I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume what you said was simply confusing, but not wrong.

So just to be clear if your raid array fails, and you’re using software raid, you can plug all of the disks into a new machine and use it there. But you can’t just take a single disk out of a raid 5 array, for example, and plug it in and use it as a normal USB hard drive that just had some of the files on it, or something. Even if you built the array using soft-raid.

I don’t want to sound like I’m just correcting you for the sake of it, but it’s actually important. Mastodon is the most popular right now, but Mastodon actually wasn’t around at the beginning! Before that was StatusNet, and before that was identi.ca and laconi.ca

So those services already existed, they were the ones built for federation, and so Mastodon was started as another compatible implementation of an existing network protocol. All of that is to say that Mastodon didn’t need to make the right choices at the beginning, and they have already benefitted from this kind of network dynamic! The system has already worked once!

Factorio in particular actually ships a native Linux version. Someone at Wube actually tries it AFAICT. So that should be something you could try day one, probably. Besides some weird situation, I’d expect every other game to be harder to run than Factorio.

It’s also worth mentioning that localsend has specific Linux support, so the app should run fine. I use it on my Linux laptop all the time!

I think it’s great! If we’re Mr and Mrs MyLastName we know they know me and assumed she was the same. If it’s Mr and Mrs HerLastName it means they know us through her, and assumed she must have gotten the name from me! It’s like putting the name of the company in the email you’re giving the email to, it tracks the source. At least that’s the game we play, because it mostly doesn’t matter to us.

On most modern distros (like Mint) you can do basically as much with Linux GUIs as you can do in Windows or Mac. So normal users don’t need the terminal. But if you want to do more, if you want the secret sauce, the terminal is there for you.

But fear not! Basically all of us have some level of autism or ADHD, and the best of us tend to be the most extreme. If anything the terminal was written by autistic nerds for themselves! If you’ll be okay being a bit of a n00b for a bit, I think you’ll find there’s a lot of depth here to obsess over / hyper fixate / hyper focus on.

There’s a reason people have been “fighting” for, like, 40 years over which terminal text editor is the superior one… The flames of war can run pretty deep, and there’s a lot of opinions.

I think the reason people are jumping to BDSM community terms is because BDSM people fucking love terms. They’ve got taxonomy for days, and they live to whip it out, so to speak.

Agreed!

I have never played a game with random strangers ever. But! My brother and sister both live hours away from me (and each other), and we keep in touch by playing online co-op games every week.

I have a group of friends that I have mostly kept in touch with by playing online games too.

So I agree with what I think you meant, but I’m very glad online multiplayer exists in some form.

Along with the others I’d also mention Outer Wilds and Viewfinder

You should look up IPFS! It’s trying to be kinda like that.

It’ll always be slower than a CDN, though, partly because CDNs pay big money to be that fast, but also anything p2p is always going to have some overhead while the swarm tries to find something. It’s just a more complicated problem that necessarily has more layers.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible for it to be “fast enough”

Knowing the folks at IA I’m sure they would love a backup. They would love a community. I’m sure they don’t want to be the only ones doing this. But dang, they’ve got like 99 Petabytes of data. I don’t know about you, but my NAS doesn’t have that laying around…

I’m not the person you’re replying to, and I don’t have any videos, but I do love dumping explanation on people! So here’s some terms:

File System: This is the way data is laid out in terms of actual bytes on the drive. It’s in charge of things like where to look to find the name of this file, or how to “last modified” date is stored, or how do I find out which files are in this folder. NTFS is a filesystem, whereas ext4 is probably the file system your linux machine is using. FAT is the older Windows one that’s still used on, like, SD Cards and stuff. That having been said File System is sometimes also used to refer to the particular data on a particular partition of a disk, like “the filesystem will allow” which really means the data on your NTFS partition. Filesystem is often abbreviated “fs”, and is in fact the “FS” of “NTFS”

Mounting: In unix systems, such as Linux, file systems are “mounted” to a place in the folder hierarchy. Everything in unix lives somewhere under the “root” folder /, so mounting is basically saying “Okay, you want to see the files in this filesystem. Where should I put them?”, and if you say /home/user/stuff then the file “one.txt” at the root of your filesystem will now be visible at /home/user/stuff/one.txt", and if you mounted it at /mnt/things it would be /mnt/things/one.txt. The term mount is used like “attach” to mean “where do you want me to hang this new directory hierarchy on your existing one”.

fstab: There are a few ways to mount things in modern linux. The classic is the mount command which looks something like mount /dev/sda1 /home/user/stuff which would take the device with the name /dev/sda1 and mounts it to the given path. Devices in linux usually live in /dev, and in this case are often given names like sda1 to represent the first hard drive (a), and the first partition of that drive (1). But, there are other ways! You can also click on the partition in your file browser and it will mount the disk for you, often auto-creating a mount path and cleaning it up when you’re done, so you don’t even have to think about it. Another way is fstab, which is a kind of config file that controls mounting devices. In here you can give default options for how you want drives to be mounted, and can even specify that you’d like some devices to be automatically mounted by the system on startup. This is actually an important part of how unix systems start, and how the root filesystem and other important ones get going. If you wanted your NTFS drive to always be available at a permanent location, you would edit this file to set that up. If this is something you wanted only periodically, then just clicking may be fine.

