Looking at it like a team sport is pretty silly, yeah, but I’m still willing to use Steam just the same. No billionaire or successful corporation is “my” people, but doing business with the ones that are decent to their customers seems fine.

Gaming generally involves paying money for proprietary software anyway, so that’s not a realm where the existence of any DRM is a showstopper for me personally. Any per-game DRM with heinous kernel-level shit such that it won’t run on Linux at all, that stuff is fine to just not exist in my world.

Throw something like Mint on their old laptops and they may not need new ones at all!

Unless they don’t have current ones, then ignore me, lol.

I had a Celeron 300A running at 500mhz

Ah, Celerons and the heyday of overclocking. I think I had a 266@400, 300A@500, and a dual socket motherboard with two 350s@550 or something like that. Experimental multithreading in Quake 3! I was in college and constantly working on my computer.

For all you “kids these days,” imagine you got a new high end CPU that had a max boost clock of 6GHz. You go into the BIOS and say “How about we make that 9Ghz instead?” The CPU is just like “bet” and runs at that speed kicking ass for years without issue.

I finally switched from Firefox to librewolf, which is a privacy focused fork of it. It’s basically Firefox with some of the iffy stuff ripped out, and with good default settings.

Firefox with proper settings is probably “fine” still, but the transition is super easy since it’s basically the same thing.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Every time I scroll past this image, that’s the line that gets me. Bold threatening declaration by fascist dictator, then ends like a work email reminding you not to leave food in the cafeteria fridge over the weekend.

The differences in sheer speed and responsiveness is something FOSS alternatives need much more publicity about. When the requirements for one product are “help the user do what they want” and the requirements for another product are “synergize the KPIs of these 53 stakeholders in our trillion dollar conglomerate, monetize our market position in every way possible, and check the minimum viable checkboxes to keep end users engaged with the brand” it shows!

Windows to Linux is of course the most significant and worthwhile. As I like to describe it, even using the most full-featured distros out there (Linux Mint Cinnamon gang represent!) any flavor of Linux is like greased lightning compared with windows. And I mean Windows 10, not even 11.

A few weeks ago I turned on an old secondary desktop PC that had been powered off for a month. It had numerous updates, everything except installing a new named version. Even the kernel. I decided to time it. From the time I opened the software update GUI – including typing in my password, letting it download, letting it install, getting the “yo, reboot when you’re ready,” etc – it was done in 5 minutes. And those were 5 minutes where the computer was totally usable. Running the current version of the full featured Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 on a PC from 2011!

My favorite recent example is the switch from Plex to Jellyfin. Now granted, fully self-hosting means more IT admin type stuff for me so that family members and I can securely connect remotely. But god damn if every single app I have tried doesn’t feel like warp speed compared with the Plex versions. Did you know that watching my media using the WebOS app on my LG TV does not have to be dog shit slow? And don’t even get me started on phone apps like Finamp. (it really whips the jelly’s ass?)

I do mostly c/c++ for an embedded product, but one of the modules in the system uses an FPGA programmed w/ VHDL. So I’ve gotten to do a few deep dives into that code in the past couple years.

It’s been decades since I’ve had to write new VHDL or Verilog though.

I’ve seen this image before. This time, however, I am half way through watching The Expanse. I had a much stronger reaction to it this time, for a couple reasons, lol.

I get that it specifies tech workers, but still my first reaction was that 12% is pretty low. You can find a much higher percentage of people who are confidently wrong about way more important things.

Honestly I think you gave the experienced adult answer to what was a high school or even middle school science question.

And unfortunately, some weapons only work on the power. Like insurance hoops and red tape to delay or deny necessary health care.

Gotta love when the conspiracy is so stupid that it’s the people who dedicated their lives to building and spreading human knowledge are the ones keeping the knowledge away from Joe public.

You know how Trump has been called the poor person’s idea of a rich person? I’m trying to think of the caricature they use for “scientist” in their minds. Maybe a woke Joe Rogan?

It’s polished and easy to use, it leverages all the work that goes into Debian and Ubuntu, but it’s still Linux under the hood and doesn’t forbid you from getting into the weeds.

I run Mint Cinnamon on my work machine, developing software for embedded Linux products, and I haven’t had any regrets.

We have rocks that do math, transmit electricity, and fly us through the sky.

When you get reductive about the natural sciences it all just boils down to applied physics which is applied mathematics.

But engineering and technology? Applied geology.

(/s because I’m not going to acknowledge that geology is applied chemistry and so on)

And use his omnipotent power to hide from you while watching your life play out in exactly the way his omniscience let him know it would before he even created the earth or you.

Unfortunately many of us have been taught that being a good person and a good citizen equals being productive and accumulating resources. Things that are quantifiable and external to the actual person and their relationships.

Being productive and accumulating some resources can be good activities to spend time on, but they are practical necessities and not defining characteristics of existence.

The more you know! 💫

Powerful oxidizers are dangerous stuff!

One I’ve learned about recently (and used) is potassium permanganate. One of its uses is for improving water quality in fish ponds. It oxidizes basically all organic matter. It can simultaneously knock out algae, bacteria, parasites, hormones, and other excess organic waste. And the pathogens it kills can’t build up resistance to it like they would an antibiotic or poison, so it can be used preventively without creating stronger bugs. You can’t really build resistance to BURNING outside video games.

But that also means that if you add too much, you can just as easily sterilize all life in a body of water, including fish and anything else you want to keep.

AND it means you need to be careful when handling it. If you burn your eyes or your lungs, it makes them stop working!

I’m not sure if I saw it in the same place, but I saw the same recommendation long ago and have stuck with it ever since.

I don’t rely on it for changing lanes though. It absolutely helps situational awareness, but I always turn and look.

Yeah I agree with that. Relying on individual compassion to fix real estate probably makes even less sense than relying on churches and charity to fix poverty and hunger.

I’m still in favor of making things better in one’s little corner of the world, because even just looking at it selfishly it tends to make your life and your mental health better too.