Random Dent

Yeah whenever I set up a computer with dual boot it’s always Windows first, then Linux. Windows assumes it’s the only OS that exists so if there’s something else there it just ignores it and writes over the boot thingy. Linux actually bothers to look for anything else that’s installed and works around it.

Yeah keep the law around in case you need to weaponize it against an individual, but ignore it for corporations. The modern solution!

I think people like her, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Karoline Leavitt are starting to turn because they have inside knowledge and know that the MAGA thing is going to crack soon, presumably because either the Epstein files or Trump’s health are worse than the public knows (personally I suspect it’s the latter, because that’s the one thing Trump can’t really weasel out of) and they want to appear to have distanced themselves from the crazy before it all happened.

I’ve been saying for a while that a few years after Trump dies, you won’t be able to find anyone who claims to have supported him and I think potentially this is the beginning of that.

Our house still has a working landline. It’s there from when my parents owned it and we didn’t shut it off because it’s cheap to run and for some of our older relatives it’s the only way they know how to reach us. We get a lot of those “Microsoft tech support” scam calls on it, presumably because they just assume landlines are all vulnerable old people.

In the UK you could also sign up for a thing where you dialed 144 and then an account number and you could call anywhere without coins and it would charge it to your home phone bill. I still have that ~15-digit phone number memorized from when I was a kid lol.

• Meta by itself just opens the launcher thingy in KDE so I can search for an app.
• Meta + T = Open terminal
• Meta + E = Open Dolphin (this is a Windows holdover, Meta + E opened Explorer but it’s kind of hard-coded into my brain now)
• Meta + F = Open Firefox

I think that’s all of them.

It really does feel like we’re in the final season of a TV show and the writers have just given up.

The other day I experimented using an AI to troubleshoot a laptop issue I was having. It produced a detailed step-by-step guide which essentially boiled down to: install this software from the AUR and then make this edit to a config file. Being healthily skeptical of AI, I first searched the AUR for the software, which didn’t exist. I then went back to the AI and said “this doesn’t exist.” It then replied “You’re absolutely right, that’s not a real thing and editing the config file would do nothing.”

The experiment has concluded.

Food is literally free, it just grows out of the ground. If we weren’t such dickheads we could just take it in turns picking potatoes or whatever and spend the rest of our time fucking about doing whatever we want. Probably

Not a thing yet AFAIK, but Trump proposed the idea this week. You can get 30-year ones here in Canada too, but I’m not sure what the lowest fixed interest rate is currently.

I don’t really remember TBH, I got into Linux at a pretty young age, but that was more about hating Microsoft than privacy. Then got into VPNs because of downloading stuff, gradually drifted down the Ubuntu > Manjaro > Arch pipeline, started hanging out on privacy forums and now I’m one of those people who needs a Yubikey to decrypt a chain of LUKS-encrypted drives to boot into a laptop that has nothing of any value on it at all lol.

I’m legit interested in that anti-camera hoodie that was in the new series of Dexter, but I’m not sure if it’s actually real or not lol.

Yeah that was my main thought about this and the Steam Machine as well. If it’s a nice cheap way to get a kind-of-mid gaming PC I can see it doing well, but if it’s the same price as a regular PC I don’t really see the point of it.

I can see the UK doing this, they love to implement ludicrously restrictive and impossible to enforce anti-privacy laws. My working theory is that they’re lobbied to implement them by IT consultancy firms, who then get hired to consult on, say, banning VPNs, take 10 years to investigate it at eye-watering cost to the public, then go “Yeah turns out you can’t ban VPNs, I don’t know what the previous government was thinking” and then use that money to lobby the new government to ban encryption or some other nonsense, then repeat.

As a person from the UK, I am fully expecting them to implement this in the next year or two, because ruining the internet seems to be the government’s top priority rather than say, fixing the economy or preventing Reform from taking over for some fucking reason.

I’ll bite!

https://xkcd.com/2347/

I think you could make an argument that being compensated for your labour, but way under the value your labour produces and also under the constant threat of homelessness and starvation if you don’t do it is still an unethical system.

Iain M. Banks is a favourite of mine, especially the Culture series. To give an idea of where his head was at, from his essay A Few Notes On The Culture:

Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

No no, we need a completely fresh and original take on the same dozen or so characters in the same ship following roughly the same plot points as last time.

I do KDE with Karousel, which is similar to Niri I think.