https://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

instead of Gentoo.

I agree with your limited-set:

TheRegister & Ars Technica are the 2 that give the highest quality overview,

and yeah, Phoronix is kinda required for Linux news,

and … how the hell could churning more be somehow increasing one’s productivity??

Stephen R. Covey’s truth about…

• the bigger one’s Circle of Concern…
• the smaller one’s Circle of Influence…

one must Focus, or one is just mindlessly dissipating one’s finite strength.

Limit one’s inputs, to quality overview points, and know which other-sites to hit, for specific digging-down into some specialty,

( Leonard Susskind’s lectures, on yt, e.g. for mental exercise: his “Time As A Fractal Flow” one is awesome, when the lightbulb goes on, at the end )

and then you win most.

Never let sand into your gears, in other words, eh?

Keeping all the “misc sand” out from one’s “gears” makes one more productive.

Oh, also www.SemiAccurate.com for the semiconductor foundry industry news, if Demerjian’s still updating that ( he’s scooped the industry toooo many times to let that one escape being important! )

_ /\ _

You, and everybody interested in this who wants real integrity in their leverage to argue this stuff, need to get Hofstadter’s remapping of gender-terms from Mr vs Miss & Mrs to …

… IF you are white, THEN there is 1 pronoun for you, …

… ELSIF you are black, THEN your pronoun is dependent on whether you’re employed or not

written by Douglas Hofstadter ( author of “Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”, the keystone to competent philosophy ), for Scientific American magazine, decades ago.

It may be in the “Metamagical Themas” book.

It was mentioned in the 1990’s in the Feminism FAQ as being trailblazing, because it caused what we were unconscious-of to GET in our faces, violating our habits, so we could actually perceive just how prejudiced it is.

searching … This may be it…

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

I only glanced at it, it’s too jarring for me ( I’d rather that I could just live in solitary isolation for the entire rest of my life: humanity’s abuse ), but it may help crystalize the ability to articulate just how stilted this all is.

I completely agree that “Mr.” and “Miss”, “Mrs.”, “Mz” all are gender-identifying, and as-such ought be considered illegal under their law.

But exactly as the convict/felon/inmate Yehoshua “Jesus” benJoseph identiied, a couple of millenia ago, legalists insist on the letter-of-the-law, while ignoring whatever law’s inconvenient to their artifice.

Legalists haven’t changed since benJoseph called them “Hypocrites!”.

_ /\ _

That depends on how it affects near-stall flight.

The most efficient cruise that is legal, is 1.30x stall-speed.

If that damage on the leading portion of the wing means your “1.30x” stall-speed cruise is now actually 1.00x, you’re gambling.

There was a DC9 that killed everybody because of pebbled ice wrecking its actual-stall-speed, years ago.

Landing also requires that you dance at the edge of stall, & if your idea of where stall-speed is, is wrong, …

_ /\ _

If it’s changing, you might want to get a brain-scan, immediately.

No, it isn’t normal ( not for me, anyhow ), to the guy who said it is normal.

It’s not an ear thing, it is an auditory-processing thing, so it’s your brain that’s doing it.

The question is why it is doing it.

Perhaps it’s just fuzzy wiring, as most such cases likely are.

( synaesthesia is a case of weird wiring, and I’ve got that, but not in the normal way, not senses blurring into each-other, but rather my non-visual cognition being a kind of “blur” to those senses, so they mesh oddly )

But if it begins changing in either intensity or character, get a scan.

( I’m a braindamage survivor, and it takes decades to adapt to braindamage: prevention/avoidance is better than hating one’s life for decades, while being bullied by all who reject that it could still validly be a problem, and hold that one ought either force oneself into being an “acceptable” drugged psychiatric-zombie, and not “pretend” to be getting better, or one ought be able to be acceptable-pretence, just like Valid People™ are. )

_ /\ _

Spend a half-month considering, deeply, which path you would most-value having taken at the end of your life.

Due to an unconscious psychological-limitation, imagine your funeral at 1.5x your current age ( we apparently have a kind of “horizon” in our ability to understand our meaning beyond that ),

and imagine each significant variant, or compromise, and see how each makes you, in that future-condition/context feel.

Your answer is within you, same as for everyone.

_ /\ _

SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

and not just privilege’s gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered “level” playing-field.

The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_ /\ _

Fish, arthropods, etc, had eggs millions of years before chickens.

_ /\ _

They are going to ignore all laws that are inconvenient to them:

IF Trump isn’t permitted to run, maybe they’ll run with a placeholder, then have Trump be shoehorned-in somehow, perhaps by Republican-electorate decree…

Legalists, same today as in Yehoshua “Jesus” benJoseph’s day, pick & choose which pieces of the letter-of-the-law that they acknowledge.

