The Bard in Green

  • Technology Consultant.
  • Software Developer.
  • Musician.
  • Burner.
  • Game Master.
  • Non-theistic Pagan.
  • Cishet White Male Feminist.
  • Father.
  • Fountain Maker.
  • Aquarium Builder.
  • Hamster Daddy.
  • Resident of Colorado.
  • Anti-Capitalist.
  • Hackerspace Regular.
  • Traveler of the American West.
  • 62 Posts
  • 1.37K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • The Bard in GreenAtoLinux@lemmy.worldHelp me ditch windows?
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    2 days ago

    I have neither used Bazzite nor CachyOS. You’re sure you don’t want to try Linux Mint? It’s extremely stable Linux for your grandma. Seriously, my dad’s laptops run Mint, and have for the last 5-6 years. When he gets a new laptop, I go over and install Mint for him (and he doesn’t know what Linux even means, he keeps calling LibreOffice “linux”). He asks me for help with his Windows desktop all the time (which he needs for certain software), but linux “just works” (his words). My son’s gaming computer and our house TV (which is an oldish Dell All-In-One that both my son and my wife need to be able to use) also run Mint.

    For me, work computers that need to be stable run Mint, work computers that need to be secure run Qubes and servers run Debian.


  • Valkyrien Skies. Then you can bring your base with you.

    Not in a million years on that server though.

    In all seriousness, second the guy who said Minecolonies. It turns Minecraft into SimCity. I really enjoy combining it with the Lost Cities. I like reclaiming ruined cities and repopulating them.

    Years ago, I played on a server that had a bunch of mods that added more hostile mobs to the point that you had until the first night to build some kind of a basic shelter and then you just couldn’t leave until you had full diamond armor and weapons (even then it was iffy). There were like goblins and ogres and tigers and bears and stuff wandering around outside. The chat was just “<so and so> was killed by <weird hostile mob>” for days. It wasn’t very fun though.



  • The Bard in GreenAtoAI@lemmy.mlI don't care how well your "AI" works - fiona fokus
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    5 days ago

    I disagree. This is like blaming atomic power for the cold war or the internal combustion engine for climate change or democracy for Trump (or the printing press for the moral decay of 15th century Europe, or the telescope for the Copernican heresy). Underneath virtually all modern problems are human beings making (often profit driven) human decisions. People have blamed the tools for centuries. But we need to look at the humans hiding behind the curtains and hold them accountable if we want to actually solve problems and change things.

    People love to hate on generative AI, and there’s no doubt that generative AI is causing a host of absolute garbage outcomes in our modern world, but the problem is not that people use it to write code faster or make some pictures they wouldn’t be able to make without it. The problem, as usual, is big corporations making big corporation decisions while the human beings that benefit from those decisions are mostly invisible and unnoticed and even when they’re not are totally unaccountable.




  • I’ve always thought this was a really cool idea. There are a few examples in Sci-Fi, other than Star Wars (Bespin). The Bobiverse for instance hints at such a thing (Odin) without getting at all into the mechanics of it.

    The biggest problem is relative weights. Oxygen is going to sink into the planet while hydrogen and other light elements float to the top. Gas giants are mostly hydrogen.

    How could a gas giant be made of mostly heavier elements so that there’s a layer of oxygen near the top (with survivable pressure)?

    • Biological processes - this is the most interesting one to think about IMO. Some kind of very interesting ecology has been going on on the planet for billions of years. Perhaps some kind of silicon based biosphere deep inside the planet uses fusion to generate energy and has been fusing hydrogen and helium into heavy elements for so many billions of years it’s changed the atmospheric composition of the planet. Paleontology on such a planet would be extremely difficult, but also fascinating. This kind of idea has been explored in Sci Fi (for example kind of shallowly in Manta by Timothy Zahn).
    • Terraforming - machines of some kind maintain your air band… probably not very well.
    • It’s actually an ancient alien megastructure - Iain M. Banks had one of these (the Airsphere) in one of the Culture books.
    • It formed in some very weird way, like in the aftermath of a supernova, in which case, what is it orbiting and how is it in a Goldilocks zone? While the idea of habitable planets orbiting black holes as been explored (Interstellar) and even studied, the most likely possibility is that the super nova remnant (black hole, neutron star, pulsar) has a stellar companion that it captured and that in turn captured one or more of the planets that formed from the super nova remnant. An extremely rare situation. IMO, this is the second most interesting possibility. If I were you, I might combine the first one and this one.

    In all of these, storms are an interesting (very dangerous) problem. On Jupiter and Saturn, storms transfer material from deeper in the planet’s atmosphere into higher atmospheric levels (leading to color changes like the Great Red Spot). Storms will dredge up unbreathable material which the very least would require the cities to seal up and ride them out. And storms on gas giants can last for decades or centuries (Great Red Spot) so your cities need to be able to navigate away from them. But this circulation of material is likely critically important for any biosphere maintaining the oxygen atmosphere.







  • Artemis is a boondoggle corporate giveaway. Its main purpose is to funnel money into the pockets of big contractors as quickly and efficiently as possible.

    I worked on it for a year and a half, and saw so much mismanagement and self-sabotage, I can’t even say. I’ve made multiple posts about it in the past. NASA spent $10 million at least having my team fail to build something that we could have built for probably $2.5 million. Most of that money vanished into the pockets of a giant, evil corporation that mostly builds weapons. I can tell you the guys (and they were all men) that we worked with from that company were laughing all the way to the bank when they canceled our project. Now they’re launching without that component.

    I have lots of feelings.