Inb4 someone writes a program and calls it AdblockAI. It gets trained on the shape of corporate logos and on the fly in-paints those regions of the screen to remove the logos.
On that same note, how about AR glasses that put black bars over ads and logos you encounter in real life so companies don’t get to subliminally advertise at you.
Rereading that, it’s not super clear who “they” is referring to. Here is what I was trying to say: In the past, some of our media has been revised to make it politically correct, books, film, and other media. I don’t agree with this, but I do think some of those people have good intentions. Putting ads on cultural artifacts (like our media) retroactively is whole new level of evil: supervillain evil. It’s like “Stonehenge, brought to you by CocaCola and Nestle” or “Skip the line at the Great Pyramid with Amazon Prime”. One is motivated by a misguided desire to protect everyone’s feefees. The other one is just pure greed.
They edited all the movie dialog to be woke/ now they’re gonna edit all the graphics to grab more money. :-D
I am thrilled every time I have the chance to reconnect with someone from high school whether it’s a student or a former teacher. Also, I’m close with someone who went through a period of physical limitations and I’m sorry to hear how this is affecting your social life. Even as a third party to my close friend’s experience, I can still conjour up powerful feelings of loneliness based on their experience.
I hope you have some great moments of reconnection!
Not a mean question at all. I haven’t had more difficulty keeping a working system than I did on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. I get everything I need in Arch and the packages are always fresh off the grill. I also like the emphasis on text config files and a ground-up install. That helped me better understand my system and how it works.
No idea about performance. My performance recommendation is “don’t run Windows!” :)
Yeah, easier is better. I’ll have to confirm what apps outside of Jellyfin and Chromecast are needed, but I’ll compare some basic Roku devices. I could probably score one a online neighborhood marketplace for a few bucks.
Thanks for weighing in.
I spanned that divide. We got an Amiga in the home when most families had no computer and even then, I had to log all my computer time in a little book to make sure I didn’t spend too much time using it. I was frequently told to “go play outside”. I was taught not to give out my name or personal information online. A few years later, I remember downloading the full resolution Hubble Deep Field images, completely filling the family computer’s hard drive and probably saturating the dial up for quite a few minutes. Now I work for questionably evil companies (on my computer all day) then go home and do computer/tech related hobbies. I went from digging holes on the edge of the woods for fun to sitting in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other tech most of the day.
Is life better post-digital? In some ways yes; in some ways no. We’ve kind of hit dopamine saturation where everything is just a click away and everything has already been done/thought/built/conceived. I have communities for the most niche of interests and I can find info on almost anything that tickles my fancy. On the other hand, there’s very little reason to leave your home and anything that makes you (or your friends) special probably looks like shit compared to the accomplishment of some random 10 year old kid from a foreign country. When the world was smaller everyone could feel bigger and more significant, but post internet, it’s clear every day that we are one of billions of people. The ads still tell us we’re special… to sell us stuff.
I find my solace in the outdoors and in regularly scheduled fully-offline social activities. I imagine being a kid got a whole lot harder after my little micro-generation.
I noticed the same thing with KDE and Wayland. Sometimes my curser still grows 10 sizes or shrinks as I pass over certain windows or between monitors but things are more consistent and predictable than they used to be.
My Minecraft pals used mumble at various points. It’s less polished than some options. I like the FOSS and the simplicity but the certificates confused me as a noob. Would still recommend.
Every cycle of enshittification sends more people looking for alternatives. Remember the rebirth of “piracy” which streaming had all but killed for the most normal normies? People crave the system, but it’s possible they’ll slowly come around. Will it be fast enough. That’s for us to find out. I gently encourage people to think about more than just tomorrow because that short term proprietary bullcrap isn’t worth it in the long term. Definitely hear you though and it does feel that uphill sometimes.
Not to mention you can fit more Reddit on a 1TB hard drive than YouTube, which makes it much easier to exfiltrate content.
I have a feeling that the YouTube apocalypse will be much harder to watch (as in “more sad/unpleasant”) than the Reddit apocalypse.
I do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Is there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?
It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.
My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.
A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.
I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.
I’m a Buddatheist who grew up with both cultural Catholicism and later Christian Evangelicism.
I like how this hints at the nature of the self. If I leave someone behind am I not also leaving myself behind?
For me, ethical acts are those that increase the freedom of the self and others. We all suffer. That’s a fact of life. If we dissolve our concept of the self and acknowledge our link to others and the world itself we can see ourselves more as threads going through human experience. If we are kind to ourselves and “others”, we have a better chance at reducing that suffering.
Imagine the time a stranger forgot their wallet and you paid for their coffee. A version of that experience could still exist in that person’s mind long after you die. It could get blended with other experiences and reinterpreted. It could be told as a story to a friend who was inspired by the act. The cascading effects of that person being properly caffeinated on that day could have world changing effects. In a similar way, I carry the shared experiences of my own ancestors and even strangers who have shared their stories with me. They are still alive as a small part of me because my true self is humanity or even some animating life force of the universe or something like that and the name that people call me just refers to the limited perspective and incomplete view I have of existence. Essentially I see existence as blinders limiting my perspective like a race horse, but the true self is a satellite view of the track. When I act, I do so based not only on my experience, but the collective experience of every perspective and experience that has been conveyed to me in every way, but I am still one human body, in physical space, subject to time. I hope that when I die, those blinders will be lifted and I’ll exist as pure conscious perception of everything that ever was is and will be. Able to see through anyone’s eyes, in any time. To feel any and every feeling felt my an animal or human. To view the entirety of existence as a completed masterpiece from outside time itself.
You can probably see why I like the Buddhists.
I find that when you acknowledge the interconnection of things compassion becomes easier.
I hope that people rediscover that within themselves and others.
Last night’s Southpark kind of hinted at this topic a little bit. I’m curious to see where they take it, but I won’t post any spoilers here because I don’t know who has seen it.
The cables seem to increase exponentially don’t they? First, you have a few computers and a half dozen cables powering things and linking everything together, then you add a couple servers, maybe a second nic on your NAS, and another switch or two since things are now further from the router. Suddenly your office looks like a giant bowl of spaghetti covered in prop 65 stickers.
I could probably learn a lot from the thread. If I don’t clean it while it’s still warm, I tend to resort to coarse salt, a bit of oil, and a scrubby sponge. Either way, it’s not easy for me to clean, especially after eggs.
You might find some of those influences in PJ Morton’s music. Sample: https://youtu.be/2F9pL06IC8k
C2C has a really cool electro-gospel song that doesn’t have overly religious lyrics, though it captures the vibes excellently: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tvY7Nw1i6Kw
Other gospel/southern vibes: https://youtu.be/xNWhiXxdbWk
Lol, I would wake up some time in February with an apetite sufficient to cause a global famine.