Zink @ Zink @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

I've said this about Musk before, and I wonder if Trump is going there too.

Essentially, you are an egomaniacal psychopath with unlimited resources, yet you have come to accept that you cannot have everything your little heart desires. Especially being immortal.

So since you are already one of the most important and noteworthy people on earth, history needs to accurately document the magnitude of your presence. Obviously!

But now is not the time to get all touchy-feely. You know damn well that destruction and chaos are quicker and more efficient ways to make your mark than creation and harmony. It is difficult to make history for curing cancer, and it is way easier to do it by telling somebody else to tell their people to go do some war crimes.

My fellow americans and I look at this concept and tilt our heads to the side like confused puppies.

Fuckin' hell, I feel like a kid in 2226 reading this on some kind of wall plaque after it was discovered in the cautionary history archives that survived the great fires. I think it struck me when I read this line:

the rot is far too deep, and the purification of chaos is, unfortunately, the only remedy

It's just a very elegant way to describe the btshit craziness of living in "interesting times."

Oh and hey future people who have presumably learned to be excellent to one another: put me in the plaque! It's a thing we used to do on this old internet here with screenshots, you see.

Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don't sound like the "I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement" folks with very specific needs.

And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.

Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you're ready to install it, there's usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.

I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.

Firstly because it's a meaningless platitude that doesn't actually make sense

The world runs on meaningless platitudes for these people!

I am not disagreeing with you; you're very much correct. But I think it's important to point out and not just let it pass by.

It's all part of the talking point conditioning and conforming that the right leans on so heavily. You need to superficially signal the right virtues with your appearance and speech.

No toasters in these parts, my fellow biological human.

That sounds an awful lot like Wilhoit's law, which I find myself referring to quite often lately.

Wilhoit's law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

edit: So the US is the rich conservative of the world stage. Super. I love seeing the news every day and wondering if any more of these maga morons are going to finally have their "are we the baddies?" moment. /s

All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

:(

Unfortunately I think the people who most need to understand why you'd be jealous, as well as why these gals would hold up "don't destroy us plz" signs while being all attention grabbing, will not be answering the phone.

I was raised in 80s and 90s maga world before it had a brand. And there are two things that I consistently see them do, which makes a lot of sense vis-a-vis the recent saying about conservatism having the in group the law protects and the out group it binds. It is these two things that blind them to the various messages of human rights. (there's a depressing sentence to honestly write about real people I know)

First they generalize, caricaturize, and exclude. They lump in these non-cis protesters right along with the non-christians, non-straights, non-whites, and various other "why can't you just be a normal person" rest of humanities.

The racism, bigotry, and LGBT+phobias are a convenient way to narrow down one's perceived size of the "in group" candidate pool, which obviously still includes them. They are not in the leopards' food chain. Obviously.

The second thing they do is conform. It goes hand in hand with the bigotry of course, but it also has to do with the fucked up psychology that goes into keeping up appearances and covering up the family's skeletons so that you always look like one of the in-group. Like if your princess needed an abortion, not only was HER's obviously the rare moral one, but nobody needs to know about it because she has her whole future ahead of her!

That's just tribalism, sure. And conservatives are bad about it in general, yes. But they can be REALLY bad about it when it comes to money, because they hate poor people. Even if they are poor. Because they need somebody to look down on. But even "good folks" can be rebranded as "poor white trash" if they don't maintain the perceived standards of the in-group.

Wilhoit's law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

After writing this post I'm thinking Wilhoit's law might just exactly right, so there's the text.

Being a parent is awesome if you want to be one and it aligns with your personality. Our existences are largely shaped by our relationships (I say this as an introverted AuDHD nerd) and being a parent is probably the most significant and transformative relationship in the lives of people who are parents.

However, I know that I have always been a kid person and also always wanted to be a parent. And then my wife and I couldn't have kids for the longest time, went through some more years of pain with adoptions falling through, and then finally had our own biological kid. And not only is he somehow perfect in a better way than we could have designed ourselves, but his neurospices seem to mimic mine so it's like I have a superpower for relating to him and interpreting his issues.

I assume that qualifies me pretty high on the scale of Lemmy users who are very much into being a parent. I'll wear that rank proudly.

With those decades of experience and the satisfaction of how it is currently going, plus all the stuff I learned navigating my mental issues alongside it, I am quite confident saying that having kids is NOT for everybody, and it will NOT fix your problems.

