I’ve been told we have state senators who openly claim to only be there to keep speeding tickets low.

If you make $50k/yr after taxes, the equivalent fine would be on the order of about $120.

Where I’m from, that’s a speeding ticket.

I still won’t forgive Shopko for consuming Pamida and ultimately taking the remnants of Pamida down with it.

I’m surprised to see on Wikipedia that Shopko actually owned Pamida basically the entire time I was growing up, they just ran it independently. They even broke up breifly before re-merging later. The second merger sent it all to shit, though. “Shopko Hometown” my ass.

I drive Linux for a similar reason to why some people prefer driving manual transmission cars to automatics.

Automatic transmission cars are ideal for a certain kind of driver that has no interest in how the machine actually works, they just want the machine to do its job as smoothly as possible without them having to think about it. Not bothering with the details is the whole point.

For those of us who do have an interest in knowing how the vehicle works, automatics become kind of suffocating. They’re designed to only ever behave in certain specific ways. If there’s a weird niche thing that we know is possible for the machine to do with manual control, but the automatic system doesn’t support, you’re just SOL. You can’t. This starts coming up in all sorts of annoying little ways, increasing in frequency as your knowledge increases. Death of a thousand cuts. You start feeling like you’re not really driving this car, you’re being taken for a ride.

Windows is like the automatic. It is a black box designed to allow people who don’t care how the computer works to use the computer. To prevent morons from breaking the internal components, they put up barriers around everything and tell you to keep out.

Linux is like the manual. Yes, it does demand more finesse and active knowledge about how the computer works to drive properly. But you’re in maximum control of it. If you want to pop the hood and tinker with every facet of its innards for whatever reason, it does not attempt to stop you. It’s all open, laid bare for you to do whatever you want with it.

Linux has a lot of options available to make it more automatic like Windows, if you want it. The difference is that the automatic-ness is completely optional in Linux. Imagine a car that can be automatic most of the time when you don’t care, but can become manual at the drop of a hat when you need it. Linux can be that if you want it to be. Windows can’t.

The meme format implies she catfished you with the promise of “Netflix and chill” at her house only to pull a gun on you.

In particular, she wants you to review and merge that goddamn pull request she made to your open source project repo two months ago that finally fixes that one really annoying bug.

The primary thing I hate about them is that every snap package appears to your system as a separate mounted filesystem. So if you look in your file explorer, you can potentially see dozens of phantom drives clogging up your sidebar.

Debian Testing.

Learning about the xz backdoor was a fun week.

Surprised how, of all the people who took the bait, not a single one of them complained about systemd.

My beard isn’t long enough to have an opinion about systemd. All I know is all my homies hate systemd for some reason.

The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.

Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.

50 F is excellent… with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you’re naked.

The correct rebuttal is that 69 degrees is ideal ambient temperature.

Stop threatening. Commit. Take the leap. A lot of us here are already on the other side and we’ll help you find your footing.

“Anymore”? I’ve never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don’t even know how to do it if I wanted to.

I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I’ve never met another NoScripter in the wild.

For me, multimedia is a non-negotiable part of the web experience.

Yes, I get as annoyed as the next guy when I want, say, a simple tutorial written in a couple paragraphs, but the only ones anyone seem to want to make are eight minute long videos filled with fluff. That sucks. But purposefully excluding it from your protocol because it burned you a fee times is a gross overcorrection in my view.

I appreciate the Gemini project, I respect its goals, and I am happy that it meets the needs of several people such as yourself. But for me, and I think for a great majority of people who would be potentially interested in its broader goal of simplifying the web but are dealbroken by lack of multimedia capabilities, Gemini will never be anything more than a toy. A quirky little curiosity that will never expand beyond a tiny clique of people who accept Gemini for what it is and are content to only ever see content from that same small pool of people.

[aggressive ruler-slapping in the distance]