A vote not cast is a vote for Aaron Bushnell.

This sounds a lot more productive than election day usually ends up. Thanks for making this election season inspiring.

Tony’s great. He does a thing he calls “Detroit style stuffed pizza” which does not really seem to be a Detroit style pizza at all but it’s fantastic nonetheless.

A lot of people like his sandwiches and visually they look very appetizing, but for whatever reason they don’t hit the spot for me. His pizzas are spectacular, and good breadsticks and wings too.

I feel bad about this and I’d like to make it up to you.

If you tell me your favorite candidate I promise to stay home on election day to cast a vote for them.

Doesn’t that seem strange to you?

It doesn’t seem strange at all. I have never once heard someone suggest that staying home is a vote for Biden, but it’s pretty well agreed upon that not voting is a vote for Trump.

…so Trump should win in a landslide, right? Yet he lost once. This seems like a glaring error in the idea that a protest vote is a vote for Trump.

Only if you believe that election wasn’t stolen.

There was a local r4r dating subreddit I posted to in 2014, somehow my (now) wife saw it like two or three months later. I titled it “Creepy guy seeks woman way out of his league”, which I am still very proud of as a great title for a personals ad.

A little over a year later we took a look back at that same subreddit and it was 100% hookups, the dating part had been completely phased out except for the subreddit name.

I don’t read five star reviews ever anymore. If I want to find a believable endorsement of a product, I’ll look for a four-star review that contains a criticism that isn’t that bothersome to me personally, but legitimate enough that I can imagine a customer who would be deterred by it.

We moved a year ago, and I found my favorite pizza guy, Tony, by maybe the most convincing online review I’ve ever read. The most recent review on google maps was a one-star that was basically like “I met Tony and he casually used foul language etc etc there is no need for profanity etc pizza was some of the best I’ve ever had though”

That doesn’t make any sense. The idea that staying home could be a vote for Biden seems pretty silly on its face. If that were true, there wouldn’t be any point in going out to vote for him, because the majority (or at least a plurality) of the country stays home regardless. He’d win in a landslide.

Mathematician here, I can answer this. Equivalence relations are symmetric, so if staying home is a vote for Trump then showing up to vote for Trump is the same as staying home on election day.

I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.

At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.

I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn’t like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn’t interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.

After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don’t fully understand. I haven’t progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.

In the past five or so years, I’ve to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I’ve moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.

I’ve basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just comfortable with it and don’t want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they’d be like wtf are you doing. It’s whatever, it works well enough for me.

I use an adblocker, but I also drive a very old car and unfortunately my cd player just broke. I can confirm that there are tons of vaginal deodorant ads on the radio, always presented as a conversation between two women. There’s no intention to be funny, they’re trying to sound like a natural conversation two women would have in private and completely failing at coming across as anything short of awkward.

“So it works well for you?” “Yes! It lasts up to 24 hours, and four out of five gynecologists recommend it!”

My favorite thing about this post is that question 2 is asked based on the assumption that you’ve answered question 1 correctly by picking “cat”.

I want to watch it just because even without knowing a single thing about it I absolutely love this parody video and would like to get a more sophisticated appreciation for the comedy there.

Came here to post this too. 2011 two-door Hyundai accent, and I really value how small it is with two doors rather than four, easy to maneuver and park and drive in general.

It’s had some issues (horrible repair job after an accident led to me driving it a while with badly leaking transmission fluid, I really think that’s contributed to 90% of the problems over the years) and a few months back I tried looking into new cars and I literally could not figure out if anyone sells a car that size in the US anymore. So I’ll stick with dealing with it breaking down once or twice a year.

Breaking down can be a huge headache depending on timing, but I’m not interested in buying used because I don’t feel like I have enough intuition for cars to test drive something for an hour and feel confident I’m not putting $10,000 or whatever into a lateral move.

I don’t think even that’s true. I think any potential consequences this story making the news could possibly incite have already been set in motion from what’s already been in the news the past few months. They won’t take any additional hit from one more thing added to the pile, but this being in the news will make activists think twice about risking their lives to provide aid.

I think what the number 44 specifically would look like was probably way outside the radar of whoever designed that font. Yeah, it looks similar, but even noticing that I still really wouldn’t have assumed that someone wearing intends it as a nazi symbol. Is there really a need to announce a ban and solidify that it will be one? Just change the damn font going forward. Are they going to ban 88 too?

