But the more relevant part is that since your Win10 install is on a VM, it can’t do shit on the rest of your system, and the GPU access is just there so that it won’t run as slow as shit when gaming, right?

Pretty much

I tried to look it up, and as far as I understood it, it’s a technique that allows a virtual machine to access a physical GPU directly. I guess that means that even if your VM is elsewhere (a server or wherever) it can still use the GPU you have.

So, to get more technical, there’s a motherboard technology called IOMMU, which was developed for containing malware that has infected device firmware. What Linux has is a kernel module that allows an IOMMU group to be isolated from the host operating system, and connected up to a virtual machine as if it were real hardware. On an expensive motherboard, you get a different IOMMU group for each PCIe lane, each M.2 socket, each cluster of USB ports, etc. On a cheap one, you get one that for each type of device, maybe the PCIe lanes are divided into two groups.

So the fun part, and why we do this, is that when you have two GPUs, in different IOMMU groups, one can remain on host and allow graphics drivers, desktop environment, etc. to remain loaded, while the other can be connected to the VM and used entirely for gaming (theoretically, if you wanted to you could game on both systems at once). Thankfully, cheap, shit secondary GPUs aren’t expensive (was once on a 710, ditched that and its many driver issues for a 1050, and my main remains a 980ti), but setting up the main GPU to switch between proper drivers and “vfio-pci”, the drivers that have to be loaded before the passthrough can occur, can be a pain.

Believing that the moon landing was a hoax, or that dark matter doesn’t exist, is ultimately harmless. The same cannot be said of disagreeing with proven, helpful medical knowledge, in favour of a gut-feeling based alternative that only makes things worse. It is a moral imperative to make you realise you are wrong, or failing that, thoroughly demonstrate it to everyone watching, so your harmful ideas do not spread.

There is something to be said for using squat toilets instead of sitting toilets in public bathrooms, so long as there are properly cleaned sitting toilets for the elderly and disabled (I have seen some shocking disabled public bathrooms over the years)

So, unpacking your worldview here, how do you feel about cancer brought about by smoking, or by prolonged exposure to materials that you know are radioactive and/or carcinogenic? Does that change with the knowledge that processed meat and plastics, things that are impossible to avoid unless you structure your life around limiting exposure to them, are most likely mild carcinogens?

Also, please tell me, regardless of how you classify addiction, that you at least understand that the only evidence-based approach to drugs is decriminalisation. Almost all of the societal ills associated with them are entirely the fault of their possession and sale being crimes. You can’t find safe environments to use them in if they’re illegal, nor can you feel safe seeking medical aid if you’ve taken too high a dose without realising it. If you’re a dealer, you have no regulatory bodies to answer to, and pay no taxes on the money you make. If you’re running organised crime, you’re already sitting on enough of a supply to land you in jail for the rest of your life, and that makes murdering competitors seem like a much more palatable option. And then there’s the developing world. Most of the money this makes ends up back in the hands of rebels, warlords and cartels in the developing world, where they cause untold misery and suffering.

But if you legalise them, that nips most of those problems in the bud. You can publicly admit to using them, feel safe seeking medical aid when you mistakenly take too much, get help from programs designed to end your dependence. The dealers go out of business, replaced by actual stores that pay taxes and follow regulations, like not being able to sell to minors or water down your product to sell more of it. Organised crime loses one of its biggest sources of money overnight, given that their expensive material of unknown origin and purity is suddenly replaced by cheaper material of known origin and purity. The cross-border smuggling also ceases, because what else are you going to find that is illegal, compact, and high in value? Oh, and the developing world can actually benefit from drug production, since the criminal groups will be greatly weakened from the loss of profits, and developed world importers would rather deal with legitimate businesses than violent criminals and rebels.

We learnt this shit a century ago with alcohol, one of the most destructive drugs (even meth would not be as destructive if legalised), why are we still doing it?

So you don’t care that the majority of people who abuse drugs are doing it to self-medicate something, be that pain, depression from the state of their life, or an undiagnosed neurological condition?

(Adderall is just a dilute relative of meth, and so has similar effects on ADHD brains, i.e. makes us more functional. Also, there is research showing that cannabis has a positive effect on autistic brains, which would explain why so many autistic people I know love their greenery. Plus, anecdotes from fellow ADHDers of “I microdose weed because it helps me focus better, and it’s easier to get than legal adderall”)

I’m one of those maniacs who went to the trouble of setting up a GPU passthrough VM instead of dual booting, and I have no intention of switching it from Win10 to Win11. If it gets infected, it can’t do jack or shit to the important parts of my system, and I can either roll back to a snapshot or nuke it.

Consider the following, though:

Advertising is a huge fucking scam, and only worth about 1-5% of the money it generates

Personally I’m the opposite, I feel like even if we can’t stop CO2 emissions fast enough, there is always geoengineering to counteract it, and human brain uploading will probably be a thing by the start of next century? At which point humanity can basically live until the heat death of the universe, because of how durable electronics can be compared to squishy human flesh.

Bit late to this, but I have a couple of big ones:

1. Once brain uploading becomes a thing, the code/data of an uploaded person should be sacrosanct. You can’t look at it, you can’t fuck with it, unless they give you consent to do so.

2. Once it becomes a possibility, every human should either move off-world or revert back to a hunter-gatherer existence. Humans in general have been a disaster for the biosphere, but especially once we started settling down and farming, and even more so once industrialisation became a thing. Earth needs time to heal from the damage we have done to it, and that means most people + all our industry and technology fucking off into space. Namely into space colonies, big rotating cans of steel the size of large islands, filled with dirt, air, water and artificial biospheres.

One where the average rent has now eclipsed the average mortgage repayment, and where all we export to the rest of the world is raw resources that are less in demand than ever

I get by fine with Duckduckgo and Ecosia, thank you very much.

Hope you enjoy being laid off when your company eats itself to keep the growth going for just a little longer to please the capitalist parasites known as “shareholders”. You can’t much money from ads when the economy is utterly, utterly in the shitter like it is right now, not nearly as much as you used to. You really think that the average person has the financial leeway to buy luxury goods or pricier options shown in ads when the budget barely covers food, bills, rent and transport costs, and everything they do buy must be the cheapest thing they can get their hands on? Your company, and all other internet companies supported by ads, made a pact with the devil, and now he has come to collect his due. I will enjoy seeing you all go hard into the red.