I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.

It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).

Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).

Honestly Star Wars has always had trash writing, it was the people around George Lucas that made Star Wars good and the more success and fame Lucas got the less he listened to others and the worse the movies got.

Specifically Lucas subscribed to Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces which is a widely discredited work of anthropology and besides Campbell was an outspoken raging sexist (women can’t be the hero they have to help the hero he said many times).

It is a reductive, authoritarian way of telling stories, it only leaves spaces for the chosen heroes. I also find it makes the universe of Star Wars cynical, evil just happens because we are sinful and it is inevitable. It is boring and not very compelling.

Andor of course goes against the grain on all of these things, brilliant series!

Tired : Cybertruck

Wired: MeatSpaceHatchback

Hey, I agree with the sentiment but sex work is a respectable job unlike being a crooked as shit congress person ruining the future of countless people :)

Also being a slut is a respectable job too, the world runs on sluts like me.

Feels like the automotive world is in utter chaos.

I think maybe a whole lot of rich and powerful people in the automotive industry are beginning to realize that most of the automotive industry is going to be “commodified” and entirely eradicated by shockingly affordable relatively small electric vehicles from China (and hopefully elsewhere too! If places elsewhere don’t just thumb their noses and say “that’s what CHINA does”) that not only displace their fossil fuel counterparts but more broadly destabilize the focus of the car as the center of modern life in a way that I don’t imagine anybody fucked up enough in their heart to make it to the top of the automotive industry can really accept.

The day Linux says all video games are compatible with their OS is the day I finally switch from Windows for good.

I mean Wine and steamOS’s Proton are that though? I mean compatibility isn’t perfect but the vast majority of games I have tried worked all the way from current AAA games to games like Steel Panthers WinspWW2 that is a DOS game from the 90s that barely functions on a modern windows computer but yet runs perfect on my Deck. Because the deck is using a virtual environment to emulate a windows OS it actually arguably creates a more stable platform to run windows software than windows itself running the program normally.

Pretty much the only obstacle left is stupid super invasive anticheat/spyware software that doesn’t bother to cover Linux in competitive multiplayer games.

Honestly I think windows is so fucked in terms of market share and it seems like they are kind of just pre-emptively ceding the battle to linux intentionally or not.

Yeah people have been waiting for years for linux to eat windows for lunch and it hasn’t happened yet but I am convinced that linux becoming massively more practical and easy to use for gaming (Steam deck being a good catalyst) in the last couple of years has pushed things past a tipping point. Gaming might not make up the outsized chunk of desktop usage, but gaming is where people experiment, try new things, learn software inside and out and it is where people are most inspired to contribute and build and polish out the annoying little details of complex systems.

Yeah Microsoft will have its walled moats around entire sectors of business indefinitely into the future, and that probably is where most of the consistent money is, but I think Microsoft shitting the bed with Windows 11 so hard is creating the rosiest forecast for the future of Linux desktops I have ever seen in my life.

These twin factors converging has got me bullish af on Linux in the near to mid term.

Let’s fuckinnn gooooooo

Lemmy Flood Gates right now.

The control room has alarms going off and on the main screen it just says “LET ‘R RIP” in blinking red letters.

You know what would keep us safer? If the most prominent news agency in the US actually did its job and did critical journalism instead of acting like RT news.

For example, more intelligence gathering power given to intelligence agencies would not have stopped the Iraq war. If anything, the more power given to these agencies, the more official they sound when they make boldfaced lies because people assume they most know something actually substantiative with all that intelligence capacity.

We would have just launched even faster into the Iraq war.

Which of course is the point

I 100% agree about the importance of learning doggie language, after all studies have shown domesticated dogs are extremely adept at learning human body language and are excited and motivated to learn human body language far past the point really any other animal gives a shit about doing. We owe them the same curiosity and interest in their language!

