Spiracle @ Spiracle @kbin.social

Posts

0

Comments

79

Joined

2 yr. ago

Is there a big difference between paid and free readers? It seems weird for them to only list readers with monthly cost (+a browser).

The discussion is fascinating. My few cents:

1. Using female as a noun can be bad, but is it "permaban the user and criticism and locking the thread bad?". Options would have included: removing the post, which wasn’t done, handing out warnings or temp bans, or even just calling it out in a mod comment.
2. Personally, I read that use as intentional in the context of the image: These titles are written from the perspective of the person in the image. The person depicted was trying to objectify a woman. Objectifying language might be appropriate since that person saw an object of desire, not a person.
3. Obviously, we lack context.

Pretty sure one of the new (announced?) changes is that people will be able to get money from being popular enough. Encouraging "engagement" and karma farming over actually using the site as a human.

Yeah. Putting all the effort into useless stuff like NFTs, crypto, or really even the whole terrible New Reddit into first making the actual experience better would have been much better. Make people pay for your awesome features after you actually have awesome features.

Instead, they made the user experience worse and worse, and repeatedly broke the tools people used to make it convenient. Not to mention all the bots and bribing mods to promote Subreddits…

Perhaps New Reddit was supposed to be their big break. Too bad it sucks so badly.

That is unrelated to normal straw usage, though. They can at any time declare that they need "medical straws", define that only certified companies can provide them, and then demand hundreds of Dollars for them. I would not be surprised if this was already happening somewhere.

The solution I’ve sort-of found is to go to communities of Arch-based systems instead of Arch itself. The same solution should work in most cases, and the communities are more newbie-friendly.

Depends on how close to Arch the distro is in this aspect/subsystem. The Manjaro community is probably less likely to offer AUR based solutions, since the AUR can be unreliable/unsafe on Manjaro.

Really depends on distro/use case/luck. I’ve had quite a few years without any issues, more with minimal and very rare irritations. The day-to-day experience continues is pleasant.

The few months have been somewhat more frustrating for me, and once I have a bit more leisure time I’ll switch distro to something that hopefully works better for me.

It lets the battery discharge to 90% while plugged in. If you’re not using it for a few days you should still unplug.

Someone made a website to compile them you might find, but here’s what I remember:

• Putting the extraordinarily unstable test release of a package in their normal release. That package specifically included disclaimers that it was for testing only, not meant for any users, and it was very clearly not meant for general release to unsuspecting end-users.
• Getting banned off the AUR (twice?) for DDOS-ing it due to their faulty code. As I recall, every machine queried the AUR for updates constantly, or something like that.
• Breaking AUR dependencies because of holding back releases for a few weeks, which they regularly to improve safety. Basically, don’t use AUR on Manjaro.

no distro will make decisions that are even in the ballpark of insanity of those by big tech corps.

Manjaro dev team enters the room.

I’ve used KDE (including Plasma) on 8 GB RAM for years. Never had an issue, though I did only play old/indie games. On old hardware like this, I’d probably try it and maybe switch later if I notice that RAM is the bottleneck.

KDE Plasma (love the looks of it, though is my hardware enough?)

With 8 GB RAM and SSD, it should be plenty. Otherwise, I’d go with something else. XFCE is quite a solid experience, as I recall. No strong recommendations there, though. I’ve mostly used Cinnamon and KDE over the years.

Linux Mint is a classic choice. Positive: It has been recommended to newbies so much over so many years that there are tons of entry-level how-tos. Downside: Many of them are old and might be outdated by now. Be sure to always check whether the guide you are following is from 2010 or something…

Same really for all the Ubuntu distros. Kubuntu (=KDE+Ubuntu) worked fine for me.

I’ve read many people being very satisfied with Pop!OS as well. Apparently, it’s a good distribution if you want everything to already be set up for gaming for you. Haven’t used it myself, though.

EndeavourOS is the one I’m personally planning to use whenever I next install an OS. The distro and the surrounding community have a great reputation for being user-friendly and reliable.

Yeah, but due to federation being somewhat slow, the kbin link shows much fewer posts. I’m not sure how exactly it works, but apparently we have to wait until posts arrive.

https://kbin.social/m/pixelart@lemmyloves.art (Most posts are not synced yet.)

There’s also https://kbin.social/m/pixelart@lemmy.ml on lemmy.ml

kbin has their own https://kbin.social/m/pixelart

Yes and no. I’d prefer user choice/curating your own list of instance you interact with.

However, each community also adds further burden on moderation. The communities you allow affect the culture, and some are very clearly more trouble than others.

My current solution would be to have multiple accounts for different sections of the fediverse. Currently I only have a generic Kbin and a Lemmy account, but if you find a Lemmy instance that’s federated with the broader free-speech spectrum without just veering into insane territory itself, I’d be interested.

Kbin user here. It does not federate downvotes from lemmy. So far, I have a total of two (2) downvotes and every single interaction, including the one I got downvoted for, was quite positive.

No toxicity in normal interactions so far. The only (slightly) toxic comment sections were regarding meta topics of users complaining about toxicity elsewhere and/or wanting to defederate more communities. Even those discussions were nearly entirely polite and productive.

