totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[SunlitZelkova]

On an unrelated note, every time an Army ad comes up on YouTube, I see the yellow star and black background in the beginning and think it is going to be a Carl’s Jr. ad.

[Nuke]

nuke vs linux 2: the wrath of the kernel

turns out it wasn't really broke. failed to build and left a bunch of bad kernels in the bootloader more like it. apparently its a bug that is at this moment being worked on, a few purges later and my shop computer works again without using the recovery menu. there is some ambiguity about whether or not the nvidia drivers were installed. package manager says yes but some of the utilities say no. note i said some.  i think throwing some benchmarks at the gpu and see if it works is in order, but then id have to figure out how to do that and i dont feel like reading another manual page the size of a phone book (some of you may remember those, they were used for interrogating crime suspects in the pre-miranda-rights-era and also for looking up phone numbers for people and businesses, they were quite large, especially in cities). 

as much as the debian user base insists on following the official instructions, they don't seem to work very well.

[Nuke]

strike 3 debian, youre out. after finally getting things working (and this is after 3 days fixing my 3d printer and then fixing the doorknob in the bathroom), the offitial debian package manager pushed a nvidia update and broke everything again. since i didnt break it this time, i dont know how to fix it.  time to dig out that iffy windows 10 ltsc instasller. frankly i trust it more than i trust win11 or mainline 10. so yea. im tired of fixing things. after all these years of computing i never thought id get to the point where there is not one modern os i want to use.

this weekend i was supposed to print joystick grips for my joystick of doom project, but instead i had to fix things. now the project is getting shelved for another week or more until im in the mood to reinstall the os.

Edited February 18 by Nuke

[Superluminal Gremlin]

Assuming G&R are right, and that 34 Billion barrels of shale oil will ever be extracted from the Permian, we have about 900 ish million barrels until we reach 17 billion barrels. Typically, once 50% is achieved, growth sort of stops. Which is bad. For every extra 2 billion barrels of extra Ultimate recoverable reserves, you add a year, so the IEA's Technically recoverable reserves, which all already suspect because the IEA stated the number, means we have about 6.5 years of growth. It's probably in the ballpark of the TRR, but that doesn't mean it would be cheap.

[DDE]

Well, first time a bank I'm a client of has gone bust.

A quarter of an hour ago, Russia's QIWI had its license yanked for financial unsoundness, facilitating payments for online gambling and dubious businesses, evading attempts at enforcement of controls against said payments and, ahem, "opening accounts using personal data without the person's knowledge and performing transactions on them". The whole regulatory drama lasted for years.

The total sum of my exposure is... a whopping RUB 9.69. For reference, wet wipes at not-McDonalds cost RUB 20.

QIWI allowed me to top off the Steam Wallet via Kazakh tenge, with a major loss on RUB-TNG-RUB conversion, but relatively risk-free - everything else involves shady online establishments, against which I wouldn't have any legal recourse. So I'm off looking for a new sanctions bypass...

[BA-Forums]

On 2/12/2024 at 11:25 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

On an unrelated note, every time an Army ad comes up on YouTube, I see the yellow star and black background in the beginning and think it is going to be a Carl’s Jr. ad.

lol

[AlamoVampire]

I want to stress that this isnt a name and shame thing. This is a cautionary tale about a game company and its less than ethical or consistent behaviors.

As some of you know I have been playing a game called Path of Titans, a dinosaur sim/survival game. I was able to log in and play my dinosaurs as recently as 060003042024. I went to log into Path of Titans not 1 hour ago to play and grow my spinosaurus and perhaps finish the growth on my Tyrannosaurus Rex. I want to stress that at this moment as I am about to log in, I have 0 indication of anything wrong. No Email from Alderon Games or anything. I launch my game on my PS5 and hit X. I am suddenly confronted with a log in error: Publisher Ban. It would seem that based on my research (I am not the first this has happened to, where a ban suddenly appears with 0 warning or explanation) I have been banned from Path of Titans. I can however still log into my Alderon account on their website. I have of course submitted a request for an explanation and to formally lodge an appeal should that be needed. 

