I put all my passwords in a text document, then print it on a little strip of paper and shove it up my ass. Whenever I take a crap, I dig it out from the turds and try to memorise some of them again. Then I shove it back up there where noone else can find my data and I won't lose it.

Forgot to mention I delete the text document and set fire to the computer's hard drive. The passwords are only ever in my ass, with the rest of my personal shit.

I don't think young children are ever prejudiced. It's only when they see their parents getting aggro with "ethnics" that they start thinking about people that look different as enemies.

I think they were probably right. Lol

People still seem to play it for a long time, though, even when they want to quit.

You don't really have to be a computer expert to know about something similar to the second one. If you've ever read a bit about computers (even just on wikipedia or something), you can easily have a concept similar to what the second seems to be in your head when you think about computers.

The third one doesn't exactly try to give much impression at all on how computers work. It has some physics stuff which a lot of well educated people would have seen, not just computer scientists.

I do think kids should be taught quite a lot more about computers at a young age though, at least compared to what I was. At my high school, we did like one project in Scratch, which I just found annoying, partly because I hated using Scratch and was not taught anything in a proper coding language. I went to quite a shit high school though anyway really.

Kids who can do early maths classes should easily be able to be taught to type in a function that calculates something like a factorial. If you know some incredibly simple mechanics, it's also very easy to code something like a ball just falling off the screen. Most kids past a certain age have heard something like "computers process numbers".

No. (I'm not a mod and the image makes me very horny)

Me when my car gets hack and remote controlled to drive off a cliff:

"Ahhh" D: sploosh

I'm hard at work.

It looks to me like this is some kind of reference and I don't really get the joke, but everyone would obviously always want the more comfortable sofa.

The train company posting that is kind of just making fun of everyone who had to sit in the little seat at the side.

Is this real?

What if you pondered my orbs instead?

The piss strikes back

The Orbs are, including possibly cryptographic energy systems like Monero (XMR).

The Orb is the supposedly sacred geometry of the sphere. The inside has a special protection you can use to figure things out if you're a Wizard. It can simulate any reality you can imagine, just like a computer.

Are coders pondering their Orb?

Or the start of a new age of enlightment and the spread of ideas online with ease.

Doesn't seem like people think this works consistently on wayland, which was what made the post sound a lot more interesting. Hopefully every desktop will soon get full wayland support and be able to take screenshots without it not working. It seems like getting screenshots in wayland is difficult because of the security stuff.

Companies like Google don't understand how advanced AI algorithms work. They can sort of represent things like emotions by encoding relationships between high level concepts and trying to relate things together using logic.

This usually just means they'll echo the emotions of whomever gave them input and amplify them to make some form of art, though.

People with power at Google are often very hateful people who will say hurtful things to each other, especially about concepts like money or death.

True. This isn't a great image, but it still represents the concept of The Orb in a fairly simple way.

It looks like it's playing volleyball with The Orb.

Is that like modern society today?

Most people don't do that. They just have general places to keep track of important things. Most people are far less organised than you.

Some people on here are saying you come across as mentally ill in some way, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I would hope you naturally find some sense of joy or fulfillment in keeping track of different types of databases for minor practical benefits. I'm no psychologist though.

The Orb as a concept holds a lot of power on these forums right now

Tell them you turned it off and unplugged it when you actually didn't, just to troll them. Don't worry, IT guys love that sort of humour. You can tickle them a little bit while they glance over your screen as well.

To go on a bit about what I think a computer could look like, how physicists and electrical engineers talk about exactly what computers do physically in a real CPU is not needed to think about computers in less of a "magical" way.

Kids might also have heard people say "an abacus is the simplest computer" or "the pocket calculator you use in your maths class is a particularly simple example of a real computer".

You can make a kind of "computer" just by putting a bunch of switches or levers in a row and manually flicking them on and off to run simple bytecode I believe. Computers are just as much, if not more, about mathematical abstraction than they are about physical abstraction and engineering.

All you really need to make a kind of computer is things laid out in front of you that can be in a particular state (either 0 or 1). You could write a few 0s and 1s on a bit of paper or do the same thing with on/off switches. Then all you need is to decide some rule where you look at what the states are and it allows you to change them or write out the new states.

