It would be because cron runs as the root user.

Castget probably looks at the file path $HOME/.castgetrc. For your regular user, $HOME is probably /home/myamazingusername. For the root user, $HOME is probably /root .

You can get a root terminal session by running sudo -i in a terminal console window. You can try running castget there to see what happens.

Sudo -n:

-n, --non-interactive
  Avoid prompting the user for input of any kind.  If a
  password is required for the command to run, sudo, will
  display an error message and exit.

It's just a nice thing to put in non-interactive scripts that use sudo. Sometimes you can end up with scripts that just wait endlessly for a password that will never be input because the script is being run non-interactively. The flag probably isn't needed for a cron job, because root probably can sudo as any user without a password, but it doesn't hurt either.

EDIT: I didn't know that there are user crontab entries as well. If you just used crontab -e without using sudo, then you don't need to worry about the job being run as root.

In line with the advice that running as root would likely not run with the correct file permissions (and would not read the correct config files), you probably want to run castget as your desktop user. Something like sudo -u mydesktopuser -n -- castget -c

It would also be such a cruel monster for the world's inhabitants. Kill the thing that's been eating tons of people? Well it's significantly stronger now.

And yeah, the centipede makes it clear that the monsters can do whatever they did in the video game. No limits.

In this episode: Ruche attacks twice. See you next week! I'm only half joking, we do get to see a new skill and we get some monster lore, potentially plot related.

I think that the show's choice (perhaps LN's or manga's choice) of having the Elymas narrate their pre-fight plan during the fight is bad. Imagine if they talked beforehand about how to get Rouche on the centipedes back. Then I'm more invested in how they can pull it off. Instead, I'm watching them do stuff, and then they tell me that they successfully did what they planned to do. Imagine if Elyma explained beforehand why logically the centipede shouldn't be able to evolve. Then I think I'm more surprised when it does evolve and I feel more inline with Elymas' surprise. Instead, I'm just surprised that the centipede can evolve at all. More generally, whether something goes to plan or doesn't go to plan, I'm not going to be very invested if I don't know what the plan is!

Venture capital funding. The plan is always to do a rug pull. Though if it properly freely licensed and the code is reasonable enough to be forked, it's less worrying but still risky. It's better to work with honest people.

A developer submitted a PR code change for systemd userdb.

My proposals (that's really what PRs are) are to implement a solution that meets the regulatory requirements in several jurisdictions by providing a way to store a self-reported birthdate locally on the machine. These laws also require that this date is collected during account creation (hence why I made PRs against installers) and you can enter any value here, even January 1st, 1900. There is no proof required, no ID scanning, and no external tracking. Nor do I have any desire for that to ever change.

Apparently the developer is confirmed to be just a regular guy. He thinks it'd be worse if every desktop environment implements their own solution to comply with these laws. He's against the various laws related to this incident.

As a fallout for submitting this pull request, he has been extensively harassed. His personal information being repeatedly posted online; his information used to sign up to a lot of sites, groups, churches, car dealerships, ordering food for him; threats of murder; regular textual harassment.

/home is not deprecated, it's optional but common. Here is the section from FHS: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/...

That was a lame place to end the season, unless the next season picks up again in a few months. Overall I had a nice time with this show.

Personally, I'm not a fan of requiring analysis of the individualized input to reach the correct (sufficiently efficient) solution for part 2. Or maybe I'm just resentful because I feel like I've been duped after writing an generalized-to-the-puzzle-description-but-insufficiently-efficient solution. 😔

These quantum ghosts need to come back down to reality.

The way Demons think in this show is a lot like LLM Chat AIs like ChatGPT work. They don't really think too much, not in the way humans do, but they excel at producing something that humans approve of. If you don't probe them too much, they look just like humans. But if you probe too far you see that their behavior is a facade and that their underlying thoughts are not like humans, and they don't necessarily even understand the words they use to appease humans. What happens when their facade improves? If a demon spent its entire life perfectly acting as a nice and thoughtful human, never causing any harm, would you still call it a monster?

Demons and LLM Chat AIs differ in what their underlying thoughts are. LLM Chat AIs generally want approval. On the other hand, Demons want to survive and eat humans. They use language to manipulate humans and get what they want.

but if you believe AC

Every time I see an AC ranking with shows I've watched I'm reminded that I shouldn't trust AC.

