First, I’m sorry that you find yourself in this situation.

Second, there’s no magic bullet that’s going to get you out of this. A tight budget might help, and perhaps tinkering at the edges might get you a little closer.

There’s a few things that might help:

1. Check what your paying for what. Can you save a few bucks by switching contacts? Phone companies are crap at offering good deals to existing customers, for example. Make sure your not paying for any long-forgotten warranty given in your account.

2. Upskill yourself: things like Alison offer free training, and a small cost for the certificate. While not enough to match a degree, that can give you the leg up to the next pay band. Often worth checking out New Skills Academy as well for offers.

3. Check out your local college/university for free short courses. Many of them will do short courses that can help improve you’re CV. Even if they are just in a subject you’re interested in, having a university course on a CV can really help.

4. Google your CV type: every type of work has a different CV requirement. Some want the biggest qualification first, some want a skill profile. We’ve all been taught to do a CV, but there are hundreds of different ways to do it. Check out what’s popular in your line of work, and update accordingly

5. Job hunt now: if your current job isn’t paying the bills, it’s time to job hunt. Look at the salary you need, then what you need to know to do the job. If you have 70% of what they are asking for, apply. Luck plays a bigger part in job hunting than we like to think.

6. Side hustle or not to side hustle: if you have a salaried job with regular hours, check your contract. It’s always good to know what requirements your current job has on having a second job. If your not feeling like a content creator, then Only Fans may not be for you: unless you happen to be really well endowed with good features. If that’s out, consider an evening job or weekend job. You might be able to pick up a few hours stacking shelves at your corner shop, or on the till/cash register. Two nights a week might be enough to help you make those ends meet. You can also try side-hustles like dog walking, or handy-person. Perhaps even a paid befriending service for the elderly (be aware there may be legal requirements in your area)

7. Plan: having a goal helps keep you focused. Knowing what job you’d like to do will help you work out what training and skills you need. Having a goal being that can also make the grind of two jobs easier as you can see yourself building towards a goal.

These are some broad-brush ideas that I hope gives you the idea that is it’s not totally hopeless.

There are two tensions here:

1. Community building
2. Code production

Community building can be done without any coding, coding can be done without any community. However, to build a large project you need them both.

In a large volunteer project like this, not everything can be worked on. You become selective. We are going to major on this thing, or specifically talk about that project to get community engagement and get the thing done. This drives the project, she helps it to stop chasing hairs. Someone has to decide what feature is going in this release to make it ready to be a release candidate.

That group of people, ultimately making and influencing those decisions, is the CoC.

Let’s take a for-instance: Sign up boxes.

For years, Linux sign up allows you to record random data into your profile, office, phone number, etc. These are text, and can be anything. Now, what if there’s a rising need to add a minicom number(minix, used to be used by the deaf to send messages to an organisation, before email). As a hearing person, this is going to be a low priority for me, so I work on something else. I’ve got spare capacity, so if the project leaders are calling for help on this thing, I can go and help.

This, ultimately, builds a better over-all product, but it’s not something I’d have noticed by myself, because I’m not part of the deaf community.

In our example with NixOS, asking for someone from the community to be a representative on it is not about code quality, but about the issue of visibility. Is there some need that that section of the community needs? Is there a way that the community can do y thing to make the os as a whole more accessible? I don’t know the answer, because I’m not a member of that community, just as I’m not a member of the deaf community.

In this case, the merit, the qualification, for being on the CoC is being a member of a section of the community. It brings valuable a viewpoint, and adds a voice at the table that can make a real difference. Most coders know that having a wish list of features at the start can make it infinitely easier to add them, than having to go back an rewrite to make them happen. Having a voice that might need that feature makes a difference

The debate for CoC is about merit, but merit isn’t just stubbornly focused on a single talent, it can also be about life experience.

I see what you did there.

Damn, screwed twice by the same Ape…

I don’t know if there is, but it feels like the email protocol problem.

Like, while the protocol sucks in many, many ways, it would take something revolutionary to replace it because it’s everywhere.

It’s been around so long that everything talks the protocol, the binaries that handle it are mature and stable.

Then you have to ask: what would you replace it with? It does the job it’s designed to do very well. There’s nothing the matter with the protocol, and it’s still fit-for-purpose.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems - spam, bad actors, and so on, but ultimately that’s not the fault of the protocol (though, maybe, for email, people have been arguing about protocol-level ways of dealing with spam for years).

I don’t have an answer, but I feel like there should be one, but I doubt the is.

However, unlike Reddit, there’s alternatives. You might not like the community on @lemmy.world, but you might like the community on @anotherlemmythatmight.exist.

Because of the federated nature, communities will naturally fracture and focus. Here, a bad faith mod will just kill a community on instance a, and people will move to instance b.

We’ve already seen things happen like this under the banner of ‘free speech’, where people believe that free speech means free from consequences. If you think that, there are plenty of instances out there. Lemmy.world isn’t one of them.

This means that you can find your favourite community in places with different server rules. Which means it will be the community - the people, the mods, the knowledge, that grows one, not just the fact the names taken.

