Cyrillic isn’t even a language

Plasma wakefield simulations PTSD triggered.

Oh, I have the same gripes and more, so in my roleplaying campaign that has later turned into a book:

1. Characters have to conspire, mostly outside of their ship, just to have a chance at a secret away from the surveillance. Two characters that are no strangers to oppressive surveillance manage to maintain exactly one secret, but its hours are inherently numbered and it takes a lot to happen to make it last, what, an entire day?
2. Alien language is one of the central problems, despite it being phenomenally trivial (and following a decidedly indoeuropean sentence structure only because the readers also need to comprehend it). All characters not preselected for fluency in it outright don’t speak it, there are just three of them on-screen, implied to be the best of the best. They then proceed to mess it up big time while messing it up, recursively, multi-track drifting style. Phonetics is mutually unpronounceable, but intelligible both ways, yet over the course of the entire story both sides attain only barely passable and generally unreliable listening proficiency. They mostly get by in alien writing. And alien writing isn’t even exactly linear, because
3. Anatomically, aliens are lizard-like. Unless your world building justifies aliens being related to humans, humanoid aliens are utter cringe.
4. Allergies are, uh, let’s just say one results in a pivotal plot point. Standard nutrient packs are a thing; people are shown to get creative with them on day two, yet not a single soul ever attempts munching any alien flora or fauna, lol. Not being utter morons about what they eat doesn’t automatically mean they’re safe either.
5. Translation is available, and the problem is not even studying the alien language, it’s that it doesn’t really help bridge the cultural mismatch; if anything, “knowing” the language is a bit of a disservice here because the inherent crudeness of the translation only compounds the misunderstandings pileup. Blue/orange morality doesn’t help it either: the question of how does one translate what was originally mistaken for alienese for “good” is, uh, an annoyingly recurring one.
6. No technology available in abundance is used in an even remotely reasonable manner. The very idea of being rational about using Tech X makes no sense if Tech X ain’t rationed. Abundant resources are gonna be used willy-nilly, period.
7. Competence is scarce, doubly so when anything goes off-script.
8. People are absurd. Groups of people are next-level absurd. Don’t even get me started on societies. Fiction involving all three that isn’t woven almost entirely from blunders upon blunders is, likely, bland competence porn. Now add a second species to the mix and there’s no ceiling to the absurdity now. At this point, getting a point across the interspecies barrier, let alone cooperating on a thing, becomes unrealistic by default. Successful willful interspecies cooperation is, at the very least, a hard-earned success worth celebrating in-universe. And that’s if the species are interested in said cooperation.

(non-sci-fi)

9. A story doesn’t feature a villain that’s a perfect mirror image of the hero, largely because 9a. it doesn’t feature any villain. Villains are lame, and so is plot-mandated antagonism. While it’s just lazy writing in general, it’s particularly unrealistic because
10. People just don’t care that much in general. Yes, I know people have interests and strong opinions on select few subjects, and sometimes these opinions even happen to clash. What are the chances though?
11. Things generally just don’t happen as much as they do in most of the fiction. Real life doesn’t have the ambient soundtrack that immediately conveys or foreshadows the importance of the unfolding events. Thus in real life, the perceived importance of events is almost always off. Fiction rhould have it the same: things happen, some might even feel important in the moment, but rarely the ones that mattered.

There’s probably more, but such gripes don’t usually spring to mind unprompted. Now, when you see them, then they do grind your gears…

well, it locks you out of SSH key logins, so on a well configured host it can sometimes increase security

musl is a libc

Same as decades before: Ubuntu.

A thousand times less than the conspirologists suggest.

Because even IRC is better than matrix

And what’s stopping you? Install new LineageOS on an unblocked Samsung, check one checkbox xin developer settings and here it is. Without the GPU, of course.

2009. 2004 wasn’t even 770 times.

Been there, it ended fine. Cheer up.

To be fair, first person (or fast paced) anything on anything leads to repetitive stress injury.

Yeah, they’do anything but use proper package management.

Am from Siberia, the article is stupid. Even with all the modern tech Siberia is rather devoid of people. Nobody has ever lived there in any numbers that’d matter. Overfocusing at it makes about as much tense as approximation it with a refrigerator.

No-no-no, you misunderstood. As soon as communication starts to happen, I grab the popcorn and step aside to watch the fight unfold.

A plane ticket to a saner hemisphere is what, 1% of the median yearly income? 2%? You don’t even need visas.

Get rid of the dGPU power comsumption at all costs, as it’s underpowered for anything serious.

Enable Intel AMT so that you get hardware level remote control, including power control.

Afet that it’s a now-weak power-hungry CPU with weak cooling, but a decent amount of RAM, so, IDK, a buildserver or a VM host for scenarios when something needs to happen in the background, but latency doesn’t matter.

There’s something really weird going on here: you can’t do math without imagining that the cryptic symbols on the page “mean” something, that they “represent” actual “objects” that “exist” and “have properties”

Please kindly stop extrapolating your unfitness to do your job onto the others.

It only gets worse from there.

What you’re saying, it’s tolerated for no good reason but buying into propaganda. I’m not saying it’s not tolerated, I’m saying there’s no reason it should be. Maybe it’s easier to see when we’re not talking US. For example, there’s a shitton of people from my country fighting knees-deep in another country precisely because this is what the government currently tolerates and rewards. Will the average person view them as dangerous unhinged murderers a decade later, when the iron grip weakens and the societal norms shift? That’s the neat part, the answer is a resounding yes, because it’s already happening, well in advance.

*groan*

What’s great about F-Droid is them rebuilding everything and automatic syndication. What’s wrong with F-Droid is their idiotic manual signing practice roughly twice a week, which they claim increases security when it only harms it. It the title is right and this new service hand-picks the apks weekly while not doing shit about their correspondence to the source code, this is the worst of both worlds.