I love Debian. I’ve bounced around distros a lot, for various reasons, but I’ll always have a soft spot for Debian.

The problem with reputations — both in terms of Linux distros and just in general — is that they tend to reflect conventional wisdom from 10-20 years ago. Sometimes that conventional wisdom was off-base from the start, and sometimes it’s just outdated.

Like, “Debian is hard” and “Ubuntu is great for beginners”. That was true enough 20 years ago. But today, not really.

My last distro-hop was to Bazzite because Debian didn’t have the latest GPU drivers that I needed (Debian 13 “Trixie” does now, btw). It was just bad timing that I upgraded to a brand-new GPU toward the end of Debian 12’s life cycle. If I’d waited another 6 months (or if I didn’t need good OpenCL/ROCm/Vulkan performance) I probably would’ve stuck with Debian.

I’m fine on Bazzite, but I feel like if I ever hop again, it’ll be back to Debian. Now that I am comfortable with DistroBox, I won’t worry so much about older application packages in Debian repos; if push comes to shove I’ll just run it in a Fedora box or something like that. Drivers are the only thing to worry about, and I’m not likely to upgrade my GPU again for 5+ years so I should be fine.

There are a million of these out there. Most of them suck. Many are, at best, ethically gray. Even the better ones spy on you in a hundred different ways.

I’d love something that actually didn’t suck, but “185 million dollar AI startup” doesn’t sound promising to me.

The big problem with the concept is that there’s money to be made by gaming the system and nobody is good at that cat and mouse game. AI could theoretically help, but let’s be real: it’s just going to scrape the same 100 identical Amazon referral listicles you’d get in a Google search, with an extra sprinkling of ads.

They could also just quit the yearly refresh cycle. Apple went several years between SE updates. Google could do the same. With changes this minor, why bother? It’s just a marketing gimmick to trick uninformed consumers.

Buy a 9a for cheaper. You can probably even get a regular Pixel 9 for cheaper.

I agree with what you’re saying; I just don’t see it in Ake’s behavior (perhaps because I am a few episodes behind).

I haven’t seen her behave irresponsibly or take the safety of her students lightly. Lounging and going barefoot are not safety issues, unless you consider all forms of unconventionality to be unprofessional, and all forms of unprofessionalism to be irresponsible.

What I see in Ake is someone who takes her job seriously, and is conscientious about what deserves her care and attention – and what doesn’t.

Posts on Twitter can get flagged with “Community Notes”, generally to advise readers about inaccuracies and lies.

Apparently “Community Note” has been verbed, without so much as a hyphen.

Yuck.

“Gets Community Noted” is such an awkward turn of phrase.

Do you think she’s acting like a teenager in a substantive way, or just in her style?

I like her irreverent attitude and I don’t consider that childish. She doesn’t act impulsively, thoughtlessly, or disrespectfully. She takes her job seriously. She intentionally goes against the grain of traditional military stuffiness because she is decidedly not trying to train a military.

The underlying military culture of classic Trek made sense at the time, but we can do better. I’m actually optimistic about SFA and that’s almost entirely thanks to Hunter’s portrayal of Ake.

Yes. I’ve recently come to realize that anytime I use ketchup, it’s better with a ketchup/mustard mix.

I’m not 100% degoogled, but if Google deactivated my account tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve migrated everything important away from Gmail. Gmail is basically just my spam box now.

I also have Chrome installed on my PC for testing purposes. It is my browser of last resort, only used on occasion when I suspect my normal browsers’ ad/tracker blockers are breaking some site.

Google Maps is hard to get away from because nothing else has all its key features, and a lot of alternatives also use Google’s data so they’re not really more private. For example, I don’t know of any good public transit apps that work in my city and are degoogled (though to be fair, it’s been a few years since I reviewed the options).

(and has E2EE)

Normally my policy is “E2EE or GTFO”, but the concept only applies to a subset of Discord use cases. A good Discord alternative needs to handle the same variety of use cases as Discord.

E2EE for a public forum makes no sense. Lemmy doesn’t have E2EE either, obviously. That’s an absurd idea.

Discord is mostly used for public or semi-public spaces. I’m in Discord servers for some of my favorite games and game studios, for example. The only barrier to entry is clicking a link, which is usually publicly advertised. I’m also in some semi-public Discords that are locked behind a membership of some sort (like Patreon), but those are still full of an arbitrary number of people I do not know. It’s not a private space. E2EE would be counterproductive.

