Is this an age thing? I’m about 40 and I never had instagram, barely used facebook, and didn’t use any others really. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem where someone backed out because I didn’t have instagram. But I also don’t have a big group of casual friends, and maybe that would be harder.

Discord sucks, but I’ve noticed a lot of social groups use it. A couple meetups I go to all use it for communication. Maybe that’s more bearable than instagram?

I haven’t! Seems similar to Falling Down

A friend and I were talking about what’s wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren’t any consequences for minor infractions. We’re all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.

Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like “I should follow the rules” or even “I should do what’s good for society.” But many people chill out at the toddler level of “I don’t want to be punished.” So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they’re doing just fine.

But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I’m not going to call the cops. They wouldn’t even come, for one thing, but I also don’t want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.

I don’t know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local “guardian angel” volunteers that patrol and “Deal with” people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don’t have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than “you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole.”

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

You’re probably not telling the total truth, but maybe consider that one person being unpleasant 30 years ago isn’t a good reason to abandon an entire form of media for your entire life. Let it go. The librarian is probably dead by now, and they don’t have to matter to you anymore.

I say this all the time! I use it to try to discredit conservatives when they make up reasons why we can’t have good things. Like, look, you love the library, and you know conservatives would make up all sorts of reasons why it couldn’t ever work. When they’re going on about how free buses (or whatever) couldn’t work, it’s the same

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

That was an interesting read. Thank you. I’ll have to do some thinking on it, and read more carefully when I’m not befogged by a head cold.

I still want, like, emotionally, the horrible people to face justice (or at least vengeance), but i can see how that can have myriad unwanted consequences.

Getting people to actually organize is hard. One of the consequences of what Luigi (allegedly) did was people at work started to actually talk about politics, where before it had been a little more gauche (pun intended). Will anything come of it? Probably not.

At that job, I feel like I was planting seeds of radicalization just by talking to people about US history. Several of them hadn’t grown up here, and had a very glossy marketing understanding. Just telling them about how like Jim Crow is a thing from living memory, not centuries ago, was eye opening.

Why is it counter productive? I guess because uninvolved people clutch their pearls and then support the police/capitalists?

The huge support for Luigi makes me think there may be a change in the air. But also that was precisely targeted, not just randomly murdering. If he had set off a bomb and killed 30 people in midtown New York, even if one was a hated CEO, I don’t think people would support him.

This is a good point. I hadn’t thought much about how some of the skills and such from unionizing might transfer to other things. Thanks

i don’t know a lot about the history of the black panther movement (not surprising nothing about it was taught to me in school). Infiltration by the government/antagonists is a real concern. As is being murdered like fred hampton. I don’t really know how to guard against that. The “They pull a knife you pull a gun. They put one of us in the hospital, you put them in the morque” attitude has bravado, but isn’t really safe or sustainable. But on the same time, just being casually murdered isn’t either.

To be clear, I support other options like a general strike and unionizing (though I think forming a union is only a bandaid on top of the evils of capitalism, it’s better than nothing).

I don’t think “just vote for the democrats in 4 years” is a viable strategy on its own.

But even so, these have to be backed by might. If you do a strike and they send police to do violence to you, you have to be ready to fight back.

Good read. The problem remains capitalism, I think.

I think a lot of places that prohibit talking about violence are supporting the horrors. Like, it’d be swell if we could vote ourselves out of this mess but that seems like a long shot, and a lot of damage would be done before that even started to take effect.

I get most of us don’t actually want to risk our lives. We don’t want to be the one guy who throws a molotov and gets shot by the police.

But shit is really bad, and at the end of all things might makes right. Principles and philosophy don’t matter if you’re dead.

I think everyone’s thought about like “what if i went back in time and shot Hitler before things got really bad?” Well, that’s now. You’ve arrived at the time travel destination.

I don’t really want to live in a world where republicans are shot dead, where the prosecutors putting people in jail for protesting are murdered in their sleep, or where the owners of a factory that pollutes the air we breathe are beaten so badly they’ll never walk again. But I also don’t want to live in the world those forces will create if left unchecked.

Besides, the right has been using stochastic terrorism for years.

Windows sure is bad, though I haven’t seen an actual blue-screen in years. That’s some foul luck.

I turn it off every night when I’m done. It boots quickly and I mostly just use it for the web browser and steam.

My work computer (Mac) I put to sleep because I don’t always want to open all the terminals and IDE and such every time.

Conservatism is generally a worthless ideology that makes the world worse, so I don’t feel a desire to spend more time with it. We don’t need to debate “what if women don’t have rights”, “what if gay stuff is illegal?”, “what if you had to pay for health care so if you were poor you’d just die?” or whatever.

Nvidia 4070 super.

I don’t remember the other details off the top of my head. Discord had me run sudo apt install linux-image-oem-24.04b and that fixed the Ethernet. They didn’t really explain details, though. Maybe there were more things to do, but I didn’t get more responses so I was on my own.

I think people over value emotions, but I realize I’m part of people too and it happens to me. Emotions are a fast heuristic but they’re not very inaccurate. They’re good for when speed is important, or when more information isn’t available. Neither is true on an async post about Linux. But yes, I can be dismissive of emotions but it’s something I’m working on.

I’ve seen too many people make strange, unhelpful, decisions because like “someone told me to do something and now I won’t” or “that guy was rude so I’m not going to listen”. That’s what your post felt like to me. (Note the emotional dimension there, heh)

Like, imagine a friend who always forgets their plans, is late, and double books themselves. You probably can’t just be like “use a calendar, dude”. You probably have to gently massage them and incept the idea. If you just tell them, they’ll feel bad, reject the idea, and continue having problems. (In real life, some months later the friend did come around to using a calendar, but only after uselessly wrestling with feeling bad)