Your last paragraph was pretty much where I was a couple years ago. I don’t remember who helped clarify this for me, but housing maintenance is very much a real job and deserves the same respect and compensation as any real job, but it can very easily be disjoint from being a landlord. Making money from owning the housing other people live in is distinct from maintaining that housing, and just because several people do both things doesn’t mean that we should treat them as the same job.

Like fifteen years ago I would buy physical books, I still have a huge collection. I was getting really into math and would buy textbooks. Sometimes they could be pricey, but for a good hardcover, it can really be worth it if you’re coming back to it a lot.

Very early 2010s the amazon books became awful overnight. You could pay $70 for a hardcover and the damn thing would start falling apart a few days into reading it. I really don’t think I’m hard on my books, I treat them with care. These things just couldn’t handle normal wear for even a short amount of time. Paperbacks were even less reliable and only slightly less expensive. So I completely ditched amazon and started ordering books directly from the publishers. Normally they’d be like $10-15 more than on amazon, but it’s worth it, they weren’t falling apart.

Probably around 2012 I finished reading volume 2 of Francis Borceux’s “Handbook of Categorical Algebra”. Those first two volumes are genuinely some of the best math books I’ve ever gone through, it took me like a year each though. Volume 3 was very expensive to get from the publisher, I think it was over $160, but since I had gotten so much mileage out of the first two I decided I wanted to just pony up. It was clear as soon as it arrived that it was a piece of shit, and did start falling apart immediately. I left emails and phone calls and they just ghosted me and I couldn’t figure out a way to get my money back. That was the last book I bought for like a full decade, and I don’t think I’ve made a book purchase from anywhere over $15 since.

Pretty sure that was Cambridge University Press, and I had purchased something else (although much much cheaper) from them the year before that was good quality.

I still greatly prefer having a physical copy, but I pirate almost everything I can’t find in a library now.

But being charitable to the person you’re responding to, they twice said explicitly that they didn’t understand what was being said and asked for elaboration and both times got a reply that more or less suggested that they didn’t understand because they’re illiterate. At some point the reaction becomes understandable.

edit: different poster from the first two, but I think they were sympathizing with the other person

it takes 162 pages to formally prove that 1+1=2

This is ridiculously backwards, Whitehead and Russell’s motivation for writing the PM was to come up with a set of axioms and deductive rules that the entirety of mathematics could be derived from. When they worked out their proof that 1 + 1 = 2, it didn’t tell the world that now 1 + 1 = 2 is now officially a fact, it told the world that the logic and axioms they built were enough to be capable of deducing some very simple facts that we’ve already been confident are true. The hope was that maybe if we keep working at this and modifying our rules when need be, we’ll be able to get a set of axioms and inference rules that are sufficient to determine the truth of any mathematical question. Calling that a proof that 1 + 1 = 2 would be saying their brand new theory was somehow more valid and more fundamental than addition of natural numbers.

A few years later Gödel came along and completely obliterated any hope of a project like that succeeding, and today literally no one thinks of the PM as more than a historical curiosity. (If you actually wanted to prove 1 + 1 = 2 from first principles today, you’d use the Peano axioms for the naturals: S0 + S0 = S(S0 + 0) = SS0, done.)

That’s a tangent from the actual topic but I feel compelled to call it out.

Getting back on track, probably 90% of the points I give on exams are for partial credit, because there need to be distinctions between having no clue, knowing where to start and getting stuck, understanding essentially every meaningful step but then writing 1 + 1 = 3 to wrap up, etc. I’m grading on both their ability to solve problems and their ability to communicate their ideas. Both are equally important.

This is very controversial, but I don’t go out of my way at all to worry about cheating. I don’t want to play policeman and teach with the mindset that my students are potential criminals. Even if I’m 99% sure a student is cheating, if I’m in the profession long enough I’ll eventually hit that 1% where I’m giving a decent student an undeservedly hard time. I’m not paid anywhere near enough for it to be worth having a more adversarial relationship with my students.

I had a student earlier this month where it looked like he probably snuck out his phone for an exam. I just wrote a note on those problems that I couldn’t follow his work and wasn’t comfortable giving points for work I don’t understand, please walk me through your solutions for the points back. I told him this verbally as well when I handed it back to him as well. He never took me up on that, but it feels more humanizing than just calling him a cheater. I think OP is getting at something similar, but I think there’s value in not phrasing it in an accusatory way.