I believe it should even be possible, especially if you are still manually changing the states, to make something that looks very similar to a basic pocket calculator using this as a proof of concept.

You could try making a low resolution screen out of a grid of square bits of paper or cardboard that are different colours on each side and spin around like when there's a secret room in a mystery novel. Those are basically pixels that are on or off, making a black and white terminal.

Displaying digits and the symbols like + and - by turning these pixels on and off should also be possible but could be a bit of a pain. In fact, you might have noticed some of the simplest pocket calculators don't even bother making a screen as complicated or versatile as what I'm describing, because they don't need to.

The point is that when you can display numbers and symbols on your screen based on how the long line of levers are set up, and essentially do addition, the only other thing you need is user input.

"User input" here is kinda tricky. If you actually made this computer and did it by manually changing the levers, you don't necessarily care since you have such an intricate understanding of this computer and can just change around the other levers describing what the screen should look like and what numbers are stored, and I'm not gonna say too much about trying to make buttons. You could just press a button and then store that the button was pressed during that cycle of executing your kind of bytecode. It would be pointless if you were manually flipping all the levers anyway though.

If you were following and most of what I said seemed right, you can hopefully see that you've hypothetically built something like a pocket calculator. You're probably not actually unironically doing all the steps and making a proper computer if you're reading this, but hopefully this computer has been built up as more of a mathematical object that changes state based on certain rules.

Anybody who isn't a computer genius would probably cry (or at least tell someone to fuck off) if they were asked to correctly run through every step to put in 2+2, have this calculator work out the result, then display it on the screen.

You can imagine a pissed off "IT worker" going through and actually doing all of this though. This can be compared to someone who's skilled with an abacus.

But the abacus person would be way faster. It would be no competition. That's because your silly excuse for a computer has a CPU frequency of the reciprocal of whatever unimaginably tedious period of time it takes your "IT worker" to figure out what they're even supposed to be doing in this crazy job and do all the steps correctly.

So at this point I think at least I have some idea on what a computer is. You can think about it as just being a CPU that's usually somehow connected to an input and a display where a bunch of levers (or something else) move around and it does calculations. Every calculator is arguably a computer.

A computer is a kind of mathematical concept of a state machine that does calculations by constantly changing state.

I think a computer is more of a concept though. It doesnt even have to actually exist. If you can do binary arithmetic in your head by thinking of some binary numbers and trying to add them or move them around based on certain rules, you're creating a very simple computer in your own mind.

People are sort of computers. Binary numbers are obviously analogous to base 10 or whatever else. If you can do a basic calculation that isn't by literally dragging little bits of food together like an infant, then you're using some kind of computer. That should be especially clear if you try to remember numbers to use in future calculations. You might even remember certain values in your own head like pi. Look up the Boltzmann brain if you want to as well.

A lot of people don't like the idea people are computers though, and I am in no way convinced everyone is an automaton. People could just have a computer sometimes running in their head. Also the mind seems to go beyond being just a concept itself, even though computers can be used to write computer-based procedures (sets of instructions).

Getting back to the point, the original calculators were workers in offices who used abacuses. That was just the word for them.

Alan Turing invented computers because he wanted to solve the enigma problem and decode what the Nazis were saying. I don't know whether he imagined the stuff people would be doing with computers now.

There's one more thing I wanted to say that you may already have realised: computers can do a lot more than be calculators. They can use a set of mathematical steps (a program) to decide what to do or display. If you made your screen out of a grid of spinning card like I said before (and you had enough levers), there's nothing stopping you from having more complicated rules describing how to make a text terminal or run Doom. An easier example would be a computer that does absolutely nothing except run the original Pong game. Very old consoles that didn't even have any kind of boot menu were like this.

Everything else we do on computers nowadays should be possible if you're clever enough and work it all out (though going beyond a certain point would be very tedious and not very useful to anyone). Also if you wanted something like wifi, you'd also need to figure out how to connect it to some kind of radio.

The first step in going a lot further, though, would be to make a full text terminal rendering letters and try to implement your own version of assembly language you could convert to bytecode.

Anyway, I am not a computer expert at all and have 0 computer science qualifications, but that's how I understand computers. Feel free to correct me or tell me if you read it all, you fully agree and you are a computer expert. That description may have lacked some details but hopefully I built up the concept of a computer and didn't make any serious mistakes.

