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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)NE
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  • Bit of a strawman, the initial complaint wasn't that he didn't say some words, the initial complaint was the billions in military aid and actual physical support the administration gave Israel.

    The only reason words matter is if they have any impact on reality. Israel knows the U.S is giving them a lot of leeway to commit this genocide because that's what the administration's actions say, hence they're two-faced.

    If they decide to stop materially supporting genocide, good. They were still wrong to do it at all, and they can't undo that, so they're still shit-libs, but better late than never I guess, and all those dead children will just have to stay dead.

  • Battle.net games have been some of the most reliable non-steam games you'll find. You'll have trouble in the Riot Games space (League on Linux, Windows 7, and 8 are all dead in the next month due to Vanguard), and some Epic Games (Fortnite), but if you're a Battle.net/Steam gamer Linux is ready for you.

  • Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone's personal computer (no matter O.S). It's also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.

    The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn't run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.

    The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they'll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don't have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we've had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).

    For what it's worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don't work, developers who won't flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I'm just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn't being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don't want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol

  • I always tip when I eat out because I agree, and this post is mistakenly directing the anger at the waiters, but tipping culture is a problem that properly developed countries don't have to deal with.

    Also, the owners do have to cover the difference to minimum wage if tips don't get you there. Minimum wage is generally too low to live off of, but some workers get paid that anyway. If you live somewhere with a $15 an hour minimum wage, and that actually aligns with COL, then tipping culture disappearing wouldn't be terrible.

  • Humans aren't perfectly rational consumers, capable of always depriving themselves of joy in the name of fiscal responsibility.

    I imagine the crux of your argument rests on the idea that eating out for $70 or $90 are two identical things, when in fact they are not. If you do it 10 times a year, it's a $200 difference.

    The reason that difference exists is to satisfy the desire the owning class has to not pay workers enough to survive. If they did, the capitalists would have less money, you would have more money, and the waiter would have the same amount of money.

    That's better. Not perfectly ideal, but better than now.

  • Why did you link this? The Biden administration didn't put this into action. They weren't even major backers for this. This is far too left for their "practical moderate" image. And moderate in America is really right-leaning by any European or Asian standard.

  • That's the Biden Administration's stance too. It's not the rhetoric they use, but now America is drilling more oil than any other country in the world. He's walked back on climate promises he made during his campaign.

    He'll say what he needs to to get elected, but once he's actually in power he's a proper capitalist.

  • You read someone "criticizing" Biden (I'll get into why this isn't actually what happened), and assumed they were right leaning without actually processing what they were saying. I don't fault them for not engaging with you.

    They were speaking to the tendency for liberals (read: democrats and republicans) to attribute anything positive to the head of state if it's from "their team" and attribute anything negative to the systemic failings of bureaucracy.

    It wasn't a specific jab at Biden, the exact same thing holds for Trump, or any head of state. The influence the president has is usually severely misunderstood by the general population, and that's a direct result of the media's constantly incorrect/partisan framing of issues

  • I've seen a couple of posts in here about sound. It's wild that I've been through dozens of distros since the start of high school (12 years ago), installed them on at least 10 machines over that time, and can't remember one issue with sound that took more than 15 seconds to fix (e.g discord choosing the wrong sound device because I have 6 things plugged in that can technically output sound, which also happens to my friends who use Windows).

    Maybe I'm just lucky. The only issues I recall having in the last decade are essentially graphics related. Either game compatibility (though proton/wine is much better than it was in 2015) or desktop environments being finicky (freezing on sleep for example), but the latter afaict was entirely due to proprietary nvidia drivers. There are proper, high-performance open source drivers in the works, so nvidia might be on par with amd in 2-3 years on Linux (which is to say literally no issues for the vast majority of people, probably far more stable than Windows).

    In the same time I've had lots of people come to me with problems that we've specifically troubleshooted and found Windows to be the issue even when it seemed like hardware problems. Like monitor flickering/black screening, and plugging in a different monitor the issue goes away. On the surface it seems like a hardware problem, but both monitors worked flawlessly on Linux for literally months. Full reinstalling Windows did not fix the issue. Upgrading from Windows 10 -> 11 did not fix the issue.

