InsurgentRat

Drugs are great, you take them too most like (caffeine, ethanol, theanine etc). It's the power that fucked that shit head up.

Loads of people take ketamine and just like appreciate jazz or some other banal shit.

Thanks, that’s a lot to think about. We currently use an oled computer monitor as a TV (hooked up to a pi) and it’s beautiful but there are limits on screen size and it’s crazy expensive (you’re paying for stupid fast refresh rates and the Gamer™ markup)

our house is very bright during the day, lots of glass in sunny Australia, so it’s probably not a great candidate for a projector generally but it does have me thinking about one in the bedroom for late night movies. Probably a lot cheaper and neater than another absurd monitor.

How dark do rooms need to be for them to work? Are there issues with shared spaces where someone might want a well lit workspace?

Yep you can! Just make sure you don’t work on it plugged in and be careful around any capacitors if you’ve run it recently. They can hold charge

Sure of course of course but umm have you seen software?

There are still windows xp computers on the internet.

It’s not insurmountable, and of course I have no idea if/how this will roll out.

Just it seems to mess with a rather deep assumption we have about how computers operate when we develop software and threat models.

Maybe, it depends how it works.

Memory is often unencrypted and/or contains encryption keys. Many programs rely on the assumption that it’s cleared on powerdown for security.

Depending on how this memory enters the long term state it seems that a lot of legacy software might become vulnerable to a really simple attack.

Pulling the plug might no longer be something that forces someone to engage in rubber hose analysis.

This sounds like a giant security risk?

Yeah it’s just the result of progress. I’ve watched people my age get stunlocked by carburettor issues or the concept of a choke. It’s unfortunate but sleekness often trades off with user serviceability.

Rather than being all “hgngh grrr the damn kids with their geegaws and whimgets don’t know how to use a simple butter churn” we have to teach people how to feel confident learning different ways of doing things and most importantly why they should care to do so.

Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.

Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.

But if you’re like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don’t know what a config file is, why would you? you don’t really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.

To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there’s a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.