• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • As a non-technical user, I think if you have a modicum of technical knowledge it’s easy to switch to Linux. But it still takes time and patience. I’m using Linux now on all of my devices (if you count Android as Linux). There is still a lot of idiosyncracy to the ecosystem but overall it’s usable. I’ve found Vanilla OS to be a great experience overall. I had some troubles with Pop_OS! On my Nvidia GPU, that was because it’s still using x11 and I use a 4k monitor with a 1080p monitor and needed fractional scaling. Haven’t had any issues on Vanilla OS because it uses Wayland. But boy, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on and why my apps were blurry and games weren’t displaying properly. Took a lot of googling and perseverance to figure it out, as I didn’t know what a display server.



  • Modern genres don’t really apply to ancient literature. Mythical, historical, symbolic and real are mixed and you’re expected to be reading or listening to the literature from within the tradition which would give you the context for knowing which is which.

    Beowulf is myth, but also history. It has references and genealogy to real figures, but it is embedded within a myth that records the meaning of that history. It’s full of symbolic retelling of that history.


  • As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.

    I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.

    Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.

    This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.

    So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.

    But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.








  • I think the clear AeroPress is definitely the most practical. Part of my AeroPress recipe relies on agitation and waiting for the coffee to sink to the bottom to form a “puck”, which is easier to see in the clear AeroPress for sure. But then also, I’ve been getting great coffee out of mine for the last couple years. I’ve just gotten used to the idiosyncrasies of the semi-opaque press that I have.

    Also, I’m curious what your experience has been with Wacaco. To me the Pico/Nanopresso have seemed interesting from a travel perspective, but for home brewing don’t look too useful. Curious what your primary use case is.




  • This is interesting to me, because my intuition would be that it doesn’t matter whether the calories are going into microbiota or fat, it’s still going to end up as weight in your body (gut bacteria still add mass).

    Also adding to what another person said, the difference here is high fiber vs. low fiber. And I think the discussion around nutrition in general is moving away from weight being a primary determinant of health but a symptom of health. I.E. we shouldn’t be seeking to lose weight but to eat healthily, high fiber, whole foods, less processed junk, exercise frequently, and weight is a trailing measure of our success in that.



  • Technology isn’t an end in itself, it is subordinate to the need to solve problems. I don’t see how we can have relevant technical progress if tech groups don’t consider “social issues” (in quotes because I’m abusing that label to include a lot of things in my head). Although maybe we’re thinking about this at different levels of scale.