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I would recommend installing a fairly vanilla Gnome distro (like Fedora or something) and then a KDE version (most major distros have a KDE spin) in a virtual machine. Gnome Boxes is a really easy way to do that. And then just customize the shit out of both of them and see what you like best.

Gnome is more of a macOS-like experience so to me, it feels more trackpad driven (though keyboard shortcuts are plentiful). Install some extensions if you don’t like something. Someone else probably also didn’t like something.

KDE is more like Windows. I’m less familiar with it but it’s on my Steam Deck so I use it a decent amount. It’s more mouse and keyboard driven, as far as I can tell. So, that’s why I think it would be fine to evaluate in a VM.

They’re both high quality, though, so it’s really about what you prefer. I like Gnome, obviously, but I prefer to code on a smallish laptop (for portability/travel reasons) and a dock whereas a lot of people want an elaborate multi-monitor situation and a different interface. Everyone has their own workflow. Both work equally well so it’s just a matter of taste and preference. (Most Linux decisions are like that and people get weirdly angry about it but that’s part of the fun. Choose your own adventure.)

Honestly (and unfortunately), the Financial Times or something like that supplemented by regular media. I’m not endorsing paid financial news sites as your only source of news or anything. But rich people pay for those newspapers specifically because they filter the signal from the noise. It’s more like a hack to see what’s important since they don’t report on drama and intrigue and their whole raison d’être is giving investors facts, quickly.

Bonus fact: basically all their paywalls are permeable. But if you need to check if a story is “important,” see what’s being covered — or more importantly, not covered — for people wearing fancy pants. Bullshit is free so free media often shovels a lot on top of the real story.

Having dreams. :(

This is a joke. I’m fine.

Got vaccinated.

That’s a joke. The real answer is almost everything. I was practically feral and lived next to a swamp in Louisiana. RFK Jr. is 100% wrong about disease prevention but there’s no vaccine for snapping turtles.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-crawford-schimel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8k4.-Dt4.yJjPB0QbgpFy

Remember that time Elon Musk spent millions of dollars and lost? It was today and it was really funny. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-crawford-schimel.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-crawford-schimel.html

Update: Eat can eat 1,001 dicks.

I will accept passive aggression. A lot of people don’t bother with the passive.

I don’t know what our reputation is globally but I live in a tourist city (New Orleans). A lot of people don’t even bother with the passive part. Most “tier 1” conference cities are huge but we’re a relatively small city. We have a population of about 350,000 (compared to over 8 million in New York City) but enough hotel space and a conference center, stadium, whatever able to host a global event. The Super Bowl was just here and Taylor Swift had three shows. Those were known events but there will be weekends where you go downtown and meet 20 exterminators or something before you realize the exterminator convention is in town. (This actually happened to me. There are so many more exterminators than you could ever imagine.)

We host a lot of events and, as a result, even people who can’t afford travel meet people from everywhere. My high school friend is a bartender and he’ll have random hatred of places and professions because they’re obnoxious or don’t tip or whatever. To this day, he loves Hawaii residents because they had a football game here once and everyone was chill and nice.

Anyway, I say all that to say: Canadians are more than welcome to be passive aggressive here. South Louisiana in general is more aggressive than passive.

https://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2007/10/08/edsbs-road-trip-baton-rouge

Once it’s all tallied, something like $100 million will be spent on a single state’s judicial election. That is insane. Ten million would have been insane just a decade ago.

I imagine that’s why things are close. A lot of voters are being bombarded with (mis)information. The people who are undecided probably have no idea what’s true or false.

My theory is that for-profit social media companies push conflict and controversy because it increases “engagement.” So, people are conditioned to be hostile and hiss like a cat at the first sign of disagreement (real or imagined). Lemmy, obviously, has different incentives.

It’s happening on Mastodon and BlueSky too. I try to respond with kindness and sincerity. (I don’t always succeed. I kind of suck at it, to be honest. But if we all even can halfass human decency, it’ll be better than most of the internet.)

