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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, Gnome is like the Apple of the Linux world. The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design. The issue tracker is a lot of “hey the OS won’t let me do [edge-case scenario that an OS should be able to do, but which most users won’t bother with]” followed by the devs going “Gnome isn’t designed to support [edge-case scenario]. Bug report closed.” Like the devs have a very “it’s not a bug; It’s a feature” mentality, and anyone who runs into that bug must be using the OS “wrong”.


  • Sure, but it’s a serious issue which is worth mentioning. Lots of Linux fanboys conveniently sidestep the whole “having the most popular GPU on the market will wreck your install” issue.

    It’s absolutely something worth mentioning when you’re pushing someone to try Linux, because the “it’s so easy nowadays” rhetoric does nothing to help when it doesn’t turn out to be easy. If you’re genuinely trying to get people to use Linux as a daily driver, it’s worth warning them about some of the common pitfalls so they can go in with realistic expectations.

    If they go in all starry-eyed and discover it’s not easy, they’re less likely to try it again in the future. After all, they were lied to the last time someone told them it was easy. Why would this time be any different?


  • It has always been there, but until Trump’s first term the Nazis were at least cautious about things. They were afraid to openly and publicly spout their BS, unless they were in large groups. Because they knew that if they held up swastika signs on the street corner, that they’d very quickly get punched in the mouth.

    But Trump changed that. Depending on how old you are, you may remember the “he tells it like it is/he’s not afraid to say what’s really on his mind” types of support for Trump during his first term. What a lot of those people were really saying is “he makes me feel empowered to say what’s is on my mind.” And what was on their mind was white supremacy and nazism. When the highest office in the land is tacitly (and sometimes directly) supporting white supremacists, they feel emboldened. And when they feel emboldened, they escalate.

    What used to be whispered racist jokes escalated into passive racism. What used to be passive racism escalated into active racism. What used to be active racism escalated into openly hostile racism. And what used to be openly hostile racism escalated into nazism.

    And the issue is that Trump/Musk have given Nazis a forum to meet other Nazis. Before, being a Nazi was a fairly lonely hobby. Finding other Nazis carried a lot of risk, because it meant potentially exposing yourself and getting your life ruined. But with Musk buying Xitter, Trump building Truth Social, etc… Yeah, suddenly the Nazis felt empowered to actually start talking to each other. The same way flat earthers used to just be your crazy uncle who smoked too much in his garage. But now that crazy uncle is part of a Flat Earth Society that regularly does large “experiments” to try and prove the earth is flat. By finding a forum to connect with other like-minded individuals, people feel emboldened as their views feel more normalized.





  • It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.


  • And here’s a reminder that if you run a Plex server, there’s an app called Prologue which turns it into a fully fledged audiobook server.

    Plex doesn’t natively support things like audiobook bookmarks in m4b files, and tries to just play them straight through like a gigantic 4 hour long music track. But Prologue does support bookmark data. Prologue simply uses Plex’s service to access the files, (because admittedly, Plex is good for letting newbies remotely access their content) and then it ignores Plex’s built-in “lol just play it like music” instructions, and actually parses the files for bookmark data.

    As someone who couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to work properly, (something about not being able to access network drives via Docker), Prologue has saved my audiobook library by allowing me to just host it via Plex instead.


  • The server owners can’t see your phone number. Discord allows you to set a minimum verification level for users in your server. The lowest is simply having a verified email on their account. The highest is a verified email, a few minutes old (so no brand new accounts), been in the server for a few minutes, and a verified phone number. It’s just a bot prevention thing, because spammers/scammers are a big issue on large Discord servers. Especially early in Discord’s history, it was a big issue where bots would raid a server and just totally shut it down with spam links. So Discord started allowing server owners to set minimum verification levels before users could interact and send messages.


  • And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a correlates with the development of ADHD later on.

    FTFY. Correlation≠Causation, especially in cases like you mentioned. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

    Are kids getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD? Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited. Every single adult with ADHD has stories about getting focused on a project right before bedtime, then suddenly realizing the birds are chirping outside their window and the sun is rising.




  • Until I learned the whole story about Musk’s takeover of Tesla, I had no idea how bad and overconfident he was at engineering and business, but once I learned that, a lot of things started to make a lot more sense.

    Yeah, my cousin used to work at SpaceX, and it’s sort of an open secret that they need to actively keep Elon away from the engineers. They have entire teams of people dedicated to shoving menial decisions and distractions in front of him, so he doesn’t have time to wander over to the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office door, there are multiple people whose sole job is dedicated to subtlety redirecting him off to other non-critical wings of the building to keep him distracted. Because if he ever talks to the rocket engineers, he’ll try to one-up them by dropping some asinine “we’re going to do it this dumb way instead” decree that requires them to scrap their entire current project and start over from scratch (for the third time this week.)


  • Sure, but this is a little like saying “there is no moral consumption under capitalism, so I choose not to participate in it.” The reality is that the entire society around you is fundamentally built upon something, to the point that only the people who aren’t financially struggling can afford to insulate themselves from it. If someone is financially hurting, telling them “lol just move across town to an apartment that costs 6x as much so you can be near a station and take the train to work” is a fucking deranged suggestion.