edmund_the_destroyer

edmund_the_destroyer wrote

The problem is that Facebook et al will be willing to spend an emperor's fortune to protect their walled gardens. So legislation to force interoperability will either be lobbied into failing or lobbied into being toothless.

I do remember that 10 or so years ago, there were apps you could use to read and post to all of your social networks at once. You login, post to one place, and it re-posts to Facebook, Tumblr, and (if your post was small enough) Twitter, and then returns all responses you got there to you. I doubt any of that still works.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Reply to by !deleted30

I thought the film had two nice things to recommend it nobody else here said so far. One I can't reveal without spoiling the whole plot.

The other is calling out that Gotham is full of poor and downtrodden people and yet somehow the police, the press, the politicians, and everyone else is desperately sorry for orphan Bruce Wayne who got to drown his sorrows in billions of dollars.

I took that as a hint of breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging that the character is absurd.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

I stumbled over this before, I ran into someone that absolutely agrees that non-whites and especially black people in the US face far worse treatment than white people by police, courts, schools, employers, and financial institutions. They don't dispute it at all.

But their definition of racism is the textbook definition, mistreatment of someone based on ethnic characteristics. So they said racism in America against whites has an insignificant impact relative to racism in America against non-whites, but it's still racism.

And that means the person and I agreed on the situation and were just arguing over labels. It's frustrating.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Wishful thinking. I say this as a Linux gamer. The SteamDeck and the incredible-awesome investment that Valve is putting into technologies that let Windows game at full performance (or near full performance, or in a few rare cases superior performance) on Linux will have a big impact.

But the overwhelming majority of people don't switch operating system unless they have a compelling reason. And the freedom and flexibility they get from Linux is of no use to them, or else they would have switched already. SteamDeck might grow the Linux desktop market share to double or triple its current size, but not enough to make a serious dent in Microsoft, Apple, and ChromeOS ownership.

I think if any technology has a prayer of breaking the proprietary operating system ownership of consumer computing, it's WebAssembly.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

I run Ubuntu on my machines. It's relatively easy to install compared to most other distributions, it's easiest to find guides and Youtube videos for it, and hardware support is good.

I want to use something I can recommend to interested Linux novices, so if they see me using it and try it themselves they get the same experience. I could probably install Arch, I've been using Linux for 20 years.

I know Canonical ( the makers of Ubuntu ) have done shitty stuff. But I haven't found other equally novice-friendly distributions with such a big variety of supported software.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

I can't get to the article, but this is the parenting I'm trying to do. Again, I'm white so my kids don't have the extra racist pressures at school, and I realize that makes it easier for us.

And it's challenging as hell. My parents ruled me and my siblings with an iron fist. When I tell my kids to do something and they ignore me, I am enraged and my first impulse is to react poorly. I have to clamp down on my gut reaction, walk away and cool off, and think through the situation. If I don't want them to take abuse and mistreatment from anyone, and I want them to be comfortable to speak up, that includes with me.

...now I just have to convince them that if I get food, cook meals, wash dishes, do laundry, take them to the doctor and dentist, and work a full time job then maybe it's fair to ask them to take out the trash. Fuck me.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

It's an insult that this even needed to be studied. In the 19th century, taxes on the robber barons was low. Their wealth didn't trickle down. In the 1920s, taxes on the rich were low. Their wealth didn't trickle down. In the 1980s, the US cut taxes on the rich dramatically, and their wealth didn't trickle down.

We've got a reproducible effect here.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Reply to comment by !deleted30 in by !deleted30

Yeah, the robot parts of Wall-E were adorable. But the idea that people with no work, no responsibilities, and no money to worry about would sit all day eating and watching entertainment? That was maddening.

I don't exercise nearly as much as I'd like because my job and other responsibilities suck the life out of me.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Reply to comment by subrosa in Fuck the metaverse by ziq

So, as fucked up as the internet is, it benefited me. I was raised an American Christian conservative, and now I'm an atheist and some kind of leftist. Most of my education that led me to reject my upbringing came from the internet, and without it I think I would have just become a repeat of my parents - who are a repeat of their parents.

I don't know. Maybe the world as a whole would be better off with no internet, even if it means that I personally remained a bigger asshole than I am now.

But you're definitely right that there's no way to escape the technology trends.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

The problem with these commands is that the spelling, capitalization, argument ordering, and so forth are inconsistent between them.

PowerShell may suck - I don't know, I haven't used it enough - but my understanding is that Microsoft tried to make PowerShell command syntax consistent across all commands. That sounds awesome. ( Don't get me wrong, I hate Microsoft, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella, etc... but some of the company's open source projects are decent. )

But I've got twenty years of bash, sed, ls, rsync, etc... so I'm not motivated to start over.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

This is mostly irrelevant, but I'm feeling chatty. One of the superhero Roleplaying Games I have, "Wild Talents", touches on this a bit. They have a section on superhero impacts on society, and point out that most comics assume that 99% of the world is no different with superheroes than ours is now. The super-soldier serum only works once, the magic ring can only be wielded by one hero and stops working if he uses it to do anything other than fight vampires, only one alien landed, the gadgeteer's tech only works for them, time travel can't change the default timeline.

But the book points out that it doesn't have to work that way. The super-soldier serum could be in every pharmacy, there are hundreds of rings that can be used for anything, aliens are everywhere, and the gadgeteer could sell self-driving cars that transform into boats, planes, plows, and harvesters in 1850, and time travel could be used to prevent the genocide of Native Americans or the African slave trade.

That sounds way, way more interesting to me anyway.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by !deleted31767 in Friday Free Talk by kin

I'm late to this party, but yeah tech is loaded with tribalism and gatekeeping, and Linux is now different. And it sucks, because I love Linux.

I use Ubuntu MATE, so on the one in a million chance someone asked me for a Linux recommendation I can suggest something geared towards newbies. (Edit: but I wouldn't attack anyone for preferring something else.)

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Yeah, I'm losing weight because I have more time to cook and more time to eat than I've had in almost twenty years. It's more expensive than cheap bulk foods but less expensive than takeout, but most of the time I got takeout in my adult life the issue was time and energy and not a preference for their food over what I could make.

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edmund_the_destroyer wrote

Hmm, 8823a413f hasn't responded, so I'm unsure they're even following.

If coding is something you do for fun, I'd say anything is good if it undermines the technology industry trend towards Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, (GAMA) and the social media companies owning everything:

  • Ad-blockers
  • DRM circumvention of all kinds
  • Speech-to-text software (since most people use speech-to-text from GAMA)
  • federated or even better peer-to-peer alternatives to centralized social networks, file hosting, search engines
  • games
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