Raising kids is probably a potentially good experience for most people, sure, but in supportive circumstances.

Unfortunately, society pressures people to conform to the norm, and the huge "you are supposed to start a family now" step usually comes right after you were pushed to go into tons of student debt, marry the first person you dated for longer than a year, then top up the debt to get an overpriced house and vehicle or two.

It's been a very long time since "I saw it on the internet so it must be true" was a novel joke.

So then some tech bros wanted to create "AI" so they fed a language based machine learning model the entire fucking internet and anybody ever expected anything of value?

It convincingly simulates a pedantic internet jackass with unlimited drugs and time on their hands. But that content is freely available at a slightly more human pace. Nobody is paying for more of it except the very same tech companies using every psychological trick in the book to drive engagement, even if it harms users.

The stuff under the AI umbrella will be useful for some things, and probably pretty valuable in some industries. New tools often are. But propping up however many trillions or tens of trillions of perceived value in the economy?

hopes that society will become more accepting of AI, or what Nadella describes as "cognitive amplifier tools."

Ok well this is a simple train of cause and effect that even Mr Nadella should be able to understand.

Make an actual tool that is so damn good and so universally useful that early adopters who pay attention would consider calling it a "cognitive amplifier."

Keep in mind that I have seen the term "second brain" used for note taking apps, usually easy to use and sync between devices. (I'm using AnyType free)

That is how poorly the "market" views your "tech demo with a price tag" product! It loses the brain title to a small collection of conveniently stored text files. Congratulations.

We need both.

Technology is awesome and I have a tech job and a house full of computers and all that. But it's important that we don't fall into the trap of "if we just got rid of the capitalists, then we could be on our screens all day in peace and health."

If you cooperate with the primitive parts of your brain that evolved to take cues from the natural world, it can often improve things across the board.

I don't have any issues with KDE, and I admire their work beyond the DE/UI. Kdenlive is my chosen video editor, for instance. I believe it's the flatpak version too, so it no doubt loads a bunch of stuff into ram.

I'm not sure what you mean by "restricting" with the DE since I have a terminal at my fingertips at all times. I assume you mean some design decisions or lack of some customization options that KDE has?

But the weird selection of apps has me lost. It comes with stuff installed that you might expect, like firefox and libre office. It uses mostly the Ubuntu repositories so you can apt or apt-get install most things you're looking for. And since it's linux you can add repositories and all that fun stuff.

I also don't know what you mean by filtering flathub.

I'd expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 ("start" button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.

I'm a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It's still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn't take away from that. It just meant that it wasn't the learning experience you'd get with something like Arch.

There's a lot of wisdom in this even though it's oversimplified.

For me, the smaller I make my world the happier I seem to be. I spend most of my non-job and non-sleep time hanging with my family, working on my house, and doing what are essentially farm chores to take care of all our pets.

Working with your hands and engaging all your senses with real stimulus from the natural world is a huge part of it, even as somebody who has been terminally online since the 90s.

Yeah that too. Didn't mean to imply otherwise!

In my old age with sophisticated tastes I do enjoy a little Brutal DOOM now and again.

Absolutely insane.

Given how long their conversation was, I wonder if some of those stats and "scores" were actually inputs from the person that the LLM just spit back out weeks or months later.

Not that it has to be. It's not exactly difficult to see how these LLMs could start talking like some kind of conspiracy theory forum post when the user is already talking like that.

Money.

Greed.

Humans (including the rich ones) looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places.

The naming is one thing I legitimately like about the whole Linux/GNU/FOSS world.

Things are still named by nerds/enthusiasts who have some spark of joy and fun left in their hearts. Could you imagine a sanitized corporate software product released today with a name that directly refers to the established product it is meant to displace?

For example, things like GNU's Not Unix or my favorite remotely accessible text/terminal based email client I used around the turn of the century, PINE Is Not Elm.

Then you get fun second-order software names like GIMP, too.

It's all so preferable to the commercial software branding world where even though the visual presentation is extremely samey (everybody switching to the same popular boring fonts and removing logos/artwork), the actual brands are often made up silly words that are easy to get the domain name and the social handles for.

Be sure to follow BONTO! on all your favorite trillion dollar propaganda and surveillance platforms!