Because the first time I read it I was a poor and stupid teenager slowly being pulled into an alt-right pipeline. After I figured that out I reread it with a more critical lens for closure.

I’ve read it twice, and I agree. The plot amounts to spoiled, rich children take their ball and go home because they’re mad the poors won’t let them strip the world of resources for personal gain. The author makes it clear throughout the text that Dagny, Hank, and Galt are the heros for fucking off to larp as robber barons in the 1880’s.

As a philosophic text objectivism is naive at best and a cynical justification for authoritarianism at its worst.

Ominous.

Validation is one of the things on maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s essential for people to feel belonging and connection with other humans. We’re hardwired for it and the lack of it leads to poor outcomes almost always.

Social media is not a good source of validation. If social media were limited to just the people you knew and communicated with at least semi-regularly it would be very useful for receiving validation. However once you branch out to people you don’t know, healthy validation becomes more difficult. It also introduces a number of unhelpful facsimiles of validation (parasocial relationships, internet points).

100,000 likes/views/upvotes/retweets does not replace respect and acceptance from your peers for your emotional wellbeing, it’s not even a good substitute.

No social media platform has figured it out yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to build one that could be a good source of validation. It’s unlikely though so long as roi is important to the people that build social networks.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

That’s not a retrofit either. With a multi tool those can be removed with a few bolts. The ones on that bench are single mold cast iron. You’d need an angle grinder to remove those, not that any law abiding good citizen would.

So dumb. They could have spent the extra money helping the people they don’t want sleeping on benches not sleep on benches. Most people probably agree, just not in their backyard or with their tax dollars. The amount of work they’re willing to put in not to help someone is absolutely astounding.

Eh, technical merit is only one of many factors that determine what language is the “best”. Best is inherently a subjective assessment. Rust’s safety and performance is the conceptual bible rustacians use to justify thier faith.

I also know religious people who have written books about their faith too (my uncle is a preacher and my ex-spouse was getting their doctorate in theology). Rust has the same reality-blind, proselytizing zealots.

The needs of the project being planning and the technical abilities of the developers building it are more important that what language is superior.

I like rust. I own a physical copy of the book and donated money to the rust foundation. I have written a few utilities and programs in rust. The runtime performance and safety is paid for in dev time. I would argue that for most software projects, especially small ones, Rust adds too much complexity for maintainability and ease of development.

Both. I have a desktop running Ubuntu (though I am strongly considering switching to debian) I use that for most computer related tasks and activities. I also have a gaming laptop running windows I dig out for some VR (it has a better gpu) and professional gigs like design or video editing.

I would install linux on the laptop, but I can’t live without a few programs I have never successfully gotten running under linux (Resolve and the affinity suite). I could dual boot my desktop into rock linux (which is the only “official” resolve distro) and try to get affinity running under wine. I have been out of work for a few years though, so removing windows from the laptop isn’t a high priority.

I know religious people who could not explain their faith so specifically.

Is it really just old men saying stuff should remain in C/C++ to preserve their nostalgia? What a bunch of petty bullsh!t.

Melissa McCarthy, she has a good sense of humor which is great because my life is kind of a joke.

There aren’t many ways to organize raising the money required to build a better youtube or reddit. You could kickstart it, but you’d better hope whoever does the dev doesn’t sell. Another option would be a large open source ngo funding the development, but you’re still talking long timelines to completion.

There definitely is room for a more pro-social social media platform that isn’t a clone of something else. Paying for it is another matter.

Stunts make headlines, not change. Change and fixing the problem these groups are fighting against takes work and lots of it.

I think those of us who care about our climate would be better served by larger scale collective action aimed at the profits of companies benefitting from destroying our environment. Even the groups you mentioned by name though probably couldn’t collectively agree on where to apply pressure.

We’re going to all get a lot more done if we’re willing to compromise and find common ground than all trying to do our own things. In my opinion the time for uncompromising idealism and lofty goals is past. We need targeted, specific, collective action anyone who cares to can participate in. The hurdle will be finding consensus on what specifically to apply that effort towards.

Write several different versions of the assignment each containing pieces of what the students need to do to pass. Give the different versions out randomly to the students and break them up into small groups to discuss what they’re supposed to be doing.

Instruct the students to compare their handouts and look for commonalities that might suggest what the assignment actually is then have each group present their findings to the class with a small Q&A and point out where students were lead astray.

You could also find a real news story about a highly polarized topic and pull articles on it with differing takes (nothing current). Have the students write a short essay about what actually happened and what opinions the author shared but presented as facts.

Of the possible ways I could die prematurely I think I would be fine dying because what I believe is too dangerous to be allowed to continue. For one, if I’m dead, I no longer have to deal with the soul crushing reality we live in. But more than that I would honestly love it if anyone cared enough about me to fry me to a crisp in the first place. I’m lonely and disenfranchised enough, even being hated and feared sounds kind of nice because at least someone cares.

I streamed it while I was working on other things but I thought it was pretty hilarious. Kamala seemed to be intentionally pushing Trumps buttons to derail him and he just could not accept that he is not universally loved.

Honestly though, given how Trump lies and Kamala was putting on a show the whole thing seemed so cynical and pointless. I’ve watched every presidential and vice presidential debate since Bush Jr.‘s second term even in the "good ol’ days" when it wasn’t just a sound bite circus very rarely was a president even able to achieve the lofty goals they pitched the American people on.

The whole thing is farcical in 2024. The lack of shared reality the Trump era has ushered in makes it next to impossible to trust anything a politician says. Kamala had spunk and moxy and was very down to earth and likeable, but policy wise she made a lot of statements the presidency doesn’t have the power to deliver on. Even with the insane power the supreme court gave the executive branch a few months ago.

Trump was Trump. It’s pretty clear how much his brain has rotted when you compare this debate with the one he had with Clinton. But otherwise you can’t trust a single word he says. His position on any matter is irrelevant because he’ll retcon it later if it’s inconvenient. Meanwhile Kamala vowed to continue helping our frenemies do some ethnic cleansing and spent most of the debate posturing for the idiots to stupid to already have an opinion.

Oh, so that’s where the creator of ReiserFS got the idea.

Software, 1,000%. I love linux and daily drive it. But when I have videos to edit, photos to rework, or collateral to design I have a windows laptop with professional grade tools to do the job.

I’m sorry, gimp is hot garbage. There isn’t a pro-grade, open source video editing tool or anything close. Inkscape is useable in a pinch. Scribus is useless.

Not everyone is a multimedia creative professional, but most software on linux never quite have the features you need, are no longer maintained, or will be useful in ten years.

That said, I’d still rather break out the laptop when doing client work than daily drive MacOS or Windows 11. Either way the barrier for most users is that linux almost works.

The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that’s the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.

Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you’re after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.

Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.

100% yeah. I guess I mean that OP is already frustrated by noise in their news sources, rss doesn’t solve curation, which is what it sounds like people think rss does. But if every story you’re shown needs to be relevant to your interests rss isn’t going to fix that.

Even the perfect news outlet that OP describes is going to have tons of boring stuff. Social media tried solving it with algorithms and will probably move on to AI driven feeds in 18 months, but their profit motive spoils the effort.

Then again I’ve thought about curation vs. aggregation maybe a bit too much.