Extrovert with social anxiety, maker, artist, gamer, activist, queer af, adhd space cadet, stoner

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • I don’t know about how “normal” that might be but you’re feelings are valid. You also can’t stop progress. People are hardwired to make crazy new stuff and we’re really good at it.

    But just because it exists doesn’t mean you have to use it. You can live a rich, full life even living like the Amish or other in low tech environments. The Mininites (like the amish but with phones and cars and computers) only adopt technology that benefits them and thier community. They live more primitively than most of the global north mostly for religious reasons, but there is wisdom in focusing on gizmos, gadgets, and software that improve your life in some way and ignoring what doesn’t.


  • I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

    She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.








  • Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

    Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

    Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

    OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

    I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.



  • Eh, technical merit is only one of many factors that determine what language is the “best”. Best is inherently a subjective assessment. Rust’s safety and performance is the conceptual bible rustacians use to justify thier faith.

    I also know religious people who have written books about their faith too (my uncle is a preacher and my ex-spouse was getting their doctorate in theology). Rust has the same reality-blind, proselytizing zealots.

    The needs of the project being planning and the technical abilities of the developers building it are more important that what language is superior.

    I like rust. I own a physical copy of the book and donated money to the rust foundation. I have written a few utilities and programs in rust. The runtime performance and safety is paid for in dev time. I would argue that for most software projects, especially small ones, Rust adds too much complexity for maintainability and ease of development.


  • Omg, so many opportunities for evil:

    • retrieve earplugs from purse, put them in, press the button, hand the staff a $5 cash tip and a pair of earplugs.
    • loiter outside offering pairs of earplugs to anyone entering the business
    • call the business, pose as a vendor so I get transferred to the manager, and play a recording of the sound.
    • leave fake reviews claiming the employees are on a covert malicious compliance strike and to show solidarity everyone should push no-tip.
    • before hitting the button ask to speak to the manager and push no tip while making eye contact with them.

    The real problem is the employee who didn’t create the policy would generally be the person subjected to any mischief so it’d lose its fun about the time the manager barred me from coming back the fourth time I no-tip stared them down.


  • Agreed, but like how do you fix it? Moving is expensive and difficult the farther away from your starting point you go. That’s something that has to be prioritized and even then, it’s not always attainable.

    Without at least some economic privilege and luck, it’s not an option for most people. Certainly there are a group of people who would like to move and cannot because of reasons they find more compelling.

    The people who would move but can’t, aren’t all of the people that don’t move far from where they are born. It could be complacency, but it could also be contentedness. The people who stay put usually have much stronger social structures than people who move around, which is not nothing.