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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Sorry if this isn’t what you’re looking for, but my answer is basically “no”.

    I can take a 10mg Adderall 4 hours before bed, and fall right asleep. Sometimes, I can take a 10mg Adderall in the morning, and fall asleep at my desk at work, only 30 minutes later.

    Adderall makes me feel relaxed and totally unstressed. I’ve never had HRV stress measured, though. What is the experience like, to you, when you are having high HRV stress levels?

    Wellbutrin and most other SSRI’s and SNRI’s make me feel a little TOO relaxed. Some of them make me feel less conscious, and a little bit brain fogged. At the time, I described it as if my soul was detached from my body.

    To me, methylphenidate (Ritalin) gives the same effects as Adderall.




  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.


  • I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.

    Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.

    I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.

    Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).



  • 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?

    1. 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.

    2. 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.




  • Haha. I sent them an opt-out notice by email, and it bounced!

    They are using Google email servers for discord .com and Google has apparently shadowbanned me. It gives an error message saying “The account [my email address] is disabled.” but I have never created a Google or Gmail account, and my email address is on a domain not associated with Google at all.

    So I’ve completed my obligation to opt-out. Discord will have no record of it, but I have the email server logs to prove I sent it.

    If, in the future, anyone needs to sue Discord and forgot to opt-out, feel free to use this same excuse.