The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.

I must be the fortieth to advise you to install Linux.

This is reach Kim levels.

I suppose I do complain when I have to use Windows lol

I hear you, and I have nothing against good graphical tools, for the record. Sometimes it is the quickest way when you’re already working in a gui context, which let’s face it, is most of the time, unless you run servers.

Which is the one case where I would double down on pushing you towards the terminal: Are you learning about Linux for the sheer joy of it and to be on the future-facing edge of things, OR are you hoping to improve your career situation? Brief self-bio: I am a lifelong geek, but in 2014 I was a trucker with a CCNA and a lot of aches. In 2015 I became a sysadmin for an animation studio based on that and my knowing Linux, but I didn’t do linux servers, I did FreeBSD servers, which at the terminal level is similar enough that I could handle it, because I focused on console skills when teaching myself more than getting my gui right. But I was intentionally seeking to make more money and stop torturing my body every day while surrounded by fucking klansmen. If you’re thinking about job at all, then I double down on the “stick to the console and get better at it,” because that will make you the wizard at your eventual job, surrounded by people enslaved to the gui. (puffs on a bit of the finest Southfarthing, which he frequently wafted an odor of at his coworkers after coffee break. People do not meddle in the affairs of effective wizards.)

That being said, you’re actually touching on the main reason we don’t have wider adoption (not wide, that is questionable if it will ever happen, but we’ll see how thoroughly capitalism implodes over the next few years, who knows) - in a nutshell, there seems to be very little active intention, and quite a lot of active resistance, to the idea of a Linux Desktop that “just works” for your grandma, as they say. I guess Red Hat was trying to be the Linux version of a Windows Server, but pretty soon they’re not gonna be much of anything if you ask me… anyways, I consider myself a native these days and let me say, Linux geeks are a bunch of fucking ASSHOLES. I try to be one of the ones who isn’t, but even I succumb to the urge to snark at lazy thinkers sometimes, which is not what is happening here and now for the record, I’m having a pretty good week and I’m hoping this all helps in some way. But I want to acknowledge the toxicity of this culture.

One might argue that Plasma or Gnome or Mint or whatever does a great job of crafting a smooth and easy UX. And that is true - I quite like the Gnome vibe overall. But let’s face it, Gnome’s bundled gui tools are indeed mostly second rate, and the devs have a bottomless well of cultural support for responding to complaints like yours with “learn the terminal then noob lol”. You also, of course, have the option to install the text editor or file manager of your choice, but then you run the risk of needing a whole bunch of extra dependencies and there goes your responsive desktop.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this culture changing until the general culture in tech changes, and that won’t change until the general culture of our economic priorities changes. Let’s see how far this implosion goes. It’s a very slow moving one.

Becoming a developer was a bit like walking into some pastoral fantasyland where everyone is extremely nice and endlessly seek to support and help you as you learn to milk the cows and such. I have experienced the extremes of workplace culture now and I never want to leave this role. If you are dissatisfied with what you do and are willing to work your ass off for a few years becoming good at things that not many people have worked their ass off to become good at, you can definitely make your life better, and I don’t just mean by having more money. I would do this job for my old trucker wage rather than leave the job. Don’t tell my boss.

I kinda said that too actually, just maybe in a little more of a supportive, you-got-this way. You came to Linux because you wanted something different, and while the Linux desktop does continue to improve overall, what you did is always where the action will be for operations like the one you did.

It’s not that it’s the easiest way, full stop - it’s the easiest way to do very complex and powerful operations on the fly, very quickly. If you lean into it for a while it does actually get easy, even.

GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.

TLDR: You don’t need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.

I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn’t sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.

Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.

At some point I discovered that some record stores (I’m talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.

When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you’d even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore’s P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.

Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.

Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn’t I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?

And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.

So I got off. I’ve started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.

Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I’ve amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.

But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don’t stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you’ve got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn’t have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you’ve started to play the game of triaging.

In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don’t think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify “solved the problem” by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won’t believe (because someone’s been skinned to get that price, and it wasn’t the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).

Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.

What I find befuddling about this is, you figured out what you needed to do, ie, you had a victory and discovered something new, and you find that somehow bad. You just did some practical console magic. By design, GNU/Linux can do a whole lot more with just the console and piping. Dive in.

I think I recall reading now that they had implemented it here. The whole “what happens there, happens here” dynamic made me cancel it out when they cancelled it down there I guess.

Did we ever have it in the first place? :>

There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.

They repealed that anyways.

Headline should read “Corporate Magazine Attempts to Stoke Up Some Of That Old Anti-Labour Heat From The 80s.”

I once needed to archive a site for offline viewing, and I did a similar thing, perhaps more primitive even, just maximized the video and then had OBS record the screen while I did other things on my second screen. Pain in the erse to be sure but I was able to watch the videos where I needed to watch them.

Kind of amazed Usenet is still a thing, I assume all the info is somewhere in the megathread how you find your nzbs and whatnot these days?

My favorite period of piracy was back when I did private trackers, and it seems like they’re still around but back then I didn’t have to use a vpn, can you get credit for your seeding through a vpn? I recall them requiring I actually forward a port back in the day. Not getting into any of that mess lol

They kept all my posts when I deleted mine, your protest will register more strongly if you delete it; at the moment they see you as inevitably coming back. And even more strongly if you get that thing that goes in and scrambles all your posts before you do.

