• 3 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of “thank yous” is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.

    I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to Linux@lemmy.ml will show on Linux@lemmy.world as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit’s multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?



  • You’ve listed a lot of good reasons why open-source for business isn’t used more frequently, and they’re all consistent with my experience as well. Are you familiar with any consulting companies / vendors who DO advocate open-source solutions?

    I’ve been considering starting a FOSS MSP / FOSS B2B consulting firm, but I’ve consistently come to the same conclusion that the tech industry and business culture here are almost innoculated against open-source. If you know any firms that DO recommend open-source solutions I’d love to check them out.


  • Karl Marx was a philosopher and economist. He wanted to understand class relations and social conflict, so he developed theories to explain why things are the way they are. A Marxist uses Marx’s theories to understand why the world is the way it is.

    Marx had a lot of theories, such as historical materialism - that all history was primarily motivated by socio-economic forces, not supernatural forces or grand conspiracy. Marx wrote that the dominate socio-economic system running the world in his time was capitalism/imperialism which fueled capital accumulation through exploitation and alienation, and used technology to further this process with imperialist wars for resources etc… He also focused on class struggle between those with the most resources, and those with the fewest resources - the bourgeoisie (capitalists) vs. the proletariat (workers/peasants).

    Marx went further than trying to explain why the world is the way it is, he also theorized on how humanity could replace the dominate socio-economic system, and what a non-exploitative non-alienating socio-economic system might look like. “Marxist” refers to anyone who believes Marx’s theories are valid and uses them to understand the way things are.



  • Gnome provides a more consistent user experience because Gnome apps usually have fewer features and don’t offer many customization options by default. KDE apps usually have a lot of settings and customization options, but the user interface might be a little less intuitive or you may have to search in a settings menu to find what you’re looking for.

    In my experience Gnome is pretty, intuitive, and well integrated, but I tend to settle on KDE Plasma because KDE apps often have more advanced functionality and more options for configuration. If you’re the type who likes to explore device/app settings to configure things exactly how you want, then consider KDE Plasma. If you’d rather have a minimal but consistent experience out-of-the-box without any tinkering then Gnome is probably the better choice for you.


  • It is supposedly a personal moral failing every time someone drives too old, too tired, or too impaired, but if trains, busses, & walking were the default ways to get around then this chronic societal problem would diminish dramatically. For the vast majority of US citizens busses, trains, walking, biking, etc are not viable options because US infrastructure & city planning overwhelmingly neglects everything but the automobile.

    Incompetent driving is rooted in systemic failures, not personal moral ones.




  • By contributing to demand for a stock you increase the valuation of that stock. Securities Based Lending is often how companies and executives secure loans and avoid taxable events. By contributing to demand for a stock we facilitate additional funding for the issuer of the stock and it’s largest shareholders.

    I absolutely agree, cash flow is a much more immediate concern to any company, but one wealthy shareholder divesting can have the same financial impact as ten thousand average citizens boycotting. Local investing is more difficult and risky, but also more rewarding and necessary. It is not just about a monetary return, it is about building social capital and local resiliency.

    You’re arguing that people should give no consideration to the long-term social and ecological harms of their investments beyond what will make them the most money. By directing our actions in that purely incentivized way we sacrifice everything unprofitable, and that alienation is exactly what causes so many chronic societal issues. I agree that an individual can have very little impact alone, but capitalism places this burden at the individual level.


  • https://youtu.be/NJ7W6HFHPYs - This video from Climate Town explains how the bank or credit union only keeps a fraction of your money in reserve when you deposit your money in a savings account, certificate of deposit, or other bank account. The bank/CU is investing the majority of your money, and ecological harm is not a consideration when they are choosing investments. When you deposit money with a financial institution it is almost certain that some portion of your money is being invested in ecologically harmful organizations.

    Similarly, your 401k funds are likely in index funds or mutual funds that hold significant shares in ecologically and socially harmful companies like ExxonMobil, Nestle, Chevron, Coca-Cola, et. al.
    Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment funds exist that ideally exclude ecologically & socially harmful industries, but every ESG fund I have ever encountered is not nearly exclusive enough and has significantly higher fees.
    For example - the Vanguard ESG International Stock ETF VSGX excludes adult entertainment, recreational drugs, gambling, weapons, nuclear power, and fossil fuels, yet Nestle is the second largest holding in the fund, and many of the other stocks in the fund likely contribute to environmental and social harm indirectly.

    Consider investing in small-businesses and organizations in your local community instead. It is truly bizarre and unique to our time that investing on Wall Street is more accessible than investing on Main Street.





  • The immutable Fedora releases, like Kinoite, have been the best development distros for me. Immutable Fedora releases come with Toolbox for making per-project containers, so you can have separate de-cluttered dev environments for each project. Toolbox containers are not isolated environments like virtual machines, so performance is on-par with bare-metal as well.

    I don’t know if Sliverblue or Kinoite is the right choice for your exact workflow, but if you’re looking for a Linux host that “just works” out of the box, has a trivial learning curve, and provides serious quality of life improvements then definitely look into Fedora Kinoite.




  • I know your struggle. It’s not uncommon to experience issues with the Windows installer if the install medium is not created using Microsoft’s official Windows installation media creation tool (Use the middle option to download mediacreationtool.exe).

    Coming from Linux, I tried writing the Windows .iso directly to a USB drive using dd, this absolutely would not work on any machine for me. Sometimes the install medium would boot, sometimes it wouldn’t, but even if it did the installer wouldn’t recognize any storage mediums or would fail part way through installing. Using the official media creation tool resolved all the issues I was having.

    I do not know why the Windows .iso images do not work on any of my machines, but it sounds like you are experiencing the same issues that I was. Give the official media creation tool a try, hopefully that resolves the issue.



  • It’s good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users’ well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.

    There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?

    The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm “growth is good”.


  • The 9to5 article is poorly written. In the first paragraph 9to5 says a new window system is “scheduled to replace” the current one, but this is not true. The cited blog post explicitly says “There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage”. The Gnome developers are merely experimenting with a new window management system and at this early stage it’s impossible to know what the finished product may look like if these experiments go anywhere at all.

    Here’s a link to the original blog post where Gnome developer Tobias Bernard explains their dissatisfaction with existing window management systems and discusses the techinical challeneges developers face.