That has always been their fundamental tactic, along with gaslighting.

Notice how the West held-to Natural Law ( morally-based Law ) in prosecuting Nazis, but … as soon as that was done … the West decided that Legal Posit-ivism ( legalism ) is the West’s right, and nobody has any right to be threatening any privilege through moral-law, as legalism prohibited that sort of behaviour.

Nothing’s changed: human-nature is the same, now, as it was back in the Christian bible’s times.

_ /\ _

A couple of decades ago, iirc, SANS.org ( IF I’m remembering who it was who did it ) put a fresh-install of MS-Windows on a machine, & connected it to the internet.

It took SEVERAL MINUTES for it to be broken-into, & corrupted, botnetted.

The auto-attacks by botnets are continuous: hitting different ports, trying to break-in, automatically.

I’ve had linux desktops pwned from me.

the internet should be considered something like a mix of toxic & corrosive chemicals: “maybe” your hand will be fine, if you dip it in for a moment & immediately rinse it off ( for 3 hours ), but if you leave you limbs dwelling in the virulent slop, Bad Things™ are going to happen, sooner-or-later.

I used to de-infest Windows machines for my neighbours…

haven’t done it in years: they’ll not pay-for good anti-virus, they’ll not resist installing malware: therefore there is no point.

Let 'em rot.

I’ve got a life to work-on uncrippling, & too-little strength/time left.

“but I don’t need antivirus: i never get infected!!”

then how come I needed to de-infest it for you??

“but I don’t need an immune-system: pathogens are a hoax!!”

get AIDS, then, & don’t use anti-AIDS drugs, & see how “healthy” you are, 2 years in.

Same argument, different context-mapping.

Tarpit was a wonderful-looking invention, for Linux’s netfilter/iptables, years ago: don’t help botnets scan quickly & efficiently to help them find a way to break-in…

Anyways, just random thoughts from an old geek…

EDIT: “when do I need to wear a seatbelt?”

is essentially the same category of question.

_ /\ _

IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn’t possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn’t a niche distro, either, iirc.

Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you’re rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn’t sane to continue doing it. )

Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don’t even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

_ /\ _

If it works for you, stick with it.

Works is a feature, not a bug.

_ /\ _

I’m commenting only on a now-traditional disinformation about GMO’s.

I don’t consider mutations to be self-inherently toxic, whether natural or engineered: some are toxic, some aren’t, in either case.

Consider that there are specific plant-materials which grab all the arsenic that they can…

Some ferns do it, rice-bran does it, there probably are others that do it.

It is sooo effective a specialized biology, that it is possible to just keep running water through a special greenhouse filled with such plants, and they’ll concentrate the specific heavy-metals, so they, themselves, can be the HAZMAT containing the arsenic, after…

IOW, you can significantly reduce the amount of loose arsenic in your ecology with deliberate-use of such things.

They weren’t engineered to do that, they just have the genetic machinery to do that.

I’ve read that rice-bran from some areas of Bangladesh, South China, etc, are sooo arsenic-rich, that they are HAZMAT, themselves, according to test/measurement/evidence.

Obviously, some lobbies want GMO to be a simple dog-whistle, they want everybody’s System-1 ( read the important “Thinking Fast & Slow”, by Daniel Kahneman: System-1 is the default-instinct system, it can be trained into conditioned-expertise, it is also the mechanism of both addiction & prejudice ) programmed into automatic, unthinking reaction against GMO.

Consider, though, what I’d enjoy: ZERO caffeine-family coffee.

And chocolate.

They’re too toxic for me, as they are.

That would require genetic-engineering, to remove those methylxanthenes from those plant-parts.

I’m NOT saying that “Round-Up Ready”™ crops are healthy for either us or for our only planet’s ecology, but I AM saying that GMO is a category, and it includes oceans more than just Monsanto’s dependency-developing pseudocrops.

IS it bad when a crop is genetically altered to improve its resistance to some “rust” or blight?

It comes down to the actual case, is what I’m saying.

Same as “All Whites are bad” or “All Nonwhites are bad” is just prejudice, the same is true of surgeries, both at the body-scale & at the molecular scale.

WHICH genetic engineering??

For what?

Where & How, in the genome?

Why?

What are the side-effects of doing that, both for the organism & for the rest of the food-web that it lives-in??

I’m commenting against oversimplification, is all:

dumbed-down may be “easier”, but it is mismanagement, inevitably.

_ /\ _

and if you consider that “economic barrier to entry” can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup’s code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code …

then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one’s code.

