TL;DR: The iconic desert landscapes from the movie belong to Western Sahara which is under Moroccan occupation. The indigenous population, Sahrawis, are marginalised by the Moroccan regime, who arrest natives for filming their own land while giving complete permission and assistance to Western film producers to shoot their scenes.

I highly recommend reading the article as it's written by one of the locals themselves.

Why YSK: Seeing how The Odyssey has amassed popularity globally, it is important to know how the illegal occupation of the Western Sahara and the suffering of the inhabitants was swept under the rug in order to produce this film, especially since no other major media outlet wishes to cover this topic.

Or any lesson for that matter

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/49370415

I have virtually zero knowledge of The Odyssey as a Greek mythology, save for a few recognisable names like the Helen of Troy, the Trojan War etc. I do want to enjoy the movie to its fullest, and if learning about the plot material is essential to it, then so be it. Is there a good resource giving a summarized version of the plot enough to understand the film? If so, I would really appreciate it if you shared it here.

I have virtually zero knowledge of The Odyssey as a Greek mythology, save for a few recognisable names like the Helen of Troy, the Trojan War etc. I do want to enjoy the movie to its fullest, and if learning about the plot material is essential to it, then so be it. Is there a good resource giving a summarized version of the plot enough to understand the film? If so, I would really appreciate it if you shared it here.

Can robot or a device be made that, given the requisite resources, could construct and assemble a functional copy of itself?

To entertain this hypothesis further, let's add a set of explicit constraints or expectations:

1. The copy must structurally match the original device as is realistically possible
2. The device must be able to manufacture at least one copy of itself
3. The overall replication process should sustain itself for an indefinite amount of iterations
4. The device must not repurpose its own parts as parts for its copy
5. The device must not peform any task other than replicating itself and preserving itself to be able to replicate
6. The device may sustain damages of repairable or non-repairable nature as long as it obeys constraints 1 and 2
7. The device may take as much time and resources as it needs to construct its copy as long as both remain finite
8. The device may make use of essential external resources like electricity and cooling to sustain itself as long as its able to accommodate its copy to do the same

Can reproduction be emulated mechanically while obeying all the constraints above or is there a fundamental limitation stopping us from realising this concept? If so, what is it?

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/48275851

Early game spoilers ahead so please proceed on your own terms!

I recently finished Undertale by playing through the neutral route and later the pacifist route. The entire experience was awe-inducing to say the least and I finally understood why the game became so popular.

The moment that made me shed my tears was during the fight with Toriel. As I had taken up the pacifist route back then, I kept sparing her for all my turns and attempted to dodge her attacks. Eventually I was overwhelmed by her fireballs and brought down to 2 HP before I could get to skip the battle portion of the encounter.

When I proceeded to spare her as before and witnessed her taking her eyes off me and disarming her menacing expression, I started to experience a weird emotion. I braced my heart, barely hanging on to life, for another brutal round of attacks, only to watch all the fire projectiles begin to evade me, which only amplified this unknown emotion further.

That's when I realised what I was experiencing: sympathy for the protagonist and Toriel's unbounded and unspoken compassion towards each other. By "sparing" her for yet another round, the protagonist was declaring that they didn't wish to fight her, despite being brought to the verge of death by her attacks and knowing that they may not survive the next one. Meanwhile Toriel, possessing the ability to decimate the human along with sufficient motive to do so, ultimately couldn't find it in her heart to end their life as she went on to quietly express sorrow and guilt in her face afterwards while continuing to "fight". This scene of self-sacrifice and remorse was complimented by Toriel's fight theme song, resembling the tone of the tragedy of fighting a battle neither one of whom wanted to fight, ending up in a stalemate.

I don't know if there was something inherently unique about this moment, for some reason I immediately started shedding tears uncontrollably. It was as if this level of compassion and sympathy was untold of that overflowed my brain, ultimately making me feel sadness and happiness simultaneously. I ended up like this whenever I saw the screenshot of the fight or watched the recording of someone else's afterwards and eventually this moment became special to me. Even as I was writing this post, I happened to cry 3-4 times.

I don't know if someone else has had this experience before, either in this game or some other media, but if anyone does, I would really love to hear about it. Either way I feel like dumping this up here as an appreciation for the game dev for the wonderous journey the game made me go through.

Early game spoilers ahead so please proceed on your own terms!

