Sure, but you’re making the assumption that no bank is a bad actor, which is the thing blockchains solve, you don’t need a Blockchain to circle money around between your friends, but it is needed when you introduce random persons who can screw the system.

For example, let’s assume that you’re using public/private keys to ensure that only one bank can sign their own transaction and it’s easily verifiable, let’s also assume your id is the transaction hash which consists of sender, recipient, value and datetime (otherwise it’s super easy to send the same transaction with different values). Now I’m a rogue bank, how can I screw that system? Simple, I need to pay bank B for something, so I send him a transaction for it and at the same time I send every other bank that I’m draining my account to my friends bank C. B thinks I paid him, but every other bank thinks I gave my money to C, if B tries to spend it he will figure out that other banks don’t recognize that transaction, and even if he shows the transaction they also see the other one made to bank C with an earlier time which bank B never saw, which means I never actually paid bank B, even though B thought I did.

How do you sync those copies? Whatever sync process you use could be abused to propagate wrong transactions into other banks unless you figure out a solution to the bizantine generals problems, other than a Blockchain I mean.

It absolutely can’t be replaced by a simple database, saying that makes me question that you truly understand the technology. Here’s the important question, who owns the database and how do you know you can trust them?

Would you trust me to manage a database that holds your money? What about someone who’s actively opposing you? How about a foreign nation? That’s the thing blockchains solve, a decentralized 0-trust way to have an append only ledger, yes a database can be an append only ledger, but it can’t be decentralized or 0-trust, that’s the important thing here.

Let me give you a very recent example, Steam has been censored, and has had to remove certain games from their catalog, this happened because PayPal and other payment providers forced their hand. This is the sort of problems that arise from having someone own the database, they can dictate what you do or don’t. Let me be extra clear, this sort of censorship is essentially impossible in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because no one controls the database.

Wanted. It’s a completely different story, in the movie it’s about a loser guy discovering destiny murders that are ordered to kill people by a Loom. The comic is about a loser guy discovering a secret society of super-villans because he also has a superpower.

But I would also like to present a counter-example. Watchmen, the ending is different from the comic to the movie, and I much prefer the movie ending. In the comic the plan by the villain is to make an alien-like monster appear out of thin air, because this will make humankind unite, in the movie his plan is to blow out the major cities in the world and make it look like Dr. Manhattan did it because then humanity will unite both out of fear and trying to stop Dr. Manhattan from doing it again. I never questioned the comic, but after watching the movie I got the nagging thought of “why would an alien appearing unite mankind? They don’t know if the alien destroying stuff was purposeful, them thinking Dr. Manhattan did it is better because they know it was intentional and done by someone who knows who they are”

Well, yes, of course I simplified it a lot, it’s a very complex subject and I was just trying to illustrate why some inflation is needed even in a simplified version of the economy. This is such a complex topic that even your answer here is simplifying the subject, for example in the matter of pricing you also didn’t mention added costs, for example storage or transportation in the case of the rice, or price gauging or other stuff that breaks the free market such as monopolies or coalitions. But at the end of the day all of that added complexity doesn’t interfere with the point that I was making that even if you could keep prices stable some asshole would hoard money to drive the prices down.

As for the inflation thing, those two are exactly the same, i.e. try to prevent people from hoarding and incentive people to spend, so your first part is exactly the same thing I mentioned. As for the second point, sure, but productivity doesn’t increase equally across the board, something might have had a huge breakthrough and doubled productivity while other might have had a setback this year specifically and decreased it, even if productivity increased equally for every single product, and more money was printed to match you’re back in the same example of keeping price steady that causes people to hoard money to drive the price up.

Finally, yes, I purposefully left banks out of the equation because then all bets are off since they play very complex games with other people’s money.

Ok, let’s start simple and work our way to inflation. Let’s imagine a world where the government prints a certain amount of money, to make things easier let’s say 1 trillion dollars, and no more will ever be printed, this makes it so that in absolute terms you can think as 1$ as a 1/1 trillion so you can buy stuff relatively to how common they are, if we produced 1 trillion kg of rice, then 1kg of rice should cost 1$, but if we produced 2 trillions then the price drops to 50 cents.

Cool, things make sense, however there are some problems with this approach, money gets destroyed, or otherwise lost forever, so in the long run $1 becomes rarer than 1/1 trillion, let’s exaggerate that and imagine there are now only $1000, it doesn’t make sense that a 1$ buys only 1kg of rice anymore. This is called a deflationary currency, and this is bad, because if you know this is the way money works you wouldn’t spend your money because it will be more in the future.

