And a lot of desktop distros know how to suggest installation so if I type ip addr it might say do you want to "apt install iproute2"? or dnf or whatever I need to make it work regardless of distro.

But if I’m trying to use a GUI it’s harder to figure out how to make a GUI tool appear. What’s it’s package name on this distro? Should I be using Flatpak and if so where’s that? Etc. And this lack of assistance isn’t (just) bad design because I don’t know how you’d design a GUI where I can go “I want the NetworkInspector tool” and it just does the right thing.

Israel has done an amazing job of pushing “antisemitism” to mean “anti-Israel doing whatever crimes they want”.

In a more just world, everyone would talk about how antisemitic Israel is, since the Palestinians are also Semites.

I thought it was because the “groypers”(? some US Nazi clan?) felt he was not Nazi enough. Who knows whether that means pro- or anti-Israel. I’m sure that changes day to day.

3rd Voice is a webcomic in a sort of post-apocalypse setting and the main character Spondule rides a bike. There’s a lot of action and the bike works well in the story–faster than running, but still able to take pretty tight turns.

Maybe the difficulty you’re having is that you want to judge all action as good (it results in a perfect world) or bad (it does not result in a perfect world) and so inaction becomes the only safe course.

The Patriot Act wasn’t created by a single individual. Not only did it require hundreds of powerful politicians working together, but many hundreds of administrative workers, tens of thousands of government employees to apply it, and millions of American voters who approved of it.

Some of the authoritarians behind the Patriot Act were, I’m sure, disappointed at how gentle it is and how few rights it strips away. But they still worked hard every day to enact it and I think you agree that it’s played a role in making America more authoritarian and more willing to accept greater loss of rights.

Do you think it’s possible to make change in the other direction in the same way? Through imperfect, compromised, incremental changes? If not, why do you suppose this only works in one direction?

Maybe you should have been doing something other than waiting patiently for twenty years. I don’t know why people expect something to happen when they do nothing.

If what you’re seeing doesn’t make sense, maybe the problem is in your interpretation?

It sounds like you see R promising “bad thing” and D promising “less-bad thing, but we will move right next time” and so you want to just give up because both options are bad.

But I think this involves viewing the parties as monolithic entities that you have no control over (as seen in “the Democratic Part Elite kept out Bernie”) when they’re actually just composed of people. An important factor is that the American people on average are much more conservative/authoritarian/pro-corporation than typical Europeans. Somewhat by history, somewhat by US-sourced indoctrination, somewhat by foreign-sourced indoctrination.

When I see real-life progressives, they’re always taking the most-progressive available action of the moment. In the moment of a US presidential election in a swing state, that most-progressive action may be voting for the slightly-less-bad candidate. But voting for a candidate doesn’t tie them to that candidate’s policies and they can spend the majority of their time and effort focused on progress.

When I see online progressives(?), they’re primarily concerned with giving up: tearing down other progressives’ efforts because they’re not progressive enough but not offering an alternative. The result of this, intended or not, is a populous who doesn’t offer resistance to authoritarianism and probably welcomes it in the end.

Get your own domain name. You can have Apple or Gmail or Proton host it, but if you ever decide to leave them all your emails still work.

Can the people advocating for AI art provide any examples of anything human-generated that is artistically interesting? I suspect not and that’s a big part of why they’re impressed with AI art.

Like, they’d probably say “The Mona Lisa” because it’s well known to be Great Art, and then their AI can draw them in the style of the Mona Lisa, ergo it has generated Great Art.

One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware. AWS allows you to pay more but have a predictable constant cost.

But I think that you’re right that it’s lack of vision. Everyone’s following the VC-backed company path, where it doesn’t make sense to save money for next year because we’ll be selling some entirely new company then.

This is like voting for US Republicans like, “what, Trump already controls the country and this dude disagrees with him.”

Rowling has said that (1) she will spend all HP profits on hurting trans people and (2) she registers all HP support as support for her agenda.

She absolutely is profiting from it.

When a game is “free” the publisher isn’t just donating it for funzies. Either Epic pays them (Epic is spending money to get people to its platform) or the publisher is using the game to advertise other games, which has value to them.

What’s the “correct” answer here? An essay about the many factors that made it all-but-inevitable that someone would usurp power away from the senate?

Tor is a pretty cool thing that came from the Navy.

I’d be curious to hear how you end up liking it.

As someone who spends a lot of time on the command-line, I’ve generally preferred MacOS over Windows as my not-Linux OS. But my impression is that for people who like the Windows or Linux GUI, MacOS is a bigger (and less pleasant) change.

And even on the command-line, MacOS is a different *nix distro and makes seme pretty weird choices (launchd, plists, /etc is actually /private/etc, …) whereas you could have vanilla Ubuntu inside WSL2.

Conservapedia was comically stupid. Like, there was a lengthy diatribe against the Theory of Relativity that seemed largely based off Andrew Schlafly confusing the Physics term “relativity” with “moral relativity” and being against the latter. This was especially weird because Schlafly personally had a background in applied physics and so ought to know that GPS satellites serve as a proof of some of Relativity.

As embarrassing as basically every page of Conservapedia was, at least it represented some stupid man’s beliefs and effort. Grokipedia can’t even do that.

oh no I suck at lemmy :( (thanks for letting me know it’s broken)

Yeesh. What’s the girlfriend getting out of all of this? Seems like a lot of work to run someone else’s life in addition to your own.

To be fair to New Hampsire: it was the libertarians across the USA who wanted to take over the state (then had to scale back their plans and took over one tiny town). The state government and the majority of state residents were not enthused by the Free State Project. However, the state’s politically-conservative roots meant that they didn’t have the cultural or administrative tools to stop that train-wreck.

Well-earned by Mamdani, but also I hope it’s the last anyone has to see of Cuomo.