I would be surprised, if you couldn’t also sell an account with a bunch of stars on the black market to bot farm operators…

A few months ago, I got myself a keyboard which specifically says “Meta” on the meta-key, because you know, I didn’t want a Windows logo and I decided, I didn’t care about Facebook trying to claim that word. I definitely don’t care for Musk trying to claim that letter either, but damn, the combination of the two might do it that I’ll have to pick a different shortcut…

I’ve seen doormats that look more alive than this lawn…

There’s Endless OS, which goes in that sort of direction. It includes even a good chunk of Wikipedia, so you can just install it on PCs and ship those PCs into regions where they don’t have internet.

Good Thinking

Normally, I would respond that I don’t do that, because I keep forgetting about those bookmarks, but now you’ve reminded me that I did pin something there last week …and then promptly forgot about it. 🙃

My parents have a smoke detector which blinks a red LED every ten minutes or so. It’s also placed in the hallway between my room and the toilet. Because that hallway is quite short and a little bit of light still came out of my room, I eventually started just not turning on the lights in the hallway, to kind of preserve the sleepiness.

Well, eventually I walked down that hallway in darkness and was right in front of the smoke detector when it decided to blink, shortly tinting everything around me faintly red. Fucking hell, that spooked me…

Fun Fact: The German word for “door” is “Tür”. 🙃

So, this is definitely not a diagnosis, as I obviously don’t know more about you than what’s in this post. But your post sounds quite a bit like the stereotypical autistic experience:

• Being really enthusiastic about specific topics
• Bonding with other folks on the autistic spectrum (that friend also very superficially sounds like they might be there)
• Decidedly preferring texts over calls
• Walls of text
• Feeling like you don’t fit in with the rest of society

Now comes the usual disclaimer: Autism is a spectrum. You might just have these few autistic traits as part of your personality and nothing else to do with it. But yeah, it could also be that you’ve got more such traits and that you’ll find it easier to bond with other autistic folks. You can check out some of the autism communities here on Lemmy to try to gauge, if your experience matches that of others in more ways. There’s also some questionnaires online, where you can get a rough score, which tells you the likelyhood of autism. For a real diagnosis, you’d need to talk to some doctors, though…

E: All of the above.

On distros like Debian, openSUSE and Fedora, you need to enable a separate repository, if you want icky software, like proprietary drivers or patented codecs. In particular, you can’t watch MP4 videos. So, PeerTube and YouTube work, but if a webpage is hosting its own videos, or you happen to acquire a video file in some other fashion, there’s a good chance that it’s an MP4 file and you can’t look at it.

I’m hoping that when these patents expire, that it’s possible to ship the MP4 codecs directly, and then at least for me, that would currently result in not needing to deal with these separate repos.

I mean, the shirt does say that he’s fucking male…

Fine, sure, but to pretend that a language from half a century ago is the be-all and end-all of human wisdom, is ridiculous. The field is progressing, so on average newer languages improve compared to old ones.

What the hell? Is this the new “Microsoft ❤️ Cancer Open-Source” ?

Yep, I mentioned to my mum a few times that I’m ‘baking’ in my microwave, which I know is terrible for this task. So, she’ll tell me I should be getting an oven, I should be getting an air fryer etc. etc… I always tell her, I don’t have the space for it, but really, I don’t want to be cleaning yet another appliance.

My standard position is that GNOME is good, if you want to just use an existing workflow, whereas KDE is good, if you’re looking to create your own workflow or you’re fine with a mediocre, familiar (Windows-like) workflow.

But unfortunately, GNOME is really disappointing in some ways. Every so often, we have someone at work accidentally using it, because it’s the default, and they always run into the same nonsense, like not being able to type a file path into the file manager, or not being able to give a name to the file they’re trying to save. These are pretty bad problems that normal users are quick to encounter. It’s a mystery to me, why these can’t be fixed, but ultimately I just tell people to install KDE and they’ve all been happy about it.

The article is misleading. The official statement is that, because of our Nazi past, we have a special relationship with both the international Court of Justice and with Israel, so we’re just not going to formulate a decision until Netanyahu actually plans to visit Germany. In effect, this means that Netanyahu cannot visit Germany, because there is a non-zero chance of him getting arrested.

In a press conference, when repeatedly asked to clarify this statement, the speaker explained why this statement is so neutral once more and then said “I could get carried away, saying I find it hard to imagine that arrests might be carried out in Germany on this basis”.

So, it’s formulated as:

• his opinion
• that he’s explicitly saying, he’s not actually saying it,
• and after repeatedly pointing out that the official position is not that.

Interesting approach, for sure. We’ve had a bit of a problem with making plastics degradable, in that we don’t want them to degrade while they’re still in use. This approach would obviously be unsuitable for packaging salty food, but for many other single-use plastics, this might be a good solution.

Big insects are fun, too. Their method of breathing through the body surface doesn’t scale, due to volume growing cubically and surface area only squarely. So, scaling them up would mean they’re constantly out of breath, well, or suffocated.

I feel like the social context also plays a role. When I still went to school and was surrounded by people believing in superstitions, the “better safe than sorry” thinking also sometimes entered my mind. Not only was I exposed to more different superstitious beliefs, I was also exposed to people making these kinds of conclusions publicly, often even as a form of socializing.

Now I work in IT, where it’s pretty much part of our job to avoid superstitious thinking and it really just feels completely foreign to me now.
I guess, part of it would be me just being conditioned to always question whether I’m making superstitious conclusions, but I do also think the lessened social exposure is making a difference.