Spyke

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linux

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Is there a USB drive flashing program in APT?

Other people have obviously pointed it out, but this is one of the many areas in Linux where the command line is so much easier than an interface that the people who write GUI tools just don't bother. The tool you need for a command line approach is called dd (I imagine it stands for direct data because that is what it does). Using dd you can take data from one place and put it into another. This means you can put zeros all over a drive, wiping it in full, using

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/targetdevice

That will fill the whole drive with zeroes, but you could also do it with random noise first, using the below

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/targetdevice

In the case of your ISO image there is someone who has included all the options including block size and so on, but the step you really need is to be sure you get the right device. Execuse the command below

ls /dev

Then insert your device, wait a few seconds, and run it again. You will have a list of all of the devices that were connected before and after plugging your drive in, so your drive will be the new one. It will probably show up as something like

/dev/sdc
/dev/sdc1

Notice that there are two. The first is the device, the second is the partition on the device. If you tried to put the content of an ISO image into an existing partition it would look like it had all worked but it would actually fail because the ISO is a full rip of a device, not a partition. Instead use the device itself, in this case sdc.

dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync

The last bit will make your system write things to the disk and make it safe to eject it. Once that is all done it should work as a bootable USB.

It seems super complex but once you have done it a few times it becomes so easy you will regret the time spent getting a GUI installed.

If you still want a GUI you could try Gnome Disks, but I never enjoyed using it.

adhd

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Fear of taking medication- thoughts?

Yes and no. I had a heart issue a couple of years ago and stopped taking my meds during that process because they can interfere with heart function in theory. That said, I think I am living up on part of your anxiety. Are you afraid that if you get used to them, get used to functioning with them on board, and then they get taken away you will be unable to function but be expected to based on recent performance?

I have had some of that anxiety and it is reasonable. People do tend to see your "new normal" and "normal" after a fairly short time. Their expectations change and their tolerance for you struggling goes down in some ways because they start relying in your performance at that higher level.

It is really unfair but that is something that happens. I have however found some ways around this anxiety. I have built better systems while using my meds that work better for off my meds too. I have automated some things, make others easier to do, and honestly stopped doing a bunch of things I used to do at all. By doing this I have reduced the demand on me on the other days.

If you can use your meds to make life easier for when you are off the meds I think you will feel the anxiety lessen.

Also, depending on where you are and local laws, stockpiling a very small amount, maybe one month ahead or something, can be very helpful. I try to buy my next dose as soon as I can and have ended up with about one month of buffer. Now if my meds are unavailable at the pharmacy I can just not stress and use my backup. Because I rotate through they never get stale and I am never holding more than two months of meds, so I am not in a weird situation of having years of meds to explain away. Be careful of your local laws and so on, it is legal here but may not be there, so don't get yourself in trouble.

Also, consider non medication supports. For me that is heavy work like weight lifting as well as eating far less sugar. Consider having a reasonable source of caffeine available and keeping your usage down so you don't built a tolerance to it. If you are out of meds caffeine can help for some people such as myself, nowhere near as good as meds but much better than nothing.

autism

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Do you get seen as being different?

Yes, but not immediately. I am seen as obviously odd, but friendly, like a very big dog. I frequently have people stop me in shops to get help getting something off a shelf or finding something in the store, though I don't mind at all, I enjoy helping people. I also get asked for directions all the time in public, a couple of times a week on average, and according to other people I know that is far more than they have. I guess I just have that "open face" people talk about, and I also make more eye contact than NTs because of masking, so I think people take that as an invitation.

Also, once people talk to me for a while, and I mean like 15-20 minutes, they tend to clock that something is up. I know a lot of things in many areas thanks to the ADHD interest in just about anything, so I can speak from a relatively informed position on many more topics than people expect. They think I am just like them because I know a comparable amount about their favourite topics as they do, so obviously it must be equally important to me as it is to them. Given a fairly short time they will watch me interact with someone else and see the same thing happen and have that moment of confusion because I am interested in too many things.

After a little while of knowing me people refer to me as a wikipedia on wheels or google with a face. If I don't know something I am always prompt to say so, but if you ask me again later that day I have likely gone and fixed that hole and have something useful to say about it, and sometimes people do exactly that. I feel like a very odd LLM in a body running on 40 watts and being surprisingly efficient.

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What's some amazing technology they have in Japan that's very normal to them but would blow our minds here in the US and western world?

