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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • People are influenced by the world and people around them. And for young people today, TikTok is a very powerful influence. It tells people what is important in life, and how to get it.

    You and I believe that hitting yourself in the hammer is unlikely to bring anything good; and highly likely to bring pain and problems; but we only know that because of things we’ve already learned. Different people learn different things at different points in their lives. And so there are a lot of young people who, when they are told that hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is going to make your more attractive - they might believe it and decide it is worth it.


  • Hmm. I just read the github thread that this is about. The devs made a mistake on this; but it seems to me that there is a bit of an over-reaction here. The people in the thread seem to be discussing it calmly and politely; and the issue (i.e. use of pronouns in the build instructions) ends up being resolved. By contrast, the reaction outside of the actual thread… is extreme.

    Like I said, this seems like an overreaction to someone making a mistake of ignorance & indifference. It wasn’t an act of malice.





  • Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)

    I keep hearing people say this. But I’ve got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn’t new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.

    … Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I’d prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so … I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don’t expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!



  • You’ve said that choosing options 3, or 4 will send a message to change party opinions for the next cycle. But the message it sends is ambiguous at best. It could be interpreted to mean that people are unhappy with the system and demand change; but it could also mean that people are indifferent, or disengaged, or ill-informed, or have been prevented / dissuaded from exercising their right to vote. Or perhaps it could be interpreted on policy grounds: perhaps votes are unhappy with genocide… or perhaps not, perhaps they are war-hungry. Perhaps want stricter rules to control anti-social behaviour … or the opposite.

    If you don’t vote at all, your message is basically just noise. It communicates nothing, because whatever message you think it sends it could also be sending the opposite. Voting third-party would be less bad, except that many third parties are exist disingenuously as a tactical way to split votes, to increase the change of victory for the party of opposite values to what the third party purports to represent.


  • But due to the first-past-the-post system, these are the only two options. The primaries are when you choose the candidates, and the election is when you choose the winner of the candidates. That’s the system you have. You really need to switch to a preferential voting system if you want to have more than two options in the presidential election.


  • This diagram helps to show that you and Hadriscus agree on the order of the posts, but not on how to describe it. That’s pretty interesting to me.

    • 4, 2, 1, 3 – labeling the posts from top to bottom with which order they should then be read. So the first post is read forth, the second post is read second, etc.)
    • 3, 2, 4, 1 – listing the order that the posts should be read if they were understood to be labelled in 1-4 top-down. So we should read the third post first, the second post second, forth post third, …




  • There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. … This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look ‘real’ for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.

    In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like “Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?”, you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. “Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten”; “What’s the most misunderstood concept in maths?”; “What’s the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?”

    A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits… is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.