    Same thing with another friend's external SSD. For some reason it wasn't being detected on his Windows 7 install. We installed Linux and the drive was picked up. Maybe Windows 10 would've also picked up the drive in this circumstance, but a lot of people hated the idea of Windows 10 at the time (this was just after Windows 10 was released, when Windows 7 still had a similar market share).

    There's likely a huge percentage of problems people attribute to hardware that are actually Windows being a shitty O.S, but nobody actually checks if Windows is the problem.

  • I had a similar experience but a different view than you. My last job had no in person requirements but we had an office for people who chose to go.

    I did a couple times a week for a few months, and it was actually pleasant, because I knew the people that were there chose to be there. I would socialize with them knowing that they actively wanted to be in a space with coworkers to socialize.

    Normally I'd be hesitant to strike up a conversation with someone from a different team in the office because there's a decent chance they just want to put their head down and work because they don't want to be there and would rather be working from home, keeping communications strictly to what's necessary.

    Sometimes I would feel less social for weeks or months and wouldn't go into the office. It was nice to have the option to do both.

  • It's a bit too reductive to turn the statement "American democracy has been dead a long time" to "we want more candidate options".

    The real problem isn't some rhetorical or presentation problem, it's that we have hard data that public opinion has actually no influence on laws. Only people within the oligarchy (e.g those with massive amounts of capital) influence the law. That's not democracy, even if you present it as such by having people tick a box every 2/4 years.

    To have a real democracy you need voting in ways that actually impacts people's day to day lives. By far the most influential version of this would be democracy in the workplace, but we don't have that, we have authoritarian dictatorships in the workplace. It's still legal to rent people with capital, it's legal to own forms of private, non-personal property (e.g factories), and as long as we have rules like these, organizations will be led by authoritarian capital, and not by grassroots democracy.

  • There are absolutely scalpers that reduce total supply. They'll only list a couple of consoles that they scalp at a time even if they buy in massive bulk, and it's all done on the pretense of a limited supply from the original seller that they're artificially limiting past what the market would naturally do (by buying a ton of them up). Given a literally infinite supply, scalpers lack an ability to do anything. Put another way, when they can't restrict supply, it's not a viable strategy.

    It's not that they refuse to sell some of their supply, it's a temporary restriction (all supply restrictions can be viewed as temporary because we don't have total knowledge of future supply). The temporary restriction benefits them because they can start bidding wars over the reduced supply, and get a higher price per unit at the cost of getting the money over a longer period of time.

    The exact same thing works for housing, when you have the same company renting out tons of units but also keeping tons of units in the same area off the market. It means the bidding wars for the smaller supply of units results in more money per unit (lower supply, same demand, means higher costs).

    The concept of a prisoners dilemma here only works if houses are fungible, but they're not. There are sometimes very similar units or even houses in a neighborhood in the same location, and these are almost fungible, but even in these contexts those nearly identical units in nearly identical locations are usually owned by a single entity (corporate or otherwise), so again there's no prisoner's dillema, they can restrict supply effectively to increase yield.

    The time vs value calculation is different for housing too compared to smaller things like groceries. If you're a grocery store, and your local distributor of apples lowers the price of apples, some of that will likely go to the customer because of local competition pushing prices down, and you have a constant supply tied to a constant demand of these (from a buyer's perspective) essentially fungible things.

    Houses are different because if you see the price of houses in your neighborhood drop by some significant amount, individual actors who may otherwise want to sell will actively choose to not list their house because they know the value will go back up, and so these actors are all incentivized to vastly limit supply if something in some area cuts the prices of houses (like a huge influx of new homes for example). These individual actors could be literal individuals or corporations.

  • Look to other forms of scalping to see how this works at a smaller scale. Scalping isn't done through conspiracy, but a bunch of small, self-interested actors reducing supply in the market to inflate prices.

    On top of that there are actors that are more coordinated and not as small, like corporations that own hundreds of thousands of homes. These corporations can just coordinate internally (not conspiracy, business) and reduce supply to increase their own returns.

