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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

    If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

    Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

    The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.


  • Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.

    It is definitely the case that I’ve had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I’ve also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn’t an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).

    It’s funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren’t so crippled. Similarly, you weren’t so crippled if you couldn’t use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.

    These days, it’s pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube – obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat – same problem.



  • I’m used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there’s nothing you can do about it.

    It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn’t move, the clock wasn’t updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).

    As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it’s also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn’t addressing them.


  • Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn’t true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can’t handle and you’re out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.

    You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.


  • Why don’t you like flatpaks? I’ve basically never had any issues with them, but maybe I will in the future.

    As for distrobox, what’s the confusion? Were you trying to do something advanced? Or, was there an issue with mapping things between the host and distrobox? I haven’t really pushed the envelope, but the only issue I’ve had is that I wanted my shell history to be different between the distrobox and the host, so I had to tweak my zsh startup files to detect if I was in a distrobox and save history in a different place.


  • As someone who started with Slackware in the 90s, it took me a while too.

    I switched over to Bazzite from Windows 10 on my main PC because I wanted something I could game on. But, even though most of my games work great on it, I haven’t played that many because I ended up just happy to have a Linux system I could use for projects I’d been putting off.

    It’s true that if you’re used to a plain Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora system, you have to do some things differently. But, in exchange you basically never have to worry about installing a package because there’s been a vulnerability discovered or something.

    The happy medium I found is using distrobox on Bazzite. Inside a distrobox, you can use apt or whatever to manage the software you want. You can even export things from the distrobox to the main OS – like, say you installed a GUI editor in the distrobox, you can have it available as if it were a normal app in the main immutable OS.

    Distrobox might help you switch if you’re feeling hesitant. OTOH, if you want to fully grok the system before switching, or want to be able to customize the images you’re installing, that can take a while to figure out.




  • The companies are not good or evil, they’re neutral. They only care about making money.

    If burning more oil generates more profit, they’ll do that. If burning less oil generates more profit, they’ll do that. And, they’ll stop operations as soon as people stop buying their products/services.

    On the other hand, they’re not honest. They use marketing to create a demand for their products and services. They lobby politicians to be exempt from regulations. They lie about how environmentally friendly they are.

    You can’t 100% blame these companies for climate change because they’re just selling things that people want to buy. But, you also can’t 100% blame people for buying those things because they’re not doing it with full informed consent about what’s happening with the money they hand over.

    In the end, we need to completely change the way western civilization lives if we want to slow climate change down, and part of that process will involve punishing companies that don’t prioritize doing things in an environmentally friendly way.


  • That’s pretty brave of you. It’s a lot of work to fight people’s assumptions, and I’m sure it results in harassment.

    But, you’re right that things will never change if women don’t do that. It’s a chicken and egg thing. Nobody wants to be the first to do it, because whoever’s first gets harassed the most. But, if enough people do it, it won’t be abnormal anymore.

    Good luck, and thanks for trying to make women on the internet more normal.


  • It’s a different model.

    Mastodon, like Twitter, is a person-centered setup. You can use hashtags, but most people don’t. You follow people not communities. As a result it’s basically microblogs, where most people are just posting into the void. Celebrities are followed more, so they get more replies, so there are more conversations. But, fundamentally it’s not really inviting interactions.

    Lemmy, like Reddit, is a topic-centered setup. It has a bunch of communities and people post something because they think it might be interesting for people who are also interested in that community. Every post is basically an invitation to have a discussion about something.

    I think the friction to posting something on Lemmy is slightly higher, but when you do, it’s more likely to generate comments.


  • Similarly a “good post”, one that gets lots of comments, would be any post that gets more than 13 comments.

    By my count, this comment will take your post from one with 12 comments to one with 13 comments, therefore I’m conferring on you the title of “good post”. Congratulations!!

    However, I’m assuming that you’re including your own comments in the comment tally. If you’re not, then your 2 comments so far to this post don’t count, and you’ll only be at 11, and therefore “not good”.

    If you are counting your own comments on your own post, can you juice the numbers by adding lots of comments? In other words, can you make a post good by interacting with the people who are interacting with the post? Like some kind of um… conversation? Sounds like cheating to me.





  • It needs a lot more people and lines connecting to the centralize services, like 6+. You have 14 dudes in the fediverse, you should have a similar number of dudes in the traditional centralized social media things. You need to make it clear that every connection between two people goes through that central server. With only 3 or 4 it looks like it’s some kind of small community there, like you’re just saying “communities exist on Facebook” rather than “on Facebook everybody connects to one central Facebook service”. It would also be good to draw a black line around the edge of the bubble to indicate it’s a walled garden rather than an open system.

    For the Fediverse example, it would be good to have a slightly darker shaded bubble with people around their local fediverse instance. That would indicate that there are local communities, but that they can still communicate with all the other communities. And, maybe show that people can be part of different communities, show one person connected both to a mastodon instance and a Lemmy instance.

    Edit: I just thought of something else to make it clearer. On the centralized networks you could also make a darker group of people who are a community on say Facebook, but show that that community has to connect to each-other through the central server.




  • I’d agree that in the current state it’s pretty useless. But, I don’t think it would take too much to make it usable. If the GRUB menu had some basic information on it like: what version is it, when was it installed, has it booted successfully, etc. then I think that would be enough for most people to figure out. Although, I do think that the current Bazzite timeout is way too short.

    BTW, on my system /boot is ext4, /boot/efi is FAT32 and the rest mounted at /sysroot is BTRFS.