I also want to stress that the player base is exceptionally toxic as a whole. They trash talk fellow players calling them garbage, bad and other far far worse things. They abuse players, mock them and do other heinous actions simply because there are 0 rules (I do not mean that as hyperbole either, their official servers have 0 rules, yet when you report players they ((the gms refer to the Terms of Service)) state there are no rules on the official servers) and can essentially get away with murder. I myself have found that there are rules if you know where to look, specifically into their ToS which are a legal contract that is enforceable by law, but, who reads the ToS or EULA? Well, one of their rules specifically bullet point 7 of section 1 subsection b: "attempt to, or harass, abuse, or harm, or advocate or incite harassment, abuse, or harm of another person, group, including Alderon Games’s employees or Alderon Games’s customer service representatives" which is the rule I would cite when reporting players. And thats the thing of it, thats all I have done in that game, aside from be mildly toxic at the start and last night (24 hours ago) supplied a complaint in the global chat about how anemic and weak the TRex is in game compared to its real world counterpart. I myself as far as I am aware have not violated any rules, yet here I stand am banned. All I have done in recent times is report players for harassment (2-3 reports at most on this subject), reported 1 player for a possible actual crime when they potentially violated a real US law, for their privacy I will not cite which law or what was said, but, suffice it to say, i may now that this has happened follow up with actual federal law enforcement, and then my most recent report was against a player who made claims that their actions did real world harm to another player. Again, I have received 0 email as to what I did or why I was seemingly banned. SO, why do I write this? I want to caution any who read this to avoid Alderon Games. They are not ethical or consistent in rules implementation or enforcement. 

To the mods, I am totally unsure if this violates any rules to make this cautionary tale, if I did/am violating something uh... I guess snip and edit as needed or perhaps replace with a cute picture of a cat? But, I really do not want our community to trip into the trap I fell into as I feel gaming should be fun and reasonably risk free. 

010903052024

[Fizzlebop Smith]

I am overwhelmed by the burden of expectation.

People often view any protracted effort on their behalf with appreciation. When the paradigm shifts to expectation we become filled with resentment. 

 A slight embracing of more nihilistic fantasies has taken the edge off.

[Nuke]

14 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

I want to stress that this isnt a name and shame thing. This is a cautionary tale about a game company and its less than ethical or consistent behaviors.

As some of you know I have been playing a game called Path of Titans, a dinosaur sim/survival game. I was able to log in and play my dinosaurs as recently as 060003042024. I went to log into Path of Titans not 1 hour ago to play and grow my spinosaurus and perhaps finish the growth on my Tyrannosaurus Rex. I want to stress that at this moment as I am about to log in, I have 0 indication of anything wrong. No Email from Alderon Games or anything. I launch my game on my PS5 and hit X. I am suddenly confronted with a log in error: Publisher Ban. It would seem that based on my research (I am not the first this has happened to, where a ban suddenly appears with 0 warning or explanation) I have been banned from Path of Titans. I can however still log into my Alderon account on their website. I have of course submitted a request for an explanation and to formally lodge an appeal should that be needed. 

I also want to stress that the player base is exceptionally toxic as a whole. They trash talk fellow players calling them garbage, bad and other far far worse things. They abuse players, mock them and do other heinous actions simply because there are 0 rules (I do not mean that as hyperbole either, their official servers have 0 rules, yet when you report players they ((the gms refer to the Terms of Service)) state there are no rules on the official servers) and can essentially get away with murder. I myself have found that there are rules if you know where to look, specifically into their ToS which are a legal contract that is enforceable by law, but, who reads the ToS or EULA? Well, one of their rules specifically bullet point 7 of section 1 subsection b: "attempt to, or harass, abuse, or harm, or advocate or incite harassment, abuse, or harm of another person, group, including Alderon Games’s employees or Alderon Games’s customer service representatives" which is the rule I would cite when reporting players. And thats the thing of it, thats all I have done in that game, aside from be mildly toxic at the start and last night (24 hours ago) supplied a complaint in the global chat about how anemic and weak the TRex is in game compared to its real world counterpart. I myself as far as I am aware have not violated any rules, yet here I stand am banned. All I have done in recent times is report players for harassment (2-3 reports at most on this subject), reported 1 player for a possible actual crime when they potentially violated a real US law, for their privacy I will not cite which law or what was said, but, suffice it to say, i may now that this has happened follow up with actual federal law enforcement, and then my most recent report was against a player who made claims that their actions did real world harm to another player. Again, I have received 0 email as to what I did or why I was seemingly banned. SO, why do I write this? I want to caution any who read this to avoid Alderon Games. They are not ethical or consistent in rules implementation or enforcement. 

To the mods, I am totally unsure if this violates any rules to make this cautionary tale, if I did/am violating something uh... I guess snip and edit as needed or perhaps replace with a cute picture of a cat? But, I really do not want our community to trip into the trap I fell into as I feel gaming should be fun and reasonably risk free. 

