I’m glad I don’t live in Whales, movies are history, and JFK supports Luigi

I was never a detailer or interior guy, but I painted a lot of cars that went through auctions and used car lots, and I’ve seen things man, unexplainable things. Not that they lacked potential solutions, but that the questions should never be asked

I hereby name mine Mr. Law Yawnson, it’s a total bore

All the cafés were a long way away from where I lived so yeah we went there like going to the movies or bowling and it followed a similar event like dynamic. It was an optional thing to do but not some default or daily thing.

Comparatively, side by side it looks square to me

It is kinda hard to explain and grasp just how much I have and can adapt. Probably the best two examples are weight and religion. Only somewhere around 5% of people that are morbidly obese, and manage to lose that weight at some point, then manage to keep it off for over a decade.

Very few people ever manage to grow their self awareness to the point of taking action to move away from their religion they were born into. Many people have various levels of engagement, but to actually logically break down and reason upon dogma and tribalism to the point of taking action for moral and ethical reasons is rare. I was never run a foul, offended, or wronged in some emotional way. Quite contrary I was exceptionally engaged, did a good bit if leading, and was well regarded. I know the information better than anyone else I have ever spoken to. When I asked questions, no one had substantive answers.

When I get into a subject, or hobby I do so on a level that is very intense and unlike anyone I have met before. I may find a friend that meshes with that one interest, but I have never met people that cross different spaces. Like right now I am doing CAD every day. I make stuff that is very different than anything uploaded on thingiverse or printables, the two main 3d files sharing websites. I design stuff that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen elsewhere too. I mull over ideas for weeks. It is always on the back of my mind. I taught myself CAD and at an advanced level beyond what most hobbyists learn.

The overall project I’m working on is for a GPU water cooler for my laptop. That in turn is for my custom agent framework in Emacs on Linux where I want to push my hardware to its limits. I got into AI after hitting a wall learning some of the material from the second year courses in computer science on my own. The agentic AI framework is basically a system to augment the LLM outputs with the materials I have in books I bought to follow along with the CS curriculum.

Another major area I dive into from time to time is electronic circuit design. I know KiCAD well and have done some rather in depth reverse engineering projects with hardware too. I can design in analog or digital and have two tooling setups for toner transfer and photolithography etching to make my own circuit boards. Coding complexity is probably my biggest weakness in hardware.

When I lost the weight, I did so as the most hardcore cyclist I have ever met. I rode in all weather. My first bike shop job was 66 miles every day round trip and I rode that for nearly 2 years. I also lead a shop ride out on most Saturday mornings, rode there and home too making that a 100+ mile day. I never had a week under 400 miles back then. I spent a lot of time on a bike. That is a chapter of my life. These are the things that define me. Holding me back from that kind of change is what I’m really talking about.

I had a really bad heart issue in the middle of a Target store one evening around 2009 and decided I wanted to change because I was on the wrong path. Before that, I was the most hardcore car nut you would have ever met. I painted cars professionally, built motors, worked in a machine shop a couple of times, ported heads for nostalgia dragsters, and was into metal fab with mig stick and tig. I was very close to doing my own metal castings, and I got into making my own custom composite parts. I specialized in plastics and repairs on stuff that couldn’t be replaced with reproduction parts too. I was so into carburetors that I was studying WW2 aircraft engines.

I can geek out about nearly anything. I have so many potential things I would love to explore but haven’t yet, like sewing and upholstery, sculpting, ceramics, radio, further into astronomy, radio controlled stuff, robotics and automation, homelab, FPGAs, jewelry making, mosaics, metrology, reverse engineering silicon, glass blowing, chemistry, organic chemistry, writing more science fiction, more fermentation stuff. There are so many cool things to get into and learn. I don’t expect anyone to have a list that matches mine. I expect someone to have a list in the first place. These things are exciting to me, they drive me, or rather the curiosity does. To some people I am tedious and boring, but that is how I feel about the stereotypical normal stuff most people are interested in or doing. I’m more than willing to do something like reshape my life because of stuff like cycling, but I would just as soon try something else with a friend or partner to better their lives in significant ways. I will gladly reshape my interests because there is no ego or narcissism underpinning any of this. I’m not naming stuff because I care how you perceive me. I don’t even think in a space like that naturally. If anything I’m hyper aware of my limitations and desire to learn more. I’m just driven by the curiosity but not like super actively either. It is a slow churn, like an unstoppable bulldozer a snail could outrun. Stand still long enough and I might grow past ya.

So for me, meeting people is simply shifting my interests around. If I was not stuck with my physical limitations, pursuing any interest of mine that has a more balanced participation between the sexes will put me on a course that intersects with at least another long term muse. My problem is that I may learn pottery, but when that moves to sintering and metal casting followed by a deep dive into CNC machining, do they follow or complain about something tedious. What about when I decide to build an EDM machine to take it a step further or I shift gears and get into music for awhile building guitar effects or amps or some analog synthesizer stuff, or writing, or airbrush graphics, or get into criterium racing. I’m not ADHD or OCD at all. I spend months to years on these things exploring them in depth.

