Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Is Linux accidentally giving itself an unfair reputation for being difficult?

Helped a non-techy person on the phone get their wifi working on a Linux laptop, we solved it by them pressing the physical flight mode button and then toggling the wireless option in the GUI. Pretty easy, as easy as Mac or Windows.

BUT... when I initially looked this problem up on a search engine, the first page of results involved the command line and scary paragraphs of CLI text about hardware and drivers.

If this non-techy person had looked this up, they would have seen scary CLI options as top results, and been intimidated away from Linux.

#Linux

last time it kept overheating while trying to compile the kernel, and we had to hold it in front of the air conditioner for like an hour to get it to finish. this time around we should be able to skip that part by using the single-core trick we recently figured out for the laptop, so that's good

as we leave gpn and its lice jokes behind us and look ahead to a long summer full of more chaos events, let's all remember that infectious disease is a community issue. lice can't buy gulasch-genusspakets and wear those shitty wristbands; they don't care what city they're in or who organized the event that brought new people together and prime new louse real estate within crawling distance.

if lice were transmitted at gpn, the same will happen at other events – sure, scale might matter, but lets not pretend that this stuff stops when the jokes do.

when we share space and closeness in our bodies, we also share responsibility. this is, indeed, the point: what brings you joy brings me joy, and what hurts you hurts me; what makes you sick makes me sick, and what helps you helps me. we run on the same biological substrate; we share similar vulnerabilities, and similar desires; and when we acknowledge this by exchanging mutual care and joy in our embodied forms, let's reaffirm that shared responsibility, too.

take care.

A while back when I discussed plastic pollution in my newsletter Talking Climate, I said the most important way we can cut it is not by recycling (only 8% is actually recycled) but rather by advocating for plastic bans where we live.

And now, guess what - there’s peer-reviewed evidence this works!

Find the article here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp9274

Do you love the idea of Free & Open Source Software, and Linux in particular? I certainly do. But until recently, I didn't think too much about what "freedom" means beyond licensing. If you're like me, this blog post by @fireborn could border on heartbreaking. But it may also be a call to action, not only for developers, but for the entire F/OSS community. I hope it is.

Excerpt: »Freedom is also not telling disabled users to go fuck themselves because they asked for a working login prompt. It’s not freedom if it requires you to be perfect, sighted, fluent in C, and emotionally bulletproof.«

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/you-dont-own-the-word-freedom-a-full-burn-response-to-the-gnulinux-comment-that-tried-to-gatekeep-me-off-my-own-machine/

found via @Natanox at https://chaos.social/@Natanox/114749881757130989

#Linux #Accessibility #FOSS #Gatekeeping

I spent a couple of hours yesterday getting Audacity building, reproducing and diagnosing the bug, and wrapping my head around the complex logic in this part of the code so that I could implement a correct fix. To have copilot review my work, which I contributed back for free, is just so incredibly disrespectful to my time and effort.

"America is so deindustrialized that they don't even manufacture consent any more."

i was bored and went down a rabbit hole of researching how computers are made and like. what do you mean we refine a stone and then etch pathways onto it. this is literally runic stone processing magic. we live in a fantasy world

"Ondernemers maken zich grote zorgen over mogelijk urenlange stroomuitval komende winter in delen van Brabant. [...] “Het vestigingsklimaat in Nederland wordt er zo niet beter op", zegt Jan van Mourik van werkgeversorganisatie VNO-NCW Brabant Zeeland. "Dat is onze grootste zorg.”"

Echt, flikker op met je "vestigingsklimaat". De "grootste zorg". Wat dacht je van alle mensen die zonder stroom zitten? Dat is blijkbaar minder belangrijk?

Als je er als bedrijf problemen mee hebt, dan draag je maar gewoon lekker bij aan de financiering van een oplossing. En niet weer gaan zeiken over 'vestigingsklimaat' en lekker de kosten van je grootverbruik externaliseren naar de maatschappij.

Helemaal klaar met dit soort figuren.

You don't have to "give it to AI" that it does some small useful thing in a bid for neutrality whenever you criticize AI. You can just criticize AI.

Being on the road again after quite a long time, I notice two main things: Dutch drivers tend to seem allergic to the right lane (even when there is plenty of space, it's like "ew no, that's where trucks/lorries/semis* go") and they have no concept of keeping distance. I'll try to keep a safe minimum distance (2 seconds, as a rule of thumb) and many drivers seem to think that's room for another two cars. I guess having a ton of steel and a crumple zone around you does make you feel safer than me on my motorbike.

*depending on your flavor of English

all the universities are like, here's a conference, no actually here's 10 conferences, on "AI in higher ed".

why are none of them like, here's a conference, and a programme, against AI in policing and the military.

is it maybe because the university is the same thing as the police, the military? ...

If you want to get "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" (or any other zine!) and you're in a country with a weaker currency than the US (India, Brazil, etc), there's a discount to make the zines more affordable. You can see it in action here:

https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal/

If you're in a country this applies to, you should see something like this:

i wish i were good at sound design so i could make something like the windows xp system sounds

Hey, so it seems that most of Rowling's money is coming from licensing deals nowadays. And you can be pretty sure that most of the companies paying for those deals don't believe in Rowling's hateful politics anywhere near as much as Rowling herself does.

Which is to say: if you create continuous hassle and reputation damage for any place that has such a licensing deal, and for any place that stocks the licensed stuff... I bet they're going to reconsider extending those license deals real quick, as it becomes a toxic asset.