The only somwhat toxic topic I participated in was when one car-enthusiast complained about the fuckcars community and got called out throughout the comment section. Piling on like that was probably not the best way and they deleted their post some time after.

It did. I must have mixed them up. Not sure about the desktop/gaming divide, I mostly get my info from random articles.

Based on a brief search, you may be correct on both counts. I’ll fix my post. Thanks for pointing it out.

If Windows works fine for you and does not annoy you, there is no need to migrate.

Personally, I’ve been mostly happy using Linux as my sole desktop OS for 15 years. However, I only switched because Windows kept breaking and reinstalling no longer fixed it. I couldn’t imagine going back now, but a big part is probably being used to it.

These days most major Linux distributions should be fine for desktop use.

Linux Mint Cinnamon use to be the go-to beginner distribution. Its design is apparently somewhat similar to Windows, giving you some initial familiarity. Linux Mint is also based on Ubuntu, which used to be so widespread that many support pages and simple how-to instruction still default to explaining it for Ubuntu.
(This can still lead to confusion if you search for "install [Windows program] Linux" and the instructions work for Ubuntu based distribution only, not for any other distros.)

The last few years, I’ve seen a switch to Arch-based distributions around. Valve itself switched away from Ubuntu to Arch in some ways. (On Steam, the system requirements still use Ubuntu as default.) SteamOS used to be based on Debian, which Ubuntu is related to, until the Steam Deck. Now it is based on Arch. More specifically, Valve seems to default to:

Base: Arch
Desktop environment: KDE Plasma (more powerful/options than Cinnamon)
Compositor base: Wayland for gaming, old X11 for Steam Deck’s desktop. (Apparently Wayland isn’t quite ready yet for that in their opinion.)

EDIT: Fixed thanks to feedback.

Arch itself is seen as a more technical distribution. There are extremely many support pages for every issue or question you may have, similar to Ubuntu, but some may be more difficult to understand. Still, support systems improve as the user base grows and Arch is growing.

For specific distributions, EndeavourOS is the one I’ve heard about being the most friendly. Manjaro is also beginner-friendly, but the folks who maintain it have some serious issues with seriously fucking things up sometimes.

https://itsfoss.com/arch-based-linux-distros/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVlD17OjFAc (Video compiling Manjaro fuckups.)

Black Alabamians, who make up 40% of the voting age population according to this article, have a reasonable shot of electing their preferred representative in at least 2 districts

Small correction, Black Alabamians make up 27% of the voting age pop. The 40% number in the article was about district 2. Based on the rest of your post, I assume you mistyped.

Here is the new map proposed by the AL legislature.

Thank you! Yeah, that is about what I thought it would be. District 7 goes from 56% Black down to 51,32%. District 2 grows to 40% Black, and I don’t see how it could grow higher without some very weird shapes. I was surprised that District 6 (Birmingham) didn’t become majority Black, but it seems that the cluster there is still taken by a tendril from CD-7.

Because of how racially polarized voting is in Alabama, the panel said in each of those two districts, Black Alabamians will need to make up the majority of the voting-age population or "something quite close to it."

That’s quite the conundrum. With party-lines being drawn so close to the racial divide, and with the USA’s horrible two-party system, a normal map would just lead to a tyranny of the majority, which is one of the worst outcome of democratic elections.

Changing the districts to more proportionally represent the population’s opinion (which in this case happens to coincide closely with ethnicity) sounds like a band-aid solution. It doesn’t fix the underlying problem, it seems obviously wrong on the surface of it, works really awkwardly, but it’s the best currently available method towards achieving equally in the spirit of democracy.

Thank you for the discussion/explanations. I quite enjoyed it and feel much more informed now.

Thanks for the article linked. That map was great for finally seeing what, exactly, people are talking about. It looks like Alabama is mostly White with two big-ish and a couple small clusters of Black voters. They achieved the one Black majority district by CD-7 basically extending two long tendrils to "eat" much of these two clusters (Birmingham and Montgomery), and despite that it is only barely a majority (56% Black).

If these two tendrils were removed, it looks like there would still be just one Black majority district (CD-6) with CD-7 and CD-2 both having somewhat big minorities of Black voters.

Seems like you would need to cut very carefully to achieve two Black majority districts, which very much sounds like gerrymandering to me. However, this is just based on that one map, so I may very well be mistaken.

"the abridgement of the right to vote based on race or color."
"Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress." (from the article)

Please correct me if I’m wrong, since I’ve only started informing myself on this topic starting with this article:

It seems to me, that the basis of the argument that you need a Black majority in order to fully assert your right to vote is the assertion that voters who are Black cannot be represented by officials non-Black people vote for. It seems to assume a strict racial divide in who people vote for, with White people having their White representative and Black people needing their Black representative.

This seems like a very foreign concept to me, since politicians are supposed to be able to represent multiple groups in my head, and since political opinions should not map 1-to-1 to race.

On the other hand, I resonate much more with the article’s quote on "voter dilution" by Terri Sewell. If you pack some districts so full that they are majorly Black, you thereby risk reducing them in others until their opinions as a voting block are pretty much irrelevant there. This seems like an argument to work towards having a significant minority of voters in several districts instead of concentrating them in one or two districts.