So that is why it seems silly to go looking for someone instead of turning inwards first. Of all of my facets, companionship is not a dedicated curiosity or interest. There are many aspects of relationships I find curious and engage with in practice, but this game of hide and seek courtship rituals with perspective strangers is not at all interesting to me.

The part that is hard to understand about who I am now is that I am limited by posture. Sitting up or standing hurts like lifting weights in a gym where you’re going to fail. The moment I’m upright I have around 15 minutes of a clear head, 30 until I degrade significantly, and within 1 hour I’m unable to mentally function at competent levels and highly irritable. Anything over 1 hour will begin impacting my sleep beyond 24 hours. By around 3 hours, it will take me a week to fully recover to a consistent circadian rhythm. It compounds worse for subsequent days of activities or random injuries that occur around once or twice a month. I appear fine other than a little limp in my gate and I can fake that if I try. Sitting in a restaurant with a date, I am just not me. I can do a lot to mask just how much pain I am in but it is miserable, and conversationally I’m not myself. To speak my mind openly, I need to be lying down and without a lot of stress beforehand. So I exist in this homebound prison. I have nothing to offer anyone anyways. And I have had to come to terms with that. Most of me died, only a shell survived. I cannot change that so I make the best of what I have.

People around me had mixed motivations in this later era as you called it. My buddies and I used cafés as a time management tool. Any of us could have built a gaming rig but we would have been on it way too much. Cafés were a destination and way to partition off gaming in our lives.

All screens were squares til like nearly 2010. Heck I have an early Nvidia GPU laptop around here somewhere with the most ridiculous looking 1:1 screen from like '08-ish.

Still peak gaming was MW3, CS, BF2-1942-2142. Back in the day, those were so good people ran successful brick and mortar businesses called internet cafés just for the masses to play those things or some oddie to hold w for hours ““playing”” WoW. Gaming sucks so bad it can’t sustain a real brick and mortar business culture any more.

It is probably just a me thing, but I had a couple of times in my life where I was in the mindset of putting myself out there, and those were dark times. I never had good results. All of my good long term relationships came from times when I encountered someone adjacent to my other interests.

We are both likely grossly oversimplifying the spectrum of potential human experience. Like I can fake extraversion or play like other types of people than my true introverted self. If I keep my thoughts mostly to myself I become very mysterious to any potential partner because of my scope of hobbies and interests. However, I actually need someone that I can talk to openly and constructively across all of my interests, a person that has a similar scope of their own independent interests. That is something I have learned the hard way. I eventually end most long term relationships when I feel held back by what amounts to a muse. They end up limited to a chapter of my life but not a fully storied main character as I evolve.

Anyways, my point is that when I actively went looking with the purpose of meeting people, I had a terribly disappointing and depressing experience. Maybe an extrovert would have a different experience. To me, shopping for people in places where people shop will likely (stereotypically) yield a shopping type of person that will likely continue to shop or find an irresistible bargain at some point.

The best experiences I had were from those I met that were in coplanar orbits to some interest I had. What I really need has been someone motivated by slow persistent but insatiable curiosity and abstract awareness. I don’t know if I ever would have found such a person in my past life, but the feeling of being held back by someone that lacks the curiosity to grow in parallel with me is untenable and empirically worse than being alone.

It doesn’t matter now that I’m physically disabled with my specific limitations. I’m now content with being alone. I feel it would be unfair to force someone to watch me fall apart and die young due to the shell of who I am now after what I barely survived. This place, through the delay of typed thoughts, is the only place a simulacrum of my former self still exists through the haze of chronic sleep deprivation and pain. So I have no skin in the game, only a reflection on past life experiences free from the addiction of relationships.

Not really the point of what I am saying. I am speaking for the other person too without bias or assumptions and I am not pushing anyone to conform to some stereotype. If you’re happy wearing dirty shirts, not showering, and staying at home, that is perfectly valid. You can and should just be yourself. If you feel the need to be someone else or wear any mask of assumption or conformity, you’re potentially hurting someone else and offering a fake version of yourself. If you’re lonely, pursue your curiosity in spaces where other people interact. Don’t just go to where you might find people. You do not exist in that space; that is not you. On a subtle non obvious level, going to a space for not you reasons like this is predatory.

I am actually saying, you’re allowed to be happy or content with whatever state of self awareness and intelligent engagement you push yourself to achieve. The pursuit of raw self motivated curiosity is the only way to expand self awareness from within and grow. When motivated purely from within one’s self, one will eventually achieve one’s true potential while being true to self.

No one deserves to partner with someone that later never showers and never leaves the house after they remove the mask of their true self.

So you see, I’m saying the same thing but with the nuance of the best interests of all parties involved. Don’t tell people to conform to combat loneliness. Make an attempt to inspire their curiosity and self growth if you feel like you’ve spotted some inadequacy, but ultimately let them be themselves so that they are not masking to hurt someone else.