010903052024

modern games in general annoy me. especially ones that are over moderated and predominantly played by children. this is actually why i no longer do multiplayer minecraft (that and normal "server maintenance" destroying my builds). mechwarrior online in comparison is a game inhabited mostly by aging grognards where players tend to be in their 30s or 40s and is barely moderated. the game is of poor quality (i dont think the engine has been recompiled in over 8 years since it has some long standing game breaking bugs, most notably a crash happy fullscreen mode). yet they still have the gaul to charge $40 for a mechpack. then most aaa games tend to be overly simplified or have strong political messaging (keep the politics out of the product). nobody makes a game i want to play anymore really, and since i got my steam deck im playing old 16-bit platformers (many of which are japanese games).

Edited March 5 by Nuke

[DDE]

If you don't give her a bouquet of roses, you don't love her.

If you do, you're profligating the family budget.

This year the roses go at $3+ each.

Flower sellers across the post-Soviet space be like:

[TheSaint]

5 hours ago, DDE said:

If you don't give her a bouquet of roses, you don't love her.

If you do, you're profligating the family budget.

This year the roses go at $3+ each.

Flower sellers across the post-Soviet space be like:

If I bought my wife a bouquet of roses at $3 each she would beat me to death with them. We do Valentine's Day the week after, because everything is cheaper. (We used to do it the day after, but all the restaurants and flower shops caught on to that.) Marry well, gentlemen....

[Ryaja]

I got braces today and dang do they hurt.

[KerbolRacer21]

Is this place for people talking about bad/painful things in their life?

When i see that stuff i think its a marketing ad for haas formula 1 because netflix is spying on me while i binge watch

On 2/17/2024 at 6:28 PM, Nuke said:

strike 3 debian, youre out. after finally getting things working (and this is after 3 days fixing my 3d printer and then fixing the doorknob in the bathroom), the offitial debian package manager pushed a nvidia update and broke everything again. since i didnt break it this time, i dont know how to fix it.  time to dig out that iffy windows 10 ltsc instasller. frankly i trust it more than i trust win11 or mainline 10. so yea. im tired of fixing things. after all these years of computing i never thought id get to the point where there is not one modern os i want to use.

this weekend i was supposed to print joystick grips for my joystick of doom project, but instead i had to fix things. now the project is getting shelved for another week or more until im in the mood to reinstall the os.

bro i just relized there's this guy who fixes his (i'm not going to say details for privacy reasons) _________'s doorknob for extra ______

anybody else here whos messages keep mergeing

[Lisias]

On 3/5/2024 at 6:30 PM, Nuke said:

and since i got my steam deck im playing old 16-bit platformers (many of which are japanese games).

I couldn't agree more. The best thing I ever bought for PC gaming was the Deck - I have a full Thrustmaster TCA Officer Pack Airbus (with additional thrust quadrant - 4 engines) gathering dust in my desk since I had bought the Deck, as I can play that thing anywhere (including on places I will never confess!! )

And I'm playing mainly indie games and 10+ years old games.

 

17 hours ago, DDE said:

Carl Barks. The best storyman and cartoonist Disney ever had.

--- -- -

On a side note, I had am absolutely hellish week. Can't disclose much, but this one I can: I had wrote a small distributed monitoring tool to, well, monitor our machines and send consolidated data and events to our APM (our whole pool of computers works as one single application after all). Well, that damned thing insisted on barking on faults on client's that were configured to be monitored only 5x8 (only a couple clients are monitored 7x24 - most of our clients operate on working hours only).

Man, that's annoying: awaking at early hours of a Saturday due a rogue alarm. Damn (more appropriate expletives not allowed on Forum).

So, by the second time this year, I got liquided and tried to fix the damned tool. Reviewed the event code, reviewed the fault detecting code, rewrote part of that code, tested it by hand, wrote unit tests for it, did integration tests, simulated faults on an working regime where the current hour would suppress the alarm, did another simulation where the alarm would be triggered.

Great. This time I must had tackled it down, right?

Deployed the damned thing. And another client's alarm goes off besides out of the intended working regime. I can't express my displeasure about the event (really, I can't - I would violate half the Forum rules, and some Laws too).

I reviewed everything. AGAIN. And, again, everything appears to work fine on my machine.

So I reviewed the code that read the configuration files. They were good.

Then I finally got it - configuration files, by Turing's Sake!! I checked the server's configuration files and on it the Saturday was configured as a Working Day... (sigh) For more than an year, the problem was a mistake on the freaking (you know what I really want to write here) configuration files.

And this was the smallest of my issues this week!

[KerbolRacer21]

@DDE The heck is your job??!!

Something depressing in my life is how whenever i try to load my 30,000 part BIG Boi plane is just breaks apart on the runway and now it won't ever load in the sph. Bye bye half of my year

Edited March 9 by KerbolRacer21

[DDE]

6 hours ago, KerbolRacer21 said:

@DDE The heck is your job??!!