    This works for smaller actors too though. As long as the number of houses owned is more than a couple, then it's likely they'd profit from temporarily restricting supply, and locking in renters to leases for more money. They'll try to slowly sell off their supply without "flooding" the market and hurting the value of their own supply, just like other scalpers.

  • I know several people who have worked at Amazon. So I have second hand experience. Maybe you think only workers of Amazon should have opinions on the topic, but that's necessarily elevating anecdotes to a position they have no place being. You need to understand the difference between a single instance of a job and the general statistical tendency of a job.

  • "it has to be though". I'm sure Amazon told you that, but what would happen if it wasn't? Would the giant multinational corporation really fail if workers were allowed to take pee breaks universally instead of some having to pee in bottles? Would it really fail if workers had an extra 15 minutes of breaks per day? Would it really fail if workers got another 0.0013% of the profits?

    Class warfare is real. If you're happy to just listen to your corporate masters, more power to you, just try not to bring everyone else down with you. Some people enjoy longer breaks, less intense working environments, and better pay. Advocate for and with those workers, and then when the protections are in place go pee in a bottle to save those precious few minutes for Amazon, as long as nobody else has to.

  • Python's disdain for the industry standard is wild. Every other language made in the last 20 years has proper filtering that doesn't require collecting the results back into a list after filtering like Java (granted it's even more verbose in Java but that's a low bar).

    If Python had modern lambdas and filter was written in an inclusion or parametric polymorphic way, then you could write:

     
        
    new_results = results.filter(x -> x)
    
    
      

    Many languages have shorthands to refer to variables too, so it wouldn't be impossible to see:

     
        
    new_results = results.filter(_)
    
      

    Of course in actual Python you'd instead see:

     
        
    new_results = list(filter(lambda x: x, results))
    
    
      

    which is arguably worse than

     
        
    new_results = [x for x in results if x]
    
      
  • In humans there's a psychological phenomenon called "crowding out", essentially it's hard for our brains to attach multiple, powerful incentives to one activity. Generally the "lesser" ones get crowded out by the more important one.

    I'm still young (26), and still feel the same way about programming, I deeply enjoy it. However, I know programmers who were passionate like me when they were younger, and that passion has been slowly drained as they continue to code professionally, and I've seen it come back when they move into non-programming roles (be it industry change or moving to management).

    Generally you won't find yourself wanting to program 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for 50 years without a substantial break, and yet that's what capitalism expects of workers. Yet you'll continue to work because there's a more important incentive than passion, money.

    You need money to survive (food, shelter, etc.) and your brain understands those are more important than fulfilling a passion, that's why you'll go to work even if you're drained mentally. You'll continue to do that forever so long as you don't have the financial freedom to do otherwise (which is the goal of capitalists, this is why we have COL-based incomes, so as not to overpay people who live in cheaper areas as it'd allow them the freedom to leave).

  • Activists don't need to be one-track minded. They rarely are. I'm a vegan, socialist, anti-fascist who is against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and for climate justice globally. There's very strong overlap in these positions. There's a reason you won't find a lot of Republican vegans, or pro-Israel socialists.

    Yes, sometimes people don't put in the time to investigate these issues, and I commend you for knowing the limits of your own knowledge, I've recommended to people before that it's better to just say "I don't know enough about this issue" instead of arriving at an under-researched position. However, it's not necessary to criticize people who are actually activists, learn about these issues, and go out into the world and advocate for change, so long as they're advocating for the right thing.

    The topic being brought up might ostracize people, but it will also put the topic into people's minds. People like you might not know what the correct position is here, but you hear the constant pro-Israel propaganda pumped out by the U.S and might arrive at a subconscious conclusion that aligns with the imperial core.

    If you hear people speaking out against the apartheid state of Israel, especially people who align with your values, you might be inclined to look into it more, or at the very least not automatically accept U.S propaganda on the issue.

  • I support creatives with direct donations. When you buy Netflix, you're supporting extraordinarily wealthy capitalists.

    If you actually care about supporting creatives, end all your subscriptions, pirate all your media, and give 100% of your previous subscription costs directly to the creatives you want to support.