The first thing is to do is to understand what you're looking at. Read this:

systemd-analyze blame¶

This command prints a list of all running units, ordered by the time they took to initialize. This information may be used to optimize boot-up times. Note that the output might be misleading as the initialization of one service might be slow simply because it waits for the initialization of another service to complete. Also note: systemd-analyze blame does not display results for services with Type=simple, because systemd considers such services to be started immediately, hence no measurement of the initialization delays can be done. Also note that this command only shows the time units took for starting up, it does not show how long unit jobs spent in the execution queue. In particular it shows the time units spent in "activating" state, which is not defined for units such as device units that transition directly from "inactive" to "active". This command hence gives an impression of the performance of program code, but cannot accurately reflect latency introduced by waiting for hardware and similar events.

For example: I have passphrase disk encryption (no TPM encryption), and the time I take to enter the passphrase is added to many entries in systemd-analyze blame. Here is the output of systemd-analyze blame if I wait 2 minutes to enter my disk encryption passphrase:

2min 12.640s sys-module-fuse.device
2min 12.618s sys-devices-platform-MSFT0101:00-tpm-tpm0.device
2min 12.618s dev-tpm0.device
2min 12.551s dev-ttyS0.device
2min 12.551s sys-devices-pnp0-00:00-00:00:0-00:00:0.0-tty-ttyS0.device
2min 12.550s dev-ttyS2.device
...

So, I guess my advice is that systemd-analyze blame is not always going to be a clear indicator that a particular service is holding your boot times back. The .device entries in particular probably just represent how long after boot that the device became active. And unfortunately the systemd-analyze tools do not always lead you to the underlying delay.

$ systemd-analyze critical-chain dev-tpm0.device
The time when unit became active or started is printed after the "@" character.
The time the unit took to start is printed after the "+" character.

dev-tpm0.device +2min 12.618s

$ systemd-analyze critical-chain dracut-initqueue.service
The time when unit became active or started is printed after the "@" character.
The time the unit took to start is printed after the "+" character.

dracut-initqueue.service +2min 11.123s
└─systemd-udev-trigger.service @770ms +158ms
  └─systemd-udevd-varlink.socket @760ms +65us
    └─system.slice
      └─-.slice

If you are trying to deal with an issue that is causing significant delays in your boot time, journalctl --boot can sometimes be helpful. For the example boot above where I waited 2 minutes before entering the disk encryption passphrase:

Jul 31 14:09:39 mycomputer kernel: Linux version 7.1.5-201.fc44.x86_64 (mockbuild@9b86e96a386140128351588d751166fd) (gcc (GCC) 16.1.1 20260515 (Red Hat 16.1.1-2), GNU ld versi>
... (a lot of log lines within a few seconds, but then I find a big jump) ...
Jul 31 14:09:44 mycomputer kernel: [drm] pre_validate_dsc:1667 MST_DSC dsc precompute is not needed
Jul 31 14:11:48 mycomputer systemd-cryptsetup[551]: Set cipher aes, mode xts-plain64, key size 512 bits for device /dev/disk/by-uuid/...
... (and then there are a lot of log lines in the following seconds after the above line) ...

From the documentation site you linked, Q4OS doesn't run inside Windows. The Q4OS installer runs inside Windows, and it stores the root filesystem for Q4OS as a file inside an existing Windows drive partition. I'm not personally aware of other Linux OS's that do either of these things, nor do I particularly desire a Linux OS that does either of these things. I can see it being useful if you want to keep your Windows installation fully intact. I imagine disk I/O performance takes a small hit.

It is annoying that you can't necessarily connect to all instances from your favorite instance, but this is also what makes the fediverse great compared to more centralized social media. Even though dessalines decided to delist ani.social, ani.social still exists and is still connected to instances other than lemmy.ml.

Although seemingly distorted views of reality coming from the main lemmy dev team do concern me.

Hmm, it's not so clear to me what the obvious loophole is. There's 2 reasonable loopholes that come to mind, but neither strike me as something that Akane would so viscerally react to. (This is not an invitation to explain, as that invites spoilers-camouflaged-as-theory.) The abstract visual does bias me slightly towards one explanation.

Also, the guy at the end... I almost laughed. Maybe that's intentional, I can't tell.

I'd think so. 3k is so many pixels to compute and send 60 times a second.

