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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • i noticed both of the ethernet lights were on and blinking

    So usually one of the lights on the port indicates the link state (up/down and if its at full speed or a reduced speed) and the other light indicates data flow. Both lights blinking suggests either a really shoddy link state or an unusual implementation of status lights on the port. Do both lights blink while its booted and actively transferring a large file? Can you find documentation of how your device implements the indicator LEDs? (I can’t tell if that’s a dongle or a port on your computer)


  • If the power cord is plugged in but the computer is shutdown, and the light is still on, then that means the network adapter supports WoL or OOB management and must stay on for that reason

    Also worth noting that Windows is especially bad about actually shutting down when you tell it to shut down because something something fastboot. I’ve seen similar inconsistently on Linux but I strongly suspect that to be more edgecases with specific hardware and my install.




  • The biggest challenge with believing in extra terrestrial beings visiting earth is just the sheer size of space. The closest solar system to Earth is Alpha Centauri which is over 4 light years away. By our current understanding of physics it is impossible to travel faster than light, so any visitors from Alpha Centauri would have had to travel for centuries if not millennia to get here (going really fast requires a ton of energy amongst other engineering challenges) simply put interstellar travel is so prohibitively slow and expensive that it will likely be reserved purely for colonization/exploration or only for the most dire of needs.

    But on top of the sheer challenge of interstellar travel is the challenge of timing. The earth is 4 billion years old and the universe is around 13 billion years old. How would a visitor traveling for centuries know that the time is right to visit? How would they know we won’t have experienced an extinction event by the time they get here? Would they even know we exist by the time they leave to visit? Or even more existentially, Humans have only been around for about 200k years or 0.0066% of the Earth’s lifetime so far. Imagine a duplicate of earth with the same history and occupants but forming just 0.1 billion years earlier. If the human equivalents are still around on that clone-earth their civilization would be literally older than the dinosaurs are here. Except there are planets both billions of years older and newer than earth, so how many of those have previously hosted intelligent life that’s since experienced an extinction event, and how many of those will one day have intelligent life form on them?

    Basically extra terrestrial life is inevitable in this universe, but the chances of humans ever meeting an intelligent life form from another planet is basically 0 due to the sheer scale of time and space separating us from anywhere and anywhen such intelligent life might exist






  • I was making after hours config changes on a pair of mostly-but-not-entirely redundant Cisco L3 switches which basically controlled the entire network at that location. While updating the running configs I mixed up which ssh session was which switch and accidentally gave both switches the same IP address, and before I noticed the error I copied the running config to the startup config.

    Due to other limitations and the fact that these changes were to fix DNS issues (and therefore I couldn’t rely on DNS to save me) I ended up keeping sshing in by IP until I got the right switch and trying to make the change before my session died due to dropped packets from the mucked up network situation I had created. That easily added a couple of hours of cleanup to the maintainence I was doing




  • The point of an emergency fund is it will get you through whatever unexpectable large expense without taking on debt. Car needed a repair and you had a health procedure plus your water heater went out all in the same year? 10k might not cover all of that but it will give you the options to manage those emergencies as they come up

    Edit to add: banks also may carry more cash on hand than you might think. I worked IT at a bank fairly recently and I could see in the teller software as I remoted in to assist them that they’d have around 3-500 on their individual tills, and when I’d stop by branches to help out with things, sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the stacks of cash kept in the on-site vault, or one time saw the teller pull out a $10k bundle of 100s to fulfill a customer request of a couple hundred bucks while I was assisting with something else. I don’t know exactly what goes into how a bank determines how much cash to keep at a given branch, but it’s certainly more than the couple thousand or so that people say branches only keep on hand




  • The unfortunate fact is it is a dog eat dog world, and corporations can and will fuck you over. Maintain a budget, maintain an emergency fund of $10k or 6 months living expenses (whichever is bigger) and be prepared to be screwed over so that when it does happen you don’t find yourself up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

    On top of this, as an additional safety net, build a friend group and build a culture within your friend group of helping each other. One friend getting a surgery? Offer to cook for them, or bring them some precooked meals. A friend stuck on the side of the road, offer to come help, even if it’s just as emotional support.

    I started this process a few months ago so I’m in a better position now that my work has announced that they’re relocating across the country and basically everyone is losing their jobs over the next 3-9 months. It would’ve been more convenient if this happened a year later, but it is what it is so now I have to shape my next steps and move forwards





  • The Sims 4 actually added a similar approach to character creation about 2 years ago, but very different kind of game with a very different market

    Off the top of my head it has options for male presenting body type, female presenting body type, sliders for fat and muscle (and you can generally reshape most of the body) and the available clothing and hairstyles got sorted into masculine and feminine with I believe more traditionally gender neutral stuff getting placed into both, then for biological purposes there’s “can pee standing up/cannot pee standing up” and “can impregnate/can be impregnated” It defaults to Male/Female defaults but makes it easy to customize, and a good mix of default townies (NPCs) are all over the spectrum.

    They also recently added more complex relationship and romance preferences, so sims can be sexually bi but romantically straight for example, but also expanded to allow various levels of openness to relationships as well as poly relationships