Me. I had 11 years. Same name as here, it’s probably all on the wayback machine or something, I did delete my account before I learned about the thing that scrambles your entire history into nonsense, I would definitely have waited if I had known that existed.

It was a process, and overall the site worked well enough for me, but a few specific things made it less and less useful over time.

The one-two punch that made me say fuck it was, I was basically down to doing two things there that I cared about: posting my animals to the cute subs, and interacting in r/Winnipeg, and less often, r/Manitoba, which were directly relevant subs to my life. I also subscribed to a lot of other ones, but the content was all kinda take-it-or-leave-it stuff. I also do shitpost a lot, and I appreciate that we have places for that too, I have historically shitposted where others were trying to eatpost more than I wish I had, though I am referring to a question of tone rather than trolling or ratfucking or any of that 4chan crap. I just don’t read the room well sometimes.

Anyways, first, I got shadowbanned in r/Winnipeg, which was the last space on Reddit that I found both relevant and somewhat harmonious to my viewpoint - the sub is an echo chamber, and I was aware of that and didn’t particularly like it, but I would rather be in a chamber that echoes my voice if I must, and at the time it seemed like there were no other such spaces available. The internet used to have places where you could have a really lively debate with people you don’t agree with and look forward to seeing them and hearing about their gardens the next day. It was really like that here, once. It’s kinda weird looking back at it now, I should look in on some of those folks.

Anyways, I will never know what happened exactly, because shadowban, your accuser not being required to face you is a feature. If a mod had ever told me what it was I did, there is actually an extremely high possibility that I would have agreed that it was not acceptable, cause I go back and wish I had played stuff differently all the time, really. I can trace that it was about three weeks before I noticed, because my posts were typically good for 5-20 points of upvotes when I posted, sometimes a 100+ jackpot even, but they all started getting consistent zeroes. Logout, check, oh hey, I don’t exist now! The cowardliness of it, the fact that whoever did it will never take ownership of it and justify it, and that being the unchanging reality of Reddit, was extremely eye-opening.

Digression Incoming: This shadowban did not make me leave Reddit, but now that I have, I basically won’t participate in a space that has shadowbanning. Last I heard they don’t have that here (indeed, the public mod logs are a big feature for me) but I will be gone if it’s ever implemented. I also don’t believe it will ever be seen as necessary here the way it became necessary on Reddit; Reddit mods can ban accounts, but they can’t ban IPs or IP blocks or any such. Why? Reddit needs lots of users to get those profits happening. If they start banning IP blocks or domains willy nilly that is failure out of the gate. The tone, or even the integrity of communities, takes a backseat to the IPO.

Here, on the other hand, we are a community of people running these servers out of pocket or community supported, and therefore, no Instance admin is incentivized to do anything but ban/defed a troublesome IP or domain; everyone here despises the trolls, from top to bottom, and none of us, from top to bottom, have any use for them. The Reddit board, on the other hand, they actually NEED the trolls, they need big numbers to accomplish their goals, and what those numbers represent - trolls, bots, AI - it does not matter. The difference is capitalism. Everyone should really be noticing that, imo.

Anyways I still had one community that was somewhat relevant, r/Manitoba, which positions itself as the “free speech” alternative to r/Winnipeg’s echo chamber. This one, I know exactly what happened, someone posted an article where a bunch of F350 drivers from a small Conservative-voting community were out protesting the state of the highways, which are atrocious and getting worse every year; I used to do asphalt, and we used to put down a few inches every summer on the road up to my place; the last four years it’s either been no work done, or else that thing where they spray tar and then cover it with fine gravel.

Anyways, these being the people who have laughed at protestors for decades and also voted this shit in, I got a little up in my blood and posted a comment that included the line “Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks.” I guess I figured as a rural-dwelling white dude I get to use that one. Anyways, reported, and next thing I know, three day ban. So much for that free speech absolutism eh?

Either way though, it was no longer an amenable place to my viewpoint, so that was that; since there are many places one can post one’s cats for oos an aws, the ban lasted about an hour, which is how long it took me to sit down at my PC and delete my account.

Oh dear, you have creeped my history and identified that I am neurodivergent, and therefore have identified the pretext to reject my thesis without bothering to really engage with its implications. Well played, you sure got that sucker.

I am afraid you are off base though, I have put bipolar in front of my various practitioners many times, and they tell me that while they do see things that resemble a cycle in the things I say to them, the problem seems to be that neither my manic phases nor my depressed phases (last one was about ten years ago and lasted twenty years or so) were sufficiently destructive to my functioning to be diagnosable.

That said, I am halfway through clearing a ~300m forest path on my property today, and intend to have a fence up a week from now, so who knows, maybe you and I are both correct and the doctors are wrong.

I actually, at one point, possessed and used an ancient “wooden console” type television, I actually even have a picture of me in front of it somewhere at age 6 or something, anyways, it had this style of remote, it really was a Space Age wonder, even as the television looked like your typical ugly chest of drawers.

This one requires the laughing Mexican guy with the missing teeth. Anyone got that gif in a barrel?

It really was, I have a clear recollection of it being one of my top sites for a good year or two. Then the bad times came.