Permissions: Virtually all unix filesystems store the permissions of files and directories as a “user” and “group” that owns the files, and then a set of whether or not the owner can “read” “write” and “execute” the file, whether other members of the group can, and then whether everyone else can. If two people were on the same computer, these would allow a person to be able to see their own documents, but not see the documents by other users. Or maybe they can see them but can’t make changes. And it also prevents random users of a system from changing important system configuration, when those config files are owned by the administrative user (called root by convention). Some config files will be read-only to normal users, and some contain secrets and so are permissioned so normal users can’t even see them. But! NFTS doesn’t follow these same conventions, so when mounting an NTFS drive on unix the driver has to produce a set of permissions that are unix-compatible, but it doesn’t have anything to work off on the disk. So the person above was saying by default it assumes the safest option is to make all files owned by the user root, and so if the permissions are the only the owner can write the files, and the owner is root, this will mean it’s effectively “read-only” to you. The terms uid and gid stand for “user ID” and “group ID”, which are the numbers that represent a user in the data. User names are basically a convenience that allows us to give a name to a uid, but it’s more efficient to store one number everywhere on disk for owner rather than a name.

So putting it all together, what they’re suggesting is that you can use the /etc/fstab file, which has a very particular format, to specify default options when mounting your drive. These options include setting the uid option and gid option to your user’s uid and gid, so that when the filesystem is mounted, it will appear that all the files are owned by you, so you’ll have full permissions on them. They’ve assumed your uid and gid will be 1000 because that’s a common convention, but if you’re comfortable you can run the id command on the command line to output your actual uid and gid (you can ignore all the other groups your user is in for now)

They also mentioned that when mounting you can specify if you want to mount the filesystem as “read-only” or “read-write”, etc. If you mount the whole filesystem read-only, then the write permissions stored on the individual files are ignored, basically. So if you were mounting with a command, or through fstab, you should make sure the rw option is present to clarify that you’re looking for “read write” permissions on your mount.

That having been said, it’s possible none of that is relevant to you if you’re mounting the fs by just clicking in your file browser. One way to tell is if you right-click on some file you aren’t allowed to edit and look at the properties there should be a Permissions tab thing. And it will list the owner of the file and what access you have. If those permissions are already set to be owned by you, then this uid thing is already taken care of for you by the file browser. In that case it might be something more fundamental to the NTFS filesystem, like the locks other people are talking about.

So those are some words and their meanings! Probably more than you wanted to know, but that’s okay. I liked typing it

I think I may have contracted some kind of brain worm, because the other day I needed to do some photo manipulation and couldn’t get krita to do what I wanted, but I went into gimp and just knocked it out. I’ve hated gimp for years, but I guess I’ve used it enough that I’ve figured out how it works… and now I don’t hate it anymore…

I think I may need help.

Oh, but I always use it in single window mode ever since that came out. The multiple windows floating panel thing drove me nuts!

I already responded somewhere else, but I have more response that doesn’t make sense in that context.

First, about deepening conversation. I don’t know about this guy, so I’ll talk about myself. I have things I’m interested in, let’s call them “interests”, and I like to talk about them. And the only thing that stops me from talking about them constantly to everyone is the social understanding that they don’t want to hear about my interests.

So all it takes to have me talk about stuff is enough questions to demonstrate you really want to know.

“What do you like about blah blah blah?” will probably get a short answer because he’s used to people not really wanting to know more, so he’s giving the smallest answer that answers the question. But then, you ask a question about his answer. “Huh, how is that different than blah blah?”

Now maybe longer answer, you listen and ask based on that, and if you can manage it you could also circle back to a previous answer to connect some dots. That’s now a discussion! Now, of course, you do have to listen. Unsure if that’s a skill of yours or not.

