• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • You have to file taxes with the US, most people with US citizenship living outside the US don’t actually have to pay anything.

    As for why to keep filing:

    • renouncing your citizenship is difficult and expensive
    • it’s hard to avoid the US

    Let’s say you have no plans to ever live in the US again. Does that mean you never want to visit friends or family you left behind? Does that mean you’ll never go to a sporting event, concert or professional conference in the US ever again? If you’re flying internationally, will you always be willing to pay extra and do extra work to avoid being on a plane that makes a stopover in the US?

    For most people it’s a few hours of work, and/or a hundred bucks or so once per year to keep their options open and avoid major headaches.


  • “If you count third party candidates who have absolutely no hope of winning, it turns out that Trump didn’t win the popular vote in 2024. Sure, more people voted for him than voted for the perfectly normal democratic candidate, but if you add her votes to the votes for the Green party candidate, the Libertarian Party candidate, the Socialism and Liberation party candidate, and RFK Jr. Combined, they all got very slightly more votes than Trump. So, America isn’t cooked.”


  • That’s his argument, but I don’t really buy it.

    For example, what would Hollywood do if Canada suddenly stopped respecting copyright? (I know we’re talking about the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA, but the C in DMCA is “Copyright”, so this would definitely be framed as Canada not respecting copyrights.) A lot of movies and TV shows are now made in Canada. I imagine a lot of those companies would pull their productions out of Canada. So, whichever politician passed the law would be labelled as the one who killed Canada’s entertainment industry.

    If Canada allowed jailbreaking John Deere tractors, or HP printers, they might stop selling them in Canada. If Canada allowed people to bypass Apple’s App Store, Apple might ban all apps from Canadians and Canadian companies. That might piss off farmers, or CTOs, venture capitalists, etc.

    Taking this step might create a lot of new jobs, but that’s a big unknown. How many jobs? How well paying? How long would it take for them to be established. They’d have to weigh that against all the people whose jobs might be disrupted. So, it’s much easier to stick with the status quo, even if that status quo means just bending over for the US.






  • I remember looking at some point, and Gnome had roughly 4x the number of developers that KDE had. If you want the best (most stable, most well tested, most feature full, etc.) programs, you basically have to use some Gnome programs. That was one of the deciding factors that pushed me to go with Gnome. If I was going to have to use Gnome programs anyhow, and they worked best with Gnome, then I thought I should use Gnome. My experience was that Gnome programs don’t really play well with KDE, but that KDE programs generally work OK on Gnome.

    I really like the customizability of KDE, but I like many of the defaults of Gnome. Unfortunately, if you don’t like some of Gnome’s defaults, it’s real pain in the ass to change them. Personally, even though I liked a lot of Gnome’s defaults, I absolutely hated some other ones. If it weren’t for extensions there’s no way at all I could use it. Luckily, some of the biggest misfeatures are so widely recognized that there are dozens of extensions to choose from to fix them. OTOH KDE’s customizability led to some issues too. I remember having some weird interactions between things because settings A, B and C don’t necessarily work well together. But, at least those settings are built into the desktop environment, and you’re not relying on some random dude’s hobby project for a critical system setting.

    At the moment, I’m pretty happy with Gnome, and most days it just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do. That’s something I never ever got with Windows. It was always a pain in my ass. And, it’s something that was only ever 90% true with OSX. Great defaults, but that last 10% is a real pain in the ass. Gnome’s extensions let me get much closer to 100%. I have to admit though, that I do dread the day that I have to upgrade it and all the extensions break.






  • It’s also the case that people are mostly consistent.

    Take a question like “how long would it take to drive from here to [nearby city]”. You’d expect that someone’s answer to that question would be pretty consistent day-to-day. If you asked someone else, you might get a different answer, but you’d also expect that answer to be pretty consistent. If you asked someone that same question a week later and got a very different answer, you’d strongly suspect that they were making the answer up on the spot but pretending to know so they didn’t look stupid or something.

    Part of what bothers me about LLMs is that they give that same sense of bullshitting answers while trying to cover that they don’t know. You know that if you ask the question again, or phrase it slightly differently, you might get a completely different answer.