• 2 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Ahh… I see you have met my dad, who decided only after I called him after having failed my suicide attempt to offer to take me back in after having kicked me out promptly at 18 and then only housed me for 2 months before driving me out to a random street corner and dropping me off saying he had lifted me back up enough for me to handle my own live because I was ruining his “vibe” while having a 3 bedroom house and a job that makes more than half a million a year.

    A man who wouldn’t let me get a drivers license because I wasn’t allowed to touch one of his cars and needed to buy one on my own and figure out how to do it by 16 despite his first 3 cars being bought for him by his parents after he wrecked each previous one.

    Seriously, when people say it is a distraction to blame generations and focus hatred on boomers I think it is a good reminder to keep the eye on the ball of extreme wealth inequality, but I think there is a really weird nut of truth in that generational hate in that wealthy, successful US boomers of a certain type really did completely abandon the “social contract” so to speak of passing the world on to their kids. Which wouldn’t be that weird if society was always like it, and I am sure the “upper middle class kids” of every generation has felt this way to a certain extent, but it really feels like wealthy boomers just foreclosed the future of… literally everybody and when you meet boomers like your dad or one of my parents or countless other wealthy boomers I have met it really becomes far more “comic book” evil than it is reasonable to assume with some of these sad losers. There is no reason for the cruelty, and for the severance of resources and support other than a bunch of cynical political ideologies that amounted to barely anything more than lobotimizing a father’s capacity to actually empathize with their child about basic life needs. It is like the condescending judgement of some wealthy boomer parents cancerously grew into a deep seated belief that their kids don’t belong to be in the same economic class as they do, whether those wealthy boomers will consciously acknowledge it or not. I mean… not the worst problem to have, I am just pointing out how pathetic and sad US culture really is among superficially “successful” families.

    Americans are the worst culture. Truly fucking despicable what they think is sane. You only get to buy how you want to be treated and the threshold for the floor of basic human dignity is more than most of us can afford.

    As someone from the US I wholeheartedly agree but I also want to qualify this a bit.

    US culture is the worst culture given how rich it is. You might go to another culture with a HELL of a lot less money in the society/less GDP (…because it has been extracted by countries like the US but different conversation) and be able to find aspects of that culture that are way worse… but more than any other country on earth the US has been able to choose the world it wants to exist in instead of being existentially forced to accept the terms set out by more powerful countries, and holy shit what the US has done with that is not only dumb it is catastrophic.

    The US is the richest country on earth, we could be treating each other like royalty, we could be saying “it is unamerican to let homeless americans starve!!” and just start giving people housing and food for free, we could do whatever the fuck we want with all of our incredible amount of power and just ignore the consequences for the rest of the world… but instead not only do we ignore the consequences of our life style on the rest of the world (again, utterly catastrophic in terms of carbon footprint, ecological impact and just plain wastefulness) we ignore the consequences of our life style on our own damn selves, our family, our kids, our parents, our neighbors and our friends.

    Like yeah I know I am not saying anything original but damn I just feel like it needs to be said over and over again, the US is a very shameful place in the sense that the amount of unnecessary suffering here is quite extreme (again, not making claims about absolute suffering… not that it is ever helpful too beyond pointing out big disparities of privilege).


  • Most americans believe the entire point of transit is to sort people who can afford it from people who cant.

    If mass transit is affordable for all it is literally considered a threat to these pathetic people who would means test their own kids before they gave them food and shelter if it was socially acceptable.

    I was in NYC recently and the amount of wealthier people who just ubered everywhere (or actually just demanded to own a car and drive themselves in the least car friendly place IN THE US) with no consideration for ever using the subway underneath their feet was pretty disgusting and appalling especially coming from somewhere without magic train tunnels underneath my feet that run 24/7…

    Notice all of these narratives run essentially in parallel with a nebulous fear of the subway being stoked by Eric Adams and centrists, they provide a convenient impulse to rationalize taking the easy way out and clogging the streets with another useless car. Kind of like convincing yourself as a kid not to do a chore in the basement because the basement is scaryyyy, I mean look at this video from somebody in another basement experiencing a freak scary incident that would likely never ever happen to me!!!

    I live somewhere with free bus transit in the US, and it is shocking how different it feels and yet also how many successful people around me with working cars just categorically ignore the use or possibility of using busses. The US is really really deeply fucked on this point and it makes me feel awful for the rest of the planet having to deal with our horrendous carbon footprints.

    New York City has so much potential, but it is utterly ruined by rich conservative money suffocating the city in a chokehold.

    I hate the US so much sigh


  • LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

    My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.

    I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me “this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!”… admittedly they didn’t know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point… they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn’t know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.

    Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah… Syncthing isn’t a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device… and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace and approach you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism… COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.

    Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing’s GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!