Simple things like a yawn usually means “hey I’m just here not trying to start anything” or a playbow is actually an invitation into playful energy most of the time, or how dogs evaluate how nervous to be about the threat of a nearby unfamiliar dog or person by whether the dog/human’s hips/shoulders are aiming towards them or not (a dog has to “aim” it’s shoulders at something it is about to attack, so aiming your hips and shoulders to the side is a form of de-escalating an immediate threat of violence for dogs).

Knowing how to differentiate the stress/pain pant from a normal pant is also CRUCIAL to picking up when your dog is suffering.

• Train your dog with a wait command before going through doors, big dogs that try to barge their way past you out of excitement to get out the door are sort of cute but also incredibly annoying it can honestly hurt someone who is frail.

• If it is a young dog you trust and you are raising them, touch their paws lots. Pick their paws up and shake em like a hand, don’t be rough but just handle their paws so they become comfortable with humans handling them as dogs can be really nervous about this and it makes it extremely hard to inspect your dogs paws for a cut that is making them limp or something.

• similarly if you are raising a dog and it is too small to hurt you, when you feed your dog hang out next to their dish, put your face near theirs (ONLY with a dog you trust), give them pets, make your dog used to the fact that humans might come near their food but that humans won’t take away their food so they don’t need to be defensive.

• the more dog time you give your dog (where you do dog stuff with your dog) the more human time your dog will give you (where you both do human stuff and behave according to human norms). Going on walks, throwing the ball, rough housing, all of these things give your dog the mental stimulation they need to relax and behave

• a good dog park where your dog can socialize with lots of different dogs and learn their doggy language is not only a fantastic way to get your dog exercise it gives your dog the opportunity to practice interacting with other dogs.

• periodically (gently) surprise your dog by nabbing their tail and giving a tiny tug, or poking them a bit on their rump when they aren’t looking. BE GENTLE and always transition to pets and praise after the initial surprise moment for your dog. If you have a large dog and some kid gets loose and runs up behind it and yanks your dogs tail for no reason and entirely takes your dog off guard, your dog will be used to this kind of bullshit and simply be surprised it is a tiny human annoying them rather than a full grown one. This can be a really dangerous moment if you have a huge dog like a german shepherd, because even if the dog isn’t normally aggressive towards kids, if the dog isn’t already well used to its owner frequently low leveling annoying it with boops, it might react in fear and self defense. If you extract enjoyment out of mildly annoying your dog for the goofs sometimes, you know tease them in a loving way…, they just aren’t going to react in fear and self defense when they are surprised by a human coming out of nowhere and abruptly surprising them.

• if you are raising a dog and you can figure out a way for your dog to meet cats, it can be helpful so that they don’t meet one in a situation you need them to behave and they go “WAIT WHAT IS THAT”. Same thing with human kids and babies.

• going away for the weekend and leaving your dog with a friend or someone else’s care is actually a really good thing for dogs that tend to get super attached to their owners (german shepherds are a classic example) as it stretches their mind a little bit encouraging them not to see their owners as the only thing in the universe, it gives them experience trying to relax without needing their One Human.

• get a collar that helps with walking better than a normal collar that just chokes out dogs when they pull, if you get the right collar/harness it will feel like you are walking an entirely different dog

• big dogs can absolutely learn how to “be mouthy” while also being incredibly gentle even though they have a mouth full of knives that can crunch through bone. Remember, dogs will carry puppies by their scruff. Dogs like humans have to learn the language of play, and they have to learn when they are being too rough with their mouth when they play with you. Many people train their big dogs to NEVER be mouthy which is understandable but if you know what you are doing your dog can absolutely learn how to play wrestle with you on the ground with their big scary mouth “chomping” (extremely gently) on your arm and both of you going at it having fun and being careful not to hurt each other. A dog can also be easily trained to get the signal for “ok playtime is over now, let’s wind down this energy” or “this is not the correct social situation to go nuts and want to play”. I tend to use the loose command “gentle” with my dogs, and I say it with a calming intonation. I have found practicing playing with a dog and then giving the command/signal that playtime is over is extremely effective over time at getting dogs to learn to become aware when they can be crazy tornadoes of chaos and when they need to chill the fuck out. If you do this right, your dog won’t ever play too rough with anybody because they aren’t going to be getting the right body language signals from those people that now is supposed to be playtime and they are invited to play,

