That first part is eerily similar to what I was about to post.

In 2011, I was a lonely introvert. I spent my time binging TV shows and reading.

In 2012, on an IRL meetup thread on the 4chan x (paranormal stories) board, I met a new friend. I think deciding to meet them was the critical moment. They introduced me to a local arts and crafts club, a certain sci-fi fandom, and Minecraft.

The arts and crafts club became the basis of a friend group that is still my main friend group today. They brought me to a local convention in 2013 where I discovered I was trans.

In that sci-fi fandom, at a 2016 convention, I met my current partner, and a bunch of new friends.

I played a lot of Minecraft from 2012 to 2016, but then my partner in 2016 introduced me to Factorio.

C:WindowsSystem32 not found

You have to escape backslashes

Beta testers should get a discount, or even get paid, in exchange for writing good bug reports. These people are fools for paying extra for earlier access to a bug fest.

I would never pre-order a game. That just makes it harder to refund it if it sucks.

draw .io is closed source.

Are you on Linux, or Windows? If you’re on Linux, which driver are you using?

I’ve seen “Domain Controller” and “Subscriber” for the sake of plausible deniability.

In the case of SPI, they want to keep intact the names MISO (master in, slave out) and MOSI. So they use things like “Main” and “Sub”.

I’ve played Doom, Doom 2, and Doom 64. Their engines lack room-over-room architecture, but they do have a Y axis, and some parkour where you run from platform to platform (without jumping). They all have a menu.

Imagine a first person shooter with no menus. You just start up the game, and you’re suddenly in a death match with some other random people. There is no customization for the type of death match. The setting and the weapon selection are randomly generated for you. At the end, you are shown a victory/defeat screen with no buttons. After 10 seconds, you join another match.

There is no pause button, no adjustment for mouse sensitivity, and no configuration for the screen resolution or graphics quality.

No menus. Definitely not a menu game.

The game also has no jump button, no stairs, and basically no Y axis at all. Definitely not a parkour game.

No, it’s not dead. The number of players is irrelevant.

A “dead game” is a game that needs work but is not under any development. It could be in Early Access, and incomplete. Or, it could be released, but still incomplete (looking at you, 7 Days to Die). Or, it could be an MMO that needs ongoing server maintenance, but they shut the servers down.

A game that is being worked on and making good progress isn’t dead. A game that is complete and relatively bug-free, but not being worked on, is not dead. An MMO getting no new content, but just enough labor to keep the lights on and the servers up, is not dead.

I guess an MMO or multiplayer game that has mandatory multiplayer aspects could be considered Dead if there aren’t enough players available to reasonably play the game. But Palworld is a single player game, or co-op with friends, not really an MMO.

Downloading any retail or food company’s app is a bad idea. It will violate your privacy, and give you little to no benefits.

I really hate when companies demand that you sign in to their website to communicate with them, when they could have just used email. Especially if they refer to their proprietary website as “email” when it clearly isn’t, and especially when it’s an app instead of a website.

Yeah, it’s definitely a problem, and genetic information could end up getting linked. Even if a person thinks they might not have DNA in any existing database, whether criminal, medical, or otherwise, there’s no telling what might happen in the future. I can think of a few different ways a person might involuntarily, through no fault of theirs, get their DNA forcibly taken with no legal recourse.

Every path here will have some tradeoffs. But the odds of getting linked are probably much lower outside your home country.

I voted you down because HIPAA absolutely does include privacy provisions, and requires written consent for data use in the way I described above.

My best recommendation would be to go to a testing lab and provide a fake name. It should work. I’ve never been ID’d at any doctor’s office, and one time did even receive healthcare under a fake name with no trouble. Of course, that means your insurance won’t cover anything, but that’s the unfortunate reality of US healthcare. Also, they probably won’t delete your data. HIPAA includes no right to be forgotten, and in some cases, may even mandate retention for several years.

Sorry I don’t have a better solution. I think your best bet is to distance this genetic data as much as possible from your real identity.

Alternately, you could try going somewhere outside the US.

I completely agree that HIPAA is dead. One time when I went to a new doctor’s office, totally unaffiliated with any doctor I’d ever seen before, the doctor instantly pulled all my medical records from several other places. They didn’t even get my verbal permission; they just did it. If that’s the level of security on these databases, and doctors are allowed to access them on old unsupported Windows computers, then it’s almost certain that the databases have tons of undetected data breaches. They’ve probably been scraped completely by multiple attackers.

If you want to get a fair price at Dominos, you have to play their game. At least look through the website for special offers on pizza, because the “menu prices” are 2.5x higher than the average price a person pays. After that, if you still want a lower price, search the Internet for coupons (although that doesn’t work as well nowadays since they use account-locked rewards systems instead of coupons).

Even if you play the game, it will still be more expensive than you remember, due to massive inflation.

I don’t go to Dominos any more due to repeated bad customer service, their website malfunctioning in a lot of ways, and the last time I visited the store it smelled strongly like ammonia.

I suppose mine would be Proton/Steam/Mate Desktop/Gnu/Linux

The existence of one or more gods can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. So it makes sense to me that some people believe in it and others don’t.

I cannot recommend any USB-connected drive for long-term use. (Only for portable devices that get plugged in for a little while at a time.) In the long term, any USB drive will randomly reset during periods of heavy use – including heavy writes, meaning some data will get lost.

USB enclosures tend to just crap out completely after a year or two, if used continuously on a server. I know because I twice used 1TB external drives with OpenWRT (home router) devices. The data will be safe on the drive, but you’ll have to replace the enclosure.

1. My first recommendation would be to look very carefully at the chassis and see if there’s any way at all to fit another SSD inside it. 2.5" SSD’s are usually thinner than 2.5" hard drives, so it may be possible, and most motherboards have more SATA ports than they need.

Is there possibly an NVMe slot on the motherboard? Or an open PCIe slot where you could put an NVMe adapter?

2. My second recommendation would be using a 2.5" hard drive. Newegg has a 5TB one for $135, but unfortunately that’s as large as they seem to go. It will be a bit slower than an SSD, but still probably around 150MB/s for sequential access.

3. My third recommendation, if money is really tight, would be an additional server, with a large 3.5" hard drive. This will be a lot cheaper than an 8TB SSD, but adds complexity, electricity use, space use, and possibly fan noise.

This is false. X is not less secure than Wayland. It does have a different security model, which can become insecure if you misuse it. I don’t think people really care about situations where multiple user accounts access the same display.

In my opinion, the benefits of xdotool far outweigh any benefits gained by Wayland’s security model. It’s impossible to make xdotool in Wayland, because of its security model.

This is a Lemmy post of a screenshot of a Reddit post of a screenshot of a Reddit post of a screenshot of a Twitter tweet.

Truly an instance of xkcd’s Digital Data comic. https://xkcd.com/1683/