Spyke

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Living the power user life over here

It's like, when you install arch, you just feel like not bothering with installing the gui stuff, because you're so above pointing and clicking on things. If only they'd make a command line version of Metro Exodus. Metro Exodus on the command line would be so much more powerful. It's so lame with graphics. Don't get me started on editing my photos of the kids and fam. Just load that pic up on the command line as raw data. I'll just eliminate the red eye reading the machine code and editing it. GUIs are for weaklings. Just install arch without X or gnome or any of that stuff. Don't even get me started on the KDE wussies. Oh yeah, you want things to look all pretty on your screen to click on. Computers aren't pretty. They take commands. All you need are fingers and a keyboard. You can play tetris on the terminal, you know. No need for graphics. The linux devs just added graphics and a GUI for wussy users. Even invented that penguin thing to make it pretty and dumbed down.

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What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?

Just misunderstanding social cues. Where I live (Spain), there's a script you're supposed to follow for certain things and newcomers, understandably, don't understand the script. One famous example is buying new clothes. They all look great on. The idea here is that the poor person spent their hard-earned money on the new clothes. Damned right they look great on! Another would be birthdays celebrated in public venues. Perhaps someone you know is celebrating their birthday in a public venue and you had no idea they were celebrating their birthday on that day. You walk up to them and wish them a happy birthday, BUT you were not invited to this celebration. Since you weren't invited you did not come prepared with a present for the birthday person. The safe thing to do is to ignore, socialize with the people you came with, and make like that person isn't even there until they approach YOU. When and if they approach you, you make pretend you're all distracted and you have to be like, "Ahhh! I didn't see you! What's up?" The reason: that person is buying all the invitees the drinks and food. In exchange, the invitees have brought presents. It's a very nuanced and weird situation all of us have encountered. We err on the fear of not having brought a present because we had no idea because we were not invited.

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What is this death trap?

I actually learned how to use vi like 30 years ago and I had all the commands memorized. Then, nano came along. All the commands are at the bottom of the screen to remind you. It was just too tempting to pass up. However, I can't help but suspect that somewhere out there I might have left a vi session open because maybe I mistyped. I might have accidentally typed ;q! instead of :q! or something.

piracy

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The copyright industry’s obsession with pursuing alleged infringements borders on the pathological

As a published author, I have to say that yes, indeed, copyright laws have turned corporations into participants in a "copyright industry." It's true that a creator's livelihood relies on people buying their work. It's also true that a creator's livelihood depends on the dissemination of their creations. The more you're in circulation, the better off you will be. Corporate greed and defending the bottom line under copyright law is getting ridiculous. It really puts limits on the scope of a creator's success. This is why there are creators out there like me who do not mind piracy. When I'm dead, if I wrote something important, I hope future people will be able to see it. I'm pretty sure that whatever I wrote isn't all that significant, but who knows? Maybe it will be. What I'm getting at: It's becoming a real problem for documenting the history of human material culture, when you think about it. Corporations are controlling and guarding the human material culture. Their goals work contrary to the goal of the historians and archaeologists of the future. Corporate greed is preventing future people from understanding their past.

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Lemmy is so good right now for no particular reason

It reminds me of internet forums of the days of yore that are long gone. People answering each other's questions. No need for moderators to have rules like, "don't call each other names" blah blah blah. It's kind of funny, but you know, the Internet had a dark age when everyone was nicer to each other. Lemmy brings that kind of social interaction back to the fore. In another stream, someone disagreed with me and did it nicely and I learned something. Give me more of THIS. And give me less of people replying with "this"

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How to avoid the Reddit downfall

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Is that really true? I navigated to the Reddit page just a minute ago and there is a ton of activity in the subs I was using before I deleted my account. There are new communities on here that were created to mimic subs over there and it's pretty telling: Little to no activity on the communities over here but a lot of activity on the Reddit subs that are being mimicked. I'm asking myself if the people that are leaving Reddit are mostly tech people, that either work in an industry related to technology or are super enthusiastic about tech. My go-to subs were humanities related on Reddit. Those are still super active over there.

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As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch

He didn't want to buy the company. So, he's turning it into a pet project. The end. The oxymoron here of this story: The winners of the 44 billion Musk payed for it probably don't care that their creation is being run into the ground while the users of the platform are obviously in an uproar. In the end, the creators and founders, etc. did it for the money, not the cultural impact they would have on the world. Twitter's former CEO has allowed himself to be interviewed from time to time to say what he thinks Musk is doing wrong, but he doesn't seem to have any hurt feelings or express any kind of extreme regrets for the company being sold. From what I've seen in the news, he's pretty dry. The drama comes from the user end. This tells me something about how, in the end, it's just rich people doing business and doing as they please with what they please. It's kind of sad. Like, let's say I made something really cool with my own two hands and my creation got turned into something monstrous. I'd be upset. The people who made twitter are happy with their riches. In the end, the outrage and scandal is kind of pointless because it's just a thing that makes more money for big business rich tech people and it always was just that.

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Why do dentists have such a bad reputation compared to other kinds of doctors?

I can say why I'm not exactly fond of my dentist: I'm missing a molar I don't need, my dentist keeps on trying to get me to spend over a thousand euros on an implant he can put in. Every visit he tries to sell me this useless implant. Every visit I say, "no thank you." This has been going on for five years. It gets old. Other than that, he's great at his job so I don't know. I don't consider him to be of the "bad rep" variety. A failed salesperson? Perhaps.

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Remember what "subscription" used to mean?

Another thing about subscriptions now is the part about "saving money." It used to be that you got a real discount on magazines if you subscribed to them. The idea was to pay more up front now but pay less money per issue. Online subscriptions try to convince the consumer that it's cheaper to subscribe to a streaming, gaming, or e-book service because you have the entire catalog at your disposal. The problem is that you're not really saving any money. You won't be interested in using the entire catalog, only a few items from the catalog. I'm not going to read all the terrible books on KindleUnlimited, for example. This is also a flat-out lie. Items get removed from the catalog all the time. Netflix, KindleUnlimited, Xbox, et. al. don't keep things there indefinitely. It's also important to consider how things you might want to use are not in the catalog, so you'd have to pay the subscription fee plus buy an item that isn't in the catalog. In the end, it's all more money for the company and less money for the consumer to save.