You may want to look into Lutris. They’ve done a lot of work on bringing windows games to Linux, and basically do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

It will also link to your Steam, EA, Origen, Cog etc accounts and do the same for games there as well.

So, Game Pass would have to pay per installation huh?

Which is going to mean a lot fewer Unity-based games showing up, because no company is going to suddenly be okay with fees out of nowhere. Especially something that allows you, the user, by design to install something, try it, then delete it if you didn’t like it. Not only that, but gamepass is from pc and console. You find a game, love it, install it on console. Then discover you can mod it, so you install it on pc. Gamepass is now on the hook twice.

Yeah, unity did not think this through. Even if that is unity working as intended, that’s still a stupid policy. Either games will now have to be more expensive, just in case, or have install licences, requiring even more dial-home to monitor.

Add to that unity not saying whether or not it’s going to use dial-home as a counter, and that works for games written years ago. Indy developers are now going to have to think long and hard about advertising old games, or discounting them. I would imagine a few of them will be pulled from stores, just in case.

There’s a lot of lack of detail here: like, how do you as a developer know how many installs there are?

The free 200k limit, does that mean profit you made, or is that 200k sales? These two things are not the same.

Time to revisit Goddot.

The last time I saw this was on a slow-failing HDD.

Check a quick fsck might get you a few answers. You can find more info in the Linux manual. It could just be one or two bad blocks that you can recover and fix the problem (though, ofc, it’s time to backup your data).

The other, slightly unusual time I’ve seen it is with mixed RAM. 16gb made of 2x6g and then 2x4gb did some real odd things to the system. If it’s not the disk, and your box will boot with one stick of ram, try it to see if it fixes the issue. It could be that your RAM speeds are off (or your like me and just put two sticks you had lying around, and it basically worked until it didn’t).

An outlier, that I’ve not seen on modern machines is io/wait for a CD-ROM to spin up, even if your not accessing the CD-ROM. Normally caused by bad cabling. Based on the age of your machine, this is unlikely, but it might be worth unplugging devices to see if one is bad and not reporting properly.

This is, if course, assuming dmsg is empty

Final thought: see if your running SELinux. If you are, turn it off and try again. Those policies are complex, and something installed in a non-standard place could be causing SELinux to slow IO as it fills your logs with warnings.

Hope that helps,

No preventing me from formatting, but from resizing the disk so I can make space for the linux on the internal SSD.

It’s a HP Envy.

TBH, I hadn’t realised it had also chosen to encrypt the inserted SD card when I added it.

I would install from a USB to another USB, but the Debian Live USB stick doesn’t recognise anything else that I plug into the laptop, so I can’t go USB to USB, hence the need to use windows.

It’s also difficult to ‘leave’ chromium when many of the alternative browsers are based on the engine.

I love Vivaldi, but at it’s cute it’s running the Google web engine. This is also going to be part of the problem.

There are very few non-Google web engines, and even fewer being used by other browser makers.

I thought I’d test this. I got the essay as the 4th result, the top 3 are about mobile phone signal, with the essay coming in as 4th.

I use Vivaldi on Android. DDG has my location set to the UK.

TBF, Pinterest seems almost made to be federated…

I think it is very much a case of developers building, or expanding apps. It’s easy to forget that many of these apps are in their developments infancy, because so (technically speaking) is the server software.

There will also, inevitably, be an interplay between app developer and server developer. Work arounds producing accepted items that other apps need to include (for those that remember, think text colour codes on IRC, mostly driven by mIRC (short have history, YMMV, etc etc)

Mind you, I’m wondering if all this federation will bring people back to IRC…

Have you looked at something like :

https://letsencrypt.org/

It offers a free CA for self-hosted stuff. It does TLS certs, and others. It’s very useful for avoiding the high fees

I have to say this is quite a worrying abuse. Both of software, and of privacy.

It’s being deployed for something it’s not meant for, and being used to remove liberties for it. Of course, much of this will be lost to media circles as in CSA cases, the presumption is guilt in the public’s mind.

Whatever the truth of the original conviction, the use of this software as a condition of bail should be banned, and abhorrent to anyone who values justice.

That is not to say the software doesn’t have it’s uses - especially in cases of porn addiction. However, the software is nowhere near good enough to be used in legal cases. It says so itself. It errs, intentionally, on gathering more data, on being more conservative, simply because it’s not good enough to make the judgement on its own.

That’s before we look at the unintentional consequences of impinging on the freedom of an innocent person (‘Hannah’), and the way in which the software is not ‘intelligent’ enough to make judgements on whether or not it should take a photo of emails. It also led to fear of accessing help (and an inability to access help).

Use of this software in this way is an abuse.

I have to say that I totally agree with the notion of looking for something that isn’t. ‘digital sugar rush’.

I enjoyed the deeper and harder discussions around politics, theology and philosophy. However, I only ever posted when I had something to add to the conversation as a lot of the subs I was in were modded by experts, and I’m at best an interested layperson.

I think for the moment at least, I need to brave commenting more. I guess we will have to so is we can attract the same experts to this platform, and get the same level of discussion.