JTode @ JTode @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I am Canadian, which means American Lite, and I currently work for a global company based in France, so lots of French people. The casual racism is often astounding and at levels that would get you seriously hurt in certain places on this continent. It's not hate-based at all that I can see, just ignorance of what exactly is going on on the other side of the world is my assumption.

I suppose I do complain when I have to use Windows lol

I hear you, and I have nothing against good graphical tools, for the record. Sometimes it is the quickest way when you're already working in a gui context, which let's face it, is most of the time, unless you run servers.

Which is the one case where I would double down on pushing you towards the terminal: Are you learning about Linux for the sheer joy of it and to be on the future-facing edge of things, OR are you hoping to improve your career situation? Brief self-bio: I am a lifelong geek, but in 2014 I was a trucker with a CCNA and a lot of aches. In 2015 I became a sysadmin for an animation studio based on that and my knowing Linux, but I didn't do linux servers, I did FreeBSD servers, which at the terminal level is similar enough that I could handle it, because I focused on console skills when teaching myself more than getting my gui right. But I was intentionally seeking to make more money and stop torturing my body every day while surrounded by fucking klansmen. If you're thinking about job at all, then I double down on the "stick to the console and get better at it," because that will make you the wizard at your eventual job, surrounded by people enslaved to the gui. (puffs on a bit of the finest Southfarthing, which he frequently wafted an odor of at his coworkers after coffee break. People do not meddle in the affairs of effective wizards.)

That being said, you're actually touching on the main reason we don't have wider adoption (not wide, that is questionable if it will ever happen, but we'll see how thoroughly capitalism implodes over the next few years, who knows) - in a nutshell, there seems to be very little active intention, and quite a lot of active resistance, to the idea of a Linux Desktop that "just works" for your grandma, as they say. I guess Red Hat was trying to be the Linux version of a Windows Server, but pretty soon they're not gonna be much of anything if you ask me... anyways, I consider myself a native these days and let me say, Linux geeks are a bunch of fucking ASSHOLES. I try to be one of the ones who isn't, but even I succumb to the urge to snark at lazy thinkers sometimes, which is not what is happening here and now for the record, I'm having a pretty good week and I'm hoping this all helps in some way. But I want to acknowledge the toxicity of this culture.

One might argue that Plasma or Gnome or Mint or whatever does a great job of crafting a smooth and easy UX. And that is true - I quite like the Gnome vibe overall. But let's face it, Gnome's bundled gui tools are indeed mostly second rate, and the devs have a bottomless well of cultural support for responding to complaints like yours with "learn the terminal then noob lol". You also, of course, have the option to install the text editor or file manager of your choice, but then you run the risk of needing a whole bunch of extra dependencies and there goes your responsive desktop.

I don't hold out a lot of hope for this culture changing until the general culture in tech changes, and that won't change until the general culture of our economic priorities changes. Let's see how far this implosion goes. It's a very slow moving one.

Becoming a developer was a bit like walking into some pastoral fantasyland where everyone is extremely nice and endlessly seek to support and help you as you learn to milk the cows and such. I have experienced the extremes of workplace culture now and I never want to leave this role. If you are dissatisfied with what you do and are willing to work your ass off for a few years becoming good at things that not many people have worked their ass off to become good at, you can definitely make your life better, and I don't just mean by having more money. I would do this job for my old trucker wage rather than leave the job. Don't tell my boss.

I kinda said that too actually, just maybe in a little more of a supportive, you-got-this way. You came to Linux because you wanted something different, and while the Linux desktop does continue to improve overall, what you did is always where the action will be for operations like the one you did.

It's not that it's the easiest way, full stop - it's the easiest way to do very complex and powerful operations on the fly, very quickly. If you lean into it for a while it does actually get easy, even.

GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.

TLDR: You don't need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.

I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn't sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.

Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.

At some point I discovered that some record stores (I'm talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.

When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you'd even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx's "Kilroy Was Here" in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore's P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.

Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.

Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn't I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?

And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.

So I got off. I've started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.

Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I've amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.

But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don't stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you've got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn't have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you've started to play the game of triaging.

In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don't think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify "solved the problem" by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won't believe (because someone's been skinned to get that price, and it wasn't the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).

Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.

What I find befuddling about this is, you figured out what you needed to do, ie, you had a victory and discovered something new, and you find that somehow bad. You just did some practical console magic. By design, GNU/Linux can do a whole lot more with just the console and piping. Dive in.

I think I recall reading now that they had implemented it here. The whole "what happens there, happens here" dynamic made me cancel it out when they cancelled it down there I guess.

Did we ever have it in the first place? :>

There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his "saving the world through capitalism" schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps... perhaps... perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre'd zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

Nah he's just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he's taking whatever work he can get.

They repealed that anyways.

