That’s funny, out here my bias is against white pickup trucks, with point modifiers.

• Lift kit? Add a point.
• Giant truck bed toolbox? Point.
• Truck nuts? Like 5 points.
• Fascist or anti-social bumper stickers like punisher logos or skeletal middle fingers? More points.

It’s so pathetically predictable…

…I dunno, I actually think it’s kinda sweet. Something bonus might’ve been nice though haha.

This. Open source passion is the future if we’re gonna have any positive impact. Dedication to a single field has its advantages but the “system” is unfairly built with that being the only valid path.

EDIT: *Sorry I ended up writing a manifesto here but hey it’s an ADHD community I hope I’m among fellows LMAO. *

Our agile obsessions are a significant strength, especially with how we can combine so many disparate interests!

I look for example, at the maker communities around 3D printers with things like the RepRap project. Thanks to all those hackers and engineers, I learned how to turn my first printer, a literal fire-hazard China kit, into a decent fabrication device.

People are rescuing computers destined for landfills and deemed “obsolete” and “end of life”, and sticking Linux on them to be enjoyed for years to come, fighting for right-to-repair, hacking vendor-locked farm equipment, just because they can, and they’re trying to do something.

Also look at the “Corsi-Rosenthal Box” ! It’s just a simple elegant design, open sourced, that unlocks non-proprietary and effective air filtration! (“$800 air purifiers with wonky proprietary filters hate this one simple box!” Lol)

There’s also the Meshtastic project, using low powered devices to create an off-grid “internet” in rural locales.

And what about the very famous “project” that released a ton of paywalled academic literature to anybody with a curious mind? (What HEROES!)

I think OP’s plastics recycling research must go the same way, and I’m personally obsessed with it too, despite lacking a degree! I hate watching the world drown in the stuff, and profiteer-science isn’t gonna save us from the oceans and mountains of garbage they created. In fact, they’re likely too busy researching how to increase production. And the marketing departments are figuring out how to green-wash it.

Saving the world from plastic is going to involve a bunch of hobbyists deploying their home-built plastic-munching drones and breeding plastic-dissolving algae in their own greenhouses.

It’s happening already! I see a future of Game developers and database admins, former-gifted-kid baristas (I see you and love you <3), schoolteachers, Youtubers, Linux nerds, artists, political scientists…

…all becoming amateur engineers and arguing pedantically on Lemmy/Reddit/whatever about the optimal setups to breed plastic-dissolving mushroom enclosures or which motors work best for an open-source machine-learning plastics recognizer algorithm released on GitLab that grinds and funnels all the stuff into separate bins, or showing off how they safely filter VoC’s in their garage while they’re melting grocery bags into filament or something.

Capitalists will rush to take the credit when we succeed, obviously, but that’s another conversation.

The point is, especially in hard sciences, we’re all raised to think we need permission from mighty level 100 gatekeepers and assigners-of-credits and granters-of-certificates.

We DON’T need permission.

In fact, I’d say rigid academic science paradigms have largely failed us in many ways, at least in the U.S., where basic education is sabotaged in favor of breeding the ideal consumer-employee, and higher-ed is paywalled by zipcode.

Anecdotally, my spouse went to school for Earth Sciences to learn how to save the planet, but found out the most plentiful career opportunities were for helping oil, mining, and gas giants know where to plunder next. Saving the planet wasn’t paying out that with-a-degree money we were all promised.

Rogue scientists and hacker punk movements and ADHD hyperfixations are what we need more than anything right now. The most learned of them design the plans, and everyone else builds, deploys, and tinkers with it. It WORKS. Time and time again. Sometimes bumbling and messy, but it’s who actually drives the future. Not jackasses in turtlenecks strutting around on stage at CES!

Corpo R&D departments can’t DREAM of that kind of agility!

Get that degree if you’re getting it, I hope it opens many doors for you, truly. But in the end, it’s just a piece of paper.

In my experience, so many of “the professionals” are just busy trying to keep their jobs, which involves kowtowing to corporate masters and neo-gilded-age barons.

The future depends on amateurs. We have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and millions of eyes and ready hands in our bazaars and cathedrals.

Basically just one of those idle clicker games at this point…

Unfortunately I’m fairly sure that particular monster actually had some sense of charisma and strength-projection. I’m sure people still saw through it, but couldn’t say much because he was considered a “world leader” with the rest of em.

This, of course, was before the grand spectacle that was reality television, so now our megalomaniacal monsters simply have to generate interesting headlines and do bozo nonsense to attempt world takeover.

I’m legit surprised MrBeast or a Kardashian hasn’t attempted to buy rulership over a smaller country at this point. You know, just for the views.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-engine-google-ranks-cia-agents/281490/

I’d like to think they’re advising on how to keep ISIS propaganda, gore / executions, child endangerment, etc, from popping up on clearnet results…

…but * sigh * , former (not ex, let’s be honest lol) spooks…so, why wouldn’t it include some kind of pro-employer propaganda plan, right?

And they always preach they wanna “run this country like a business.”

It’s so bleak.

And it’ll watch, listen, and report on you the entire time!

I don’t see how people fall for these grocery-store smartphone appliances on wheels, but their predictable, dangerously entitled driving patterns tend to check out.

Whaaat that’s crazy interesting! Thanks for replying!

I know there’s been a lot of progress made with Monado on these units but the controllers are still no-go from my understanding. Is he using the controllers or just the HMD? :O

I might just have to spend a weekend figuring out how to build Monado hahaha.

After that huge “Salt Typhoon” hack against major telecoms, you’d think people would take “security nightmare” a little more seriously!

