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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 4th, 2023

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  • There are definitely a lot of little things in gimp that make it hard. The lack of a shapetool is one(yes yes it’s not a drawing app but a basic edition helps) and other things like adding text with a black outline or shadow. After literally decades they finally added in a way to make it easier to image macro text in. The old way involved several submenus and I know I couldnt figure it out on my own without a guide.

    I know sometimes people come into an opensource ecosystem and complain that everything is worse because they arent used to it, but at the same time there are a lot of open source programs that are very rough around the edges and the developer cant see it because they know the program inside and out so of course it’s intuitive that this feature is burried in here and this feature way in there.






  • I feel like the big issue is the difference in how it’s portrayed. In DS9 and even enterprise section 31 are the bad guys. They are portrayed as a shadowy organization that thinks it’s doing the right thing but when confronted gets in the way. In DS9 they even lose. Section 31 arent an example of the end justifying the means being a necessary evil, they are something from within for the idealistic federation to overcome and defeat.

    As a concept section 31 doesnt make a whole lot of sense lore wise because the federation is a paramilitary organization. Sure they are scientists, explorers, and philosophers at heart, but they are also very much a military Navy. We also see that starfleet does have a non section 31 intelligence complete with spies that go deep undercover get the trust of their enemies and sell them out. The federation knows the galaxy is a hostile place which is why they explore in heavily armed warships with a crew that follows a strict chain of command.

    I think part of the wish fulfillment and idealism of the federation lies in the implication that they are also very powerful and able and willing to defend themselves with great force. Even the cruise ship Enterprise D was able to take on multiple enemy warships at once and win.

    The major difference between section 31 and standard federation operating procedures seems to be their appetite for genocide and civilians.

    It is a thing that has made me nervous about this new project since it was announced. Section 31 appearing as a bump in the road for our idealistic federation members to deal with works and allows them to stay the badguy. Them as the protagonists of a show or movie puts us in a situation where we get told stories where the ends justifies the means. And they either do this by making the federation seem naive and incompetent(which they arent they have a prime directive where they sterilize all life on a planet) or it has them justifying some heinous crap.






  • The weirdos crusading against bloat helped keep distros light weight and performant decades on. It allowed a linux distro to fly on older hardware that was bogged down by newer linux versions. The legacy to this day is that WMs like KDE can actually be fairly light weight and there is still attention paid to not using a lot of resources.

    Nowadays I feel like the complainers dont even have a consistent definition of what bloat is and it ranges from command line only users who know theyre crazy and niche but speak up anyway, to people who are just upset if a distros ships with basic default tools like an image viewer or something that opens text files or videos, or drivers.

    The whole thing is also silly with how much cheaper ram and storage have gotten. Even moreso because the distro and WM isnt the limiting issue. Yes you can still run a KDE based distro with 2gigs of ram, but as soon as you open your web browser and visit the modern internet the dozen high definition images that load in and videos and javascript.


  • Roe getting gutted was the result of conservative judges that got appointed to the supreme court and the states that have taken further steps to restrict are republican run states. The majority that the Dems had was very slim not enough to get a lot passed especially when the “majority” included “moderates” like Manchin and Sinema.

    I agree the Dems and libs suck. If they werent so smugly sure that clinton would win 2016 they would have not played politics and forced in their supreme court pick and we would have less of a minority.

    Roe getting gutted is the result of a decades long plan by the republican party and letting them them win a majority again will only make things worse.



  • Hardware is a big factor in this. Mint in particular is a stable distro based on the ubuntu LTS so it’s slow to get new kernels and you need a ppa to get a fresher mesa install and this is essential for newer amd hardware. Conversely if you’re on a rolling bleeding edge distro and you rely on nvidia and their closed drivers then you’re often one update away from breaking them.



  • Yeah I dont think I’ll ever understand these weird 5g skepticism threads. I do get better battery life on lte than 5g and building penetration means a lot more switching between bands(an issue specifically with my pixel’s radio) but similar issues existed with with lte and 3g when they launched. I guess the difference is LTE already has speeds and latency enough for people to get by.

    And yeah on lte you’re already getting 10-60mbps down so for most use cases you probably dont notice a huge difference in speed while browsing social media, and watching youtube. But having a network with higher speeds and more bandwidth is better for handling congestion. If you live in an area where the 5g is unreliable or your phone has poor support for it then you can just switch to lte while things keep cooking.



  • Personally as an RSS user I dont even want or need it to send me the article. I almost always just click the link and go to the website directly. I think RSS could still exit as just a link aggregate with a preview. The thing that lead to the decline of RSS is that it was competing with social media and news aggregates like google news.

    Setting up your RSS reader takes work. Even the super user friendly ones like feedly still require you to search for different sources that you want to add. In the old school and more pure RSS programs you have to manually find the rss link on a website and add it to your feed.

    In a more open optimistic future of the internet this would be the way we get content. Exploring the web and adding it to our list if we want updates o demand. In the actual modern internet addictive monopolistic social media has to cater to algorithms instead or social media engagement(that often doesnt actually read the source).

    Google not encouraging and getting rid of its rss content certainly didnt help matters but I think RSS is just a living fossil of a potential evolutionary branch that the internet count grown into but didnt.