OP’s article is from July 1st.

OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second.

• There’s zero consistent theme.
• The images are generated.
• They’re all “BY JOHN” (no pfp, no last name, no bio, let alone no indication why they’re qualified to write about this cornucopia of shit).
• It only ever hyperlinks to itself – i.e. the sources may as well be “I made it the fuck up”.
• The way the articles are structured are LLM slop to a tee – randomly bolding words, meandering prose, overuse of bullet points, jarring logical flow, etc.
• At least five articles per day from the same “person” despite extensive length, perfect grammar, and alleged research being done.

Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?

I remember speculating as a (small) kid that the AI soldiers in Battlefront II’s local multiplayer might be real people employed by the developer. Not the brightest child was I.

• sudo is telling the computer to do this with root privileges.
• chmod sets permissions.
• Each digit of that three-digit number corresponds to the owner, the group, and other users, respectively. It’s 0–7, where 0 means no access and 7 means access to read, write, and execute. So 077 is the exact inverse of 700, where 077 means “the owner cannot access their own files, but everyone else can read, write, and execute them”. Corresponding 700 to asexuals is joking that nobody but the owner can even so much as touch the files.
• / is the root directory, i.e. the very top of the filesystem.
• The -R flag says to do this recursively downward; in this case, that’s starting from /.

So here, we’re modifying every single file on the entire system to be readable, writable, and executable by everyone but their owner. And yes, this is supposed to be extremely stupid.

I know it’s just an early mockup, but Calamares looks waaaay better than this, and I wouldn’t want to see this replace it in anything even close to this state. This is not slick.

Though serviceable, [Calamares is] not as slick as the initial setup on Windows, macOS or even GNOME.

Setup on Windows? Slick? Dude fuck, I do not want whatever vision this author wants for Linux if the minefield of dark patterns is “slick” to them. Calamares is the slickest, most straightforward OS install I’ve ever had, far surpassing Windows.

Basically what @meekah@lemmy.world said: the idea is to be practicable. Here’s a stream of disconnected thoughts about this:

• What you pointed out is actually consistent with how a disproportionate amount of vegans are staunchly anticapitalist.
• A cut-and-dry example of someone who’s still vegan but eats animal products based on “practicable” is someone whose prescription medication contains gelatin with no other pill type; vegans aren’t going to say “lol ok too bad bozo you’re not vegan anymore”.
• The core focus of veganism has traditionally been non-human animals with the idea that a reduction of cruelty and exploitation toward humans is, at most, peripheral. This is changing in my opinion, especially when questions like “vegan Linux distro” don’t involve animals short of what the devs eat.
• Based on what you say (as someone else pointed out), a distro based solely on FLOSS would probably be regarded as “the most vegan” if that were ever measured by anyone (it never would be).
• It’s a weird analogy, but after you’re done using and purchasing products derived from animals, what’s “practicable” from there is kind of like a vegan post-game. Many vegans, for example, won’t eat palm oil because of how horribly destructive it is to wildlife.
• Growing all your own food is in that post-game area of “practicable”. It’s up to you to decide if that’s practicable for you. It’s up to you to implement that if you think it is or, if it’s not, to maybe think about how else you can reduce harm with how you buy vegetables. It’s up to you if you want to share that idea and help other people implement it themselves. It’s widely accepted that it’s not up to you to determine if it’s practicable for others.

I would say that most vegans, even if they’ve never heard it, at least approximately follow the Vegan Society’s famous definition:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Striking the parts that seem irrelevant to this specific question:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for […] any […] purpose […]

Keep in mind that “animals” in that first part is widely treated as “humans and non-human animals”. So you would have to decide 1) to what extent cruelty was inflicted to create the distro, 2) to what extent people and non-human animals were exploited to create the distro, and 3) if there exist practicable alternatives that meaningfully reduce (1) and (2).

OP, you linked to the comments instead of the top of the article. 💀

I’m not agreeing with their dumb point, but just pointing out: this satellite works on radar. I’m genuinely concerned how many people seem to be commenting without reading the article.