#NotAllCops

Well, I'm already on the record as to my view of what constitutes child abuse; the fact of the matter is that we have to live with a lot of people doing a lot of things that we don't like to children in a free society in 2023.

What is kinda good from my 50-odd year perspective is that people are not quite so entitled now as they were when I was a kid.

Let's see what they do about that podunk police force that murdered the smalltown paper down in, was it Kansas there? Seems to me that whole town should already be overrun with g-men in horn-rimmed glasses ready to Mississippi Burning the whole county to the ground.

Edit - also, to be fair, quite a few people hate the cops even more after they need one, because the cop didn't do shit.

In the final analysis, if they take it that far, I'm only gonna care about what precedents are being set by it.

ACAB

Well, I suppose the education system gets the teachers it pays for...

Agreed.

Still, fuck him too.

Cosigned!

Exact dates escape me because I'd just as soon it all never happened. These are the rough outlines cause now my bile is up.

But, it's days before the 2016 election and everyone is laaaaaaaaughing at the idea of Trump winning. It was a real "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment except instead of one gun-jumping paper it was half the fucking country. Not me, and not a few other people who went on the record; Michael Moore called it, on the record, before anyone else that I'm aware of. I'm not a fan of his, cause after a while he becomes kind of, I dunno, cloying. But he called it a good year before the election, and he called it accurately for the right reasons.

Anyways, Assange released a bunch of nothingburgers about Clinton days before, but it was a sufficiently large trove of emails or whatthefuckever that there was no possibility of its being properly assessed on any level, and that analysis getting into the public mind before the election, in the first place. But never mind that, a lie can go round the world etc etc, and the Gamergate machine under Steve Gammon's control had already stoked a forest fire of fascistic emotion, for which these "Hilary Papers" became explosive fuel. I was on Twitter in the year or two after that and I remember "But Her Emails" being the venomous hashtag accompanying every picture of refugee children in cages and such.

That was one punch of two, delivered by Assange through Wikileaks, and that was the moment that I became his personal enemy, whatever the law might think. It was a piece of a calculated and coordinated propagandist operation, is my opinion on the matter. Or he was just that big of an asshole. I don't know, as I said, what all he thought he was getting, other than attention, which let's face it, is enough for most. Maybe he also thought that there was no way Trump could possibly actually win, and he was trying to shortsell a bit of extra heat for the coming highly-lucrative Clinton presidency. Lots of fuckwits did that too.

The other punch was of course the FBI guy announcing, this one I remember was eight days before the election, that they were investigating Clinton. Again, I cannot say that this was in any way coordinated, but boy did it put a real period on the whole "Clintons are murderers who are going to be exposed any day now" conspiracy that remains strong. Comey's PR since then has crafted an image of a resolute lawman who did what he was supposed to do according to the book. Such homunculi do exist in America. Fuck him too.

I dunno if that clarifies anything at all but that's another serving of my loathing. P.T. Barnum still has the pulse of America.

*Edit: I give some very flippant replies to an earnest defender of Comey further down in the thread. I did not have the energy at the time so I just defaulted to ACAB, because ACAB.

BUT, here is my only-slightly-more-nuanced take on Comey: Comey also knew that the same dynamics re the dexterity and agility of lies would apply to his Obviously Very Meaningful Announcement only 8 days before an election. He knew that there was no possibility that (a) the public would assume she was innocent until proven guilty, and (b) that even if she was, that truth would never drown out the howls of the Trump faithful, which at the time were very compelling to that bizarre species of ape, the Swing Voter.

He knew he was serving one particular side of this election.

If he didn't know these things, then he is an incompetent stooge and deserves to go down in history as an Incompetent Stooge.

Either way, fuck him also. *

In what ways do you envision working with LLMs as an educator of children?

I have used ChatGPT to explain to myself a number of fairly advanced technical and programming concepts; I work in Animation through my own self-study and some good luck, so I'm constantly trying to up my skills in the math that relates to it. When I come up against a math or C++ term or concept that I do not currently understand, I can generally get a pretty good conceptual understanding of it by working with ChatGPT.

So at one point I wanted to understand what Linear Algebra specifically meant, and it didn't stick but I do remember asking it to expand on things it said that weren't clear, and it was able to competently do so. By asking many questions I was able - I think - to get clearer on a number of things which I doubt I ever would have learned, unless by luck I found someone who knows the math to teach me.

It also flubbed a lot of basic arithmetic, and I had to mentally look for and correct that.

This is useful to an autodidact like myself who has learned how to learn at a University level, to be sure.

I cannot, however, think of a single beneficial way to use this to educate small children with no such years of mental discipline and ability to understand that their teacher is neither a genius nor a moron, but rather, a machine that pumps out florid expressions of data that resemble other expressions of similar data.

Please, tell me one.

Time for Jello to write "We've Got An Even Bigger Problem Now"