That said, I have a few friends who habitually DM me on Discord, and I’m like “dude, I know you have Signal. Use it FFS”. One thing I like about Lemmy is that when you go to send a DM, it literally warns you against using it for DMs:

Warning: Private messages in Lemmy are not secure. Please create an account on Element.io for secure messaging.

The problem is that there are very few people who are familiar enough with both Discord and Matrix to give a meaningful answer.

Personally, I use both, but for completely different use cases. I do not understand how one could be used as a substitute for the other. Perhaps I’m missing something, or perhaps everyone who thinks Matrix is a good substitute for Discord just don’t use Discord very much.

If you have a small group of friends who occasionally hang out in chat, sure, Matrix is fine. If you’re in dozens of Discord servers, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of channels, and hundreds or thousands of users, no. At least, not with Element. Perhaps there’s a better client out there for that?

Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner

The key point here is that it is portrayed as horrible. Ake resigned in protest and only came back for the opportunity to make amends. The scene is there to show how far the Federation has fallen, in order to set up the task of rebuilding it.

Starfleet Academy has a justification for how shitty the world is, and IMHO it’s approaching it correctly. There was a galactic disaster that almost completely destroyed the federation, so SFA is literally post-apocalyptic. But it’s using that setting to tell a hopeful and positive story.

The core message of the show is that you can rebuild a just society even after it’s gone so far down the shitter. You can choose to do better, to be better. This is culturally relevant.

The number in e.g. “Category 5” hurricane actually refers to the Kinsey scale.

Same with Italian food. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century.

Leonardo da Vinci lived his whole life never knowing what a tomato was.

I am curious if they are going to reveal anything about Gideon S. Turner. I can’t entirely tell if Caleb is making stuff up and Tarima is playing along or if Gideon S. Turner has a very strange history.

I was confused by this. It came hot on the heels of a truly excessive number of historical name-drops and references, so I was like “Turner? Was he on…Enterprise? DS9? Did they mean Tucker? What’d I miss?”

It was a funny bit but it didn’t really land for me because of that.

Yeah. I’ve been using Macs since System 6 and while I’ve often disagreed with Apple’s direction, this is the first one that feels downright incompetent, in much the same way as Microsoft’s Vista and Windows 8 designs were.

There’s no consistency between how things look and how they behave. There is useless clutter everywhere. Legibility of text is an afterthought. It’s like they forgot the distinction between graphic design and UI design.

But it looks pretty at a glance, so…great…

Unrelated, but can you tell me how you set up your Mac OS 8 Platinum theme?

This is a perfectly reasonable take. This part pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Still, it’s utterly ambiguous here where Vincke is drawing the line between “critical” and “hurtful” or “personal”. And in any case, it can be appropriate to direct some outright vitriol at the people making a game, inasmuch as art expresses the values of its creators. You don’t get a pass for making poison just because you poured your heart into it. Sometimes, utter scorn is justifiable. If Vincke is serious about this conversation, I would encourage him to actually cite some reviews, games and game developers and discuss the finer workings.

I don’t expect Vincke to call out any specific writers, but unless he does, I really have no way to tell what, specifically, he’s trying to argue against. He’s opening himself up to being misinterpreted, and a lot of people won’t even realize they’re doing it. His little rant is like a horoscope reading — so vague as to let you project your own ideas onto it and pretend they came from somewhere else.

But really, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Perhaps I just don’t read those types of publications, but I can’t recall the last time I read a professional video game review (as opposed to, say, Steam user reviews or randos on Reddit) that personally attacked creators. If anything, most professional reviews err heavily on the side of positivity to avoid angering fans and potential advertisers. The article touches on that, too:

I’ve received plenty of death threats for scoring things 8/10 or lower, and in a media sphere that depends on traffic volume, there is continual ambient goading to approve of, or at least acknowledge games that already have some kind of mass following.

Death threats. For an 8/10 rating. Completely insane, but sadly not surprising.

On the one hand, sure, it would give the administration an “excuse” to escalate still further.

On the other hand, who are we kidding? They’re not going to stop escalating no matter what. There’s no point in trying to appease fascists. They’ll take whatever excuse, no matter how flimsy, whenever they feel like it regardless. That’s how we got here.

Do they even say what processor it has? All I see is “4-nanometer, 5G IoT SoC platform from MediaTek” which means nothing to me.