Okay, but consider that the ultra-rich technofascists are a group that has had a disproportionate impact on the continued pillaging of the climate. They aren’t just opportunists wanting to make the most of the fragments of society that will remain after climate disaster, but people who have been working to bring that scenario into fruition because it’s profitable in the short term whilst positioning them to take even more power.

I cannot emphasise enough that they want this, and that this ideology goes further back than the current wave of them. The reality of climate change is unfathomably dire, but I hope you understand why it’s necessary to resist these people as part of whatever climate resilience we can build. I’ll probably be dead before shit really hits the fan, climate-wise, so my goal is to do whatever I can to support the people who come after me. If those techno-assholes are allowed to inherit the fragments of society, the entire planet is even more fucked

Do your feet ever get too cold to wear that, and if so, what do you do instead?

Oh my gosh, the “abusive partner” comparison resonates so hard. I was helping a friend out with their laptop recently, part of which involved reinstalling Windows. Even in the initial configuration stages (before the stress of updates and resetting settings), I was incredibly skeeved out by the process.

“Do you want to turn on $thing? [Yes / Ask me later]”

I was surprised by how genuinely gross I felt to be clicking “Ask me later”. The next screen didn’t help matters

“Do you want to turn on $more_bullshit? [Yes / Not now]?”

“No.” is a complete sentence, but it’s apparently not one that Windows understands. Or perhaps it understands it all too well, because I expect that this coercive strategy works to push this bullshit onto some of the people who try to opt out.

The whole process was genuinely stressful, and I could feel that stress in the tightness of my chest by the end of it. At first, I felt silly that this had felt so invasive and weird (especially given that this form of asking for “consent” is everywhere nowadays), but my friend said that it made sense to them if we consider how tightly entwined our lives are with technology nowadays. I am not my body, but the degree to which I inhabit it is why bodily autonomy matters so much. Similarly, I am not my computer, but I spend so much time there that it does sort of function as an extension of me — it’s no wonder we take psychic damage from the kind of bullshit Windows pulls

TL;DR: This is a somewhat meandering tangent that doesn’t necessarily have a point to make, but your interesting comment evoked these thoughts in me, so I figured you might find these interesting

I am not a vegetarian or vegan (yet?), but I have many friends who are, and it’s cool how that changes the dynamic. My vegan friends tell me that being the only vegan at a barbecue usually sucks, because there are rarely good options provided by non-vegan hosts. In contrast, when I am the only non-vegetarian/vegan in the group, it becomes trivial, if not optimal to choose non-animal food products, and it’s always striking to me how refreshing that feels.

For example, if everyone orders 3 tapas-style dishes and shares freely with the rest of the table, then I am able to experience more options if I opt for vegetarian/vegan dishes — if all three of my choices contained meat, then it would be pretty impolite to expect the rest of the table to share their food freely with me given they can’t have any of mine. A more balanced path would be to get one meat-containing dish that was just for me, and two dishes that could go towards tapas socialism for the table, but this falls flat if I don’t enjoy the meat dish as much as I expect, because that leads to either wasting good food, or eating something I’m not keen on. In contexts where most/all of my dining partners are vegetarian or vegan, it is easier to for me to go with the flow. The ease of this (especially with respect to the reduction in guilt that you describe) is a large part of why moving to being vegetarian is one of my horizon goals.

Another example is a Jewish friend who often explains her dietary requirements as “basically just vegetarian”, because that’s more straightforward than explaining kosher requirements to non-Jews — especially given that my friend is comfortable eating some things that other Jews might not consider to be kosher, and these nuances aren’t something you can explain to someone who’s just trying to plan food for everyone. If my home is full of vegetarian food, then my friend, who is like a reincarnated gannet who hates food waste, can swoop in and hoover up all my expired and mostly edible food when they visit. And it’s easier to avoid getting to the stage where food should be thrown away if I can share it with vegetarian or vegan friends, so this is another way in which reducing animal products in my lifestyle is a boon rather than an inconvenience.

I tell these mini stories because your comment caused me to reflect on how dependent hassle is on the external context. The way this links to Linux is that one of the things that caused me to switch was that Linux is pretty common in scientific computing, especially high performance stuff. A lot of software works with both Linux and Windows, but I kept finding issues that only arose on Windows versions, or poorer documentation on the Windows side of things. I felt an implicit pressure to switch to Linux, because that specific context and community made me feel like the odd one out. The science stuff didn’t require switching to Linux on my personal PC, but I figured that making that leap would help me to really feel comfortable with the scientific aspects (somewhat analogous to how I have made a concerted effort to learn how to cook food from cuisines that are less reliant on animal products/meat, because it’s a useful strategy to become a more skilled cook).

Your comment is interesting to me because I had a completely different read on the meme. The tumblr tboy compared using Linux to “being transgender”, so read “using Windows” as being analogous to being cisgender (i.e. identifying as the gender you were assigned at birth). I get why you opted to think of this in terms of gender presentation though, because how does one map “being [transgender/cisgender]” onto “choosing to use [Linux/Windows]”. Indeed, I was confused by this too, at first, but after a moment of pondering, I found a fun interpretation from thinking of “using Linux” as the thing that’s not the choice.