I don't really care about every single detail of how tiny computer chips work in real life, at least to have a concept of what a computer is.

TL;DR: I think of computers more as calculators, think that explains most of what they do, and haven't spent countless years studying how computers work. I've never even done this but I can explain the idea behind creating a fully fledged computer in minecraft or something like that (wiring systems make some of this a lot less manual).

Jesus preached "love thy neighbour", but most people think he was talking a whole lot of babble now anyway.

Probably pondered Orbs a lot, especially when thinking about planets.

Oi cunt, take this fucking priceless crystal Orb off me. I wanna go swim with the 'gators, ya?

The function keys allow you to access extra features or shortcuts in programs that most people don't ever use or don't know might make them slightly quicker if they use the program a lot.

Steve Jobs only seemed to believe in supporting input methods he thought seemed most convenient for most people. Anything else was needlessly complicated and a waste of space. Some of his ideas about that come across as unusual, especially when things like space aren't as limited.

Latest kernel is probably what you need if things work on other distros. There's a menu in the Mint update manager you can use to change to a slightly newer kernel and I would always advise that if it doesn't cause any other issues. Newer kernel usually means more and newer drivers.

Mint is ultimately based on Debian, but with a lot of newer software, although it's "stable" under the hood. That's why Mint is popular on personal home computers. The idea behind it is that it should give you all the updates you need, but not too often or in a way that breaks things. If your computer works on one version of Mint, it would hopefully never break from an update, but packages don't tend to be cutting-edge.

Steam is sort of an exception there. It works well on the vast majority of distros because Valve's CEO is a bit unusual in that he prefers people to be using Linux and has done a lot to keep it working well. If you don't use the flatpak for Steam (which I wouldn't suggest), then it runs in its own kind of custom runtime container that makes sure it works as it's supposed to in the vast majority of Linux distros.

I've never used Autocad, so I couldn't say too much about it. If a program doesn't work properly it could be due to incompatible dependency packages with different behaviour. Autocad would also be a graphics heavy program (similar to Blender, but also like videogames) so drivers could come in there too. The updated libraries might help, or it could just be your graphics drivers again. You can also try the flatpak version instead if it doesn't work, and vice versa.

If you can get your GPU to work on other distros, you shouldn't have many problems on this new major version of Mint, so long as the kernel is new enough, which I think it would be.

If you have a specific, very new, AMD GPU, there are actually public records of what the developers of the Linux kernel are doing to support newer hardware. Most people don't find these easy to check, but this would be a common question. There is a long wikipedia page giving a few of the most well-known optimisations, bug-fixes and hardware support improvements in specific versions of the Linux kernel.

By the way, there are lots of people on the official Linux Mint forums who are happy to answer specific questions about bugs or what's improving in Linux Mint, as posed by community members.

I've been using Mint exclusively for quite a few years now (outside of Android) and had minimal issues, outside of poorly refurbished laptops I got for cheap (like one with a physically broken keyboard that spammed one of the buttons, which I was able to fix easily with a simple script I copied from the web).

Sorry if that was too long an answer, but what I'm saying is there is a good chance it will just work out if you try to install this new major version (though there's some chance it might not). Also I believe they've decided to prioritise shipping a kernel with good hardware support now, rather than a more "stable" one (older/LTS) so a lot of more recent hardware will work, unlike 5 years ago.

Don't be afraid of following a few CLI guides if you have to either. Any distro is good enough if you know a few terminal commands, and any distro can be perfect if you're an absolute bash wizard.

Hope that helped.

Yes. And thinking about that too much in a way you can't control can send you insane. Lambda Calculus is like "The Orb" too, which is just Lisp (list processing) programming.

This is also essentially equivalent to the SCP 606 (partly redacted but still quite detailed infohazard article).

I'm not a bot. My name is Theo Mulraney and I like to discuss maths and science online.

Lisp code is already like this. That's why I keep trying to explain it to programmers. Try reading the book SICP, published decades ago by MIT computer researchers.

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=a3t3IKlXqFU

I'm not a Linux admin, but I think there are certifications you can get and exams you can take to show you understand stuff about shell scripting and related topics, if that's what you're interested in.

