Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 9 Posts
  • 523 Comments
Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2023年7月12日

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  • Remember, it’s all or something, not all or nothing.

    For me, I look at each major category of things in my life a few times a year and ask myself how I can improve the ethics of my participation.

    So for food, I have been vegetarian for years now, which is good, but lately I have been trying to cut out most processed foods. I also have started shopping more and more local, getting as much of my food as I can from local co-ops, individual sellers, and small local grocery chains.

    For software, I’m FOSS everything as much as I can be. 100% Linux on my computers and servers, and I have replaced almost all my programs with FOSS alternatives. Even my phone doesn’t run stock Android.

    For work, try to find places to work that roughly align with good principles. For instance, try to get a job at a credit union vs a traditional bank, or try to find an employee-owned establishment vs a traditional top-down corporation.

    If you have to work for a corpo, try to pick one that has a good reputation with unions and workers, like Costco, vs Starbucks or Walmart.

    Capitalism is a machine that grinds us all down, so don’t feel guilty about not being perfect. But do the best you can to reject it, little steps at a time. Always be improving, bit by bit.











  • In my early teens, I got really into computers, built my first PC when I was about 13, started learning Windows batch scripting and using GameMaker to make goofy PC games.

    Along the way, I found Trinity Rescue Kit and was also introduced to Fedora Core by a nerdy guy who worked at my local YMCA.

    I didn’t actually enjoy it too much back then, so I left it alone for years until about 5 years ago when I started to get back into the free software movement and related interests.

    I’ve been 100% on Linux for about 4 years now and never looked back.


  • It’s designed to be more compatible with MS’ .docx formats, less weird formatting issues when converting between them. But the actual features it has is less than LibreOffice.

    Two different focuses, LibreOffice is designed with more powerful features and uses the .odf file format by default.

    OnlyOffice is lighter weight and designed with MS Office compatibility first and foremost, although both suites support both file formats and in my experience, both work great with either file types and for basic users, have all the features you would need.





  • Read “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, it’s free online.

    He lays out a brutal critique of the modern mathematical curriculum in the Unites States but in summary:

    We teach mathematics to children as a huge set of rules to memorize and use to get good scores on standardized tests so that they can “get into good colleges.”

    We don’t treat mathematics with any reverence or care, like we do with the arts. Math is taught as a bunch of arbitrary brute facts that old wise men came up with centuries ago and we spend all of elementary and high school relentlessly drilling them into students heads no matter how much pain and suffering it causes.

    There is no actual exploration of mathematical beauty, or mystery. There isn’t any discussion of the underlying philosophy of mathematics, or how any of the rich and fascinating history of its development as a field. It’s like if we taught music as just a way to write notes on a page in certain time signatures and keys, but never actually let students listen to a piece of music or discuss the great composers or cultural movements of music through the ages.

    Of course that seems ridiculous to people, but for some reason when we do that exact same thing with mathematics, nobody bats an eye. In fact, people think it would be strange to do it any other way.




  • Depends on the use case.

    I use Nobara on my gaming rig because I wanted up-to-date packages without being on the cutting edge like Arch. And I also wanted all the lower level gaming optimizations without having to set it all up manually. Plus, KDE is soooooo nice.

    Debian on my servers because I want extreme stability with a community-driven distro.

    Linux Mint on my personal laptops, because I like having the good things from Ubuntu without all the junk. Plus the Cinnamon desktop environment has been rock stable for me. It’s my goto workhorse distro. If I don’t need something with a specialized or specific use case, I throw Mint on.

    Arch on my old junker devices that I don’t use much because I like making them run super fast and look sexy and testing out different WM’s and DE’s.

    Void on my junkers that I actually want to use frequently because it’s super performant and light on resources without needing to be built manually like Arch.

    Ubuntu server if I am feeling stanky and lazy and just need something quick for a testing VM or container host in my home lab.