They have a device which progressively shines a light on a piece of paper while moving across the page and converts the brightness of the reflected light into an audio signal. Once it reaches the edge the paper is incremented and the process repeats. Each of these segments of sound are sent via a standard telephone connection to a similar device on the other end which uses the sounds to reproduce the image on the original paper on a new sheet of paper. This can be used to send forms, letters, black and white pictures, and even chain letters. It also forms the basic underpinning of a significant fraction of formal communications with landlords, employers, medical systems, government offices, and so on.

news

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Richard Dawkins quits atheism foundation for backing transgender ‘religion’

Reply in thread

"It's basic biology, XX or XY, man or woman!"

"OK, but have you ever looked into intermediate or advanced biology?"

Dawkins is such a disappointing person. He has all the knowledge required to not only understand but also advocate for trans people but instead is defending the Anglican church, "light pedophelia", and gender essentialism. He wrote a couple of books with some good parts but honestly, he is a sad old man and should be forgotten. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.

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let 'er rip

Actual direct conspiracy is usually not necessary to achieve the outcomes of most nefarious things people worry about. Two rich people which both want to protect their own wealth can look at each other and their respective actions and then take next steps working to protect their wealth without ever talking to each other and get basically the same outcomes as if they had coordinated. Shared interests and a reasonable understanding of the likely outcomes of choices can be almost as good as direct conspiracy.

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Technology is kind of shit now

Come on over to the open source free software world. Things are exciting and shiny and new while also working better every day. My most recent install of EndeavourOS took about 20 minutes with all drivers and boot stuff working correctly first try, as opposed to the multiple hour installs of 15 years ago. CalyxOS is awesome and has some really cool isolation between apps, not to mention ad blocking. And free hardware is becoming a real option with the newer RISCV stuff coming to market, allowing many more SOC designs to flourish.

I have been in to tech for about 25 years and it has never been cooler than right now with Valve bringing immutable Arch as a base for their OS and making proton work so well that I don't even check before trying things.

Also, man, some of the stuff coming out of the 3D printing works is just amazing. There is a guy who I follow who is working on solid state propulsion, another is working on 3D printed rocket engines, and another working on prosthetics. Cool things are still happening, just not on Windows or Mac.

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What is the technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else's life and shit your own values all over them.

I don't drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.

My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.

The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.

Comment on

XXX

UBI will cycle in the bottom of the economy.

When you give a rich person more money they buy assets and increase their wealth, it does not impact their spending activity and has no measurable impact on economic activity.

When you give a middle income person more money they buy something new or pay down debts. Buying something new stimulates economic activity, but paying down debts is really just another wealth transfer to the banks which are owned by rich people.

When you give money to low income people they spend it. They have unmet needs and always have something they can spend that money on. That money then generates economic activity.

Increasing economic activity is what all of the interest rate and inflation talk is about. If you get people spending money that generates activity which increases wages, increases income, and decreases wealth inequality.

A good example is during the GFC the Australian government gave low income people $750AUD, about $350USD. The prime minister asked people to spend this money rather than save it. People bought a bunch of things, in the people I knew it was mostly TVs and new clothes, things you can put off for ages but benefit from whenever you buy them. All of this purchasing stimulated the economy, leading to Australia being less impacted than almost any other G7 nation. We recovered very quickly and boomed from there.

If you want a more long term example look at any welfare. If you have extremely poor people they just die. They are underfed, have weak immune systems, and they face imminent death. They can't access housing so they end up on the street. They have tonnes of inteactions with police and end up in the criminal justice system. They end up having their lives ruined and being purely a drain economically. They suffer.

If you give them enough money to have housing and food they are not going to be as costly to manage. They won't require policing, they won't get sick as often, and they will suffer less. Will this increase the competition for the lowest cost housing? Yes, but the answer to that is to build more housing. Even with the impact to housing cost this will not result in 100% of that payment going to landlords. People don't pay their whole income for rent, they will buy food and other needs first, so if they are faced with too high a rent cost they will remain unhoused but at least tbey will eat.

news

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Plastic Discovered In More Than 50% of Plaques From Clogged Arteries

So to clarify for those who don't want to read the article and a few supporting pieces, this is talking about the presence of plastic micro particles in plaques removed from patients.

Removing the plaque can reduce the risk of stroke so it is done fairly frequently. When they took out the plaque they checked for polyethylene, common plastic for bottles, plastic containers, and similar uses, and for PVC, famous for pipes and incredibly sweaty pants.