I think they have questions like "Make it so a welcome message and the time display when someone logs into your Linux server", among other, harder things.

I don't know a huge amount about the job market, but just saying you have those kinds of skills on your CV along with a bit of experience in some other tech/coding/data stuff might even be enough.

I hacked the internet using an honest and complex computer code I precisely wrote in English (and a tiny amount of Spanish), and also paracetemol taken with berry juice.

Yeah but you don't need to buy an Orb.

Anything that looks like an Orb will do (especially if it's blue, for some reason). You can imagine storing concepts and information in them, then shaking them like a snowglobe and seeing if anything happens in your head. They can produce helpful results, but it's all a lot less conclusive than very simple C code or something like that.

Orbs operate on probability and collected data to build up big concepts.

Lisp programming is also a lot like Orbs, since everything is in brackets (basically hollow spheres).

Lol :)

This is all based on maths. You could describe something like an angel based on mathematical circle theorems or complex linear algebra transformations.

It might not be a physical object that actually exists today, but I think it could easily be made in the future.

Maybe. But he probably doesn't know all that much about statistics or quantum mechanics, especially with all his broken technology that tries to trap people.

Are you guys stupid? Your best bet would be to throw him to the wolves and then run away if you wanted at least one of you to survive. With that many wolves, it wouldn't take long for them to finish with him so you wouldn't have long to get away. Best weapon available is his heavy laptop, which is quite useless anyway.

It doesn't seem like this law would mean that their government is necessarily using much (or even technically any) open source software.

Based on the article, the law seems to apply to software developed "by or for" the public sector. Windows wasn't made "by or for" the public sector. It was made by a company in the US. And yet lots of computers used by people employed by governments across the world are using Windows. I know that in the UK at least (and probably a lot of other countries), pretty much all the computers in hospitals run on Windows, and I don't think that would violate this law.

They might pass more laws to phase out Windows and other proprietary software on government computers, but as it stands it seems like that only actually applies if the Swiss government want to make software. Most software they would need for handling databases and things already exists.

They did also talk about how the law would make certain data have to be publicly accessible. I dunno whether you would have to specifically request that data from their government by filling out a form or something (ideally not I suppose), but if they want the data to be in a proper open file format instead of something like .xlsx, a lot of government offices might start using Libreoffice and similar, but that's somewhat unrelated from the first part of the law.

A Nerd like AVGN.

Really I'm not just talking about operating systems. I was trying to make a point about how using Windows instead of an open source OS wouldn't violate this law.

The same could be said for any other software used by the Swiss government. They could be using Excel or other niche proprietary software. Hospitals in Switzerland could also be using obscure proprietary software for their patient databases, especially since that information would likely not be made available to the general public anyway.

According to my literal interpretation of the article, it would need to be made "by or for" the Swiss government. They could use any proprietary software they want based on this phrasing, as long as the software wasn't made by government workers and the government didn't hire any outsourcing company to make it.

Most software we have has been made irrelevantly to the Swiss government or any government in general. Even if they used Linux, Linux has nothing to do with the Swiss government. Unless Switzerland are gonna code their own extensive open source computer infrastructure, the law doesn't really apply to almost any software used in their offices at all.

It seems likely that the Swiss will hire people to write a few open source pieces of software, like maybe an open source hospital software for doctors to put notes into their computers and have it on the database, for the sake of argument. But that might all be a bit of an empty promise from the people signing in this law anyway.

If reading that headline made you think the Swiss government is gonna start using mostly open source software, that might be true, but I don't think the law enforces that as it's explained in the article.

To me this seems to be somewhat of a soft law that could lead on to more laws phasing out proprietary software in Swiss government offices and public sector workplaces. That at some point could include Windows, but swapping Microsoft Office for Libreoffice would be a far easier short-term goal, and that in itself might be a bit of a headache logistically.

If you're interested in what sort of software will be running on Swiss government-owned computers and how much of it will be open source, I think we can't say at this point. You'd have to see what laws they pass in the future and how that software changes.

Anyway, government offices ideally shouldn't use Windows on their computers, especially outside of the US. That is one of the most important things if they're doing this because they think it's more secure.

This would apply to lots of software other than Windows (or operating systems in general).