comfy

Defenestrit

Adblockers have been mentioned a hundred times, as they should.

Annual reminder to donate to Invidious too. YouTube has done some serious work to try and block most of the instances.

Codeberg works for me. I used to use a couple of indie instances of gitea for various smaller project, but both have either gone down or been at risk, so I mostly use Codeberg which is more organized and failsafe.

Someone posted an image that says “Verify you are human”, with the test being “I stand with Palestine”. The implication is that those who do not, are not human. Yes, joking about how Zionist scum (and apathetic people) lack humanity is dehumanization. The image is very literally saying some is not human if they don’t stand with Palestine. And to recap what I said, this isn’t some moral objection - death to the Zionist Regime and those who empower it. The problem is that dehumanization of humans is an anti-materialist delusion, which has historically led to underestimating enemies.

Oh hey, my anniversary is coming up. For base daily driver on desk and lap, just a stable standard beginner friendly distro. I’ve customized it a lot, added custom hotkey scripts here and there, but it’s so close to base that a stranger could use it. VMs for anything specialist, a couple of portable USB distros for presentation/demo/one-purpose OS environments, but for the most part I’ve just kept it simple and clean.

When one takes a step back, it’s obvious that our own societies have their own ingrained systemic biases. All our journalists and other writers will have biases that they and us might not even notice are biases, since we believe they’re just fact. AI datasets have run into this problem plenty of times, for example when government regulation has told insurance companies not to use factors like ethnicity or races in certain calculations, but it turns out that some ended up indirectly doing it anyway since postal codes approximated race in many regions. There are layers to systemic biases.

Btw this is not an argument against Wikipedia in any way. I think it’s perfectly valid to criticize it for accepting “blatantly false but “verifiable” “ edits. I’m aware that the world is complex and perfection is idealistic, especially when it comes to topics where sources are inherently strongly biased, but publishing false information on a site with the format, style and reputation of Wikipedia is a real problem at a scale with far-reaching impact. To shift the onus of fact-checking onto the user is extremely inefficient and negligent. I’m not even saying that there is a better solution, but it’s certainly an argument criticizing Wikipedia.

Just as an anecdotal side note, just this year I found a typo (92 instead of 82) contradicted by a quote attached to the cite reference later in the paragraph, and very easily noticed if one checks. I only use VPNs so I can’t fix it.

Yep. If money isn’t a problem, the answer is ‘never’.

Does your local government publish advice? Some have a contact who can tell you what is safe to use in their infrastructure.

It depends what you mean by movement, and where you mean. There are already some direct action movements on the ground, like Subvertisers International, Adbusters and historically B.U.G.A.U.P to name some famous Western ones.

Bombs not Food

Sulfur and charcoal, delightful!

If there’s no specific use-case (this is a general introduction, not Intro to Operating System Design) and this isn’t academic Computer Science teaching, then certainly a scripting language. Easy to learn, easy to use, and much more applicable for simple automation that benefits the people learning. C is dangerous if someone doesn’t take care. Java is verbose and personally I didn’t enjoy it one bit. You said this is a non-technical crowd and you expect them to follow at home.

Yeah, synesthesia counts!

Find a physical activity you enjoy and do it at least three times a week. Either join an organized religion or specifically curate a group of people you do a weekly activity with who will come check on you if you suddenly stop showing up. I managed to get both these with sport teams. (At least in my area), the local sports competitions are actively looking for players, and if you have skills or enjoy a role others don’t, you can even just volunteer (instead of pay fees) in a few teams before joining one you like. And one foot in the door will likely get you invited to other teams and competitions when someone’s team needs a substitute player (or you can just ask, “Does anyone have a team that play on Thursday nights?”). In my favorite team, I became de-facto captain of because I showed up most reliably and was the remaining member of the original team as people left and joined. One week I forgot to tell them I would be away for the match due to travel, and the next day I wake up to a couple of check-in messages just to make sure I haven’t vanished or had a bookshelf fall on me. And it’s a reassuring feeling to realize you’re part of a community that cares about each other.

An end result of liberalist idealism. (plus what others have said)

Celebrating on the 24th. It’s not even a long historical tradition in my own family or local culture, we adopted it after my grandparents celebrated a few Christmases with a Central European immigrant family in the neighborhood who start celebrating at midday 24th December and realized it enabled those of us who were married/etc to celebrate the next day with our other families. It’s much more relaxing like that, I’ve heard my friends complain after trying to fit in a breakfast, lunch and dinner at three different Christmas parties in one day to avoid offending anyone.

only a few hundred