Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

@valkyraven oh wow, that's terrible. Hoping they get you back up sooner than that!

Republicans: "The Second Amendment exists to protect the First Amendment"

Also Republicans: Bans books and criminalizes freedom of expression.

@calicoday Yeah, I go to Reddit fairly often for that kind of thing. Basically a worse version of StackExchange.

But I created an account and tried to get back into the discourse recently, and had a way worse experience than I've had in the past.

The one thing that seems to have changed is that violent and harassing comments actually seem to get admin attention now.

I guess the toxicity has the admins seeing the writing on the wall for the future of their site. Probably too late though.

Returned to Reddit for some reason for the first time in years, and I'm not sure if I've just become a better person since I was last there, but the toxicity over there is just awful. Not sticking around...

@PixelAndPolyCurator I'm working on everyone's first Blender project right now: A donut.

I'll definitely post it once it looks the way I want it to!

I've been spending a lot of my free time learning #Blender, and I finally feel like I know enough to actually use the software. I'm still a complete beginner, but I might start posting stuff that I've made soon.

It's a really cool program, I've wanted to learn it for a long time. Really happy with a lot of the improvements over the past few years that make it easier to get started. Used to feel like I needed a degree to have a chance at making anything...

I'm always a little taken aback by some of the scam items sold on Amazon, but these faux CBD gummies with 15 MILLION milligrams (33 pounds) of "hemp" per serving might be the most absurd one I've seen so far.

To-do:

-Install Pop-OS.
-Install Drivers, software, and custom user config.
-Restore Steam library.
-Test everything to make sure things still work the way I like them.

Here's all that went wrong:

-Nvidia driver not compatible with Blender.
-Upgrade driver and lose graphics entirely.
-Downgrade driver and still have no graphics.
-Futile troubleshooting and frustrated googling.
-Try to boot from USB, MSI fastboot blocking all preboot USB.
-More googling...
-Take computer completely apart to get to BIOS battery.
-Reset BIOS
-Put computer back together.
-Turn of Windows defaults in BIOS.
-Boot to USB.
-Back up home folder to USB hard drive (ongoing)

Love it when a small project like "get Blender working with my RTX 2060" turns into an entire evening taking my PC apart, resetting the BIOS, backing up my NVMe, installing a new Distro, and reconfiguring from scratch...

To be fair, my PC has been through a lot of hacking, patching, breaking, fixing, and dist-upgrading over the past few years, this is probably a good thing that needs to happen.

Retiring Kubuntu and getting a fresh start with Pop-OS. Hopefully rendering with Cycles at the end.

Need a math tutor?

@bstacey People are embracing the "Artificial Intelligence" of language models the same way Tesla drivers embrace the "Full Self Driving" of driver assist, as it drives them at highway speeds into the side of a semi truck.

I feel like if China can fly a spy balloon over the US without the military immediately noticing, we're pretty much guaranteed to lose a war with them should that ever happen.

"The size of three buses" is more than enough to hoist a nuke over the US.

Why have ICBMs when you can hover your bombs right over their targets?

The military would basically be liked "Sir, radar has picked up som..." *BOOM*

@kev

Don't forget to filter "RT @" to get rid of the crossposted RTs.

If the crossposter still even works, Elon did make a mess of API support.

@rockylhotka A large number of home routers today have OpenVPN baked into them.

It's pretty straightforward to get set up, and when you connect an outside device in tunnel-all mode, it's like you're connected to your own home network when accessing the Internet.

If you only have to connect once per month to "check in", it should be fairly trivial to avoid issues.