I recently finished Undertale by playing through the neutral route and later the pacifist route. The entire experience was awe-inducing to say the least and I finally understood why the game became so popular.

The moment that made me shed my tears was during the fight with Toriel. As I had taken up the pacifist route back then, I kept sparing her for all my turns and attempted to dodge her attacks. Eventually I was overwhelmed by her fireballs and brought down to 2 HP before I could get to skip the battle portion of the encounter.

When I proceeded to spare her as before and witnessed her taking her eyes off me and disarming her menacing expression, I started to experience a weird emotion. I braced my heart, barely hanging on to life, for another brutal round of attacks, only to watch all the fire projectiles begin to evade me, which only amplified this unknown emotion further.

That's when I realised what I was experiencing: sympathy for the protagonist and Toriel's unbounded and unspoken compassion towards each other. By "sparing" her for yet another round, the protagonist was declaring that they didn't wish to fight her, despite being brought to the verge of death by her attacks and knowing that they may not survive the next one. Meanwhile Toriel, possessing the ability to decimate the human along with sufficient motive to do so, ultimately couldn't find it in her heart as a mother to end their life as she went on to quietly express sorrow and guilt in her face afterwards while continuing to "fight". This scene of self-sacrifice and remorse was complimented by Toriel's fight theme song, resembling the tone of the tragedy of fighting a battle neither one of whom wanted to fight, ending up in a stalemate.

I don't know if there was something inherently unique about this moment, for some reason I immediately started shedding tears uncontrollably. It was as if this level of compassion and sympathy was untold of that overflowed my brain, ultimately making me feel sadness and happiness simultaneously. I ended up like this whenever I saw the screenshot of the fight or watched the recording of someone else's afterwards and eventually this moment became special to me. Even as I was writing this post, I happened to cry 3-4 times.

I don't know if someone else has had this experience before, either in this game or some other media, but if anyone does, I would really love to hear about it. Either way I feel like dumping this up here as an appreciation for the game dev for the wonderous journey the game made me go through.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/47762187

When I first installed CachyOS, my mind was blown away by how quickly and conveniently I could start playing my Windows games with it. With its proton-cachyos-slr wine executable, it was only a matter of setting the game executable and runtime locations in Lutris and I could start playing the game immediately.

However, ever since I updated my system with sudo pacman -Syu in the beginning of May, almost every game stopped opening like it used to. Of those games, almost half of them would simply not open at all with any tweaking. The rest of the games eventually started to run but some of them were hit by performance degradation severe enough to not be playable.

I tried to search for the cause on the CachyOS forums and wiki. I managed to find some posts somewhat discussing this issue, citing issues with the new kernel or the proton-cachyos-slr package. Unfortunately following their proposed solutions like downgrading proton-cachyos-slr or tweaking runtime settings in Lutris didn't fix the problem.

Eventually I moved on to the CachyOS documentation, mentioning an option of using an alternative wine executable wine-cachyos. It wasn't available as a regular executable option and had to be called manually, but eventually it allowed me to play most of my games like before.

I don't feel comfortable with this setup since the entire implementation feels like a hack instead of being an in-built feature, requires additional configuration process for every new game added and still doesn't allow me to run some of my games that I have spent most of my playing hours on. I have been experiencing this for almost 2 months and I have been contemplating my decision to update my system.

Is there a way to go back to how my system was before without resorting to snapshots or a fresh installation? I don't expect solutions as you would do in support forums; I am just in need of advice on where to start looking to solve my concern. If you need debug info or context, I'll happily provide them.

When I first installed CachyOS, my mind was blown away by how quickly and conveniently I could start playing my Windows games with it. With its proton-cachyos-slr wine executable, it was only a matter of setting the game executable and runtime locations in Lutris and I could start playing the game immediately.

However, ever since I updated my system with sudo pacman -Syu in the beginning of May, almost every game stopped opening like it used to. Of those games, almost half of them would simply not open at all with any tweaking. The rest of the games eventually started to run but some of them were hit by performance degradation severe enough to not be playable.

I tried to search for the cause on the CachyOS forums and wiki. I managed to find some posts somewhat discussing this issue, citing issues with the new kernel or the proton-cachyos-slr package. Unfortunately following their proposed solutions like downgrading proton-cachyos-slr or tweaking runtime settings in Lutris didn't fix the problem.