Relationships certainly can and do change people, but let those that want to change someone find their query in the true depths of the coal mine if they choose lest they unwittingly find themselves on an impossible journey to the center of the Earth.

Yeah, I’m kinda volunteering for the mod part. In truth I think it would take the respective instance admin setting up such a thing specifically. Like create a throwaway or something so that the actual user is not propagated to other admin or the full activity pub feed being transported. The one instance admin would know and have the ability to filter or block, but that information would never escape the one server. As a mod I would be blind to actual potential bad actors and only filter at the liberal community and comments level. So basically a normal community that replaces the OP name with Anon, and never shares the real ID with anyone.

I keep seeing people go to the effort of creating a throwaway account to say or post stuff they want or need to externalize on the threadiverse. I’m willing to bet that for every person that goes to that much effort, there are likely somewhere between 10-100 people that lack an outlet and motivation to do the same. Greentext is just a mutual pretext on my part for genuinely caring about people under pressure right now and in need of an outlet in a way that is not really well supported by the fediverse or activity pub.

We are small enough here that regular names and people can hold meaning in familiarity and memorable history. Kind words and social interaction anonymously from these may hold considerably more value and meaning within this social dynamic that is not afforded elsewhere.

why label and tribalism. just be you and do you things and if that intersects with someone else or not, who cares, you’re just you as your true self. Leaving that space to find someone is silly nonsense that probably won’t work out well because that person is not the real you. Pursue your curiosities until it takes you to your happy place

Close the fediverse, we already had a solution

Drive to your local LKQ distribution center with stock and an extra $100. You won’t make it past the 3rd installer you see show up in a van before someone will take your $100 with a new windshield installed within 30 minutes. Never buy a car unless LKQ makes reproduction parts. That is where 90% of auto body repair parts come from in the USA. Anyone can walk in and pay cash too.

Must be why he looks like he has a bad liver or too much colloidal silver, like some dumb smurf-hillbilly Hoosier

The UEFI boot system is tricky and you need to get along with Secure Boot to do this. Secure Boot is outside of the Linux kernel. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have systems for this. Fedora uses the Anaconda system and I believe they do it best. I have had a W11 partition for 2 years and never used it once. It can’t even get on the internet with my firewall setup, but it is there and never had any issues the 3 times I logged into it.

I think all of the Fedora systems support the shim key and secure boot but I know Workstation does. For Ubuntu I think it is just the regular vanilla Ubuntu desktop that the shim supports. This may be somewhat sketchy with Nvidia or maybe not. Nvidia “”““open sourced””“” their kernel code but the actual nvcc compiler required to build the binaries is still proprietary crap.

I have a 3080Ti gaming laptop. It isn’t half bad with 16 GB of video RAM from all the way back in 2021. Nvidia is artificially holding back the vram because of monopoly nonsense. The new stuff has very little real consumer value as a result, at least with AI stuff I run. The hardware is a little faster, but more vram is absolutely critical and new stuff that is the same or worse than what I have from 3 generations and nearly 5 years ago is ridiculous.

The battery life blows and the GPU likely won’t even work on battery. It will get donkey balls hot with AI workloads, especially any kind of image gen. This results in lots of thermal throttling. All AI packages run as servers on your network. If you are thinking along these lines if running your own models, get a tower and run the thing remotely.

I manage, and need the ergonomics for physical disability reasons, but I still would prefer to have a separate tower to run models from.

Anyways, you can sign your own UEFI keys to use any distro, but this can be daunting for some people. The US defense department has a good PDF guide on setting your own keys. The UEFI bootloader for the machine may not have all key signing features implemented. There is a way to boot into UEFI directly and set the keys manually but this is not easy to find great guides on how to do it step by step. Gentoo has a tutorial on this, but it assumes a high level of competency.

Other than signing your own keys, the shim keys mentioned are special keys signed by Microsoft for the principal maintainer of the distro. These slide under the Microsoft key to keep secure boot enabled.

If you boot any secure boot enabled OS, the bootloader is required to delete any bootable unsigned code it finds. It does not matter if it is a shimmed Fedora or W11. If you have any other OS present in the boot list, it should be deleted. W11 is SB only, and this is where the real issues arise.

Ghost of .ee – too soon

Are you insane? Debian is a base distro like any other and runs more hardware than any other. It has all of the bootstrapping tools to get hardware working.

Canonical is a server company and Ubuntu server is literally the product.

Arch is absolute garbage for most users unless you have a CS degree or you have entirely too much time on your hands and don’t mind an OS as your life project. Arch abhors tutorial content in all documentation and therefore dumps users into a rabbit hole regularly. Pacman is the worst package manager as it will actively break a system and present the user with the dumbest of choices at random because the maintainers are ultimately sadistic and lackadaisical. Arch is nearly identical to Gentoo with Arch binaries often based on Gentoo builds, yet Gentoo provides relevant instruction and documentation with any changes that require user intervention and does so at a responsible and ethical level that shows kindness, respect, and consideration completely absent from Arch. Arch is a troll by trolls for trolls. I’m more than capable of running it now, but I would never bother with such inconsiderate behavior.