In both cases microplastics were found in the plaque. Both of these plastics have been shown to cause inflammation in other experiments where the plastic is introduced into the body.

What they seem to be suggesting is that some amount of the inflammation around a plaque could be caused or enhanced by these microplastics.

This study shows that in some plaques, about half of those examined, these two plastics were present. Previous studies have shown plastics can cause or enhance inflammation.

This study does not show that plastics are the primary cause of heart disease. It also does not show how much of an impact microplastics have on the formation of plaques, how dangerous they are, or whether they grow.

Because of the lack of information on how impactful microplastics are and the difficulty of reducing exposure the best evidence currently suggests focussing on removing the big known risks for heart disease. Those are smoking, alcohol, excessive sugar, burned or oxidised fats and oils, and a lack of physical activity. It would be wise to focus on those factors which we know cause heart disease rather than worrying about this small to nonexistent factor.

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Biden uses feisty State of the Union to contrast with Trump, sell voters on a second term

Reply in thread

I'm not an American so I'm not invested in the same way, but if you don't want Biden because of his actions with respect to the Gaza genocide can I ask about your thought process regarding what happens if he does not get in? If he loses the only possible winner is Trump because he is the Republican nominie, so is a vote not for Biden basically a vote for Trump? Or do you see it some other way?

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Moderation conflict involving c/vegan

I'm reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said "Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it".

If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don't axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.

As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don't have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.

news

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SNAP recipients told to buy shelf-stable food or go to food banks as funding deadline looms

This system is fundamentally broken. In Australia there is no path by which people on Centrelink would not have their payments processed for more than a few days. I remember a bank issue which caused a bunch of people to not get their payments on time and it was a major issue, people were absolutely livid. That was only a couple of days late and was resolved promptly with hardship temporary support available for those who really needed it.

For the system to be able to fail like this means those who designed the system want it to fail this way. They could change the funding mechanism to make sure SNAP is immune to government shutdowns if they wanted to. They have chosen not to so that they can use hurting poor people as a political weapon. Removing this weapon should be the goal of any reasonable party and it should be urgent. There are many similar funding holes that can be closed with reasonable legislation and would take away the impact of political dysfunction from the poorest and most vulnerable of society. Choosing to do otherwise is choosing that harm.

android

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The network can see your imei and triangulate your location as long as your radio is on

Put simply the radio broadcasts a sort of hello message to the tower so the tower knows where to listen (this is about signal direction or beam shaping, but imagine the eye of Sauron swiveling to see Frodo). This includes the identifier of the handset, the IMEI number, so that the tower can keep track of who is who. The second step of getting connected to the network is done with the details inside the SIM card, specifically the IMSI number.

If your phone has no SIM card you can still make an emergency call. You can also have an eSIM which is a software version of the SIM card. In both cases you can bypass the SIM and get connected.

If you turn airplane mode on the radio is powered off in theory, but this is not absolutely guaranteed. It should be off, the system will report it is off, but there are fringe cases where it may still be very slightly active, usually from malware or similar things.

So no SIM means no IMSI, but the radio itself has the IMEI and that handset is hard coded to that identifier. If the radio powers on it will broadcast the IMEI to negotiate connection with or without the SIM and IMSI.

Comment on

Doc put me on a high dose steroid today for the first time. I am ready to fight god.

So from a medical perspective the relief of inflammation can be extremely liberating and can feel godlike indeed. Getting that by suppressing your normal immune function is a very short term and unsustainable option, but there are a few other options that can have similar if less intense experiences.

Reducing inflammation by removing something you are allergic to can have a similar relieving impact, though it can take weeks to even months for the immune cascade to settle and it may remain overactive for even longer if it is a long term exposure.

Removing a long term stressor like changing job, fixing your ergonomics, changing your shoes, or moving more can have a similar impact.

Changing your diet to remove highly inflammatory foods and replace them with less inflammatory foods can also work well, though finding out what is or is not inflammatory for you can be a bit of an experimental process, some people respond to different things with an inflammatory response for reasons I don't understand.

I found that getting rid of dairy, dropping carbs to very low, cleaning out mould, getting a much more physical job, and getting rid of chairs in general all helped me a lot with my long term inflammation issues. My nasal issues cleared, my back stopped hurting at all, my pants fit better rather than being tight on the thighs, my headaches went away, and generally life improved.