Understandable. FWIW members (15 USD/month at this time) get a discount and the option to use one of the credits you get each month. So Dune can be had for 14.99. I get the pricey books with credits, others I use the discount for. It’s a bit odd and I don’t love memberships, but I do want to support ownership models where they still exist.

If you share access with friends and family using a self-hosted audiobook server then the value really sky-rockets.

instead of giving money to a Bezos/Amazon owned service, you can support services like libro.fm that let you download/own the audiobook mp3 outright.

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Yes. I encrypt because theft. I know PopOS and Mint make it 1-click ez. …unless of course you want home and root on a separate drives. That scales difficulty real fast. There’s plenty of tutorials, and I managed, but I had to patch together different ones to get a basic setup-- Never mind understanding exactly what I did and repeating it (the latest challenge I’ve been dragging my feet on). I do hope this is an area that sees more development in the near future.

People, listen to Juvenile and “back that thang up!” That man understand the importance of data redundancy.

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Glad to see people making videos about this stuff. I hope they continue in that direction and dabble in sharing on a peer tube instance or something similar. Creation is one aspect, but distribution also matters. Talking about breaking free of corporate control loses some credibility when it’s content for- and can only be accessed on- YouTube.

I use youtube less and less because it’s not as information dense as other sources. When I do brave YT, I have a simple css override via stylus to hide thumbnails. It has helped reduce that sad feeling about the human spirit YT leaves me with.

The stylus snippet:

ytd-thumbnail {
    background-color: #000000 !important;
    display: none;
}

I’m using xkb and modified the custom layout so RAlt is Altgr and layer 3 places arrow keys under my right hand and various brackets under my left when I hold right alt modifier. Sorry I can’t give more info at the moment. Feel free to message me if you pursue this and hit a wall. I can provide more details this weekend.

[Edit: just saw the wayland info, apologies if that means xkb is out. Honestly don’t know the implications offhand. leaving this comment in case there’s anything useful]

Are you my 30’s?

“But it’s so convenient to not have the means of production,” says the person who has seen enough ads to become an ad themselves

“This isn’t a business. I’ve always thought of it more of a source of cheap labour, like a family.”

December vibes. More places should just take the month off. Surely the data shows how unproductive most are. Now’s the time to get cozy and rest.

Even in death they’d be causing sea levels to rise.

I think about this often-- followed by Homer Simpson’s voice saying, “Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid.”

I’m with you. Another perk is a sense of where you are on the planet. If I get up with the sunrise at 22:00 somewhere, then travel somewhere the sun rises around 18:00, it’s obvious the sun is hitting this part of the planet sooner.

If UTC were widely adopted, it’d be interesting to see what employers near time zones would do. EG start work at 19:00 or 20:00? 19:30? Flex-time with mandatory core hours from 22:00 to 02:00? Maybe I’m over optimistic, but it seems like it would encourage more flexible work hours.

Dang, that’s rough. I’m glad things turned around. Speaking to my own psychology: It’s easy to internalize a string of bad luck. Then when other people go through it-- whether in group therapy, a global pandemic, or a massive recession-- it shows how random or circumstantial life and luck can be. It helped me internalize it less and get out of my own way.

I was unemployed, isolated, and anosmic-- then covid hit and I was like, “hey everyone, welcome to the club! Yes, it does suck but at least now there’s people to empathize with.”

requires terminal skills to deal with most things

Have you actually used linux? Terminal is optional. Most linux users use it because it’s rad, not because it’s necessary.

Digging through the registry or searching ad laden websites to find where a new setting or old menu is buried is more time consuming than typing man <command> or tldr <command>. The latter is to improve my system and the former to prevent a private company from making it worse.

I would say there’s been a mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon and from Reddit to Lemmy. The current numbers are still a small fraction of the original services, but the federated services have reached a critical mass where they now offer comparable value. YouTube hasn’t been ubiquitous for that long and it’s already pretty enshittified. I see a lot of people who are fed up with it and looking for an alternative. The peertube platform is there, I think with more people and content and it’ll join the ranks.