christian

Maybe like twenty years ago my Demonoid account had a glitch where it showed my download as a few bytes, regardless of how much I was actually downloading. The number definitely should have been way way higher. Every time I would log on the digits for my ratio would run off the side of the screen.

Is being noble on Gaza worth risking Gaza being obliterated by Trump and the GOP?

I'm going to ignore the implication that "being noble on Gaza" is actually more risky for him and just assume that's true. What the fuck kind of question is this?? Biden should absolutely change course to being noble on Gaza. Yes it is worth the risk, arguing that he shouldn't take that risk is saying you're okay with continuing to sacrifice Palestinian lives over the coming months if it means a better chance of beating Trump and saving them from a theoretical worse fate.

Sure, there's a chance Biden will lose the election anyway, but I'm sure they're capable of understanding how necessary their sacrifice was. I actually kind of hope that you're one of the people who thinks we all should support Israel and that you're making a bad attempt to play sympathetic here, because this this is an absolutely ludicrous contortion to justify continuing to fund a genocide.

No one makes the decision to continue funding the destruction of a people out of concern for what those people might go through if you don't. Total horseshit.

You could have answered my question a bit earlier, I broke my nose this morning and now her divorce lawyer has informed me that my neighbor across the street has gone up to 12% better than me.

EDIT: I just went over and broke the guy's kneecaps and am now happily married again.

We had a cat a while back with horrible flatulence among other stomach problems for a couple years. He was kind of a dumbass and at one point he ate some bristles off of the broom, caught him chewing on it and didn't realize he had actually swallowed anything. A tiny bit after I had taken it away from him he coughs up the bristles with a tapeworm tangled in there.

I swear we did like a million stool samples the first couple years we had him that showed no parasites. We had just brought in two of them a couple weeks apart in the past month when that happened. My wife took a photo of the worm, we went straight to the vet and he got medication that solved all his issues essentially overnight. For the record, if this ever happens to you, the vet we saw suggests putting the worm in water to preserve it and bring it in, rather than just snapping a photo and trying to get the thing as far away from your household as possible immediately afterwards.

I think "Thank god our cat ate that broom" is a phrase not used very often outside of our household.

I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.

I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he'd point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn't feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.

Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He's giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn't really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris' post where he addresses zero of Chris' points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn't actually care about free software.

At that point I didn't really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.

Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I'm pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called "PureOS") because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren't taken seriously.

Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word "functional".

I'll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.

edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads "PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops." Sounds like a community of happy customers.

Good comment. I'm pretty sure "public money, public code" used to be a slogan a while back. It didn't get a lot of traction but it resonated with me.

I'm considering getting back into pc gaming, it's honestly been a couple decades so I'm ludicrously out of touch. On top of that I don't know shit about wine, in my 10-15 years of running linux I think I've only run wine one time, right after making the switch. I quickly decided using native apps was easier and I've never really needed any software badly enough.

Anyway, my assumption is that linux piracy is so scarce that I'd be better off just looking to run windows cracks through wine, is that accurate? Are there any decent private trackers for games with a reasonably low entry barrier (an interview process for example)?

The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.

Oh wow, I had totally forgotten that it started as phoenix. I only remember that name because the first time I downloaded the browser, the homepage read "Phoenix is now Firebird".

I don't anymore, but it definitely still doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as reddit is.

In the past, the security fortress Lemmy has had that reddit doesn't is the userbase being too small for organizations to feel astroturfing is worth their time.

Yeah, probably a little, but this same change was 1000x more noticeable like half a year ago when reddit banned third-party apps. I think it's reasonable to lament the change, and I kind of miss the tight-knit community from the first three years I was here, but it's still worth celebrating the platform taking off. Ultimately all you can do is be the change you wish to see in the world.

That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I'm going to be a little less zen about it.

I saw the picture before reading the edit and was trying to imagine what OP was doing that made the end key significantly more useful than the home key, like not going backwards on principle or something.

There is expensive because of brand and expensive because of material quality, do your research.

If "do your research" means take a couple minutes to make sure there aren't glaring red flags about a purchase, then yeah that checks, but I see this phrase used as a more serious concept which just doesn't seem realistic given my experiences.

I feel like if you don't already know what to look for in your specific product of interest it's impossible to do research and have confidence. Like when I don't know where to start and try to research products through a search, I go through so much SEO bullshit in such a short timeframe that I have no confidence in anything I'm looking at, including the stuff that looks like it has a good chance of being legit. Maybe I can find a forum of some sort, but I'll need a way to tell that the users aren't just talking out of their asses (or bots, or paid sponsors). Major review sites are a mess.

The phrase "do your research" is way overstated, because someone who knows what they need to look at is already going to do research and is not the target audience. The time it takes to filter through all the nonsense and form a coherent opinion researching something from scratch is so enormous that it's hard for me to imagine someone actually doing that diligently for anything less expensive than a car. What actually happens is you just give up partway and make your best guess like you would have done in the first place. At that point your research has led you to seeing a bunch of ads and a few conflicting opinions. Yeah, that will influence your decision and possibly be helpful, but the benefits are marginal compared to the time investment, it's rarely worth more than a few minutes if it's not a major purchase.

Or maybe everyone else is a lot better at this than me and I'm making a fool out of myself by posting this.