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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • If I’m reading that right, that could also say that Instagram is suppressing anti-israel content? It’s just saying that in comparison to Instagram tiktok is showing more x, y, z. But Instagram is absolutely not a neutral point to measure from.

    For starters there’s different demographics on each one, but I’m sure you could adjust for that, maybe the study did. But I don’t think you can adjust for the impact the US government has on Meta. I don’t believe for an instant that some US agency isn’t manipulating algorithms or requiring certain tweaks to steer discourse just like they did with US news outlets.


  • Agree 100%

    I think Cuba is a great example, since it’s less emotional right now for most people. We’ve been starving those people since 1960 for what? For cooperating and allying with a country that we didn’t like? For nationalizing the oil we were harvesting on their island and selling for our profit? (After we started santioning them too) 64 years of collective punishment for being too commie near our precious stolen land.

    Our government does deserve blowback for what we’ve done in our relatively short time around. I hope it isn’t taken out on the people, but if it is I guess it makes sense for how we treated everyone else.



  • Their coffee tastes the way it does because of how they roast it, it’s a purposeful style thing (that tastes terrible and is horribly overpriced imo).

    Their roasts are also darker than they say. Everything they have is dark roast, with their ‘blond’ coming in closer to a medium.

    People go nuts over the sugar, caffeine and perceived status, it has nothing to do with the taste of the coffee. As a fellow black coffee drinker, my recommendation is to avoid Starbucks unless you happen to be near a union store where the coffee is guaranteed to taste more like freedom, but still like ashes soaked in oil.

    In case you want more details: The way coffee roasting works is you move beans around in a real hot container, and you try to keep them to a specific point on a temperature graph at each moment as they roast. A different roaster would roast them a bit slower, but Starbucks just blasts those beans with everything they have, then they don’t stop until the beans are burnt. This gives them their “signature taste”. This is largely because of Howard Shultz, the guy who drove the company to be a cafe, and until recently the CEO. That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.


  • I just installed Fedora with KDE plasma and Wayland last weekend using the surface kernel. Was pretty painless, after abandoning a couple other distros that did not play nice.

    The instructions on the GitHub are also very good, though obviously every years surface has its challenges I’m sure.


  • You might have fixtures that overheat the bulbs. LEDs run cool compared to other bulbs but they are very sensitive to heat (that’s why the old ones had fins on them). If your fixture is enclosed, LEDs in there will have a much shorter life span.

    One common fixture in these parts are those silly domes with the screw in the middle, they regularly killed bulbs at my old place. I even had one come out that had discoloration from the heat.

    CFLs and incandescents didn’t like those fixtures or heat either, but I don’t know as much about how their life span was impacted.






  • Dicey dungeons is a blast! I have such a hard time with the engineer, I’m sure there’s a trick but haven’t quite sussed it out.

    I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 again after a long hiatus after my raid static disbanded. Only a little bit into the new expac but it’s been great! I think the new daily system has done a good job of getting me to come back with a clear list of things to do and compelling rewards.

    I’ve also been playing Peglin, trying to work through the cruciball. Really fun/frustrating/satisfying game.



  • I’m with you in parts, but some products are definitely made to a lower standard than they should be. There’s reasons why they are made to that low standard (money for shareholders being the primary motive in most cases), but that doesn’t excuse the waste they are creating and the bad situation they are placing on consumers.

    We are faced with a false choice, choose either cheap and disposable or expensive and repairable. Most don’t have the money right now to afford the repairable option and then take the more expensive in the long term disposable route. This keeps more money flowing to the company, and it keeps the consumer unable to buy the better option.

    In the past there was not a disposable option, perhaps not an option at all, and the base cost was higher, but consumers had more money to buy things with. People also made more money than they do now relative to cost of living. There was also a member of the family at home sewing clothes and cooking meals, that’s a lot of free labor. I deep dove into budgets from 1914 and sears catalogs but it’s perhaps too much for this (though it was interesting).

    I’ll close with an example about clothes dryers (USA). They are incredibly simple appliances, they are made up of a rotating drum, a blower, a heater, and a control system for timing and temperature selection (basically another timer). In older models this did not break often, and when it did it was standard parts and quick labor and it’s working for another 5-10 years. Newer designs have proprietary parts and chips that change from year to year. This means if your chip breaks you’re done and you need a new appliance. The chip doesn’t bring much new function to the appliance, and it certainly isn’t anything that couldn’t be done with an off the shelf part.

    The difference is things were designed to be repaired before and now they aren’t. We can still design things that way but we choose not to. There’s no huge extra cost associated with a replaceable battery or an off the shelf control chip, companies just choose to push disposable because it makes more money. That push is bad for people and bad for the environment, and to combat it we can buy repairable, but we should also push back on companies trying to make a quick buck and support right to repair where we can.