monk

Oh, I have the same gripes and more, so in my roleplaying campaign that has later turned into a book:

1. Characters have to conspire, mostly outside of their ship, just to have a chance at a secret away from the surveillance. Two characters that are no strangers to oppressive surveillance manage to maintain exactly one secret, but its hours are inherently numbered and it takes a lot to happen to make it last, what, an entire day?
2. Alien language is one of the central problems, despite it being phenomenally trivial (and following a decidedly indoeuropean sentence structure only because the readers also need to comprehend it). All characters not preselected for fluency in it outright don’t speak it, there are just three of them on-screen, implied to be the best of the best. They then proceed to mess it up big time while messing it up, recursively, multi-track drifting style. Phonetics is mutually unpronounceable, but intelligible both ways, yet over the course of the entire story both sides attain only barely passable and generally unreliable listening proficiency. They mostly get by in alien writing. And alien writing isn’t even exactly linear, because
3. Anatomically, aliens are lizard-like. Unless your world building justifies aliens being related to humans, humanoid aliens are utter cringe.
4. Allergies are, uh, let’s just say one results in a pivotal plot point. Standard nutrient packs are a thing; people are shown to get creative with them on day two, yet not a single soul ever attempts munching any alien flora or fauna, lol. Not being utter morons about what they eat doesn’t automatically mean they’re safe either.
5. Translation is available, and the problem is not even studying the alien language, it’s that it doesn’t really help bridge the cultural mismatch; if anything, “knowing” the language is a bit of a disservice here because the inherent crudeness of the translation only compounds the misunderstandings pileup. Blue/orange morality doesn’t help it either: the question of how does one translate what was originally mistaken for alienese for “good” is, uh, an annoyingly recurring one.
6. No technology available in abundance is used in an even remotely reasonable manner. The very idea of being rational about using Tech X makes no sense if Tech X ain’t rationed. Abundant resources are gonna be used willy-nilly, period.
7. Competence is scarce, doubly so when anything goes off-script.
8. People are absurd. Groups of people are next-level absurd. Don’t even get me started on societies. Fiction involving all three that isn’t woven almost entirely from blunders upon blunders is, likely, bland competence porn. Now add a second species to the mix and there’s no ceiling to the absurdity now. At this point, getting a point across the interspecies barrier, let alone cooperating on a thing, becomes unrealistic by default. Successful willful interspecies cooperation is, at the very least, a hard-earned success worth celebrating in-universe. And that’s if the species are interested in said cooperation.

(non-sci-fi)

9. A story doesn’t feature a villain that’s a perfect mirror image of the hero, largely because 9a. it doesn’t feature any villain. Villains are lame, and so is plot-mandated antagonism. While it’s just lazy writing in general, it’s particularly unrealistic because
10. People just don’t care that much in general. Yes, I know people have interests and strong opinions on select few subjects, and sometimes these opinions even happen to clash. What are the chances though?
11. Things generally just don’t happen as much as they do in most of the fiction. Real life doesn’t have the ambient soundtrack that immediately conveys or foreshadows the importance of the unfolding events. Thus in real life, the perceived importance of events is almost always off. Fiction rhould have it the same: things happen, some might even feel important in the moment, but rarely the ones that mattered.

There’s probably more, but such gripes don’t usually spring to mind unprompted. Now, when you see them, then they do grind your gears…

well, it locks you out of SSH key logins, so on a well configured host it can sometimes increase security

Because even IRC is better than matrix

Been there, it ended fine. Cheer up.

Get rid of the dGPU power comsumption at all costs, as it’s underpowered for anything serious.

Enable Intel AMT so that you get hardware level remote control, including power control.

Afet that it’s a now-weak power-hungry CPU with weak cooling, but a decent amount of RAM, so, IDK, a buildserver or a VM host for scenarios when something needs to happen in the background, but latency doesn’t matter.

Those Zebras that are, like, 1/8 of the volume of what the median pen in this thread is gonna be. I’m not here to pinch hoses 5x their cartridge diameter, half of their length hanging out for nothing, I’m just trying to write. Any non-zero thickness works for that.

Yeah, except there’s no video link.

I had to write https://github.com/t184256/podcastify / https://github.com/t184256/yousable to actually get videos. Now, when I’ve done that, Bob’s my uncle. Actually usable YouTube with automatic predownloading, local playback and no ads.

1. What’s the significance of the particular canary, what’s omitted?

2. Why would one need a special USB device for that if literally any USB device would work with, like, half a dozen lines of configuration?

Good that OLED displays are no longer a luxury.

The Country Formerly Known As Russia

Mine are supported by Gadgetbridge and have no WiFi. Sounds secure enough to me.

It’s been 6 more months, so, here’s your answer.

alternative to youtube-dl

uses a configurable Invidious instance

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thinking-quickly-dave-constructs-a-homemade-megaphone

You can’t kill 12+% when you’re in a demographics hole.

I’m coming from an oppressive dictatorship that kills people for disagreeing with them. One thing to enables them to is voter anonymity. An oppressive MAGA husband example is cute, ofc, but I wasn’t solving “how do we make people vote with there heart is”, this is kinda out of scope and definitely not crucial for a functional democracy, but wishlist-grade at best.

Now, voter bribery is a good one. Never thought of that and can see how this could be a much more sizeable problem.

Shareholders, who else?

Uh, no. We already have dozens of publicly characterestics to discrinate people against, we can handle one more for a huge benefit of never ever doubting election count results again.

Electronic voting works wonders. All you need to sacrifice is anonymity.

What have you tried?

We are a stupid neural network trained to detect fertile partners of a specific sex. Ever wondered why so many girls try to oversaturate, say, their naturally ever so slightly brighter lip color? Everything mass beauty industry does is taking male/female characteristics and dialing them up to eleven.

All to make our mating radar detect the gender from as many yards away as possible.

Being animals sucks. =/