[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago

This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.

This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.

The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.

Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.

For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah, totally respect your opinion, but I emphatically disagree with it. The goal of what’s being discussed here isn’t to maximize production for the sake of shareholders, it’s to maximize quality of life for employees. To that end, five six-hour days are worse than four 8-to-10-hour days.

If I start work at 8 and get off work at 2:30 or 3, I still can’t start my camping trip a day early, or spend the day at the water park with my kids. I still have to give up n x 10 hours of my life, where n is my commute time, assume I work in-office.

I would much rather work until 630 Monday through Thursday, and have an extra day where full-day activities are possible every week. That’s worth more to me than 10 extra hours per week of after-work time.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 15 points 1 year ago

The wording is a little misleading. A “white noise” podcast isn’t just 80 hours of TV static, it might be a recording of a cafe, a bus station, nature, a storm, etc. not something that’s just generated on-device, meaning it’s gotta be streamed.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 31 points 1 year ago

I’ve known a guy for like 20 years, currently in his 60s, who firmly believes that anthropogenic climate change is entirely false.

He has a bachelors degree in physics, a bachelors degree in mathematics, and a Ph.D in economics. He’s written a handful of high level Econ textbooks, he’s worked as a professor off and on at 3 or 4 respected universities here in the US. He was most recently employed at a supply chain consulting firm, making an ungodly amount of money.

By all accounts, he’s an extremely smart, well-educated, well-read guy. But holy shit if that boomer isn’t constantly reposting the most transparently fake anti-science nonsense on his Facebook page. Think, “New research proves that Climate Change is a liberal myth” - The Religious Conservative Storm.

Just demonstrates how it doesn’t matter how educated someone is if they don’t think critically about information that confirms their expectations.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It’s not technically true that Mac is Linux, but people say Mac “is” Linux because they are closely related and function identically for a lot of workflows.

Bear in mind that most people think of Linux in a DE-agnostic way. “Linux” isn’t what your desktop looks like, it’s a collection of a kernel and (mostly GNU) software that is largely shared between many distributions. Mac feels a lot like a different distribution of Linux, with some (or a lot of) quirks.

I’m a SWE and I work heavily in a CLI environment. I can use the same shell with the same software and the same configuration files shared between my Linux machine and my MacBook. Honestly the biggest indicator that I’m on Mac instead of Linux is that I have to remember to use homebrew instead of pacman/apt/etc. Otherwise, I was move my entire Linux workflow to Mac in a day or two, and can maintain the two environments in parallel.

Trying to do the same in windows is… frustrating, and only works at all because of the WSL letting me run a Linux pseudo-VM on top of my windows session.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 30 points 1 year ago

Did you even read the article, Mr/Ms climate scientist?

He’s asking people not to talk like the world is going to catastrophically end once we hit that 1.5 degrees milestone, because it’s making people feel hopeless and apathetic, which is actually slowing our efforts to change.

And he’s totally right. If the government told people a meteor the size of Texas was going to impact earth in 12 hours, there would be effectively zero effort to stop it. If you tune in to a lot of the conversation around climate change from people who are not climate scientists, but who want to leave a better world for their kids and believe climate scientists, they feel hopeless. It feels like a foregone conclusion that we are going to go over the 1.5 degree goal (probably because it is), and if we think the biosphere is going to collapse when it does, it is really, really hard to take action.

It’s not saying to undersell the risks, he’s saying to be truthful about the risks. We can definitely still salvage complex life on earth with optimistic, consistent effort, but recent media coverage has been giving the impression that it’s too late. This is bad and counterproductive.

Keep on fighting the good fight brother/sister.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 15 points 1 year ago

Just so you know, you don’t have to announce if you’re leaving a community. Just go. Nobody cares

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 25 points 1 year ago

Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.

It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.

What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.

But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 15 points 1 year ago

Careful there, expressing an honest take about an Apple decision instead of trying to spin it like it’s evil is a good way to piss a bunch of people off.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago

I think the answer to your question about why it’s frustrating for some people and not others has a lot to do with use case.

One use case that easily makes Linux way less frustrating is of developing software, especially in low-level languages. If you’re writing and debugging software, reading documentation is something you do every day, which makes it a lot easier. Most of the issues where people break their systems, don’t know how it happened, and can’t figure out how to fix it are because they default to copying bash commands from a Wordpress blog from 2007 instead of actually reading the documentation for their system. If you’re developing software, a log of the software you’re installing and using is open source, so you benefit tremendously from a package manager that’s baked into the OS.

If your use case is anything like that, Windows in particular is way more frustrating to use IMO.

If instead your use case is using a web browser and a collection of proprietary closed-source GUI tools, then most of the benefits that you’re getting using Linux are more ephemeral. You get the benefit of using a free and open source OS, not being tied into something that built to spy on you, not supporting companies that use copyrights to limit the free access of information and tools, etc. Those benefits are great and super important, and I would still recommend Linux if you’re up to it, but they definitely don’t make computing any easier.

If your use case is anything like the second one, you’re probably used to following online guides without needing to understand how each step works, and you’re probably used to expecting that software will make it hard for you to break it in a meaningful way. Both of those things directly contribute to making Linux might be frustrating to use at times for you.

If you’re in the second category, the best advice is to get used to going to the official webpage for the applications you use and actually reading the docs. When you run into a problem, try to find information about it the docs. It’s fine to use guides or other resources, but whenever you do, try to look up the docs for the commands that you’re using and actually understand what you’re doing. RTFM is a thing for a reason haha.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 28 points 1 year ago

Sort of related, but this reminds me of a really annoying thing that’s been happening on my work windows 11 machine.

Any time I launch chrome from VSCode to attach a debugger, edge launches along with it, and directs me to a page that says “try the new bing.”

Absolutely infuriating, makes me want to uninstall edge.

[-] jemorgan@lemm.ee 17 points 1 year ago

Sign me up for the class action. I was thinking of just spinning up a selenium script because I’ve tried using one of the bots to delete post history before, and it didn’t work, so I was assuming the API was resisting. Disappointing to see that even clicking through everything doesn’t work reliably.

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jemorgan

joined 1 year ago