kava @ kava @lemmy.world

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Gnome is an opinionated desktop environment and that turns some people off. But it's bold enough to make some design decisions and have a limited scope. KDE tries to be another Windows alternative.

Of course, you could go with a tiling window manager but my vote goes to Gnome. I've had a very smooth experience on Gnome for the last couple years.

We would still be supporting Israel with Biden in place. The only difference is there would be a few "we are very concerned" statements from the White House press secretary instead of Trump's reality TV show statements. But in the background, the same number of MK84 2,000lb bombs are being transported by the same military vehicles and they blow up on top of the same people.

i think the only way we can survive and create a successful egalitarian society is by having some sort of overlord ruling over us

so for example let's say we write a constitution and then have a super-powered generalized artificial intelligence machine force us to follow the rules

or aliens. we could become pets for alients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4

I mean, Bannon started this whole thing. He was pushed out of the inner circle but he was the one with the vision back in 2016.

Bannon is a visionary and he had the right idea. He just didn't have the ability to execute. Trump took the ideas from Bannon and found new allies who have the ability to execute. Musk (and Thiel) were more than happy to jump on board

Edit: just in case it's not clear I'm not endorsing his views. I am firmly anti-Nazi

look there was no plausible deniability when Elon did it. He pretended like he was a weirdo autist the night of with his weird head bobbing and his exaggerated gestures to try and give plausible deniability. but the Nazi salute was putting the toe in the water. feeling the room

it seems that the wannabe Nazis felt like the water was warm enough and they're gonna start descending the staircase into the pool

And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book

The books on my 1st generation kindle have been there 15 years unchanged. Just don't connect devices to the internet that don't need to be connected to the internet.

The "internet of things" that was sold to us is just a way for corporations to exert more control. I am pro-technology. I think an ebook reader is infinitely more useful and valuable than a paper book - I can fit tens of thousands of books on my Kindle, more than I could read in a lifetime, and a full charge lasts more than a month at a time.

I can use whatever font I want, I can scale the size to what I want. I can change the margins, place bookmarks, gives a % of how far I am in a book, skip to chapters, etc.

Like, it's objectively better than a book.

But it doesn't need to be connected to the internet.

you're correct it's not a unique experience to feel isolated from the rest of your peers. i feel like it's an experience that might actually be increasing. i think social media ironically adds to this in the youth. many biracial people also experience something like this (ie, too white for the blacks, too black for the whites)

when i got here initially i moved to a place where nobody spoke my native language. so when i went to school, i would get put in a class all by myself with a nice lady who would hold flash cards with pictures on them. she would show me a card, it would say something like "cat" or "ball" and then she would repeat them over and over.

so the first year or so of primary school I was alone in a room because I didn't speak english yet. really what eventually taught me english was cable TV

another element in the experience is being afraid of authority. the police were dangerous because at any moment if they caught us the family could get separated and we could get deported. one time my parents were cleaning an office late at night (they worked in cleaning when they first arrived in US) and they brought me with.

i didn't understand what a fire alarm was so i pulled it. my parents, scared that the authorities would arrive and see a young child, took me and put me in the backseat of the car where people's feet usually go and they put a blanket on me. they told me to be very quiet and not make a sound otherwise we could all be deported. so i hid in that car for an hour or so until the emergency services left

i share these things not to say i had a hard life or anything like that. I think I had a good upbringing. and I understand many Americans have had much worse experiences and also feel alienated as well.

But I share these things just because the story in the OP touched me because I was that 11 year old child once. It's a life and a set of experiences a lot of Americans don't really think about very much. Or at least historically has been more or less ignored.

Nowadays illegals have attention but unfortunately an overwhelmingly peaceful people become "rapists and murderers". if you look up statistics, illegals are 2-4x less likely to commit crime than native born americans (if you get any charge at all, you can get deported.. even if you get acquitted or the charges dropped!). so naturally they tend to be more careful breaking laws

I'm not sure where exactly they made the switch. Basically, I got my girlfriend one a year and a half ago and it did not need the software. I explained to her to turn off the wifi and just download books and drag and drop.

But then around Christmastime last year my girlfriend's cousin wanted an ebook ready so we bought her a Kindle and I gave the same advice. But she couldn't figure out how to drag and drop, so she brought it over. I was fussing around thinking something was wrong with my USB cable but then I realized it required that special software.

So the switch happened at some point in the last ~18 months or so my memory's a bit hazy

Amazon just couldn't let it be. There's a certain set of people that just aren't going to opt into all the bullshit. These people just want a plain and simple ebook ready to host their ebooks. They think if they force the special software they'll be able to do things like sign into your Kindle and change your settings by force.

