Yozul

Hey, if you don’t think distributions are doing anything, you can always use Linux From Scratch.

Seriously though, most of the work done by good distros is specifically so you don’t notice things. They make a bajillion independent open source projects work together nicely. That’s something I’m glad I don’t have to do myself.

The big five is pretty much the only version of this that’s actually sort of kind of almost a real thing. Nobody likes being told they have high neuroticism though, so it’s not ever a fun fad meme thing.

It would be nice, but they gotta eat.

Well, most dentists would recommend most toothpaste. They’re a lot more concerned with making sure people are brushing regularly than they are with worrying about the brand of toothpaste they use.

That kinda means the exceptions are weird and highly dependent on the dentist and toothpaste brand involved. Maybe they think it’s overpriced, maybe they think it’s less effective, maybe they have ethical concerns about the parent corporation (looking at you, Crest), maybe they’re super picky about what they recommend, maybe they’ve never heard of the brand before, maybe they just got lousy swag from the company rep and they’re being petty. It could be all kinds of things, and the ads certainly won’t tell you what they are.

There’s also the pesky detail that if minerals in the soil are taken up into plants, and plants are then eaten by animals, then animals need to go back into the soil we grow our crops in or the the soils get depleted of minerals. That’s why most salt is iodized, because we’ve leached all the iodine out of our croplands and never put it back. There is only so much fossil fertilizer in the world. Eventually we are going to have to accept that we are part of nature instead of separate beings above it and doing things to it. Factory farming sucks and needs to end, but we can’t “Just fucking leave animals in peace.” we are not separate from them. They are us and we are them.

Amazon is super evil, but it mostly comes from the way they treat their employees and sellers. The customer service is… okayish, mostly. They certainly have problems there as well, but it’s not the real issue.

Why? Now the Democrats are going to start tearing each other apart and in the end they’ll pick someone even worse and now we’re even more likely to end up with Trump winning. The only people who ever had a problem with Biden being old were the people who had already made up their minds.

“!” in math is the factorial symbol, and 2 factorial is just 2 times 1, which is 2.

Not a guarantee, no. A very, very strong predictor though. You have to have some kind of evidence beyond just vibes to start making claims that this time is totally different from all the others before anyone should take you seriously.

At every step of modern computing people have thought that the human brain looks like the latest new thing. This is no different.

Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don’t want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it’s still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart’s content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.

Not counting the time a lady popped her clutch pulling out of her driveway and hit me, since I guess that’s not “almost” an accident, probably the time I got caught out by a snowstorm, and on the way home I did a 360 on the freeway before regaining control. Thankfully there was no one else around, so it didn’t hurt anything other than my pride.

If you think China is any better than the US, then you’ve just switched flavors.

I mean, he can be the most important founding father of modern psychology and also have been wrong about everything he said. Let’s be real. Modern psychology is still very, very wrong about a lot of things. It’s a science in its infancy. Alchemists were wrong about everything, but their work made chemistry possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn’t always mean those giants were right.

Okay, but why go about it that way? That can’t be the only way of making a viable alternative to sudo. Why does everything need to be part of one project? If you want to reuse code why not spin it out into a library so each component can be installed with just the libraries it needs and not the depending on the whole gigantic thing? KDE works that way. It’s obviously possible for some things, at least.

One of my favorite things about Linux is simply fiddling around and finding the things I like and don’t and just using the ones I do. I can’t do that effectively with systemd though. Sure, it’s theoretically modular, and there are even a couple parts left that can work independently, but mostly it’s just one big block of half an operating system that all gets lumped together into one gigantic mess, and I can’t effectively just use the bits I like. It’s kind of all or nothing, and then maybe being allowed to double up on some of the things I’d like to use an alternative to… for now. It just kinda sucks the joy out of using my computer, but trying to avoid it completely is a massive pain in the butt.

There’s no big dramatic thing wrong with systemd. Using systemd and being happy with it is a good thing. I do not object to the existence of systemd. Systemd is fine. It just makes me like Linux less is all. I am enjoying my time with my computer less than I used to, and the universal dominance of systemd is probably the biggest reason for that.

I guess for me the difference is that the kernel is just way beyond what I can understand and has never had any viable alternatives, gnome I really don’t like, and everything else you listed is just collections of simple stuff that aren’t actually very interdependent. Systemd is a giant mess of weirdly interdependent things that used to be simple things. Sure, some of them weren’t great, but every major distro abandoning all of the alternatives feels like putting all of our eggs in one basket that’s simultaneously getting more important and more fragile the bigger it gets.

This is fine, but why does everything need to be part of Systemd? Like, seriously, why can’t this just be an independent project? Why must everything be tied into this one knot of interdependent programs, and what’s going to happen to all of them when the people who are passionate about it and actually understand all the stupid ways they interrelate move on with their lives? Are we looking at the formation of the next Xorg? Will everybody being scrambling to undo all of this in another 20 years when we all realize it’s become an unmaintainable mess?

From what I understand most can’t spray, except in the west of North America, where the most common ones can. Even here it’s not all of them, and yeah, they are pretty chill. They don’t spray when they’re confused, just when they think something is about to eat them. Dogs are pretty famous for investigating things by shoving their faces into them though.

They’re not particularly trigger happy with their spray, so it mostly happens if you have a pet that finds them before you do. If you just take them outside in a jar or shoo them out the door with a broom you’re usually fine. A dog with stank face is no fun though.

The ones where I’m from are often over an inch long, and can spray kinda like a skunk. They’re good for the local ecosystem and they’re mostly harmless, but you definitely don’t want them in your house. If you want to look them up I think the most common name is desert stink beetle.