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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Right, but this is fundamentally at odds with the ‘Linux for everyone’, ‘Linux for gaming’, and ‘Linux can replace Windows for most use cases’ rhetoric.

    If you enjoy Linux for its own sake and you like fiddling around with it and learning its ins and outs, it’s fantastic. But if you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can get back to what your were doing, it leaves some room for improvement.

    We can’t have both, and that’s fine. There’s also an argument to be made for people getting used to dealing with a command line because it’s something of a prerequisite for getting away from increasingly shady corporate overreach. But that doesn’t help me when the solution to getting my extra mouse buttons and precision mode is to create a well documented bug report for Solaar and then wait. I just want my push to talk to work, you know?

    That gap is definitely shrinking as time goes on, but it’s still an obstacle and it’ll always be part of the conversation around GNU until it’s no longer a concern for one reason or another.



  • Literally money. More specifically, the financial need under a capitalist system for businesses to constantly grow and increase profits, and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product. Most businesses on any sort of large scale today aren’t in it to do a good job at making whatever it is they make, they’re in it to make money. Their actual ‘business’ is just an incidental stop on the way to making more money.

    You see this literally everywhere. Remember Odwalla? They made these great, super-thick bottled smoothy-like juices. Easily the healthiest thing you could find to drink in most of the places they were sold. Then Coca-Cola bought them out, changed the name to Naked Juice, and watered them all down. What we have now, as a result, is a pale imitation of what we once had.

    Why? Because Odwalla was profitable, so it was profitable for Coca-cola to buy up a competitor for shelf space. But once they were bought up, there’s no incentive to deliver the same quality of product. They have no remaining competition, so they can release a shittier version and we’ll basically just suck it up because it’s still healthier than soda.

    Our reward for worshiping currency is for everything ever made out of love of a craft or an art to be exploited and turned into a shittier version of itself.

    The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.




  • Sure, if the civilian population of the US had to actively repel an invading army with their own organized militia, it’d be completely one-sided.

    But if the US military were engaged in a war against its own civilian population, it wouldn’t be a remotely straightforward fight. They’d be dealing with a local population and the emotional impact of fighting their own population at the same time. Guerilla warfare in the United States would be a mess to try to deal with. We have a lot of wilderness, and the division within the military would likely be significant enough to have a major impact on any attempted operations.

    The US military is really good at organizing its troops to fight for the US. Fighting against the US is a whole other can of worms. And by my count, most older vets wouldn’t be on the side of using the military against our own civilians, whether they’re otherwise more on the conservative side of politics or not.

    I don’t think there’s anything like the kind of support or organization to see something like that happen, but I think it could get a whole lot uglier and more complicated than just the numbers suggest.



  • Millie@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Okay, so as a cab driver I have a lot of opportunities to get frustrated with how selfish and myopic people are. But you know what happens when I do that? I make myself miserable.

    I, personally, find that my mental state is much, much better the more I’m willing to accept people not doing things ‘the right way’. Yes, I could get annoyed for the hypothetical people who might encounter an obstacle to their mobility here (who have not and may not ever arrive), but what will that actually do for me or for anyone else?

    Unless I’m actually moving the obstacle my disapproval is completely useless. It may even cause me to do something stupid and inconsiderate myself as I become distracted by my annoyance.

    But if I just let it go, smile, and move on, the utter insignificance of the action can just fade into the background and not make itself part of my focus on how to reflect on humanity or my day.



  • It’s not just about having the biggest reach, though.

    I’ve noticed that some of the folks who are generally against defederating, whether it be between independent fediverse instances or from large companies, seem to have this impression that fediverse needs to take a huge chunk of some market share in order to compete. But the whole point of the Fediverse is that it doesn’t need to compete.

    It’s not a company looking to increase their size, following a bottom line, and trying to increase profitability. It’s a network of people who communicate and share content. There’s no need to compete with anyone in order to accomplish that. We’re doing it right now regardless of whatever else exists out there.

    We’ve gotten so used to this model where there are only a few really culturally relevant social media sites, but that’s literally because we’ve just bought into the business model of these companies as societies. Slashdot has been going strong since 1997. Is it the biggest forum or news site on the internet? No. It gets a tiny portion of the internet’s traffic. But that’s plenty to be what it is!

    The fediverse is not facebook or twitter or reddit, and it shouldn’t be. We don’t want or need it to be.

    I heard someone make the point recently that nobody walks into a nice, small restaurant and says they wish they were at McDonalds. Facebook is the McDonaldsification of the internet. Let’s be a bunch of small mom and pop restaurants instead.