But what happens? Instead of gaining those people like me or you into their ecosystem, they're just gonna lose future hardware customers. I would have been perfectly fine buying Kindles for the rest of my life if they had just kept that feature.

I'm sure it's going to be reversed engineered at some point but it's absurd. I don't understand the short-sighted greed.

Up until fairly recently, you could just drag and drop files onto the Kindle with a usb. I've had my first generation Kindle for almost 15 years now and it still works. Just download an .epub file, convert it to .mobi with Calibre, and drag and drop it over to the Kindle.

I have a newer one too, that I got a couple of years ago as a gift.

The trick is just disable the wifi and never let it communicate with Amazon servers. They will mess with your settings and push secret updates that remove features. For example, it could "sync" your books with your Amazon account if you naively log into your Amazon account and that literally results in you not being able to remove items from your Kindle without logging into your Amazon account on your computer and going through a million menus. It won't let you do it from the Kindle, even if you're offline.

But if you just never let it connect it to the internet at all, you're fine.

Although the new Kindles now require a special Amazon software to copy files over (because of "convenience") and it won't communicate with the usual protocol so you can't drag and drop like you could for the last 15 years.

So yeah, don't buy a Kindle. at least not a new one.

Thank you. I feel like one these days. Especially after the naturalization ceremony. This is a country of immigrants and I'm part of it. I'm not ashamed of it anymore. I was when I was younger.

thank you, i appreciate the kind words. like i said, after processing and coming to terms with my upbringing, I see it as a positive these days. I got a unique outlook on life that most people don't have the privilege to see.

I know things about this country Americans don't have any clue about. By being sort of "in between" cultures, it lets you zoom out more easily. the world which was once small gets bigger.

It’s very depressing our world is still caught up in racial problems and not important problems like food and shelter.

I think people are scared. Americans are insecure about their future. Financially, emotionally, and societally.

I think we have to go through this painful phase but we will come out the other side with a new 21st century ideology. Once that fixes the contradictions of the 20th century one we still have.

exactly this. later on as an adult I realized I had my own path and that path was always going to be different from the average. got me thinking differently, opened my mind, etc. I think also knowing 3 languages helps

ideology gets impressed upon you at an early age already, especially here in the US.

I grew up illegal in the US. I was brought on a travel visa at the age of 5 and it wasn't until my mid 20s that I became a citizen.

I vividly remember being in elementary school, around her age, in music class where we were learning the national anthem. The entire class would stand up and we should sing "I'm proud to be an American" and I remember silently crying as I stood up and sang the song.

I cried because I understood even at that age that I was not an American. I was part of everything while simultaneously always being detached from everything. Never fitting in, but pretending to. I think long-term it created a strange sense of detachment from society. This shit fucks you up and it's heavy stuff for a child to process. It wasn't until my adulthood that I really started to understand and internalize a positive narrative from my upbringing. An 11 year old child does not have the capacity to process this.

And I'm in my 30s now- I grew up illegal before social media and before this xenophobic outburst started circa 2016. I'd imagine it's so much worse today.

I feel for this little girl. I feel for all the children in the country who's only crime was existing. Obama, while famously being the deporter-in-chief (both Obama terms aw more deported than Trump's first term), at least did offer DACA as an executive order for these children.

Really, I think you can tell the state of a society by how they treat the vulnerable. And the US is getting increasingly brutal and cruel. We're in for a wild fascist ride, comrades. It's only just begun.

don't leave. same reason i remain in florida. that's why they want. if all the sane people leave, you raise the % of insane to sane.

we counter intuitively need more progressives to move and live in florida and texas. these are going to be the two most important starts in the upcoming century

plus while the government is insane, there are many varied and diverse communities in these states. i live in an immigrant heavy community in florid and absolutely love it more than the blue states i've lived in the past. minus the state government, needless to say

Texas will inevitably be blue. Just like what happened with California.

I think his is absolutely the right course of action. We as humans have a weird psyche and we sometimes externalize internal issues and project them outwards either onto ideas or people.

So for example, incels have serious issues with self-worth and they externalize those issues into hatred of women and society at large for their position in life. They feel, perhaps, they are not the man they feel like they should be- strong, handsome, wealthy, etc. And so they take blame at external circumstances in order to lessen the cognitive dissonance that if they are lonely and undesired- it's almost always due to their own decision making and perspective on life.

