I’m just some guy, you know.

  • 5 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • KDE. It’s customizable without adding lots of weirdness. It’s got a solid set of included tools like Dolphin and Konsole. It’s generally very stable and visually attractive.

    No shade to other DEs. I’ve tried lots of them, I even have a couple of alternative DEs I’ll log into when they are useful (i3 is great if I am doing something repetitive). But KDE is just the most comfortable for me for daily use.

    The non-Gnome COSMIC DE that System76 has been developing is looking really promising though. I have the alpha on a spare laptop and find it very functional.




  • Once had a lucid dream about a big dream convention full of people collectively dreaming. Hung out with some cool people who told me that the “convention” is always going on, but it’s hard to get to unless you know how to dream about it.

    This group of “dreamers” told me to look closely around the building we were in, and to think about the interior of the building when I’m falling asleep to bring myself back. They also warned me that it was impossible to share personal details with each other because we’ll never remember those parts when we wake up.

    After a while I was warned that if I didn’t wake up soon, I might not remember this dream and I might not be able to try to come back. They gave me a drink that I was told would wake me up immediately, which it did.

    I remember everything vividly, except for anything identifiable about anyone I met.

    I have never been back, not for lack of trying. It was a pretty standard hotel convention center environment. I think about it before bed now and then and hope I find myself back there. Maybe I go all the time and dream-me never thinks to get that super-helpful drink that woke me up last time…







  • You don’t have to know how to write your own software to install another App Store on Android.

    Amazon has their own competing app store, with boomer-friendly instructions for installing it:

    And Amazon’s phones and tablets use their own “FireOS” remix of Android without Google Play Store available.

    I prefer the OS being open to third-party installers over any legal mandate that app stores not being allowed to curate their own store’s offerings. Closing off Google’s app store to competing app stores only makes sense if other app stores have no reasonable access to customers, which is clearly not the case.

    Complete bullshit that they’re throwing this ruling at Android when iOS doesn’t even let you download and install a third-party app without either jailbreaking, or hooking up your iPhone in developer mode to a computer running xcode. Apple treats Cydia like it’s malware. Google perfectly tolerates Amazon and F-Droid running their own operations.


  • My experience with BlueSky has been that it is better than Twitter because it is smaller and doesn’t cater to the far-right.

    BUT…

    It can become extremely toxic very fast because they implemented the same poorly executed features Twitter did that fucked things up. In fact, it’s way worse than that…

    The two features they copied from Twitter that hurt them the most are site-wide search and quote posts. Site-wide search enables people to “namesearch” or to monitor keywords for issues they want to fight about. Quote posts are a well understood “dunk mechanism”, that largely encourages dogpiling.

    As for being free of a central algorithm, that seems good, until you see that there are tons of community algorithms you can subscribe to instead. Now there are algorithms for things like “anti-Zionist posts” and “pro-Israel posts”, which not only let people find their preferred echo-chamber, but also provide trolls access to exactly the groups of people they want to argue with or harass.

    These algorithms can be built to detect certain hashtags and phrases, or they can just be big lists of accounts like a Twitter group. There’s no telling when you might show up in one of these algorithms or why.

    As a result, if you say anything less than agreeable about any issue, there’s a chance you’re going to hear from a bunch of accounts you’ve never met before, regardless of what side of an issue you are on, or how extreme your view actually is.

    I don’t recommend it. It’s a pro-profit company that seeks to be a wholesale replacement for Twitter. AT Proto federation is a complete joke, it’ll never expand if it doesn’t have a flagship open source server. They’ll give up on it just like Twitter did and just be another centralized, toxic, microblogging community.






  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eetoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comWord recall
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    1 month ago

    I had a political conversation with a right-wing co-worker a while back, and he generally operated in good faith, but he got flustered and tried to do the “why do you use big/pretentious words” scold on me, and he did not handle it well when I responded “I guess home school and Liberty University didn’t land you with much of a vocabulary”.