As for the asking out, I think you should do it. But if you don’t trust yourself to deliver the speech live, you could write it down / print it out. Just make sure it contains escape hatches for him that assure him it’s okay if he doesn’t share your feelings, and that he can just tell you if that’s the case, and probably ends by saying he doesn’t need to necessarily give you an answer now and you’re just happy you could get it off your chest. I think going for something casual is better than something heartfelt and romantic, but I don’t know the two of you. The most important thing is that he knows, and the second most important thing is that you don’t want it to wreck things if feelings aren’t mutual.

And if you don’t want to awkwardly read it, you could just hand it to him and let him read it at his own pace. This lets you watch his face while reading, if he makes facial expressions and if you can read them.

I would recommend against an email or a text, though. It feels like, from the bits of your personality I’ve picked up here, the time between when you send it to whenever he responds is going to be absolute torture for you. Whereas he might just be busy and not have even seen it yet, you’ll already be inventing bad scenarios and deciding which new city you should move to since you obviously can’t stay here, etc, etc 😉

So probably best to deliver it in person, maybe at the end of a hangout, so you can be sure he received it and read it. And I know you may be scared, but don’t tell him to read it after you’re gone, because that’s now email territory where you can’t ever know if he’s read it yet! Just have him read it, assure him it’s okay if he doesn’t agree, and let him respond. And even if he doesn’t have an answer now, you know it’s done.

Good luck!

I’m a man, my wife made the first move, and I’m very glad she did! Taking the step from friend (or even just acquaintances) to more is risky for anyone. But, and maybe I’m biased here, I think it’s currently even more risky for guys. Word can get around, and you’re more likely to not just lose the one friendship, but to be labeled “creepy” generally if you’re wrong. Of course it’s possible for that to happen to a woman, but it’s way less likely for a woman to be perceived as a creep in general, and also men don’t talk amongst themselves the way women tend to.

Anyway, I knew my wife from a social space, and I didn’t want to be the guy who poisoned the environment and made it an uncomfortable location for women by pursuing any of them. So I was friendly and tried to be as non threatening as possible, which meant no asking out. So I was very relieved when she made a move!

Don’t know if your situation is anything like that, I’m just unsure of your source that says “active woman means short term”. I mean, think of all the dudes hitting on strangers in bars which either turns into a one night stand or a short fling. The averages have got to be better than that, right?

Yeah basically! There’s a reason most romantic comedies end with them starting to date. It’s because that’s the zany exciting bit. After that part, the next 40 years or whatever is a roommate who lives in your home with you, and you do taxes together, and you eat dinner together, and you go to your shared friend’s homes to hang out, and maybe you teach weird little gremlins how to be humans, and you talk after work about how your day went, and what you’re planning to do in the future.

And that stuff can be great! But looking like a model doesn’t make that stuff much better. Even people who live with models probably “get over it” pretty quick. You can’t be in awe 18 hours a day every day for 15 years. But, having a shared foundation of experiences and mutual respect does make those things easier. Liking each other’s friends does too.

You can learn to love someone, and you can learn to find an attractive person unattractive through interaction.

Can’t tell if trolling, quipping, or honestly asking…

I feel like some people who don’t want friends are often people with low self esteem who have decided their hypothetical future friends will abandon them, or not like them, or whatever, and so they convince themselves that they “don’t want that anyway” as a way of protecting themselves from future pain or embarrassment. In those cases, dating aside, the person should work on their self esteem.

If it’s not that, one could try casual hookup apps. These rely on a certain amount of work, and there’s no guarantee, especially if one lives in a less populated area, but it’s possible.

And the third option for someone who doesn’t want anything social and just wants sex, is sex work. This is exactly what it can be for! The only trouble is that in most places it’s illegal, which pushes it underground, making it both difficult to find and potentially dangerous… but this is the niche it’s meant to occupy.

But honestly… at least consider that it may be the first case, and see if you can search your feelings to figure out “why”.

One thing you could try, if you haven’t, is dating someone you connect with, and have a fun time with, even without “romantic spark”. Attraction can be important in a relationship, but in a long term relationship spark often doesn’t last anyway, and it’s other things that actually keep people together. Getting along well, working well together, handling stress in complementary ways, etc, are all more valuable long term.

So just as an experiment you could try dating someone for something “long”, but not actually that long in the grand scheme of things. Maybe 3 months, roughly one season. Even if you’re not physically attracted to them, try dating them anyway. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t actually lost anything. Just a bit of time. And you will have officially “had a girlfriend”, and gained some amount of relationship experience, even if it wasn’t the best.

And if it just so happens that you’re just not an “early term” guy, buf you’re actually a pretty good “mid-term” guy, then that’s great! Keep going! You haven’t got a lot to lose, in a sense, so you’re available for experimentation.

You’re not alone! This concept is called Liquid Democracy