Ubuntu tboy seems to consider using Windows to be an innately bad experience, and whilst he didn’t explicitly suggest this is true for everyone, it’s useful to look at this through that lens. If “Using windows” = universally bad, then that would suggest that “being cis” = universally bad. That sounds ridiculous and is quite an inflammatory statement on its face, but it’s not necessarily attacking cis people, but the concept of cis-ness (or assigned gender at birth) itself. In other words, “existing in a world where Windows is treated as the default option sucks because loads of people hate Windows, but may not even realise that an alternative exists, or switching is (or perceived to be) too difficult”.

At this point, it’s probably useful to situate my perspective here: I am cis, and I’ve found that I feel most free and empowered as a woman in spaces that are super queer — i.e. the kinds of spaces where I forget the construct of gender entirely, or it is thrown into sharp relief and I see the absurdity of the system now.

To bring this back to the Windows comparison, I remember that when I was dual-booting, I had problems with my computer’s system time because Windows assumes your hardware clock (the one you can set in BIOS) to be your local time, whereas Linux (and MacOS) assumes that to be UTC. It would make more sense if Windows could switch over, but that’s not practical in part for the same reasons why they used local time in the first place: backwards compatibility . Of course, Linux has its own inherited contexts, conventions and traditions, but Windows feels far more caged in by the past because of its status as the default. But rather like cis-ness, I wonder what the world could look like if there wasn’t such a hegemonic default option. What might it look like if even people who weren’t “computer people” could be empowered to do cool stuff with their computer? Is that even possible? It’s hard to say, because a world without such a default is highly speculative, but I don’t need to be about to visualise specifics of that to complain about how the assumed default is harmful to more people than realise it.

Their recommendations thing is still relatively new and developing, but I love listenbrainz recommendations. You can set it up to follow your music listens on multiple different music streaming apps (and locally too, I think). It made it easier for me to bite the bullet and cancel Spotify.

Only with smart lights can I laugh maniacally and have myself be silhouetted by flashing white-blue lights behind me. I didn’t become a mad scientist to do this stuff manually.

This is going to be such a ridiculous disaster that it’d be entertaining to watch it go to shit — if it weren’t such a critical system they’re fucking with.

I find myself commenting far more often than I did on Reddit. I remember once that I lamented that Lemmy doesn’t have a “super upvote” in the way that Reddit gold used to be (which is a silly thought, given that I have never, and would never pay money to gild a comment). However, I realised that on this more discussion based platform, a short but meaningful comment can readily function as a super upvote. I think the lack of karma accrual for comments/posts also promotes this.

(tangent to your question because someone already answered) I think that courtroom stenographers (people who type up what’s said) use special chording keyboards. I’ve also been to a few events where there has been someone transcribing things in real time for accessibility purposes, and they also use a cool looking chording keyboard. It takes some learning, but the max typing speed is way faster than any conventional keyboard could manage — which is why skilled people use them for transcribing stuff

A brand that I’m aware of that does them is Charachorder.

Benzene is OP and I love that for it

Just adding onto the good answer you already got, but the thing that made this click to me was understanding that if you’re not port forwarding, you’re limited in the connections you can make to other peers. Specifically, you can only connect to peers who are fully available. Whereas if you’re port forwarding, then you can connect both to people who are limited, and to people who are fully available.

I imagine you would get faster download speeds if you were port forwarding, but my impression is that this mainly is a factor for seeding, which matters more if you’re on a private tracker that requires a certain download/upload ratio; it’s way harder to keep that ratio above 1.0 if you’re limited in the peers you can connect to.

I really like it. The composition of the elements is excellent, which is great for both clarity of reading, and also a sense of understated elegance.

Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/s09Er

This is wisdom that I wish I had had years ago. I learned this the hard way

I really need to get round to setting it up. I know it won’t be difficult, I’ve just been pretty mentally drained and feel like I haven’t had the brain space yet

I had a friend who spent a long while out of work in their 20’s because they had a mental breakdown and quit a well paying job. They later told me that it was less a choice to quit, and more the knowledge that if they continued there, they’d end up killing themselves. They knew that being unemployed would likely be just as torturous for their mental health, but it would at least be different.

This is all to say that I reckon that for many, choosing to be unemployed is probably an irrational choice, but when you’re not doing well mental health wise, you’re not necessarily going to be able to make rational choices.

I think you’re right that everything being fucked at the moment is probably a key driving force here, and it’s why I worry that even throwing a heckton of money at mental health services wouldn’t be enough. It’s also why Reform are doing so well in the polls — people are desperate for something other than the same old stuff that we have seen from both the Tories and Labour, and Reform are the only ones offering something different. It’s a shame that the “something different” that Reform is offering is nothing but a scapegoat painted to look like a real alternative

“think about making some of the standard drugs in this country to improve supply.”

A friend was telling me earlier about the various logistical tricks that Lidl and Aldi use to reduce prices. For example, because they primarily stock own-brand products, this reduces the number of different variants/brands per product they have to source, which means they buy larger amounts from fewer suppliers. This means they can negotiate with the supplier to get them to package the product so that packaging has super prominent barcodes for easy scanning, and the boxes can go straight from a pallet onto the shelf, reducing labour. In short, by doing stuff in bulk, they have more negotiating power.

i think your point about stabilising drug supply is an example of the kind of thing the NHS could do to leverage its enormous purchasing power. I know that one of my medications is quite expensive for the NHS, but also quite widely prescribed, for example.

This is super cool, thanks for sharing. You’ve reminded me that I wanted to make or buy an hourglass — visual timers are useful if you have ADHD like me

That’s probably who I’m remembering; I recently discovered his work.