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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Yes, but nothing real came of them. The US government has a long and well recorded history of spending money on pseudoscience, even well after it’s been debunked, as long as there are True Believers in the chain of command.

    And the conspiracy theory community has a long and even more dramatic history of taking those mole hills and turning them into mountains (especially if grifters can sell books and / or T-shirts and / or weird copper sculptures that are supposed to “protect” you from it).

    Look, I grew up with parents (and a wide community) who believed in psychic shit, crystal healing, telepathy, getting messages from the Akoshic record, what evs. It’s NOT real and also believing it is NOT harmless. You’re gonna find PLENTY of misinformation about what people “believe” but if you look into any of it, you’re going to discover that somewhere along the line someone channeled something or someone like David Icke or Garahm Hancock or Rudolph Steiner or Drunvalo Melchizedek or Raël is involved, or someone is selling tickets to their lecture or psychic seminar.



  • That sounds like pseudoscience to me.

    On the other hand, there have been rather dramatic advances in brain / computer interfaces and using machine learning to interpret electrical signals from the human brain. The good news there is that every brain is different, the machines need to learn each brain individually (a model trained to pull dream images out of my brain will pull just gibberish out of yours).

    So far, the researchers would need your close cooperation in order to train a machine to understand even a little bit of what’s going on in your mind. This tech is nowhere near being used for interrogation.








  • Give me an example or two of a GUI program that you’d want to run, that doesn’t have a maintained version that will run fine in a modern environment, that you’re actually frustrated because you can’t run it.

    We can bitch about how dependency systems work all day. I want to try to install something with a sane use case and see what we’re on about, since this is literally a scenario I have barely run into. I gather that for me to run into it, I would have to practically go looking for it. Which to me, sounds like a very specific problem for a very specific subset of users, not a general problem worth paint brushing the entire ecosystem with.


  • Why do you think I’m angry? You (and my buddy) are just comically wrong, don’t wanna learn and get frustrated and mad when you run into trouble, like a cartoon character trying to open a can with a hammer.

    I use Linux for everything, it’s stable, easy, fun I’m WAAY more comfortable in it than I ever was in Windows. Your opinion doesn’t change how well Linux works for me and has for decades. It’s definitely NOT shit, you just don’t know what you’re doing.

    You’re like a dude talking to a professional race driver saying “Why drive manual, automatic is SO much easier, and therefor better and manual is harder and therefor shit.” Like dude, you’re talking to a room full of professional drivers. Like think about that for a second before you keep going the way you have been.


  • Seriously, give me some examples. I’m genuinely curious because I’ve run into this problem like… once, ten years ago. Twice, if you count trying to run Heroes of Might and Magic III for Linux that came out in like… 1999, and I eventually got that to work too (I needed an emulator) and I’ve been an almost exclusive Linux user since 2001.

    I said disingenuous because my lived experience is like “wtf is this guy doing wrong?” and so you REALLY come across like you’re just trashing Linux and talking out of your ass.

    I’m not trying to be insulting, just giving you feedback about how you’re coming across.


  • Your surround sound, I’m sure it could be done. I’ve set up some pretty successful visual / audio stuff with Linux. I did IT for an Indy film festival four years in a row and we used Linux for all kinds of stuff (mostly because the festival was broke and didn’t want to spend money on new computers or software). We would run into hardware and configuration issues and our philosophy became “if you can’t solve it in two hours, distrohop.”

    For the rest of it, I couldn’t agree more. If you need the tools that lock you to the platform, you need the platform FOR THOSE TOOLS. I have Windows and OSX machines (although it’s been like a year since I couldn’t do something on Wine, even if it’s glitchy). My Windows machines dual boot and I haven’t booted the windows partitions in literally 6-8 months. One OSX machine gets used almost exclusively for video conferencing (just because it’s in a convenient place) and for Garageband. The other OSX machine literally… just runs linux VMs that I can connect to over the network for various projects. I had other plans for it originally, but someone gave me a 6 year old Dell all in one that now runs Linux Mint and performs better than my actual Roku TV anyway. It’s a bit smaller than the TV, but it doesn’t matter to me. The TV disappeared into my wife’s office and now she’s the only one that uses it.