But this video says the effect on battery life in their test was like 6%, going from 4k to 800x600. I can imagine that some screens are better at saving power when running at lower resolutions... but what screen manufacturer would optimize energy consumption for anything but maximum resolution? 🤔 I guess the computation of the pixels isn't much compared to the expense of having those physical dots. But maybe if your web browser was ray-traced? ... ?!

Also, if you take a 2880x1800 screen and divide by 2 (to avoid fractional scaling), you get 1440x900 (this is not 1440p), which is a little closer to 720p than 1080p.

Four contrarians walk into a bar. The first one says "ouch, I stubbed my toe on a chair". The second one says "there is no actual bar, because this is a joke", the third one says "no it is real, I'll have one real beer, please". The fourth one walks away.

But more seriously: yikes.

Aqua is spot on, Mem-cho starring in Love Now is pretty out-there. Mem-cho must have significant mental fortitude.

Also a good amount of air-time for Kana in this episode. Including a song?! I thought it was only play for a few seconds, but they played a whole 90 second song! I'm hoping the next couple episodes have more Kana in them so we can continue to see her character develop.

They also posted the songs from today on Youtube!

• Green Pepper Exercise
• Full moon...!

I'm not familiar with Radeon PowerPlay, so I don't know if there is a proper way to solve this, but you should be able to make a systemd system service to run the upp command on boot.

To do so, I think you can use the following:

[Unit]
Description=Run my_user_script
After=suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target suspend-then-hibernate.target


[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=upp -p /sys/class/drm/card1/device/pp_table set --write smc_pptable/SocketPowerLimitAc/0=312 smc_pptable/SocketPowerLimitDc/0=293 smc_pptable/TdcLimit/0=300 smc_pptable/FreqTableSocclk/1=1350 smc_pptable/FreqTableFclk/1=2000 smc_pptable/FclkBoostFreq=2000

[Install]
WantedBy=suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target suspend-then-hibernate.target

To configure this service:

• Save the text (using sudo/root) to a new .service file in /etc/systemd/service. (e.g. /etc/systemd/system/my_update_pp.service)
• run sudo systemctl daemon-reload to tell systemd to re-read the service files
• run sudo systemctl restart my_update_pp.service to manually run the service
• run sudo systemctl enable my_update_pp.service to tell systemd to run your service automatically on boot/wake (WantedBy tells systemd when it should include the unit/service, After, Wants, Requires, and Before help systemd decide the order to run all the units/services)

Notes

• Usually for simple systemd services, you can omit After and set WantedBy to just WantedBy=multi-user.target, but if you also need to run upp after sleep or hibernate, then you probably need something more complex. I copied the After and WantedBy from a stackexchange answer, but I haven't tried using those targets before. You might have to add multi-user.target to the WantedBy list.
• I don't actually know if you need to run upp after sleep/hibernate. Running on boot might be sufficient.
• I think you can skip the chmod if you run upp as sudo/root. Systemd system services run as root by default.
• I don't know how safe it is to mess with PowerPlay during boot. My gut says it's probably fine, but it also seems like something that could cause graphics to not work. Tread carefully.

References:

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/...
• https://www.freedesktop.org/...
• https://www.freedesktop.org/...
• https://www.man7.org/...

Shows for Winter 2024 on my radar, that I am interested in watching:

• Classroom of the Elite: first two seasons were fun, looking forward to season 3
• Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki: first season was OK, I'm interested in where the story will go
• Mato Seihei no Slave: I vaguely recall someone saying there was something good about the source material
• MASHLE: first season was OK, I'm not very interested in S2, I might binge it when the season is complete
• Blue Exorcist: oh, another season. It's been a while. I remember liking the first season and being confused at the start of the second season (it's about 6 years between each season, so maybe I just forgot some important details. From a S2 MAL review: "the season does not follow the end of season 1. Episodes 18-25 were not canon and accordingly, they do not exist in season 2", I didn't know this, so maybe that was my problem)
• The Dangers in My Heart: first season was fantastic, excited for the second season
• A Sign of Affection: the source material is rated highly on MAL, I'll give it a shot
• Banished from the Hero's Party: First season was OK
• TSUKIMICHI: I liked the first season, looking forward to the second season
• The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil: I saw the PV, I'll give it a shot
• Cherry Magic!: The source material is rated well on MAL, I'll give it a shot
• The Witch and the Beast: The source material is rated well on MAL, I'll give a shot
• The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash: WILDCARD, I dunno, it sounds like absolute trash from the title, but I think I'll give it a shot anyways