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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • Bill Gates has made anti-knowledge sharing his lifelong legacy, from crushing OpenGL by bribing game developers not to build in it, to pushing the US gov’t to give away COVID vaccines to poor countries rather than making the data available so they could make their own. His influence in the industry towards proprietary and closed source code is unmatched. Like, we all love the nerd jumping over the computer with the goofy smile but that dude is a piece of shit.

    My point was that if we (you!) were able to level the windows/Linux gaming playing field before he died, that would make him mad, and make me happy.




  • My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

    (Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

    Did i mention that i use arch?

    More importantly:

    fucked up all my data with no backup.

    One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

    Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.



  • The enumeration on the losing side of that debate is probably correct. But as a person who was in my early 20s in 2000, I’d like to offer what I will characterize as The Historical Context and Definitive Conclusion to This Debate.

    No one actually gave a shit about that debate. Sure, it came up, but it did not alter anyone’s party planning. We weren’t actually celebrating the changing of the millennium, we were celebrating because we had a permission slip to do so. Any attempt to withdraw that permission was unwelcome.

    In Paris on December 31st, 1999, at around 11pm local time, someone threw themselves in front of a metro. The trains were free that night (because it was the 100 year anniversary of their opening iirc), but because of that suicide, at least one of the train lines was substantially delayed. The streets from the center of the city to the north side were crowded well toward dawn as everyone chose to walk home instead of wait indefinitely in a stinky train station.

    That person, who chose to end their life on the tracks that night, holds the core truth of the debate within his death: it’s a ridiculous debate and those who would fight for it should just stay the hell home and let the rest of us drink a lot and dance.



  • Literally a children’s hospital in my city had their shit locked up by “hackers” – they were using pen and paper to schedule appointments for weeks, using handwritten notes to pass health details from ER to ICU, etc. It could still be down for all i know, I haven’t checked in a while.

    I don’t know exactly how much pain and suffering this has caused kids, or how many died because of it, but i know how hard it was when my son was in the hospital for months when he was little, and that was with a fully functional hospital.

    It’s fucking disgusting. And I’m like kinda pro-crime a lot of the time…



  • It’s hard enough to get people on board with social movements that directly help them and have no downsides; you’re going to have a hard time promulgating a financial system that undermines the wealth of the people who dominate the standard financial system, especially when the more wealth you’ve accumulated (in the standard system) is directly proportional to your ability to spread propaganda to support your wealth.

    There are better, more winnable, battles to fight than the global financial system.

    While i agree that a victory there would be huge, part of the reason it would be so huge is because of how very, very unwinnable it is.

    That said, if you’re super stuck on finance as the issue you want you be involved with, imo, the best thing you can do is communicate the questions – the problems with contemporary finance, of which there are so very many – and don’t waste your time offering solutions.

    (Even if we had a solution that could work, it would surely be obsolete by the time it could be meaningfully implemented. Cryptos of all kinds, at this point, can only provide their benefits to people with disposable wealth, who can afford to take the risk, and those are exactly the people who don’t need you to fight for their interests. Or anyone – but you’re not anyone, you are you; your energy is finite, spend it where it can help the people who need it most.)





  • So you’re saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.

    Kidding aside, you’re absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN’T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it’s not perfect.

    If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google’s many spywares – there’s loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.


    Edit: the “federated Netflix” – I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: “anyone” (anyone federated with other instances) can “upload” videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.

    And federated Amazon – that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.




  • You’re right, I’ll concede that – but only because BSG is an amazing show and very few characters can be reduced to “good” and “bad” – even the “antagonists” (in the traditional sense of those characters working against the stories’ progression) have pretty valid reasons for doing what they do.

    Gaius (sp?) is one of the closest characters to “bad” – but not because of the bad things he does, but because of the bad things he is – ie, vain, selfish, etc – and the fact that he lets those negative characteristics drive his actions.

    All the characters have flaws, but the “good” characters do their best to mitigate their flaws, and let their positive traits motivate them. For example, Adama often acts before he thinks, a trait that is awesome in combat, but can be less positive other times – and he (as best he can) seeks advice and counsel from the people he trusts (eg Saul Tigh) – he knows he can be impulsive and he knows his “instant judgement” decision making isn’t perfect.

    Cavil (that’s his name I think) is close to “evil” but he does have reasons for his actions – preservation of his “species” (though really it’s just himself) – but he’s evil because of the fact that he doesn’t listen and acts with disloyalty and dishonor.

    (There’s an amazing comeuppance for the titular character of the show Nathan Barley that epitomizes this idea: Barley doesn’t actually do anything wrong, but his motivations are repugnant, and his motivations are what’s revealed… Shit I should write a whole essay on that…)

    Are there contemporary shows that are as good as BSG? I kind of gave up on TV after Firefly.