“Coopetition” Bill Gates coined, where you “cooperate” with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.

I’ve been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female…

: P

The book “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess” by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women’s-rights simply don’t progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages…

So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…

That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

It’s still true.

Conditioning an entire population’s System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place…

Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas…

… digging …

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

( that isn’t a quick read… may come back to it some day… )

Bingo!

“The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic.”

from

https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people’s System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

What about Hebrew?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

No wonder women can’t get equal-validity in Jewish culture…

( I read a Jewess’s writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ … which explains the damage in the stereotypical “Jewish mother”, a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature… )

So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is … baseless, in some/many cultures…

Interesting, but depressing.

: \

IF by “security” one means bugs have been prevented from living in it, there is one coded in Haskell, it may be named XMonad or something…

( … digging … )

Yep:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad

from there:

“Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]”

Dig: 2000-ish lines of code.

https://xmonad.org/

https://xmonad.org/documentation.html

Hoomin, if you can, please read Daniel Kahneman’s "Thinking Fast & Slow, and also Kegan & Lahey’s “Immunity to Change”.

Your Kahneman System-1 has decided some of your life for you, and your unconscious-mind is fighting-off-adapting, to protect inertia/deadness, and that costs.

You don’t have to accommodate your unconscious-mind doing that: you can change the rules, but it means using the actual leverage of understanding to cause change…

Life happens. Shit happens. Some of us have been set-up to fail. Some of us have set ourselves up to fail.

The fools who pretend that Free Will doesn’t exist, don’t understand that free will exists in time, and your life-vector IS your determination, not today, or this-minute, but your ongoing determination.

Earn your life: change rules in your own unconscious.

The “rat race” won’t do it: it wants to consume your life.

Parents can’t do it for one, one has to do it one’s self.

Friends can’t do it for one, for the same reason.

Give it a shot.

Libraries exist, and maybe they can get the books for you.

Define “Friendly Fire” when it was a bit-error in a logic-board that made an AI butcher our own troops…

This is inevitable, just as autonomous kill-drones are inevitable.

Still jacking-up WW3’s tantrum/pogrom as hard as possible, of course…

The Great Filter is going to change the unconscious-mind nature of whatever remnant surivives this century.

( PS: the only climate-model I know-of that ISN’T contradicted by Antarctica’s current heating, is a powerlaw, and it predicts between 5C & 9C heating for our current atmospheric CO2 & human-added-methane.

5+C when the methane’s CO2-equivalent is ignored, between 8C & 9C when it is included.

That, too, is a Friendly Fire, incident, but planet-scope, right?

Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19798

Factoring in the excess methane, only, that we’re producing, brings it up to 8.33C planetary heating, using methane’s 20y CO2 equivalent. Other manufactured greenhouse-gasses are not included in that estimate.

Other tidbits…

Just Have A Think, Antarctica https://youtu.be/T0qRoeEcKtY

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios – a warning for financial services https://actuaries.org.uk/emperors-new-climate-scenarios

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/08/antarctica-warming-much-faster-than-models-predicted-in-deeply-concerning-sign-for-sea-levels )

Isn’t the Pentagon & the pushers it is addicted-to, every bit as trustworthy as Big Oil?

Russia, the invader, is the Good Guys, in the Russia vs Ukraine war??

Disinformation-propaganda.

https://bigthink.com/thinking/fascism-definition-stanley/

People need to understand those 10 points that are characteristic of Fascism.

Comically, Fascism was invented by a Black man, an African, named Marcus Garvey, and Mussolini stole it from him, then Hitler from him, to the best of my knowledge…

The problem is the end of civil-rights: WHEN the only internet left is the internet that IS for-profit propaganda, auto-deleting all non-compliant human thought, discussion, intelligence, objectivity, etc,

THEN humanity is just managed “steers” whose lives are being consumed by corporations which graze on us.

Since another dimension of ratchet is the concentration-of-wealth, you can see that working-destitution is being enforced on more & more of humankind, and real wealth being limited to fewer & fewer…

What happens when the working-poor try fighting for a fair share of the economy?

Rigged legislation, rigged “police” ( I used to believe in the police ), anti-education Florida-style for the public, etc…

AI tilts the playing-field, and it does-so for the monied special-interest-groups.

They don’t have humanitarianism at heart.

Neither do the politically motivated.

Neither do for-profit-psychopaths ( corporations are psychopaths ).

Living in a Decorator Prison is all humanity can hope for, now: inmates, … except for the fewer & fewer oligarchs & the financial-class.

'tisn’t looking good.

Without Divine Intervention, which is statistically improbable an event, these are The End Times, but not for the reason that the religious claim.