I firmly believe that a “crustless ice mantle” meets the definition of an ocean.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • Global solutions are nice to ask for, but not forthcoming. We can start by investing in alternatives at the local/national level, encouraging others to do the same, and advocating to grow an alternative way of living that is less extractive and more respectful. Ideas can spread quite quickly, if the conditions are right. A global switch isn’t possible immediately. Infrastructure must be planned. International economic planning and international cooperation are low right now. Even intranational cooperation is low.

    Cooperation grows from the bottom up, and we need to find something locally/nationally to agree on and cooperate over. Plastics and recycling being a unifying issue is hopeful to report, and is something that can be tackled at the local level. I have greatly reduced my own plastic consumption (it’s not zero) and saved money doing it. Plastic products are usually expensive conveniences. Now I spend my days cleaning instead of just tossing and moving on. A part of the problem is that living well requires labor, and our society forces us to sell all of our labor energy to make a boss rich and pay us pennies. Further, we all live in atomized, nuclear units that must be self-reliant, which requires more labor to meet needs compared to the economies of scale involved with community-pooled labor to meet shared needs like food (a major source of plastics waste).

    Previously, western society supported this structure via sexual segregation where one sex provided the labor to live well, and the other provided the labor donated to capitalism in exchange for the family unit being allowed to live. Then, the sex whose job it was to help us live well realized that they were being oppressed in this scenario, since they were being denied many basic rights of citizenship such as being seen as a person by society. They were tricked by the capitalists to demand that they may also donate their labor to the invisible hand in exchange for something closer to full citizenship. This creates a domestic labor vacuum that prevents pay parity. Domestic labor needs are being suppressed by convenience plastic use. The need for someone to do domestic labor causes women to fall back into this role due to the structural vacuum. Convenience plastics use is required to support the lack of time available now that Bosses demand double the labor from each family unit compared to the 1960s. Dropping plastics increases domestic labor requirements which exacerbates the sexual labor vacuum and pay gap. I see a local/national need to fix sexual issues as blocking a fix for our plastics addiction in the west. Abstracting the problematic societal structures around sex, calling them gender, and then breaking their rules is the current strategy to free ourselves.



  • What motivated you to switch branches? Did it solve another issue? Why were you not on the latest branch yesterday, ie, why did you roll back originally? Does one driver work better for some games, and another driver works better for others?

    Nvidia drivers are jank. I honestly haven’t touched them since 2017. I remember having to reboot and switch drivers to switch games I was playing with friends and finding the whole experience annoying as hell. I realized that Linus Torvalds was right, fuck nvidia, AMD is the way to go. Have not had to touch anything with my drivers since switching. All of my interactions with nvidia since have confirmed that they are not a company deserving of my patronage.



  • There’s usually only like 5 tracks. “What’s recommended” is nouveau, which works but not for gaming. It’s recommended because it’s open source and can do most things that the proprietary nvidia drivers can do. Nvidia is really bad at maintaining their drivers, and different drivers work better for different cards.

    Nvidia sucks. Switch to AMD and never have a problem again. Or spend an hour testing each of the proprietary options maintained in the debian repos, and most likely find that at least one of them works. Until an update to the drivers or kernel comes along, and breaks it again, so you have to play around with driver versions and kernel versions to find a combo that works. That’s less likely to happen if you stick with a debian-based distro vs a bleeding-edge distro like arch.

    And buy AMD for your next machine to send a message to nvidia that their driver support sucks!









  • Not only that, but having the entire executive branch come down to a single elected ticket is a clumsy and low-resolution choice for voters. Especially when you consider that there are only two tickets (blue and red) to vote for.

    The position of the president is superfluous and should be eliminated. A president hires people to run the executive branch. That’s how senile Biden can be so effective. He hires well. The American people should be hiring (directly electing) the cabinet, the judicial branch, the top generals, the top ambassadors, etc. Those people could vote to approve/veto bills, or do other jobs currently reserved for the president. This would mean that our whole executive branch isn’t getting replaced every 4-8 years. I bet that if people were voting for each cabinet position independently, we would see a lot more specialized candidates running, and room for third-party break-ins to smaller positions. Each cabinet position is focused on specific issues that relate to that position. This gives voters more granular control over the executive branch. Have each position up for election on a staggered timeline so not everyone is up for election at once. Force the races to be focused on specific issues by making the election be about a specific department. Maybe AOC could win Labor Secretary, but that race shouldn’t have a foreign policy discussion. Maybe Bernie could run for Secretary of State as a referendum on pulling out of the Middle East. If we are electing people to specific jobs, we can focus on those jobs instead of all the other bullshit that the election cycle focuses on. Replace the presidency with a document/constitution that outlines the checks and balances, roles and responsibilities of each of these positions.


  • There is a difference between background-level bulk sniffing and someone-here-maybe-incited-violence targeted sniffing. The former is data collection, which is passive in the form practiced by “the feds”. The latter is data connection, putting effort into connecting a subset of the data that has been collected to form a story. Data connections need a framing, a nucleation seed, an impetus for why the feds might think such a connection is interesting or relevant or worth adding to their story about a larger incident. Collecting data is cheap and done in bulk, partly because it can be done passively and partly because the US govt paid a lot of money on storage and collection mechanisms. Connecting data is something that requires a lot more time, effort, patience, and vetting to make sure you are doing it right.

    Or you can give the job to generative AI and hope it doesn’t hallucinate that someone innocent is guilty; with a large enough data pool (ie the internet, reality, what-have-you) it’s possible to select a misleading subset to support whatever hallucination you want.

    It’s easy to do wrong, which is exactly why you don’t want the feds sniffing around. Especially now that they have the tools to automate doing it wrong, and might not know how to use them yet.




  • I love organic maps and openstreetmaps. The biggest thing missing is satellite view. I like to wander around and explore an area on maps before visiting. OSM has more interesting/relevant details and better visual color coding than the vector street map on google. Google has a satellite map, which is non-negotiable for me especially if I need to quickly orient myself while driving in a new place. I use three layers loaded into qgis for planning trips: OSM, google maps satellite, and a topographic map from USGS. I sometimes use organic maps on my phone if I don’t have access to a computer with qgis. I rely on Google while on location because organic maps lacks a satellite feed.