Random chance gambling. All throughout history there have been many statistical anomalies and if I joined them in such a competition, I’d have just as good a chance at winning as anyone else.

Seems like a short term problem. The birth rate in Good Korea is so low that before long they’ll have vastly more housing than people to live in it.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of cool and useful stuff you can do with KDE Plasma (and Kwin).

Another tip: Did you know that KRunner (Alt-Space) can do unit conversions? Type Alt-Space and 10cm or something like that and it’ll give you that value in inches.

Another: You can bind shortcuts to mouse buttons like Ctrl-Alt-Right (click) And Ctrl-Alt-Left to say, switch desktops right/left.

You can type Ctrl-i in Dolphin to filter files. So if you’re looking at your enormous downloads directory and you want to see all the .png files you can type Ctrl-i, png and it’ll only show you files with png in their name.

KDE’s “get hot new stuff” framework works with Dolphin “actions” (context menu file handlers) so you can go into the settings—>Context Menu and click on “Download New Services” to browse tons of free scripts/tools that let you do things like file conversions, write disk images to USB drives, get checksums, etc.

I actually made a personal script that converts videos to looping .webp files (or just sets WebP files to loop forever). So I can right click on a .WebP, .webm, .mp4, etc and it’ll run ffmpeg on it in the background.

Eternal Forms™

Hell’s software of choice.

Every decade since 1999 (the year of the Linux desktop—for me) I spend a few weeks trying out all the hot new shit in terms of desktop environments. I’ll switch to Gnome for a few days, get disappointed at how much I miss from KDE, and then try one of the newer ones like Cosmic. Then I’ll play with the latest versions of the classics (xfce) and marvel that they still make you configure everything in a single file or they still lack basic shit that normal people want like a clipboard manager.

All the actually useful or just plain really, really nice/handy stuff is built into KDE Plasma. I’ve been using so many of those features for so long, I can’t fathom having to go back to a world without say, being able to navigate the filesystems on all my other PCs via ssh:// (and other KIO workers).

I remember when KDE 2.0 came out and it added support for kioslaves (now called KIO Workers) and it completely changed how I viewed desktops. That was in the year 2000. How is it that literally nothing else (not other FOSS desktops nor Windows or Macs) has implemented the same feature?

It’s not just the file manager, either. I can access ssh:// (or any other KIO worker) from any file dialog! The closest thing is shared drives in Windows but even that isn’t nearly as flexible or feature rich (or efficient, haha).

Then there’s the clipboard manager (klipper), Activities, and a control panel that lets you customize everything to extreme degrees. It even supports fractional scaling and has supported that since forever. I remember when they introduced that feature over a decade ago and it still blows my mind to this day just how forward thinking the devs were.

Monitors since forever have had a different X DPI than the Y DPI. Yet only the KDE devs bothered to both query the monitor’s DDC info to figure that out and set it correctly when the desktop starts.

There’s other features that drive me nuts when I don’t have them! For example, the ability to disable global shortcuts on specific windows. So if I’ve got a remote desktop open to my work I can send Super-. (Win-.) and that’ll open the Windows emoji picker in the remote desktop instead of the KDE one (locally). And it will remember this setting for that application!

I can make any window I want stay above others temporarily to take notes, enter values into the calculator, or just turn any window into something like a HUD (you can control any window’s transparency on the fly!).

It even supports window tiling! A feature most people aren’t aware of. Like, if you’re already running KDE, why bother with a tiling window manager? You’ve already got it (though the keyboard shortcuts to manage the tiling layout in real time are lacking).

TL;DR: KDE Plasma is the best desktop in existence across all platforms and this is easy to prove with empircal evidence.

Oh… I remember the last time someone said this about a decade ago. Good times!

“Kids these days” have all the best toys/games. It’s been true for like 100 years now.

Something better will replace Roblox. It’s as sure as taxes.

It’s no different than other kinds of voting: It only works if everyone is well-informed.

I did a ton of research about the neurological differences (the kind controlled by hormones like oxytocin) between men and women for a book… Men and women are equally emotional but testosterone is a literally “chemical brake” on tear production… Which is a stress reliever (reduces cortisol).

What this means is that if you have a room full of people and the women are crying because something awful happened, it’s likely that the men would also be crying if they didn’t have testosterone cutting it off. The same emotions are there, it’s just they aren’t as visible (external) in the men.

That’s just the most obvious, easy thing to explain (everyone understand tears) but there’s so, so much more to this kind of thing. Understanding these sorts of differences would be greatly beneficial to society. If only there were some area of study for this kind of thing…

Wait until you see Gen Alpha’s spending on alcohol!

Yeah it’s a common thought: An afterlife where people gather before going on to the next.

Usually, people think that the quality of your choices for the next life will be based on whatever criteria they think was most important in life. Someone who went out of their way to be nice will believe that it will be based on how nice you were. Whereas someone who spent their life accumulating money/power will assume it’s based on that.

For all we know, though, your “afterlife score” could be based on how many different sorts of food you tried, how many buttons you pressed, how far you traveled from where you were born, etc.

I actually have a novel idea about this concept: Dude dies and gets the red carpet treatment in the afterlife. He’s very happy about it but he doesn’t understand… He never got married and spent most of his life doing data entry and courtroom steganography.

Turns out, he got the high score in “button pressing.” He’s at the top of the leaderboard and this qualifies him for all sorts of “premium” reincarnation options. Not only that, but the gods intend to put his talents to use right away on “pressing issues.”

Comcast—in the top ten of the shittiest companies of all time that no one wants to have to deal with—is surprised that their “new” deal of, “be slightly less villainous, and expect all our problems to go away” isn’t working.

Some day, you will fall down.

In hell, they just use Crow Pilot for this sort of thing.

Me, at life’s exit interview…

“Sooo… I’m regards to my, er, contributions to the good of the world… Does open source software count? What about all those times I made witty comments that made a few people smile? 😬”

If there’s so much gold you can pave the streets with it, it’s not very valuable.

Having said that, if we’re all living in a simulation, then having our “streets” (cables) paved with gold sounds fantastic 👍

Only thing better would be fiberoptic cable but that might not be possible since you can’t carry power over fiber 🤷

Aside: You can generate power from light traveling through fiber optic cable but it’s not the same thing as carrying power efficiently over copper or (better) gold.

Speaking about assumptions about the afterlife, people who believe in reincarnation typically believe that after you die, you get reincarnated. The assumption there is that it happens right away. What if it happens like a thousand years after you die or maybe an entire universe goes by?

Wrong way to handle AI summaries: Google crawls the article and presents it’s summary.

Right way to handle AI summaries: Your own browser uses a local AI model on your PC to generate the summary.

The first is easy to stop with legislation, the second is impossible to stop and yet, if you try you’re a fucking asshole trying to tell people what they can and cannot do with their own hardware. That’s straight up villain behavior.

Quick! Someone throw a bucket of water on her!

Now you have me thinking: Isn’t “FUCK VILLAIN” just another way of saying, “rapist”?