PowerPoint slides.

Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

PowerPoint slides.

Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.

At least you don't have to program the damned slides. Sometimes, dude, I have this urge to quit this software business and try to make a living selling sandwiches on the beach or something.

[Nuke]

On 3/8/2024 at 8:24 AM, TheSaint said:

If I bought my wife a bouquet of roses at $3 each she would beat me to death with them. We do Valentine's Day the week after, because everything is cheaper. (We used to do it the day after, but all the restaurants and flower shops caught on to that.) Marry well, gentlemen....

or dont, its cheaper. 

[TheSaint]

10 hours ago, DDE said:

PowerPoint slides.

Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.

 

[KerbolRacer21]

11 hours ago, Lisias said:

At least you don't have to program the damned slides. Sometimes, dude, I have this urge to quit this software business and try to make a living selling sandwiches on the beach or something.

If you do sell sandwiches make sure that you have PB&J! (Just some business tips)

Edited March 10 by KerbolRacer21
kept merging

[Lisias]

I just nuked a working KSP 1.12.5 by accident while wiping out a damaged beyound salvage KSP 1.9.1 test bed. (sigh)

Not exactly an auspicious way to start your day. 

[KerbolRacer21]

I was editing the ksp game files and i broke my version so i have to redownload now.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

This is time-critical, but Flight QR899, with both of my parents, has diverted to CMB (Columbo, Sri Lanka). I can't find any news reports to confirm why they diverted, so does anyone know of any websites where I can find lists of either Pan Pan, Mayday or other emergency calls?

[AstroWolfie]

@Superluminal Gremlin, news will probably be released after landing. Hopefully your parents are OK. I knew someone who's friend was on the Alaska flight where the door plug blew out.

[SunlitZelkova]

I just watched the MH370 documentary series on Netflix and boy is it a steaming hot load of garbage.

1. These people seem to not know a lot and be in total denial. Aircraft vanishing without a trace has happened before, and yet we moved on. Finding things in the ocean is hard, yes, iN tHis DaY aNd agE things do go missing and can’t be found. There are still massive WWII ship wrecks we can’t locate. How are we supposed to figure out where a plane that’s been blown into pieces is?

2. It legitimizes conspiracy theories. There’s a funny moment in the first episode where a journalist called Jeff Wise talks about “going through heaps of trash” on the internet; baseless theories about what happened. But his arguments and the theory of a French journalist called Florence basically rely on the same logic, rhetoric, assumptions, and tactics as any other more fantastic conspiracy theory involving aliens or the Bermuda Triangle. Yet, the producers chose to present their theories as the mainstream ones.

3. It is too heavily dramatized and focusing on shock and mystery instead of facts. The wreckage found in Madagascar, the route on the computer simulator, and the military radar data are rejected for ridiculous reasons (“One guy couldn’t possibly find that much,” “The pilot seemed like a good man/there was this random peculiarity in the flight simulator data,” “there are no radar images,” “they didn’t scramble.” Aircraft control and air intercept radars don’t produce recorded images. It isn’t satellite SAR. Of course one guy will find all the debris if no one else is looking on the beaches. Of course the pilot would use the cursor to drag the plane to the southern Indian Ocean, who would fly in a straight line for hours on their flight sim just to crash? Did the journalist even know if fighter jets were based at the airport it flew over? It could have been full of transports?

The documentary’s one saving grace is Blaine (the guy who found wreckage on the beach), Mike (an aviation expert who worked on the fact supported Indian Ocean theory), and the former commander of the search effort from Australia. As the former commander says, “opinions are like [redacted], everyone’s got one.” At the very least after leading people along with these garbage theories backed up by pure rhetoric and connect the dots instead of evidence, it tries to debunk them in the end.

Unfortunately, I’m highly skeptical the average viewer will see it that way. By allowing the conspiracy theorists to paint themselves as “journalists” and “experts,” they legitimize the theories in the eyes of the average viewer and cause them to stick compared to the 3 minute rebuttal at the end.

I swear, I’m afraid for the world and society if this is what passes as good journalism or education nowadays. It’s very disappointing compared to how well done the Challenger disaster documentary series was done.

I believe the families interviewed are simply in denial. MH370 is not “the future of aviation safety” as they claimed recently on the 10th anniversary. It’s an echo of the past, and can just be thrown in the disappearance bin alongside Star Tiger and Star Ariel.

In this world things go bump in the night and sometimes can’t be found anymore. They need to accept that instead of becoming conspiracy theorists rivaling David Icke in their tenacity. It’s not healthy and is a bad precedent for how we as a society respond to future disasters and incidents.