For international readers or Americans unfamiliar, Wisconsin has a state Supreme Court vote. It’s probably 50/50 and is the important one. Florida has 2 special elections for vacated House of Representative seats in Congress. The districts both voted heavily for Trump so the Republican candidate should win.

So, in Florida, don’t necessarily expect the Democrats to win. But if it’s even close, Republicans will be filling some diapers. They should be winning these districts by 20 or 30 points. Winning with 53% or whatever would be a really bad result for Republicans.

We’re aware. People who get all their news from Fox or ignore politics in general probably aren’t but even my conservative family members are embarrassed about the threats to Canada and Greenland. Canadians are generally considered super nice and polite by Americans so pissing them off crossed a line. Even apolitical people probably know the U.S. National Anthem is being booed at sporting events.

There’s elections in several states today that will provide some data to know more. Louisiana had an election on Saturday and rejected 4 constitutional amendments supported by Republicans. None even got 40%. Louisiana is an oddball state so I’m not sure it’s a harbinger of today’s elections but if voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere vote like Louisiana, it’ll be very telling.

This may not be what you’re looking for since you said “modern” but A Short History of Wine was a fun read and covers a ton of world history. It’s obviously through the lens of wine/alcohol but it’s often actually about trade networks, different cultures, and diplomacy.

It’s through a specific lens and doesn’t pretend to cover everything but alcohol pops up in history often enough that it almost mirrors economic history.

If that isn’t your thing, I would recommend regional history books. It’s almost impossible to cover all of human history without some sort of focus. Otherwise, it’s just a textbook and you can download a professor’s syllabus to find those.

Early in my career (a long time ago), I was tasked with ordering replacement chargers for some laptops. I ordered several off Amazon and even though they were labeled as being what we wanted, they were apparently bootleg and were not, in fact, the correct charger. Fried a few laptops before I realized Amazon wasn’t the “Amazon” of yore selling first-party parts and I was ordering from random third party sellers. (That was all relatively new at the time. Amazon was a bookstore branching out in my head.)

In fairness, I was a programmer and not an electrical engineer. And chargers back then weren’t exactly USB-C level smart. The barrel charger fit. I just thought “Oh, what a great deal. I’ll order these and get plaudits from my boss for saving money.” It wasn’t even my money.

The other one is that when I was learning to code — I’m self-taught because everyone was back then — I used Vim and invented my own style. All my code was basically unformatted or, at best formatted consistently in a very non-standard way. That’s easy to fix nowadays where I can hit save and my code gets formatted automatically but it wasn’t so simple back then. I still feel bad for the engineer who followed me who had to fix that shit.

I’m a good tipper, having waited tables before, so usually ~30% but it’s certainly not expected. 20% is the standard tip.

This probably isn’t helpful for referring to all Americans but in the U.S., we use whatever state/regjon within the United States a person is from as the demonym. So, someone from California would be Californian, someone from Texas would be Texan. For a regional example, someone from the Northeast would be a New Englander.

For most of the history of the Republic, the states viewed themselves sort of like EU countries do now: independent states in America that united. It probably wasn’t until the World Wars that it changed.

It can get more complicated, unfortunately. Native Americans would probably use their tribal name instead of the state, for instance. But that’s why we don’t have a demonym and everyone has resorted to USian or USAian on message boards.

Elon is probably mad it launched on an Ariane 5 and it went so perfectly, we’ll get an extra decade of science out of it.

The Ariane 5 really was a reliable rocket. It had some failures early on, like basically all rockets, but then it had 82 successful launches in a row and then one partial failure before having another long perfect streak.

Obviously, more expensive than modern reusable rockets but JWST was important enough of a payload, that I’m glad NASA/ESA chose Ariane. (Plus, given JWST’s delays, I imagine when that decision was made, SpaceX was still iterating and having occasional explosions.)

Doom had IDKFA that just basically gave you all the weapons and keys. I was a pretty young kid when that game was popular and all I wanted was all the guns.

It’s not a code, per se, but the method to get unlimited money on SimCity for SNES is forever in my brain. (I didn’t always use it but sometimes, I just wanted to make a cool city and not do the tax and budget stuff.)

It’ll take longer than 2 years. It’ll take a decade.