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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’ve been in-process trying to flip a surface pro 6 into a Linux tablet for a while now. Can’t answer all your questions but can provide a few. First things first: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

    That’s your hub for most of tue stuff you’ll need to do it. You can look up your hardware in their feature matrix and see what is supported.

    Generally touch and stylus work. Things like camera are much more hit or miss.

    In terms of distro… welp it’s always kinda impossible to make a “right choice”. Everything will have pros and cons. Originally uninstalled arch just to see if I could. And yes, it turns out you can. Problem is, I use Ubuntu on a couple of spare computers as servers and such and I’m more familiar with how that works, so I thought ok I’m having some trouble getting a couple things to work I’ll just put Ubuntu on here and then I don’t have to remember two different ways of using the OS (mind you I was using gnome in all cases, so really wasn’t a big deal to have to research a few arch specific things).

    Problem is, Ubuntu fails to install. I’ve tried about 4 times and it always fails out, and I can’t figure out a way to access any install logs after the fact.

    So I’m probably gonna put arch back in there because it worked, mostly.

    You’ll have to be willing to tinker a bit and get used to some different ways of interacting. Overall touch was pretty ok and gnome in my case was pretty nice for navigation.

    I was using an app called xournal++ for stylus/notetaking, and it seems very well featured for a Linux stylus application. That said, my pen stopped working a while ago, and I could not figure out how to fix it, which is why I was gonna try again with Ubuntu. (Xournal wasn’t to blame for the stylus problems, just couldn’t use it because stylus was useless)

    I still think it’s a good learning experience, and probably a good way to resurrect an older piece of tech to usefulness. Personally I wanted to replicate stuff I do on my iPad, but be able to fully Adblock YouTube, etc. my iPad is way better for reading and handwriting, but otherwise is an obnoxious locked down operating system that I find more and more annoying. Basically it’s a great tablet but limited. Whereas like the windows version the surface is not a great tablet, but an acceptable hybrid.


  • TLDR The US is a mafia-esque arms dealer / financial scam that masquerades as a “moral democracy”. Capital won in America, and this is what happens.

    Each person is not a member of a society or community, but is a competitor. We are atomized, severed from our families and communities and increasingly told we are commodities ourselves. This strategy works in favor of central power as it actively works to erode the ties between people, and that makes them isolated and unable to band together as easily.

    Sure there’s individualism and other toxic mythologies that play some part, but the country has increasingly become a corrupt business that serves its board of directors and not its employees. I’m sure there are countless moments where you could make an argument that this process went into overdrive, for me it’s around Regan and after and the various policies that led to destruction of unions, led to offshoring and functionally turned the US into a financialized service economy. Maybe that’s just coincidence and the real cause was the collapse of the USSR, like I said there’s probably many moments/causal events one could make a reasonable argument for.

    What we have now: some clown dimension right wing that would like to legalize sport hunting immigrants and the homeless while fire sale busting out the entire US govt, and a bloodless “liberal” center-right that merely wants to criminalize, imprison and then work for profit the people the right would like to sport-hunt, while funneling money to their friends and family. Both are fine with genocide, provided the weapons proceeds end up in the correct place. Those two political fronts represent a section of the populace that is likely less than .01%.


  • Yeah I basically agree with your point about the unpleasant logic behind such a move, and would only add that Greenland looks appealing if you’re trying to lock down the arctic from both sides of the continent—US has good arctic frontage on Alaska, and Greenland would bookend Canada and allow US more flexibility in countering Russia and expanding oil extraction.

    I was trying to think about where this suddenly came from, and the first thing that kept popping up was Trumps current obsession with drill baby drill, the arctic is the last frontier for potentially easy extraction once all the ice melts and Canada, US and Russia have already been playing footsie there for a decade under the guise of science and commercial traffic trying to lay claim to stuff that was ignorable before.

    Like some dude got in his ear and convinced him the future is in the arctic. It also adds some further explanation to Trump “joking” about making Canada a state. If it was just economic hardball / a new trade deal, they could leave it at tariffs and the like, but they keep saying they want to make it a state…

    All of that makes me sick to my stomach, but as you say there is logic to it.







  • Unless we get a blow-out for either candidate that cannot be challenged, which does not seem likely based on the polls and battle lines, even if we have a Biden-esque victory for Harris, I’m fairly unsure of what will happen next. I personally doubt full on Civil War like in the Garland movie, or the actual civil war, but I would expect all kinds of shitty legal tricks, possible Supreme Court involvement and of course, stochastic and targeted violence, particularly towards immigrants and minorities. In other words, win or lose, I think the US may be in for a bad time. Hopefully I’m working in my assumptions here and it is somewhat more boring.

    To better answer your question though, assuming things don’t completely fall apart: the two sides already don’t mix much, which is part of the problem in the first place. We’ll get more govt inaction due to gridlocked congress, probably more defense spending and some states, in the absence of federal legislating, will continue to take a larger role as they have been doing already in the recent era.

    So basically more of the same, on a not-great trend line. Something has to give at some point, it’s hard to imagine how you could put the genie back in the bottle now, particularly with overall conditions in the world due to late-stage capitalism and climate change constricting each year.



  • I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:

    1. It ignores the very real number of voters who chose not to vote democratic or vote at all simply because of Clinton as candidate.
    2. it ignores massive mistakes made by a hubristic campaign that couldn’t fathom losing to trump.
    3. it supposes that people that voted green, would have gritted their teeth and instead voted Clinton, which is not a safe assumption.

    Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.

    I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.



  • It makes me wonder—would the dynamic change if there was only an upvote? So you could choose not to upvote, but the default action would be a neutral one, and if you liked/wanted to support/etc you could signal that.

    I see tons of posts on here now that are downvoted to oblivion, because they are a legitimate article that says something a group doesn’t like. There won’t even be comments on the post. So like a Reuter article that discusses Palestinian casualties and no comments and like -20. This doesn’t seem like a super useful mechanism. Or at least, it’s just functioning today as a content preference “I don’t want to see this typed content” as opposed to “this is bad info, out of line with the community, etc.”

    And despite ranking my list by either hot, or top day/six hours, I still see the downvoted posts regularly so the mechanic doesn’t even really do anything in terms of visibility. Or possibly there’s just too little content on a given community for it to get filtered out.


  • This is it, I’m pretty sure. I had plenty of brushes with nettles as a kid, but I’m not super aware of them to be able to avoid them as an adult. However I spend less time in high grass and forests, since I need to be present in the spreadsheet factory, and when I do make it into the wild, I usually wear pants and the like to avoid scratches, ticks and poison ivy; so less likely to get nettles.

    Side note: we bought some nettles from a local farm last year and made a couple dishes with them. Pretty tasty, if you already like tho ha like spinach or mustard greens (think saag paneer)