Truth is though, your average Valorant/League/Whatever player probably isn’t even aware of it running when they smash through ok -> ok -> agree -> yep -> accept -> accept -> ok -> play.

Any kernel-level anything connected to major corporate servers should be scary and taboo, but except for the alarm-raisers who know what they’re talking about, most people don’t even understand the implications.

I’m glad Steam is at least marking a big “This game requires kernel level anti cheat” on store pages now. It looks ugly, possibly scary, so maybe that’ll raise some awareness and make developers not want to go with it.

“Cant have those TenCent CCP botnets sniffing the same customers WE’RE sniffing! Get outta here!”

–M$, prolly lol

Out of sheer curiosity is he using a fancy Steam VR kit like an HTC Vive or something?

I’ve fully switched over to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed at this point but I’m so bummed out my Samsung Odyssey is relying on heroic support from Monaco dev(s?) to even have a hope of it running.

But Windows is killing WMR too and they don’t care, so OS really isn’t an issue here. I’m keeping my Win10 partition there getting dusty though, because it still has WMR on it. =\

Man that’s sad, because I was considering it just because it had a stronger “Network Effect” than Mastodon.

That FOMO is pretty real though. These multiplayer service games are a flash in the pan sometimes, where once their heyday is over, they become “Hey remember that old game?” and there might be some reverse-engineered private servers running from like, Lithuania, with 4 people online after that lol.

I feel this pretty hard with Helldivers 2. I had a BLAST with the first game! Loved it! And apparently this one is good too!

But Sony is determined to be Sony, and it’s got kernel-level requirements, so nope, I’m missing out. It does suck, because before all the drama I really looked forward to it. It genuinely looks fun. I see my friends playing it. Oh well.

Watching Arcane made me almost wanna fire up League of Legends again, but once they announced their anti-cheat, I quit forever. (Probably for the best, let’s be honest lol.)

So yeah with an OS, I think people feel like some killer app will come out and if they’re not running a system it was tailor-made for, they’ll miss out on it entirely.

For all my disc games or other just standalone .EXE stuff, Bottles has been nothing short of mind-blowing.

I’d say the Flatpak might be your best bet if you’re on a rolling distro.

My only other tip is to make sure you set your Bottles directory to wherever your storage partition is, as it’d probably fill up your /home by default pretty quick!

If I recall Intel’s GPUs are a little slimmer right? But I’ve heard middling results with compatibility and such.

The Steam controller 2 will be releasing soon

I think I’ve just been avoiding news in general for a while. This is GREAT to hear! I still love my OG Steam Controller. Great little piece of hardware.

I notice a lot of comments here saying “Hey go live your life now! Pick up that guitar or paintbrush or dancing shoes or whatever! Live for you!” And I agree. I often struggle with these existential thoughts.

But something they might leave out is that it’s HARD.

Following your own path can be unpredictable, and meandering, and you need to know who to trust and lean on them, and let them lean on you.

It can be a one-move-to-the-next kind of existing without that facade of “predictability” a society-prescribed life will get you. The good news is that stability is a myth anyway, so why not see it for what it really is?

I was treading water in a soul-destroying job for almost a decade when I finally saw the opportunity to strike out for myself, and I ran for it. My wife was promoted to a position that paid more and she didn’t hate it, so we discussed it and I quit, and took on more household duties and put my efforts towards finally becoming a 3D artist.

It’s been like a year+ and I still haven’t “made it” yet! It’s scary! But I’ve gotten some gigs! I’m still slow, and not as wildly creative as I’d like to be, but I do random labor on the side and try to keep my costs as low as possible. But she’s happier with how not-depressed I am, and I’ve made so much progress more than I ever would have otherwise.

Are we even able to start saving for retirement? Not even close! But I’m betting on myself and in the process I get a lot more time well-spent with the person I love.

No, not everyone is gonna have these opportunities or privileges, I know. But keep looking, talk to people, DO THE WORK instead of just talking about it. Help people! Let people help you! There will be some foothold for you somewhere.

And if you gotta pull some shifts at a coffee shop to keep the lights on there’s no shame in that! And you’re gonna have people who think you’re crazy and try to pull you back into the pot with the other cranky crabs because you’re there reminding them that they could’ve done something with their lives too.

My point is, taking charge of your life instead of asking permission from various gatekeepers is HARD. You might follow your dreams and find out you suck at it. The dream might even change at some point.

But it’s worth doing. Because what’s the alternative?

Lord knows if the worst were to happen, your boss will be filling your job before your body is cold. So where is your effort, energy, discipline, talents, love, best spent?

As Bruce Lee once said: “Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.”

I’d add, “one worth living.”

I made a vow to myself long ago, because this world’s warped ideals tend to creep up on you when you’re not looking.

I often recite that vow any time someone dear to me apologizes for something like “taking up [my] time.”

I tell them that I vowed to myself that I woud never, ever, regret time spent in good company. Even if it might have been a little inconvenient for whatever reason. We were put here to love thy neighbor, not to hustle and hoard.

Simple as that. It’s kept me from losing the picture so far.

Makes perfect sense. It’s like having $999,999,999.99 in a management game.

It doesn’t go above that, but if you buy a ton of assets and set them down, it’ll probably climb right back up there to the limit again at some point.

You still have a billion bucks to do whatever with.

Although yeah, businesses routinely buy things for billions (like acquiring Minecraft? Hah) So they’d find some clever way of putting it all in some kind of “company trust” or something, so they don’t have it as an individual.

But I’m no lawyer. I still think having it on the books would be better than not, if it went to healthcare and education instead of funneling into the defense industry, that is…

By 2028 this may be possible idk.