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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • I streamed it while I was working on other things but I thought it was pretty hilarious. Kamala seemed to be intentionally pushing Trumps buttons to derail him and he just could not accept that he is not universally loved.

    Honestly though, given how Trump lies and Kamala was putting on a show the whole thing seemed so cynical and pointless. I’ve watched every presidential and vice presidential debate since Bush Jr.‘s second term even in the "good ol’ days" when it wasn’t just a sound bite circus very rarely was a president even able to achieve the lofty goals they pitched the American people on.

    The whole thing is farcical in 2024. The lack of shared reality the Trump era has ushered in makes it next to impossible to trust anything a politician says. Kamala had spunk and moxy and was very down to earth and likeable, but policy wise she made a lot of statements the presidency doesn’t have the power to deliver on. Even with the insane power the supreme court gave the executive branch a few months ago.

    Trump was Trump. It’s pretty clear how much his brain has rotted when you compare this debate with the one he had with Clinton. But otherwise you can’t trust a single word he says. His position on any matter is irrelevant because he’ll retcon it later if it’s inconvenient. Meanwhile Kamala vowed to continue helping our frenemies do some ethnic cleansing and spent most of the debate posturing for the idiots to stupid to already have an opinion.



  • Nothing, the point I was making is that annoying vegans and linux users would be annoying know-it-alls who never shut up about what they love and feel strongly about regardless of what activity they engage in. Crossfit also has zealots that are famously annoying, so it seemed like an easy way to illustrate my point without getting in the weeds like I have done now. Nothing to do with moral philosophy, annoying people are annoying.




  • News headlines won’t change national culture or policy. The pro-policing subset of America is large and has a lot of dark money supporting. Private prisons and the handful of companies that support them, weapons companies who have seen record profits because we militarized our police after 9/11, and fascist sympathizers and supports all want things like that to happen.

    Unless you, me, and everyone else who cares about the issue called our representatives daily to demand action, nothing will change. Even if every single person who wanted police reform in the US called their federal and local representatives demanding change, there is still a good chance the pro-police-brutality club would still have more influence.


  • Software, 1,000%. I love linux and daily drive it. But when I have videos to edit, photos to rework, or collateral to design I have a windows laptop with professional grade tools to do the job.

    I’m sorry, gimp is hot garbage. There isn’t a pro-grade, open source video editing tool or anything close. Inkscape is useable in a pinch. Scribus is useless.

    Not everyone is a multimedia creative professional, but most software on linux never quite have the features you need, are no longer maintained, or will be useful in ten years.

    That said, I’d still rather break out the laptop when doing client work than daily drive MacOS or Windows 11. Either way the barrier for most users is that linux almost works.


  • The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that’s the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.

    Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you’re after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.

    Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.





  • Personally I’d recommend focusing your time and energy on the things you can control. As an individual, there is nothing you can do alone about it. If you feel strongly enough about it you could join or start an advocacy organization about the part of the problem you find most galling. But the truth is unless enough people both want change and are motivated to take action to get it the world will continue its decline unchecked.

    Volunteer if you can, but try not to let it get to you. The impersonal brutality of our world sucks butts. Some horny french guy would tell you that life is absurd. If everyone agreed we shouldn’t burn fossil fuels, we wouldn’t. But we can’t ever all agree about anything. Most landlords aren’t malicious, they just don’t understand how their greed affects others and don’t care enough to try. The horny french guy’s drinking buddy and metamore would say you can only laugh at the absurdity of existing at all. If you look hard enough the entire universe seems in on how fucked we all. Do what you can, but find something else that makes it bother you less (like a hobby, not a meth habit). I like writing weird stuff and being the model maliciously compliant tenant.

    You totally have a move with the landlord. Follow the rules of your lease chapter and verse. I bet there is a specific clause in there about you being responsible for any unreported maintenance issues. And there is also a clause saying something about the landlord’s responsibility to perform maintenance. There is usually some wiggle room, but there is probably like a two week window in which the landlord is required to fix any issues with their building.

    Report everything. Get on a first name basis with the maintenance folks and whoever answers the phone for your landlord. I had a roach problem because my next door neighbor was a hoarder and left my landlord voicemails every night updating them on all the new locations I have found roaches and my efforts to eradicate them myself. Once the roaches were dealt with my landlord was very willing to overlook those maintenance fees because it’s cheaper than court.

    Edit: and was probably grateful not to deal with that tenant.





  • On a technical level, no. You’re right. It would not be possible to capture the protocol entirely. But meta has serious cash to spend on marketing Threads. If they can capture enough of the ActivityPub market and were to collab with Bluesky and use their protocol (I forget the name), or make their own, it’s only a matter of time before the drop activitypub and force users either to join threads or lose access to their users.

    Threads and Bluesky are kind of an existential threat to ActivityPub given Meta and Twitter’s track record with Open Graph, bootstrap, and public api’s.




  • 100% yeah. I guess I mean that OP is already frustrated by noise in their news sources, rss doesn’t solve curation, which is what it sounds like people think rss does. But if every story you’re shown needs to be relevant to your interests rss isn’t going to fix that.

    Even the perfect news outlet that OP describes is going to have tons of boring stuff. Social media tried solving it with algorithms and will probably move on to AI driven feeds in 18 months, but their profit motive spoils the effort.

    Then again I’ve thought about curation vs. aggregation maybe a bit too much.