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Cake day: December 4th, 2023

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  • This is absolutely heartbreaking and the inevitable result of not just the repeal of roe but the active punishment of women. And people who are anti choice have this image in their head that it’s some woman who slept around, didnt feel like using a condom and at 8 months 3 weeks is trying to use an abortion in place of birth control. They believe that obviously that the law wouldnt be so cruel and sinister as to cause people to die and withhold medical care and make exceptions when it makes sense.

    But then theres this:

    Soon after the ruling, the Biden administration issued federal guidance reminding doctors in hospital emergency rooms they have a duty to treat pregnant patients who need to be stabilized, including by providing abortions for miscarriages.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fought against that, arguing that following the guidance would force doctors to “commit crimes” under state law and make every hospital a “walk-in abortion clinic.” When a Dallas woman asked a court for approval to end her pregnancy because her fetus was not viable and she faced health risks if she carried it to term, Paxton fought to keep her pregnant. He argued her doctor hadn’t proved it was an emergency and threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her. “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result,” he wrote to the court.

    Genuinely an evil evil man.





  • This is an unfortunate situation when large scale suppliers dont play ball with smaller stores and when predatory chains like dollar general play the price wars game to drive away better options.

    Unfortunately the kinds of people who live in food deserts tend to be the most price conscious and they will take the longer trip if they need to in order to stretch their dollar out more.

    As an aside I think the article focusing on Cairo, IL of all places was such an unusual choice and I wonder how much of the problems that they had were unique to their location. Cairo is a town who’s population has been declining and whos buildings have been abandoning for the better part of the last hundred years. This is a trend that a lot of rust belt cities share, but Cairo was a small city of under 20,000 that has shrunk to under 1,000. What few people remaining there got a further kick in the rear by the fact that the area has gotten some bad flooding as well.

    Cairo is a relatively remote town that is being steadily abandoned, and has a propensity for flooding(which accelerated the slow process). That isnt to say that they arent a food desert, or that the remaining people there who likely cant afford to move dont deserve better, but I feel like they are an example of a town who’s got more stacked against them than what we usually think of when we think of food deserts (like a poor neighborhood in a city). Honestly I think its not unrealistic to believe the town as a hole will be abandoned in the coming decade.



  • My big issue with amazon these days is that it’s flooded with trash. Like sure if you want some disposable garbage that you dont think twice about or if a very specific item you know is good is for sale on their site you can use them and their return policy is good.

    But otherwise the flood of no-name vendors has become like browsing a more expensive wish.com. So many randomly generated non reputable companies selling the same rebranded knockoffs of knockoffs at various price points. It used to be that at least you could go up in price bracket and get to the actual products but now even that is hard. You can check out products worth over a hundred dollars and it still have mixed reviews and no actual brand recognition . It’s gotten to the point that if its something that matters or is more that $50 I search on big box sites and either order directly for them or find the item and get it off amazon.




  • Yeah and AI is pretty useful for doing certain things. For example my pixel can turn on subtitles for any video or audio playing and even translate it for me on the fly. AI isnt blockchain and it isnt all chatgtp or making images with too many fingers. People are talking about improving web standards as if whatever ai stuff google,MS, and apple are cooking up wont be used in order to enhance various web features.

    Likewise firefox is currently a good browser and does keep up for the most part. I’d understand the criticisms if firefox was suck in 2009, but modern day firefox is fast and works well and they will likely continue keeping up with standards while an independent team works on the open source AI stuff


  • people have been asking for imessage on android for years now and i really don’t know what the issue is.

    Apple wont until somebody makes them.

    The default text messaging app on ios is also stealthily a fully featured chat app that means that less tech savvy iOS users just think their texting is better.

    The blue bubble green bubble issue isnt because ios users hate android users and the color green as much as it’s bad, it’s because big group MMS chains are TERRIBLE. I remember having a friendgroup in the 2010s that had a big mms group chat before we switched to groupme and then eventually telegram(we would have done google messages if google hadnt abandoned it began its not infamous chat sabotage). It was bad. Low quality media, the protocol updated in batches so sending and receiving wasnt as smooth as a chat app, and also you technically could just leave. We eventually switched to a platorm agnostic solution because we had diverse devices.

