The only thing that I would miss is contactless payments via my phone.

Neat info. Positive comments in this thread prompted me to go read the thing, and I appreciated how it is a ground-up explanation, but still quite accessible. Now I understand why WINE is not an Emulator (I had been wondering, tbh)

Absolutely iconic, I love it.

Anyway, since thinking of Cult of the Lamb has got that Stupendium song stuck in my head, here it is for any of you who want to share in my curse https://youtu.be/6ywXBNpc-To

Archive link for anyone who finds this useful https://archive.ph/E7XFt

Edit: Have read the article and daaamn, this is ridiculous. Thanks for sharing this, I hadn’t seen it yet.

For me, it’s actually easier to trust sources like unionriot.ninja — though by “trust”, I don’t mean “take them at their word”. It’s more like a “I understand how to situate this journalism within its wider context”. Which is to say that I find them easier to vibe check.

I find smaller outlets like this are often pretty good with their sourcing. For the example, from these guys, I think I read some really good coverage of some specific issues in the prison system. The article was clearly written to persuade (and as you say, clearly left wing), but the way it was doing that felt transparent. In particular, I think there was a quote they used from a legal expert, but they also included links to that person’s work/full quote, which makes it easier for a keen reader to vibe check the person. I like their transparency.

I agree that it’s hard to place them on a “reliable” spectrum. My instinct would be to place them quite high, because the fact they’re open about their biases (i.e. left wing perspective) and they are good at citing sources makes it easier for me to evaluate their work. However, that doesn’t feel right when we consider what kind of news outlets would typically sit there — many of our heuristics for parsing media are still anchored in a more traditional model of news coverage, which these guys clearly aren’t.

Oh, I love this one, it’s very silly. I find it oddly grounding when I discover that the cause of a problem was me being silly, because I’m already aware that I am prone to foolish errors (as all humans are); when I discover that an unfathomable computer error is actually my fault, it feels like everything is right with the world

I didn’t get the joke until I read your explanation, but now I do get it, I think that it’s a very funny joke.

I’ve never had things break after doing updates in Arch. Am I doing something different to most people in the “pacman -Syu” memes, or is the likelihood of breaking stuff overdone as a joke

Whilst automated tools can help on this, there is a heckton of human labour to be done in training those tools, or in reviewing moderation decisions that require a human’s eye. I think that in a world where we can’t eradicate that need, the least we can do is ensure that people are paid well, in non-exploitative conditions, with additional support to cope.

Actually securing these things in a way that’s more than just lipservice is part of that battle— I remember a harrowing article a while back about content moderators in Kenya, working for Sama, which was contracted to work for Facebook. There were so many layers of exploitation in that situation that it made me sick. If the “mental health support” you have access to is an on-site therapist who guilt trips you into going back to work asap, and you’re so hurried and stressed that you don’t have time to even take a breather after seeing something rough — conditions like that are going to cause a disproportionate amount of preventable human harm.

Even if we can’t solve this problem entirely, there’s so much needless harm being done, and that’s part of what this fight is about now.

https://www.codingfont.com/ is a fun, tournament style quiz that compares different monospace fonts. It’s far from comprehensive, but I found it useful to gauge what font features I find stylish and readable

(For the record, my go-to font is Jetbrains Mono)

I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to. If by “three tiers”, you’re talking about pre-Hard-Mode, Hard-Mode, and post-Plantera, I don’t think that falls under what is typically meant by “level scaling” (I realise you didn’t use that term specifically, but people up-thread did). Level-scaling would be if a green slime, which dies in 2-3 hits at the beginning of the game, grew stronger alongside the player such that later in the game, it would still take 2-3 hits.

I’m not saying this just to be a persnickety asshole, but instead to make the point that Terraria is so great because it doesn’t have the kind of scaling that Oblivion and many other open-world RPGs have. I love how Terraria has no qualms in repeatedly bitch-slapping you back to spawn if you insist on heading into areas you’re ill-equipped for (and the tiered progression ensures that there’s nearly always some such difficult place, even as the player levels up). I also find it interesting how the tinkerer’s bench acts as a key driver of progression by allowing you to pack more accessory function into fewer equipment slots.

That is to say that unless I’m misunderstanding you, I completely agree with your points, except that I would consider this to be an example of good progression without level-scaling

I was telling a friend about him the other day. She said she found it odd how it seems like he became a martyr for his ideals, in that the way that he is remembered is almost like he’s a mythological figure, more ideal than man. I agreed with her that the loss of humanity due to such a high profile death is tragic, but that it wasn’t the internet who turned him into a martyr, but the FBI (and whoever else was pushing for his prosecution).

They threw the book at Aaron Schwartz because they wanted to set a precedent. They wanted to turn him into a symbol, and that led to his death. I’m proud of how the internet rallied around him and made him into a different kind of symbol, but like you, I feel sad to think about what could have been if he hadn’t been killed (I know that he died by suicide, but saying that he “died” felt too passive). It sucks that he’s just a part of history now.

A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.

I revived a friend’s old laptop by installing Linux on it, and I told her that using Linux entitled her to a small amount of “nerd creds”. Years later, she told me that it did end up eliciting mild approval from a woman who ended up being her partner for multiple years. The system works!

I had a similar experience. The video that helped me had pretty poor video quality compared to some of the other results, so I only turned to it when I was burnt out from basically every other video being useless for my task. Props to all the Indian educational YouTubers

Ah yes, because the rest of the world is so great at responding to online mis/disinformation.

I already have it in a virtual machine: the past ✨

I feel like there’s a joke in here about Linux users propensity to distrohop being like a ritual reenactment of switching to Linux for the first time (without having to defile one’s computer with Windows again)

Damn, thanks for that link; earlier today I was telling a non techy friend about Unicode quirks earlier and I could vaguely remember that post, but not well enough to remember how to find it. I didn’t try very hard because it wasn’t a big deal, so the serendipity of finding it via your comment was neat.

Okay, but consider that the ultra-rich technofascists are a group that has had a disproportionate impact on the continued pillaging of the climate. They aren’t just opportunists wanting to make the most of the fragments of society that will remain after climate disaster, but people who have been working to bring that scenario into fruition because it’s profitable in the short term whilst positioning them to take even more power.

I cannot emphasise enough that they want this, and that this ideology goes further back than the current wave of them. The reality of climate change is unfathomably dire, but I hope you understand why it’s necessary to resist these people as part of whatever climate resilience we can build. I’ll probably be dead before shit really hits the fan, climate-wise, so my goal is to do whatever I can to support the people who come after me. If those techno-assholes are allowed to inherit the fragments of society, the entire planet is even more fucked