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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Me too. At least with Temu and Wish I know the majority of my money is going directly to some crook in China and not to Bezos. Cut out the extra middleman. Same low quality of goods, direct from the drop-shipper lying about them or perhaps even the factory counterfeiting them. It’s a substantial improvement in supply chain honesty and legitimacy, you’re left with no illusions about the products and all the reviews are fake, so it’s deeply refreshing to not have to try to figure any of it out. It’s always 100% consistent. You know exactly what to expect, with no worry you’re accidentally going to overpay for something you think is genuine and receive a box full of rocks that’s obviously been opened, stolen and returned, nah not on these sites. You’ll get exactly what’s pictured (not to scale necessarily, though). Way more reliable than Amazon.


  • Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but I want to emphasize that whether you mean it that way or not, it’s true. Each person helping and participating makes the work a little easier and success a little closer. A movement requires leaders and builders, certainly, and those people are often doing a lot of heavy lifting. But it also simply requires members, and numbers, and people just showing up. Your support, simply just being here, means more than you might know.



  • Oh, so you don’t like my summary of the article you didn’t read? Maybe you should go read the article then, then you can come back here and we can have a proper argument about what you expected the TL;DR should be.

    I don’t know why you think you don’t have time to read the article, you seem to have an awful lot of time to split hairs about “out of touch with voters” vs “out of touch with reality” as if these are vastly different things in your attempt to start an argument while agreeing with literally everything I was trying to suggest with that term. I have clearly made the mistake of stepping into your well-laid trap, you got me, fair and square, I concede to your superior intellectual position and withdraw my own, whatever you think that may be.

    I have to say though, you sound very much like you have a little bit of personal opinion going on here too. I’m not terribly interested in what that is, so I’ll be leaving now.



  • What a shame we don’t have enough armed forces to defend and patrol one of the most remote, inhospitable, largest territories and longest coastlines of any country in the world. You would almost expect that would take a significantly larger military budget than your economic peers, not a vastly smaller one. Funny how that works out.

    But yeah let’s just keep selling off all our natural resources for bargain basement prices to a single bidder and doing nothing to defend them from anyone else. Once the natural resources are all gone we’ll have nothing left worth defending anyway. So I guess that’s the long-term strategy?


  • It is a perfectly valid approach, and there are also many other perfectly valid approaches. “Better” requires a definition of what you want to be better. If there’s something that’s making you uncomfortable about the process, let us know what concern or issue you’re seeing with it and maybe we can guide you to a better way for you. But there’s nothing wrong with the way they’re doing it. Others may have different preferences (including you, YOU might have different preferences!) but they’re just preferences. It’s not right or wrong, even if some people argue that it is, they’re always going to have some preferences embedded in that judgement. There’s always more than one way to do it. That’s the joy of it, really, and sometimes you’ll have to experiment yourself to find out what ways YOU like the best, that make sense to you, that are comfortable for you, or that do things the way you want to do them.

    It’s your own self-hosting setup, you get to make the choices. Sometimes the number of choices can be intimidating and lead to analysis paralysis but the only way out of that is to realize that there really is no way of finding the “best” until you’ve tried many different ways and figured out the “best” yourself. That’s why the only real advice I can give you is to just go through the tutorial you’ve found and do it the way they do it for now. You can change later, as you learn more, when not if you decide you want to do something differently. Because you will. We all do. It’s part of the process.


  • I agree that the open source package dependency situation in many popular languages and ecosystems has gotten way out of hand. Well, at least my addiction to reinventing almost every wheel myself and self-hosting my own cobbled together infrastructure which has permanently afflicted me with chronic not-invented-here syndrome aren’t feeling like such a crippling disability anymore. Maybe it’s not always such a bad thing in every situation.



  • As a veteran of gaming on Linux for several years, I have to admit I keep a small collection of various usb bluetooth dongles, because honestly, built-in bluetooth support still remains questionable and unreliable in many cases, at least for me and the systems I use it on. I don’t necessarily blame Linux as much as I blame the manufacturers of the chips and devices, but unfortunately we have to live with the chaos that their reverse-engineered-firmware-reliant devices create. Any cheapass bluetooth dongle is probably fine, the cheaper and more ubiquitous it is, the more likely it uses the same shitty chinese chip that all the others use and that a bunch of someones already hammered out drivers for, but honestly even with multiple different models and brands it still seems like a crapshoot which one feels like working properly at any given time, but usually one or the other will work and get things to connect, and it’s usually perfectly reliable once all the drivers have loaded and it’s all paired up and things start working. The struggle is real, though.


  • Its wireless is much more compatible, supporting several different connection methods for use with different proprietary systems, and is just generally a better and more capable device. They’re worth every penny, IMHO. 8bitdo’s quality changed my opinion on gaming controllers that had developed after years of being frustrated by cheap, wonky, second-rate, third-party garbage controllers like MadCatz and Logitech that used “features” to cover for the fact that they were cheaply made, overpriced, and deeply inferior. 8bitdo controllers are the only ones I trust anymore. Even Nintendo apparently can’t be trusted to make quality controllers for their own systems anymore. But 8bitdo can.





  • A very reasonable and sensible perspective, but what if that’s still not going to be a fair trial either? We all have pretty strong opinions about torture, so I think we may need to go the extra mile in this case. If no unbiased jury can be found anywhere on planet Earth, then we’ll have to send them to Mars for a fair trial instead. It doesn’t even have to be elaborate, we can use the rules of the good old fashioned “trial by ordeal”. If you can survive on Mars, that demonstrates you were innocent all along and you can come right back home. Otherwise this is going to get dragged out for years and years while they dig up even more evidence and who knows what else may get discovered. This is really the best option for everyone. All aboard to Mars.


  • I agree with you. I like the things he’s saying, the problem is I don’t believe them. Even if I were to believe him as an individual and his own intentions I still don’t believe in the others in his big tent, the party, the organization, the apparatus, the system, the environment. I don’t think his intentions will translate into real change. Trust has been shattered. Only real and significant actions will start rebuilding bridges and trust, and there is no obvious framework available that would allow those real and significant actions to start to occur. I don’t see any realistic path forward.

    I don’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that I desperately want a peaceful, non-violent path forward. I want a white knight in shining armor to ride to the rescue and fix everything. But I don’t actually believe they’re going to come, and if they did I am starting to understand that they would simply be cut down immediately and wouldn’t actually win the battle single-handedly the way my naive imagination thinks they would.




  • Neither capitalism nor socialism are a universally applicable perfect solution. They both have noble goals on paper, and horrible failings in practice. Balancing the two, using elements of both, within limits, with regulation, with moderation, is the only approach that makes sense to me given what we know about both approaches. Like any balancing act, staying on top of the balance takes continuous effort and will never remain stable, sometimes you need to push in one direction, sometimes the other, sometimes you overcorrect. We overcorrected way too far towards capitalism during and after the cold war, and now we’re falling and I don’t think we’re going to be able to catch ourselves. But we’ll still have to get up after the fall and try again. I don’t know if there’s a better “third way” but if there is, I’m confident the path to it will be found somewhere in between the two, not at the extremes.