    Now in the US iphone ownership is like 60 percent. I imagine the ratio is even worse for younger users. So for these users they use default messenger with most people and get feature rich multimedia chat app without even looking for an alternative provider. In some cases I imagine there are users young enough to not even realize what actual text messaging is or if they do there are chunks that think apple just texts better. It gives a perception of quality.

    Then they invite Johnny Android and suddenly the chat degrades back to 2005 flip phone quality SMS/MMS. Now this is entirely apple’s fault and the inability to chat with android users is technically their problem. Or it would be if iphones werent so popular. From their perspective they were having a good time using their default cell phone messanger and the android user broke it. Likewise unless Johnny android is particularly popular or charismatic it’s likely they wont switch to telegram/signal/whatsap/line/etc. They might just leave Johnny Android out of group chats because his presence isnt just green it makes chatting clunkier and worse.

    Johnny android might feel left out even if he isnt being outright bullied and may want to switch to an apple device. Likewise the iphone users may not want to leave the ecosystem and then not be able to easily communicate with their friends.

    SMS fallback I believe started more or less as a way to deal with inconsistent data in the early smartphone days but the unintended consequence of killing off the appeal of third party chat apps on their platform and creating a weird social bubble was a happy accident and apple is never going to give that up.

    Kids beg their parents to buy them iPhones and parents do it so their kids dont get left out or bullied. Even adults are pressured into this and it can be a factor when online dating.





  • Nvidia isnt so bad if you’re on a stable distro it supports and using x(though Ive heard wayland support is improving for it). On rolling or more cutting edge distros where the kernel is likely to change every few weeks and major DE versions might ship that proprietary driver will hurt.

    That said while amd is generally better on linux for this reason it’s worth mentioning that it has two huge flaws:

    1.Its not perfect like the fans mention. As someone who owned a 3500u and 6650u apu life under amd isnt always sunny. 3500u had a kernel regression for about half a year that prevented the cpu from idling and rembrant apus have an issue where the whole system locks up which seems to come and go(feels like it’s gone for now but Ive thought that before). Desktop gpus are better, but they still did suffer from driver bugs. I think my experience with my 5600xt was better than windows fans had for that generation, but it was not entirely stable and I did suffer from many kernel panics and system freezes. A few mesa and kernel releases fixed that, but it wasnt perfectly smooth. In addition to that no hdmi 2.1 support which is fine unless you game using your nice oled tv because no tvs come with display port. Proprietary drivers do allow for supporting some of the more obnoxious features that arent allowed.

    1. It can vary gpu/cpu to gpu/cpu for how fresh your software will need to be, but generally newer hardware needs very new kernels just for basic support and it may need a few more releases to get stable or good. So if you want to just sit back with ubutnu LTS or debian you need to make sure the release cycle lines up with support for your hardware. The other end of the spectrum is that being on a bleeding or cutting edge distro can mean stability issues and regressions. So for example a month or three ago fedora pushed a kernel update that had a regression where my 6800xt gpu wouldnt clock up when utilized so gaming framerates tanked and retroarch shaders were choking up. I could just use the old kernel but I had to make sure that the kernel updates didnt bump it away. Also an entire point release and several releases after that before the bug was fixed.

    So while there is a lot of pro amd comments in the linux world and its worth acknowledging that the open source drivers are generally good it’s not perfect and the grass isnt always greener.




  • While I understand the concern over the single appstore monopoly that we have on any device, I think it’s worth remembering what ecosystem android and IOS came into.

    The old multimedia phones that were sold in the mid 00s were effectively “smart”. Many of them ran java and you could install programs, and freely install ringtones, and browsers that actually worked like opera mini/mobile. The thing is you couldnt by default. At least not in the US. The devices were locked down and everything you did went through the carrier’s store. And US telecom services are some of the greediest and scummiest companies out there so you couldnt even use your own mp3 files as a ringtone.

    Apple combated this with their closed off ecosystem, but android did face issues with fragmentation in the early days and needed a way to prevent the telecoms branded phones from stinking up the ecosystem. They did this by leveraging the play services and play store. From the playstore they can also since mainline release various peacemeal updates which helps resolve their other issue with fragmentation and thats android device being abandoned.

    Sure enough you can still release your own version of android without it, amazon’s tablets and tv sticks do pretty well.

    That said I do think it’s a good to help people move past the default and open up the platforms more, I just wish it would apply to all smart devices,