Eventually I moved on to the CachyOS documentation, mentioning an option of using an alternative wine executable wine-cachyos. It wasn't available as a regular executable option and had to be called manually, but eventually it allowed me to play most of my games like before.

I don't feel comfortable with this setup since the entire implementation feels like a hack instead of being an in-built feature, requires additional configuration process for every new game added and still doesn't allow me to run some of my games that I have spent most of my playing hours on. I have been experiencing this for almost 2 months and I have been contemplating my decision to update my system.

Is there a way to go back to how my system was before without resorting to snapshots or a fresh installation? I don't expect solutions as you would do in support forums; I am just in need of advice on where to start looking to solve my concern. If you need debug info or context, I'll happily provide them.

Some stories, either in form of a book or a movie, seem so immersive that I feel as if I've transported directly into its universe. Other stories have some flaw that ruins the entire immersion and makes the story seem like a fictional piece of content. However I'm not able to pinpoint what the reason behind making a story immersive is. What do you think?

Edit: changed title

This was the first movie made by Quentin Tarantino that I watched. I didn't know anything about the movie, apart from a handful of references I observed from memes.

The story was undoubtedly different from other movies yet in a way still entertaining. However I am unbeknownst to what the actual plot of this movie was supposed to be nor what was special about it to be considered so popular. Does the fact that it deviates from traditional storytelling in itself act as a selling point?

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/40885318

I'm going to switch from Windows 11 to Linux soon but first I wish to backup every every data and config files I can in my current Windows installation, even those that wouldn't natively work in Linux. I know the \Users folder is important to back up, but I don't know what other directories I am missing.

I'm going to switch from Windows 11 to Linux soon but first I wish to backup every every data and config files I can in my current Windows installation, even those that wouldn't natively work in Linux. I know the \Users folder is important to back up, but I don't know what other directories I am missing.

I've only heard bits and pieces of this from friends and strangers through some specific events so far and desire to know more about it, at least that which is publicly witnessed or documented. I just mean to learn this for educational and entertainment purposes because I am genuinely intrigued with the logistics behind making these operations possible like the other topics that have been covered by Wendover Productions.

There seems to be a serious lack of a Discord equivalent fediverse platform unlike other social media alternatives. Most of the closest options are either too overwhelming in UI/UX for majority of people coming from Discord, missing deal-breaking features like video calling or are not federated.

Could it due to some technical limitation of the ActivityPub protocol? I skimmed through its documentation and I get the impression that content may not be accommodating of instant messaging without unconventional modifications. It would also be troublesome to federate massive bunch of messages across (physical) servers in real time.

If it were truly possible to create a Discord alternative, what would it take to make it compatible with the fediverse while also ensuring it feels functional and intuitive for migrating users and not pose too much of a resource drain for self hosters?

Edit: Modified title to clarify post talking about ActivityPub in particular

In elaborate terms: you have the ability to change any one of the protocols, specifications, designs or standards of the above at their proposal stage or before their mass adoption. You may choose to modify or reject an existing one or create one by yourself.

Some users and I would have common ideas in mind, however I would love to see some esoteric ideas as well.

I have Pangolin set up as a reverse proxy in my VPS and Cloudflare as a DNS provider with its free tier.

I want to migrate out of Cloudflare for my setup, however I lack the requisite network knowledge to safely transition my VPS and domain to better alternatives and don't know where to start its research from.

There are two features I intend my setup to have after the transition:

• DDoS protection: I was considering using Crowdsec as there is a guide to incorporate it into Pangolin, but I do not know if it will be sufficient or not. I saw a post earlier listing some alternative DDoS protection solutions, but I am wary of their limited free tier options compared to that of Cloudflare and I don't wish to pay for them as my homelab is mostly going to be used by me and a handful of friends.

• Wildcard Certificate Generation: My domain provider has a poor DNS service and is not listed under LEGO's supporter DNS providers for enabling wildcard certificate generation and the Cloudflare one does not seem to work for some reason. I don't know of any other compatible DNS provider I could shift to unless it is provided within the other DDoS protection services as mentioned above.

Again, I don't have much knowledge in this field but I'm willing to learn and make an informed decision. Please let me know any suitable alternatives for the above, the pros and cons for the migrations, or some guide on performing such transition from Cloudflare as you seem fit.

For user-readable files or media I store them under ~/docker/data, and for everything else I store them under ~/docker/stacks/[service] where ~/docker/stacks is maintained by Dockge.

Is there a better way to do this?