Ok, let’s try to combat that, let’s then say that the government prints a certain fixed amount of money every year. Some years less money would be lost, those years the value of money would decrease, other years more money would be destroyed, and those years the money would be worth more.

What happens now? Well, people would speculate, and not spend in some years, overspend in others, and the economy would be a wild mess because some years people would hoard money because it would be worth more next year.

Ok, what if the government tried to estimate exactly how much money got lost and printed the same amount, so you (in theory) always have the same amount of money going around.

Turns out this also is a bad idea in the long run. Because while money won’t increase in value because there’s a limited amount it becomes a 0-sum game. Why is that a bad thing? Well, if there are only 1 trillion dollars in circulation, each dollar I hold and refuse to use increases the value of every other dollar I have, so people with lots of money would hoard their money as much as possible to make the rest worth more, allowing him to earn more and store more and turn the currency into a deflationary currency again.

This leaves us with only one option, the government has to print more money than what’s lost, this makes money be worth less with time, but also forces people to invest their money instead of hoarding it, because otherwise it’s worth less, and if they invest it it’s circulating in the economy so in theory everyone wins.

That’s interesting, I don’t remember which implementation I’m actually using, possibly RADV, but don’t remember having any issues, unfortunately I don’t have Indiana Jones to try to independently confirm that the driver is indeed causing a problem there. Have you seen issues in other games?

No it hasn’t, Nvidia usability in Linux now is the same as it was 10-15 years ago, and that’s sort of the problem. What do you think has improved since then? I remember ~18 years ago getting Nvidia to work with the proprietary drivers on my Mint was just a couple of clicks away and I could play oblivion and many other games that ran on Wine (and the very few natives we had) just fine. The majority of the Nvidia issues are self-inflicted, always have been, the problem is that because you have to use the proprietary drivers it’s very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and inexperienced people tend to do it very often, so my guess is that 10-15 years ago is when you started using Linux, and broke stuff with the Nvidia driver, nowadays you don’t break that stuff and you think the driver has changed, when what has changed is you.

Yes, I have a near flawless experience with Linux, but it was years in the making. One thing people don’t realize when they switch over is the amount of time you’ve spent in dealing with similar issues on Windows, but you did it so long ago and so often they’re second nature to you, so you don’t perceive them as problems. But when you start from scratch on Linux they’re daunting problems because they force you to learn new stuff.

The same will happen to Linux over time, some stuff you’ll fix once and forever, others you’ll learn to work around and be okay with it. For me nowadays whenever I have to use Windows for something more than simple stuff it’s death by a thousand cuts, because I haven’t used windows in so long that my muscle memory for those caveats and weirdness (that I didn’t even noticed before switching) is completely gone.

As for the specific things, you’re using an Nvidia card, which is known for not playing nice with Linux, you haven’t mentioned drivers but you have two options here, open source and very poorly performative Nouveau driver or the proprietary and doesn’t play nice with other stuff Nvidia one. Both are bad, but probably you want the Nvidia one.

Also I don’t know how Ubuntu studio is, but I would recommend you try other distros, maybe Mint or I’ve heard wonderful stuff for Bazzite. Any way you can have your /home be in a different partition so you don’t lose your data when switching over and trying stuff, eventually you might find something that clicks for you, and it’s smooth sailing from then on. Good luck.

Probably, I honestly don’t remember the actual sketch too much, but at the time it was part of the zeitgeist and it was an example of perfect comedic timing.

A partition is a dedicated space on a disk. In windows there’s not much use to partition a disk, but it can be done, and you would have a C: and D: drives with only one physical disk. I used to do that back in the day to have a partition for backups.

If you only have one disk and want to have multiple OS, you need to partition the disk, so that each OS can write their data without interfering with one another. Essentially what you’re doing is, like you said, putting a wall between areas in the disk, but you can do that regardless of having different OS in each side.

In Linux things are a bit different, the representation of your disks is a file inside /dev, for example the first disk (non-nvme) Linux finds will be /dev/sda, the next one will be /dev/sdb so on and so forth, but since disks can be partitioned the first partition in your first disk is /dev/sda1, then /dev/sda2, etc. Then there’s a file called /etc/fstab that has lines like /dev/sdb3 /home, this means that the 3d partition in the second disk will be accessible in the folder /home. You don’t really need to worry about this file in general, during the installation there will be a nice GUI to let you say which partition goes where.