• all dogs love it when you scratch just above their tail on their rump, it is like a cheat code for making a dog stop worrying about who you are as a stranger

• have friends over to normalize humans coming in your house, if you don’t your dog can easily fall into the habit of barking like a maniac every time friends come over and it can be scary and disorienting for guests

• the way you keep your dog from barking way too much (and jumping up on people) is literally just making the commitment to be more patient than your dog in making sure to always give feedback to your dog when they do those things (whatever your training style is).

• take your dog for dumb trips in the car to the store and back sometimes, definitely try to make it fun for them (and definitely don’t leave them in your car in the sun when it is hot for really any amount of time) but your dog will likely enjoy the stimulation of all the sights even if it is just a boring car trip and assuming you don’t have to go in wherever you are going for too long they will see it as a fun adventure. This helps train your dog to be chill about car rights and not loose their damn mind every time you are actually going on an adventure with them.

• if you have a big dog it is worth getting them used to being picked up in a bear hug occasionally as this can make dogs really nervous if they aren’t used to it and you don’t want to try to make them used to it in an emergency where they can’t walk or you need to lift them onto something. Make sure to support their rib cage (and back legs if possible) when you lift.

• Dogs are like people in that most of them want a job, they want something they can do for the pack that they are good at. Understand dog tricks from this perspective, you are giving your dog a job that they can do that gets them praise from you and other people and stimulates their brain.

I think anything meaningful has to start from local mutual aid networks, creates connections with your neighbors under the assumption that we need to take care of each other, we can’t assume the system will be functional.

Even if your goal isn’t directly to organize locally, it is a prerequisite to getting pretty much anything meaningful done (which I kind of hate because when people call it “organizing” they aren’t kidding, and I hate organizing things lol) because whatever meaningful thing you want to happen will inevitably be implemented on a human level through those local connections.

Better shower thought: When the rich push the cost of housing high enough that a good portion of a society is one or two crises away from being homeless the best economic policy for fixing the situation is making the rich scared as fuck so whatever compromise we put on the table looks much more appealing than what the general public is threatening to do to the rich in the streets.

“It’s always two steps forward one step sideways with you Gary”

It’s not nice to beat yourself up like that, a shower should be a place to unwind not judge yourself.

Does giving to a panhandler help them or are you just enabling their lifestyle and making them dependent on that form of income which may prevent them from getting a real job?

Criminalizing homelessness and making it a sign of essentially being a pariah in society does far more to ensure homeless people become dependent on begging for money than giving money to homeless people does.

Most societies in history have had codified ways of beggars receiving food or basic needs from vendors, the current situation in at least the US is horrendously cruel.

If panhandling was 100% illegal with a felony charge for those panhandling and for those giving do you think more people would pull themselves out of being homeless or would they just suffer more?

Homelessness is not caused by laziness as the state of being homeless is exhausting both mentally and physically, thus codifying the act of being homeless and needing money as even more criminal doesn’t do anything to stop people from falling into homelessness and getting stuck there. What causes people to fall into homelessness and extreme poverty and get stuck there is how obscenely cruel our society is structured and how if you fall down everybody around you starts kicking you because that is just what we do when people fall down.

It doesn’t really matter what a homeless person uses the money for that you give them or that the homeless person might think “oh this is a good spot to panhandle” if you give them money in that spot, these are trivial little details of the day, they have nothing to do with what is crushing that human being down (especially when you live in the richest country on earth like I do, and we have plenty enough resources to go around if we cared to tackle wealth inequality).

A social network/online community can either be significantly profitable or healthy for its users. Pick one

This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.

I completely agree, fuck discord