Being somewhat sympathetic to OP though, there is a sense of feeling insulted when a student puts very little effort into pretending they’re not cheating. I try not to take it as an affront to me personally and imagine that they do the same for all their instructors, but I do feel kind of peeved sometimes.

I’m skeptical this was actually taken out of context. Trump had an interview about two years ago where he leveled this exact accusation against Putin. I really recommend watching this short clip for context, it’s still hard to believe most Americans aren’t aware of what was said here.

This is a disgustingly cynical interpretation and I really wish it wasn’t realistic.

I know this is a weird choice but the Lustmord tribute album “The Others” is probably my favorite of the decade so far. The first half is pretty close to the dark ambient Lustmord is known for, but as the album goes on it has some more melodic contributions which are really spectacular.

Ethereal Shroud’s “Trisagion” album is really great if you’re into metal. Also with regards to metal - the song “Aggressor” by Vredehammer is crazy good, especially the first 2:20 or so, but the full album doesn’t quite match it for me.

“Aether” by The Moon and the Nightspirit is wonderful folk music from Hungary, but they’ve had a few other albums in the past that match it for me.

Yes.

I think I have a mental disorder where if people online are angry at me I actually start introspecting a lot rather than blowing it off. Sometimes I have something I want to say anyway and emotionally prepare to eat it.

My favorite band is Elend, they’re essentially unknown outside of the metal community in spite of not being metal in any way. (They are one of the only non-metal bands given an exception to be listed on the metal archives.) It’s neoclassical, but at times absurdly violent and their first three albums have harsh vocals. (Note that “Weeping Nights” is more or less an alternate version of “Les Ténèbres du Dehors” where the male vocals have been removed.)

violent, harsh vocals

violent, no harsh vocals

beautiful sad music

absolutely gorgeous shit with screams

(just giving youtube links so you can redirect to your frontend of choice)

I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.

I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he’d point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn’t feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.

Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He’s giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn’t really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris’ post where he addresses zero of Chris’ points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn’t actually care about free software.

At that point I didn’t really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.

Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I’m pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called “PureOS”) because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren’t taken seriously.

Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word “functional”.

I’ll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.

edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads “PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops.” Sounds like a community of happy customers.

Good comment. I’m pretty sure “public money, public code” used to be a slogan a while back. It didn’t get a lot of traction but it resonated with me.

The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.

Oh wow, I had totally forgotten that it started as phoenix. I only remember that name because the first time I downloaded the browser, the homepage read “Phoenix is now Firebird”.

Honestly, I think it’s even overblown as a thing on reddit, I feel like virtually no one who is over fifteen and using reddit recreationally cares about karma. I’ve heard it presented like people are out there karma-farming because they feel a sense of pride in having a high number and I kind of think that’s an invented caricature to get mad at. I’m skeptical that anyone actually cares.

Obviously there are people and businesses/institutions who use reddit for promotion and narrative shifting and there are bot accounts to be sold to those institutions, and all of them definitely care about karma, but I think that’s something different (and more harmful).

In the present discussion, the people posting want to share that they’re trying something new. I don’t open these posts myself but I think that’s fine. It’s very unlikely there’s some hidden motive here. As someone who cares about free software and the linux ecosystem, I would hope that the community is receptive and encourages newcomers to participate.

I do understand how OP could be annoyed at seeing a lot of these in his feed, but I think the solution is to get them off his feed, just block the community. Letting newbies have their moment is more likely to grow the community.

Yes, it probably is the best that you personally can reasonably do, but I think the point is that the responsibility shouldn’t be put on working individuals who cannot really do anything beyond that. It’s very plausible that public transportation that doesn’t suck could be implemented in a few years if there were political will for it. It’s just hard to believe that if you live somewhere that has never in your lifetime had the political will for public transportation that doesn’t suck.

Eastward is an indie game I got because I saw someone recommend it on Lemmy a couple years ago. The pixel art was amazing, and some of it had a very unique eerieness. The story was heartwarming at times and creepy at other times. The only real complaint I had was that so much of the story remained unexplained after the ending, I really wanted to see all the little pieces of plot tied together.