How is that useful? Well, if you have the system in /dev/sda2 and your /home folder in /dev/sda3 you can format /dev/sda2 and reinstall the system or change the distro entirely without losing your data stored in /home.

PS: I’m simplifying some stuff, but for reference :

• you might see partitions jump from 2 to 6 in older systems, this is due to limitation in partitioning schemes for old disks
• if you have a really old computer you will see /dev/hda1, this is because the s in sda refers to SATA, which essentially all disks are nowadays
• nvme drives are /dev/nvme0n1
• /etc/fstab has other parameters to tell it certain flags like mount read-only. Also it rarely used /dev/sda1 style naming because that might change if you swap the cables in your computer, instead it uses a unique identifier that’s points to the correct partition regardless of order.
• Partitions are not really a wall, instead the first bytes of a disk contain a table saying stuff like byte 0-61648716832 partition 1, bytes 61648716833-9274816418393 partition 2, etc. Old drives had limited space in that table so you had to create one partition for the rest of stuff and repartition that again, which is why partition numbers jumped from 2 to 6.

but all that’s besides the point.

Many years ago I went to the movies to see a movie, I think it was Season of the witch (although I thought it was way before 2011). There’s a scene where someone is trying to do an exorcism and the demon shouts with a very deep voice “SILENCE”, and then there are a couple of seconds of silence in which I couldn’t resist calling in the correct tone “I kill you”.

For those too young or that have already forgotten about it look for Achmed the Dead Terrorist on YouTube.

Definitely an anti-hero, also Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and The Comedian. Watchmen (and other Alan Moore works) is filled with anti-heros.

I don’t think you’ll find a replacement because the distinguishing feature for CS is that it’s a service game that you can play online with other people, any game that is not a service game will not be the same, because the single player campaign will be finite and playing against bots gets boring very fast. But that’s okay, as far as service based gaming goes CS is not bad, it doesn’t require payment and at least last time I checked the micro transactions were all cosmetics so no pay to win either.

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/657/ and the reason I watched Primer in the first place. After dozens of watches I think that perhaps it’s possible the graph is relatively correct (maybe)

Mint is a great distro for beginners. Coding is not required, but coders prefer Linux because it makes our lives easier in some ways.

I would like to take the opportunity to give you two advices that I think everyone who wants to use Linux should hear:

Install from package manager

In windows the way to install something is to look it up on a browser, open a sketchy website, downloading a binary and executing it on your machine. That is definitely NOT the way to do stuff on Linux. Think on Linux the same way you do Android (which is actually a Linux distro), if you want to install something you look it up on the play store, and only if it’s not there you consider alternatives like downloading a random .APK from the internet. Linux should be the same, except there are several alternatives before downloading a binary from the internet, like adding a PPA in debian based distros (Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian, so this applies to you) which essentially gives extra packages to the package manager or using flatpak/snaps (two different technologies that try to do the same, i.e. a new way of packaging software for Linux)

Keep /home in a different partition

In Linux any folder can be in any hard-drive/partition. So it’s possible when you’re installing your system to have what you would normally think as C:\ (which is called / in Linux) in one partition and /home (i.e. the folder home inside /) in another. This is great because it allows you to reinstall or change your Linux distro without losing your personal data.

I don’t smoke tobacco, tried it once when I was younger, not my thing, didn’t liked the feeling on my lungs at all, and I’ve seen how difficult it is to deal with the addiction from both my parents, so I never wanted to start. Weed smoke is a bit less coarse on my lungs, but still I strongly dislike the feeling (dry herb vaporizer is much better in that regard).

Alcohol I don’t usually have. I might drink a beer or a whiskey in social situations, but haven’t been drunk in the past 20 years.

You do know those are real, right? They’re called Onigiri, and most sushi places sell them.

This is something important everyone forgets, the majority of those “self-made” billionaires started out as multi-millionaires.

As I’m sure many have already told you Stalin was not a Fascist. I’m not sure if you’re asking about fascists in specific and used a wrong example or about totalitarianism in general and used the wrong word.

For fascism in specific it’s usually about a common enemy and economic crisis that can be pinned on that enemy. But there are other stuff as well, there’s a great movie called “Die Welle” (The Wave) which is based on an actual scientific experiment called The Third Wave in which a teacher showed how fascism is able to take root.

For totalitarianism in general the answer is a lot more complex, each dictator grew to power their own way, but populism and fear mongering are common practices.