only ever getting less restrained over time). Just go ahead and call it "incredibly clockable space opera" because you tell more about yourself than any kind of seriously objective future. Maybe it would be worth doing more collaborative work with a higher variety of perspectives if you were actually serious about that goal of the subgenre.

The worst part of reading "gritty" , "hard scifi" novels are when I am trying to skip over the incredibly uncomfortable and unrelatable amatonormative cishet sexual sequences and then the author makes part of the really overly detailed sex scene have critical plot information. So then I have to double-back and actually closely read the weird fetish of some asshole they think is normal because they are painfully british or something.

I like playing a fun game where I download a highly rated scifi book and intentionally don't look at the author. Then I try to guess what kind of person the author is, their beliefs, where they live, etc. Then once I finish the book I read their Wikipedia page and see how right I was. Although there isn't even remotely a way of measuring how "correct" I am, I think I am getting a lot better. I read mostly female authors before this, and I think the most distinctive departure from that style has been a skew of varous British men writing in the 90s with bad ideas about eugenics and all the half-unpackaged baggage of fallen empire, which is probably more towards the average for the genre as a whole. There are all kinds of words that I am really glad don't get used anymore which were big with that type of guy. The rule with this is that once I read the first paragraph I must commit to finishing the book. I am not allowed to read the wiki article until the book is finished. That's the only way I can stomach a lot of this kinda stuff. It has been interesting to see where ideas come from this way.

As an aside: I think "hard sci-fi" is such an unserious genre. All it indicates is a certain disdain for social sciences and an obsessive focus on contemporary pop-futurism. That shit ages like uncorked wine in a swamp, and can only ever seem 'serious' in the context of its time period. All the pop science theory that is not widely known to be disproven yet always becomes pivotal plot devices that can come off as laughable a mere decade later. Imagine how tacky all the "what if the AI but singularity" and "quantum xyz" writing of this decade will be in 5-10 years when it is clear that stuff has barely changed our world, unlike the books where it somehow fantastically contrives moves a plot along by unlocking secrets of the universe or whatever. Yeah like sure, the doodad of the day from last decade toootally turns out to be super true and change everything radically in practice through inevitable consequence technology alone, sure. I'd like a hard scifi writer to think for a second just how many inventions, refinements, and discoveries amount to basically nothing on their own, versus the rate at which technology has ever really changed human history in vast and sudden sweeps. Incredibly rare. It ain't gonna be the silly pop-science doodad of the decade. Maybe if you had to make up something that wasn't the leading pop-science theory in popular media and design around how it actually changes things massively it would be too hard for hard scifi. Also so much of it is fashy british admiralty style crap, there's no way spacebound people are doing British Empire navy roleplay in anything other than your dreams lmao. The least realistic part, only second to every mention of "quantum" or "string theory" or "graviton" or whatever changing everything.