As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap

  • 3 Posts
  • 314 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • As other people in this thread points out, WSL is not ideal but it really saves the ass of anyone forced to use Windows at work.

    I have a thinkpad handed to me from work with windows on it and all the usual restrictions. I tried for a while to use it by constantly running a virtual machine with Linux, but Windows is not a stable enough environment to host that. So in the end I just bought myself a framework laptop because nobody actually controls that I use the laptop provided by work.

    Not everyone is that lucky. Canonical found a way to make their life easier. I think that’s objectively great, no matter what you think about Canonical as a company.

    WSL is not generally something people use because they are afraid of changing to Linux, they use it because they are not allowed by IT to change their OS.





  • Yeah, I find that the point is rarely well made and it’s often because the whole argument is a bit confused. People want to present it as being easier than it is.

    Open registrations on the fediverse is a problem in general. Trolls abuse it to make accounts specifically to harass specific users. Those not being harassed will not notice this - before the “fetch all replies” feature was introduced they wouldn’t even see the replies. And because it seems so much better than other platforms unless you’re actively being targeted, you’ll have minority women or whatever raising the problem and a bunch of white men will respond that they have no idea what they’re talking about and that there is no problem and that they should just block the trolls. Blocking the trolls is just not efficient if they keep popping up all over the place.

    One way to avoid this as a server admin is to defederate instances with open registrations that are being used in this way. But Mastodon.social is too big for this strategy to really be viable.

    Of course, open registrations is also key to people bothering signing up in the first place. People are not used to resistance, and they don’t want to write a letter of motivation to sign up for social media. So the issue is not easily solved. Mastodon is working on better moderation tools. Hopefully they’ll manage to address it that way.


  • relies on the supplier being truthful with their documentation for their production

    So the supermarket needs documentation and to take precautions, because they are to a certain extent responsible for the legality of the stuff they are selling.

    In the real world supermarkets don’t just pick up carrots from some random guy showing up with a trailer full of them. In online markets, this is closer to how it works. Those running and profiting off online platforms should be accountable for what they sell. If Amazon lists electrical products that don’t meet fire safety standards on their website they should be held accountable for selling these products, even if they only act as middle men.

    If companies can just take the money without any responsibility we’re fucked.




  • In six years I have burnt through two Lenovo ThinkPads. In the first the USB C charging port malfunctioned, and it turns out the charging port is soldered directly to the motherboard so they had to replace the whole thing. Ever since I got it back from repairs it enters into kernel panics all the time, no matter which distro I install.

    I was in the middle of writing my thesis so I had no time for repairs when it broke, so I ordered mysef a new ThinkPad. I had to choose between pre-assembled models, and I wanted a high resolution display, a good processor, and some other things. I got one with not quite as much RAM as I really needed, and found out when I wanted to upgrade that they had rendered upgrading RAM completely impossible in that model of ThinkPad. It wasn’t even one of the new slim ones, but a pretty traditional bulky one. Complete bullshit.

    Both of these laptops are recent enough that had they not sucked I would still be using them years from now. I’m happy Lenovo appear to be changing their ways, but I wouldn’t touch another ThinkPad with a stick after my experiences with them.

    Currently I’m using a Framework 13. Hopefully it’ll last me decades.




  • Yeah. Sites like CNET and TechRadar seems completely uninteresting at this point. Wired and the Verge seem to have done a better job at transitioning into reporting on how tech affects society, which is much more interesting. 404media seems to be doing well in that business.

    The leading article of the Verge at the moment is on what is real in the age of deepfakes, relating to war and disinformation. Wired writes about “All the ways big tech fuels ICE and CBP”. 404media runs a story about how “CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements”. Meanwhile, CNET is headlining how “Apple’s new MacBook Air is faster. It also costs $100 more”, and TechRadar tells us about “the seven best gadgets we have seen today”. I cannot even imagine caring. I wouldn’t even have cared back when I did care.

    Besides, if a tech site does their job these days their readers will not be using Google any more at all.



  • I think the advantage is that it reads partly as a FAQ, partly as a place to read whatever commentary on the situation people seem to agree with. It’s a place where people can discuss and ask questions more generally. Other threads tend to be more about specific breaking news and developments, maybe missing the bigger picture.