I don’t know why you’re assuming their ‘/s’ is alluding to sarcasm around this being surveillance versus sarcasm around needing more surveillance. “We need more surveillance (we actually don’t)” seems to be indicated here, not “This is surveillance (it actually isn’t)”.

Especially when Reddit types are notoriously, chronically unable to read articles before they go spouting uninformed bullshit in the comments.

Did you read the part where this is a radar satellite designed for monitoring the climate? That is, did you read anything besides the headline before you decided: “Yeah, I think I’m able to make informed commentary about this”?

Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

• Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
• Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
• And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
• And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
• And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
• Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that’s impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.

“Play has no limits, but your credit card does. Let’s aim for that.”

Betteridge’s law in shambles

I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.

Re: Entropy:

• Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
• Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.

blackbox/BlackBox

Notepad and WFE get thrown off hell in a cell into an announcer’s table by Kate and Dolphin, respectively, but to say they “don’t work” is intellectually lazy and dishonest.

Who are you trying to convince right now? Linux and macOS users are probably never going back to Windows if they can help it, and Windows users will correctly say “but it’s right there; I’m using it right now”.

deleted by creator

Correct and not at the same time. I’ll use Wikipedia as a source to hopefully show you that I’m in a position to understand some of the nuances.

1. Never, ever, ever cite Wikipedia in formal writing unless it’s to cite some meta aspect of the project itself (such as “this article was 5879 words long as of 4 May 2025”). If you really do need to formally cite Wikipedia, always make sure to grab a permanent URL for the current revision.
2. If you already know a fact but just need it cited, look at the inline citation in the article, evaluate the source, and use it if it’s to your liking.
3. You don’t necessarily have to look at Wikipedia’s sources at all if you don’t want to. You can look at something stated on there then go out and try to find more in-depth information about it if we just cover it in a sentence or two with a shallow citation doing the bare minimum to support only what we say.
4. There are some subtle qualities to articles you only pick up on as an experienced editor, but here are some less vibes-based things: does the article have a little grey or blue padlock at the top right on desktop? Those are protection templates, and they prevent IPs and very new editors from changing the article. Is there a green circle or a bronze star at the top right on desktop? Those represent a good article and a featured article, respectively. A good article has been peer-reviewed by an experienced editor, and a featured article has been peer-reviewed by at least several highly experienced editors. These articles are routinely scrutinized to make sure they keep up their overall quality, and this status can be removed if they deteriorate.
5. Wikipedia legitimately has high standards for the information presented – way higher than when teachers were (absolutely correctly) panicking about students sourcing it in their writing. In 2012 – 13 years ago, when I would consider Wikipedia to have had much lower standards than it does today – it was found that its information about psychological disorders was of higher quality than Britannica and a psychiatry textbook. 2012 Wikipedia was still climbing its way out of the hole that Wikipedia stopped digging around 2006 when it implemented quality standards, and it’s vastly better in 2025 than in 2012.
6. There’s honestly nothing that wrong with using Wikipedia as a source in casual disputes over popular topics. For how many Mughal casualities there were in some obscure 1608 battle? Yeah, probably continue on to the source the article cites instead. For the date of JFK’s assassination? Just take it at face value, to be honest. For something where you just want to give someone a casual overview of the topic? Really just link them to Wikipedia; it’ll likely do a better job than you unless the subject is very underdeveloped there or unless you’re a subject matter expert.
7. As for using Wikipedia as a source in your own private life when you just need to check something? In that case, just try to keep in mind your own level of familiarity with the subject, how obscure the subject is, how contentious the subject is, if the article overall looks well-cited or if it looks/sounds like someone just injected their own original research, if the inline source looks credible (this last one doesn’t guarantee anything; if you want a guarantee, check the source yourself to ensure it says what Wikipedia says it does), if it’s plausible that Wikipedia isn’t showing the full context here, and if the consequences of an inaccurate understanding are worth risking.
8. If you see something on Wikipedia that’s uncited or poorly cited, please either remove it or attempt to find a robust citation for it. It helps a lot.