Hi, I’m Shauna! I’m a 37 year old transgender woman from Ontario, Canada. I’m also a Linux enthusiast, and a Web Developer by trade. Huge Star Trek fan, huge Soulsborne fan, and all-around huge nerd.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • First of all, make sure that Steamworks Common Redistributables is installed because according to the steamdb page for GTA 5 it requires vcrun2022 and d3dx9 installed from winetricks (or protontricks) which it normally gets from the Steamworks Common Redistributables automatically.

    From my admittedly very brief research, it doesn’t look like you can play GTA 5 online if you skip the launcher but if you want to just play offline you can set your Steam Launch Options by right clicking the game and going to properties. If you set it to %command% -scOfflineOnly that will skip the launcher but disable multiplayer.

    You can also try setting the Steam Launch Options to PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% which forces Proton to use the OpenGL driver rather than the Vulkan driver for D3D.


  • I was also kind of surprised when looking under the hood of proton that a lot of the fixes for games are pretty simple and often the same fix over and over again. Also, it’s just basically running winetricks on the prefix to install things like vcrun2022 (Visual C++ runtime) and dotnet48 (.NET runtime). It’s pretty simple stuff, really, but priceless when considering that no manual tinkering is required by the average user who would give up as soon as a game doesn’t launch once.

    Oh, also I should point out that if you want proton to run non-steam games but for it to run protontricks to fix any compatibility issues, just make sure that there’s a text file called steam_appid.txt in the same directory as the game executable. The file should contain only the game’s app id which you can find on https://steamdb.info/




  • I doubt that there’s any real benefit to walking barefoot. There seems to be very little science to support it that I can find, but I’d be interested to see if anyone can find some.

    I question the benefits mostly because it’s well known by historians that before the invention of modern shoes, most people walked very differently than we do now. Heel-to-toe walking basically didn’t exist until modern thick-soled shoes became commonplace, and instead toe-to-heel or rather ball-of-the-foot-to-heel was the norm.

    If you’re going to walk barefoot, make sure you learn how to walk barefoot safely. Here’s a pretty good video about how to do it correctly: https://pi.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=3iLJ0frWE9E



  • I’ve watched Sabine for awhile, she’s a really great science reporter who keeps things simple and pretty brief. Just a note though, I feel like she sometimes takes very skeptical and conservative views on some subjects where she doesn’t really have any expertise. It also makes me kind of uncomfortable how she seems to be obsessed with Elon Musk, she mentions him in basically every video.

    Despite all that, she’s pretty great, check her out, just keep in mind she talks about a lot of things she isn’t an expert in.





  • It’s definitely an edge case by say you’re in ~/ and you run a script like ./code/script.sh then it thinks the current working direct is ~/ rather than what is probably intended which is ~/code/. If your bash script uses full paths like /home/$USER/code/ then it will still run correctly regardless of the current working directory that the scrip was run from.




  • That’s true of any galaxies which aren’t gravitationally bound. At closer distances (tens/hundreds of millions of light years) gravity wins out over the expansion of space and keeps things together. At larger distances, the expansion of space wins out and clusters of galaxies will drift apart faster and faster until the combined speed of them moving away and us moving away from them will exceed the speed of light and we’ll never see those galaxies again.

    Our neck of the woods is called the Local Group because scientists are bad at naming things and includes the Milky Way galaxy, and the Andromeda galaxy, as well as between 50 to 80 more galaxies.

    As for the black holes, yes, eventually all that will be left are black holes for trillions of years until even those evaporate which is often called the “Heat Death” of the universe. That is just a theory, but if it’s true, it won’t happen for 1.07x10^106 years. Considering the universe is only 13.8 billion years old right now, that’s a very, very, very long time.






  • I’m not a professional, but just an enthusiast but I’ll try to simplify the article from my layperson perspective, so take my interpretation with a grain of salt.

    The new theory seems to point to how Einstein’s theory of gravity considers the “energy-momentum tensor” to be unchanged in all scenarios. The energy-momentum tensor describes the relationship of energy as it changes between various forms, for example a stick of dynamite exploding changes the chemical energy stored in the dynamite into kinetic energy - the force of the explosion - and if you calculated the energy of both they would be equal to the initial chemical energy stored in the unexploded stick of dynamite. Which is called the “law of conservation of energy”, that energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed into a different form of energy.

    The problem arises in high-energy situations where infinities start to appear in the equations. If you know much about math then infinities can break equations, and often in physics if there are infinities appearing in your equation then it usually means that you’re missing something crucial. So scientists can use a technique called renormalization which can apply tweaks to equations to reduce these infinity spikes. At these high-energy situations described, renormalization fails and the equations can’t be properly satisfied no matter how you tweak the variables. This is a big problem since a correct theory should be able to come up with answer for all possible situations that might arise within the system it’s trying to describe without breaking.

    Einstein’s field theory - which is a model used to describe spacetime based on the distribution of matter within it - uses the curvature of spacetime, the relationship between stress and energy, and the cosmological constant. The new theory proposed suggests that adding to Einstein’s field theory with math that accounts for the relationship between temperature and entropy, and the relationship between charge and interaction changes the equation in such a way that the infinities disappear, even at higher energy levels which traditionally break field theory, and most importantly that it’s still consistent with observations.