Just getting started on Lemmy!

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 28th, 2025

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  • I can’t speak to Arch but I use Ubuntu every day. I hate on Ubuntu because I use it every day. They make terrible choices. They’ve got common, serious issues people have reported at least as far back as 2009 with no acknowledgement or plan to address. I’m on LTS and they push through multiple reboot requiring sets of updates a week, heedless of the impacts.

    I don’t feel like learning a totally new environment so I’ll be switching my main computer to Mint whenever I get the time. So I can deal with someone else’s annoying decisions for a while.


  • The original HTC Incredible. Comparatively speaking, it was a very modern looking phone. The back was the thing that people noticed. It had a weirdly shaped battery cover back. The physical interface was pretty great and it included an optical cursor or whatever you want to call it.

    modern phone gripe

    It could be operated with one hand whether you’ve got big hands or small hands. I hate the fact that everything now is available only in phablet and bigger phablet.

    And without user swappable batteries. Ugh.


  • I’m not sure I consider them a trustworthy source per se. I don’t think they’re necessarily less trustworthy than the BBC. BBC is propping up a Western colonialist perspective. (Not trying to beat up on the Beeb specifically. Major trusted U.S. news sources tend to more specifically support U.S. nationalism … even the “liberal” ones.)

    I think if a viewer / reader in a Western mindset, the difference in the blind spots between Al Jazeera’s perspective and Western media will complement each other in a way that will give readers / viewers a more well-rounded perspective on history. At least as compared to sticking only to Western perspectives.





  • An idea whose time as come … again.

    We’re at a unique moment where a decent computer from 10 years ago is still pretty usable provided you don’t have Windows 11 or a need to run a particularly recent version of Mac OS. There’s no real reason to keep replacing laptops these day outside of physical damage.

    Not to mention the advantages of having the ability to pull a battery from a computer that won’t respond even to the power button (a problem I had to deal with for a Windows firmware update I told Windows not to apply … this year or late last year). I ended up connecting USB accessories to run the battery out faster so I could get my computer back. Technically, I could have gotten the battery disconnected but the bottom panel was messed up and I couldn’t sensibly get it off without voiding a warranty.

    Bring back swappable batteries. And how about RAM and storage that’s not soldered on while we’re at it?



  • Not an athiest but not a Christian or Muslim either. I used to be a Christian. At roughly the minute mark, the presenter claims that the Bible says that god is a Trinity. The video references Matthew 28:18-20 (about baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). While it’s true that Matthew says that about baptism, that verse doesn’t say that God is a trinity. Trinitarianism is one doctrine some have derived from the Bible but the Bible doesn’t contain the concept directly or Christians wouldn’t have had so much fighting about it. That’s not even getting into the nature of Jesus himself which spawned some humdinger disagreements over time. 🥴

    Slightly before that, the presenter claims that the Bible is our only source of truth (paraphrasing … not going back to get the exact wording). The video doesn’t prove that and it’s not true that the Bible is our only source of truth.

    It also relies on a lot of ignorance of the Quran at the very least on the part of the people watching it. I’m not in a position to speak much to the Quran other than to note that a devout Muslim would likely not find those arguments compelling.

    This kind of “apologetics” / evangelical effort aren’t edifying or useful to the believer or the unbeliever. To borrow a concept I heard from Christians while I was one … those who can be argued into converting can be argued out of it. This kind of presentation is the sort of thing unprincipled people use to grift money out of believers in the idea that this will convert unbelievers.


  • Being limited isn’t that big a deal. My instance has them limited because of their lax moderation and an excess of reply guys. All it means is that I get a notification saying “Someone you might know sent you a notification” and I get to review and accept or deny the notification depending. Plus they have to request permission to follow me so I get to check them out before accepting.

    I still have tons of mutuals on .social and I get new ones all the time. While each person making the choice about whether to accept notifications or follows from a particular user is going to make their own choices, I don’t think it’s particularly inconvenient.

    AfD sidebar

    For their lack of adequate moderation capacity / interest, .social has one topic they tend to over-react to. AfD sympathizing isn’t that one thing. Not to suggest they’re right here. I’d need the thread context and a better understanding of German to weigh in on that. Moderators are human and they’re going to make a bad call eventually. I’m not in a position to guess whether they made a bad call here. AfD aren’t just some normal political party, though.



  • At the moment, not so far as I know. The challenge for any client is that Mastodon (right now) doesn’t load entire threads unless you’re on the same server as OP. Instead, the API object says the post is “in reply to this post.” If no one on your server is following the post directly prior to that in the thread, then the chain is broken.

    There’s a bot called FediFetcher that an admin can install to pull in other toots in a thread. Vanilla Mastodon is already working on an effort to integrate this functionality directly but I don’t know how soon it will be live.

    There’s a browser plugin called Substitoot that will pull in other parts of a thread provided you click on the next post up in the thread (in my experience this may take a few clicks).

    Lastly, I hear that GoToSocial already pulls in the rest of the thread.

    None of that does exactly what you asked for but it’s a prerequisite to implementing what you’re hoping for.





  • If part of your coworker’s job is answering questions for coworkers, it’s disrespectful (not to mention a career-limiting move) to outsource that labor to an LLM. However, your coworker may be in a situation where they feel overwhelmed by coworkers not using available resources or they may have some other reason for “outsourcing” their work to an LLM. Or they could be underpaid, disgruntled by workload, or a bunch of other different things.

    Without more context, it’s hard to know what may be going on there. I don’t think a constructive conversation with your colleague is possible without getting more information from them. I would recommend being pretty direct. Maybe something like: “It seems like you may not have read my question. This isn’t a question that I can get a usable answer from an LLM for. Is there another resource you think I should have used before contacting you?”

    If this still feels too confrontational, you could take out the second sentence.



  • For my full desktop, I turn it off when I’m not using it. It basically exists to do heavy compute tasks. I basically do that a few times a week. There’s no reason to leave it on if I’m not in the middle of a job. That would be true regardless of the O.S. I’m using on it.

    My main computer, I suspend. Usually, I try to make sure that happens on purpose because Ubuntu has this impossible to troubleshoot behavior1 that seems to happen more often if it falls asleep on its own.

    I would be more inclined to shut it down but I’m particular about my windows and it takes what feels like an hour to get everything just so after reboot. I can’t deal with that every day. (Nor am I thrilled about how often Ubuntu LTS wants me to reboot for updates. My desktop needs Ubuntu Studio LTS but my main computer doesn’t. When I get time and energy, I’m switching it to Mint so I can deal with someone else’s obnoxious choices for a change without learning an entirely new distro.)

    1 The behavior is not recovering video on wake. It does seem to be working but following the commands I have memorized to shut it down from inside a virtual terminal don’t work. The only way to get it down is to hold the power button for “4 seconds” or pull the power plug.