So for example a young male teen may feel all sorts of negative emotions and decide that gender dysphoria must be the diagnosis- when maybe he's just a little feminine and attracted to men. But if they start to identify with the trans label prematurely, they could end up doing unnecessary damage to themselves and their development.

I wholeheartedly and unapologetically support trans people and in my opinion if transitioning is determined the most effective treatment to gender dysphoria by one or two clinical physicians, I would absolutely support my kid transitioning. Trans kids have a very high rate of suicide so this is actually a very serious life and death diagnosis. It's more dangerous statistically than some types of cancer. And if my kid had cancer, I would want to obviously look at all possible treatments plans we could take.

But just like the dad, I would start with regular therapy and work our way up. See what else is going on. I would also spend time with my kid and really try to get a sense for what's troubling them. I don't think there is a substitute for a parent who cares.

Anyhow, interesting post, thanks for sharing this intimate exchange. It's a reminder that we are all humans and even those who we may label as "conservative" cannot be condensed down to one statement. This is one of the reasons, for example, I love Florida even though it's a red state. I'm the furthest thing from right wing, but you'll find that many Latinos who identify as right-wing have many views that would be considered "progressive".

We're all ultimately people who hold multitudes.

Get an old Kindle. The new ones make it hard for you to connect to your computer. They require you to download a "convenient" piece of software meant to allow you to transfer files. But conveniently it also makes it so you can't transfer files easily without it.

Even just a couple of years back you could plug in your Kindle to your computer through a USB and just drag and drop files. It only reads the proprietary .mobi format but Calibre, an excellent piece of software, will automatically convert .epub files to .mobi for you and it has a great algorithm.

Then all you gotta do is look up whatever you want on libgen and for the price of one kindle you can have a virtually infinite library of books.

I've actually had my first generation Kindle for about ~14 years now and my newer one for about ~3 years. I won't ever buy a new one, but the ones from ~3 years ago are excellent pieces of hardware.

You just have to disconnect it from the internet and never turn on the wifi. If you do, Amazon will fuck with your settings and make your life difficult.

Basically, if you're on a budget a used Kindle from ~3 years ago is a great choice in my opinion. If you want something new, stay far away from Amazon.

this was was always going to end with Russia taking a large chunk of Ukraine. there was some collective delusion for a while that it wasn't because of strong state war propaganda

but Russia is always going to care more about Ukraine than the US. It's their neighbor who they have more or less controlled directly or indirectly for hundreds of years.

US support was always limited and self-interested. Just like every time US hypes up some international ally to inevitably discard them. Remember the Kurds? I'm guessing Taiwan is the next one going forward

i'm kind of lost on how to respond to this. we weren't talking about games, the card analogy was to show that even with a relatively small set of starting conditions you can get to relatively absurd possibilities very quickly. it was to highlight the chaos theory that rules our lives.

the OP wasn't about winning or losing anything, it was about "having experienced all life has to offer". that would necessarily include both winning and losing combinations, no matter your subjective definition of "winning" or "losing"

and even having said all that and to follow your analogy- there are many games where drawing a face card (a-k) is a bad thing.

you ever play rummy? you want the least amount of points at the end of the round and face cards are worth more points.

you can make a straight flush with a 2 3 4 5 6 in poker, a face card can be enough to bust you in blackjack, etc.

this is the wildest statement i've seen all month

the breadth and depth of the experiences that life has to offer is unfathomable. do not be so brazen to assume you have experienced even a tiny drop of vast ocean of what humans have actually lived through

From suicide in the trenches to the raising of a child; from gazing upon Earth from space to hunting a predator with a spear; from meditating in silence for weeks to leading a entire nation through a crisis; from winning a chess tournament to starting a business—and losing it all in a bankruptcy—existence is infinite, or may as well be.

think of it this way

there are 52 cards in a deck. that means every single deck has a specific order, right? what are the chances of you getting one specific order of cards if you shuffle? Well, how many different combinations are there? 52! ( ! means both factorial and emphasis here)

That's 52 × 51 x 50 ... all the way to × 2 × 1

That's 8x10⁶⁷

That's 8 with 67 zeros. Here

80000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

For reference.. the number of seconds since the Big Bang is estimated to be about 4×10¹⁷

Now think of your life and human life in general. Think of all the variables. Hell, there are 7 days in a week. 52 weeks in a year. Coincidentally the same as a deck of cards.

If you do something different every week, there are going to be 8000000000......... different ways your year could turn out.

So, please do not fall victim to this type of irrational thought. I’m not sure if it’s arrogance, depression, or something else leading to that delusion, but it’s a wild statement—absolutely nuts