  • Men need to find animal

    Women needed to make sure it was safe to eat

    Most food eaten wasn’t harvested from animals for most of human history in most cases. The obsession with hunting and meat consumption is a cultural one FROM CURRENT CULTURE (especially in the US where I live).

    There really is no good reason to enforce our current conceptions of gender, masculinity and feminity on wildly big swaths of human history. It is always a lie best case, worst case it plays into dangerous narratives about who “men” and “women” are “”“”“naturally”“”“” supposed to be.

    These kinds of reductive generalizations seem fun to make but they are hurtful, just plain wrong and honestly just kind of boring compared to the actual truth.






  • and if Kamala is the next up that gets the nomination, support the hell out of her.

    We all understand this isn’t the battle of mordor, this is after the battle of mordor and we are at the edge of the volcano trying to work up to the edge to cast the ring back into the fiery pit.

    the ring must go in the lava

    Nobody outside of the maga bubble (which is NOT a majority of the country) is confused about that, the problem was a lot of people along a broad spectrum didn’t think Biden could win with concerns mostly around age/mental state but also it just wasn’t the right vibe for the moment (also his horrendous handling of the Palestinian Genocide which Kamala isn’t necessarily a solution to but I will take a partial win when I can get a win).

    Kamala can easily beat Trump, it isn’t about being charismatic it is just about speaking truth to the moment and honestly Kamala can walk away with this election just by running as a pro-choice candidate who is a woman alone, and of course that won’t be all she will run on.

    Do I like Kamala? No. Do I think this fixes the Democratic Party? Absolutely not. Do I think this is good news and will I now support Kamala where I was having extreme difficulty supporting Biden? No doubt, I want to see meaningful motion on the treatment of the Palestinian Genocide, but for all you centrists out there who kept claiming leftist Biden haters aren’t going to support the replacement for Biden if Biden stepped down… the moment is now… and look around you, support just skyrocketed for the Democratic nominee for president in every conceivable way except a sliver of racists in the middle who already were MAGA heads in the hearts anyways…









  • I don’t think you’re talking about the Outlook I am talking about because I’m talking about the Outlook Mail and Calendar apps, not the Office ones. And that’s fine and dandy about proprietary software and all but frankly I haven’t really seen any non-proprietary mail apps that look aesthetically pleasing. But that’s besides the point, it’s a matter of personal preference when it comes to visuals after all.

    … I am not just talking about little details and preferences here? Windows products are increasingly broken and dysfunctional at every level. Features don’t work, features are randomly changed and broken, nothing is consistent, core features of the computer are made opaque, any given Linux package manager is about 1000000 times more trustable than the ad ridden, sketchy, bloatware filled Windows store where you have to hunt for actually useful and trustable tools. One of my old bosses had his work windows computer update to a new windows OS without really asking him (technically it did, but then it just kept scheduling an OS upgrade until he missed it). It didn’t break his computer, but he had thousands and thousands of hours of cad drafting work on that computer and Windows could have EASILY fucked up in the update process, or the old software we were using could have EASILY not been compatible. Windows basically flipped a coin for whether they were going to utterly grind my bosses business to a halt and cause utter panic or just have the computer update. This is not “user friendly” software design, this is not “easy to use software made by an extremely competent software company”.

    I’d also like to add, nowhere did I ever mention using laptops. All my experiences are with desktops that I had a hand in building from scratch. So I’m not sure what you’re even getting at with those assumptions.

    …because for 99% of people who are going to be using a computer for light email, research and text editing work they are going to be using a laptop? I don’t really understand what about my argument doesn’t apply to windows prebuilts that have good driver support for linux…?

    It’s somewhat concerning that you have such a strong obsession over the topic that you would go and whether intentionally or unintentionally offend people and I hope that you are a much more pleasant person to converse with outside of this topic or even this site.

    I think it is completely reasonable to be upset when someone is condescendingly foreclosing the possibility that something can happen when the evidence they are using for it is outdated and they refuse to update it in their heads. The only response at that point when someone refuses to re-evaluate their position and continues to “speak for the group” when they really don’t represent the group anymore is to make it even clearer that they don’t speak for a group, and I am sorry if my method offended here, I believe your heart is in the right place but please stop trying to tell us about how stupid and unwilling people are to learn new things. Please please please just keep your mouth closed, it doesn’t help anyone, period. Even if you were right, there would be nothing to change in our actions as it would just be hopeless to even try?

    This isn’t 2015, a good Linux distribution is as polished, easy to use, and easy to explain to a newbie computer user as Windows is. If you aren’t ready to accept that shrugs I mean fine but don’t push your outmoded narrative into conversations that might actually convince someone who doesn’t know about Linux that it isn’t worth checking out as a serious alternative. You are actively doing damage to the future of this software movement by dismissing it offhand like this.