arsCynic

Neo: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger
[He does]
Neo: and you give me my phone call.

Patrick Boyle, John Oliver… people like these should be running things.

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Seems like it’s a yearly subscription membership only thing. If I can’t buy it and own it I pirate it.

Any Gameboy game with an emulator.

Nintendo doesn’t care about making their old games, nay, works of art like Golden Sun still playable, so I consider them free to play at this point.

Zen, LibreWolf, and Waterfox strip Firefox clean of AI.

Zen is a feature powerhouse like Vivaldi, without the bloat. LibreWolf is privacy focused and ships with uBlock Origin by default.

Zen is my main browser. LibreWolf at work for stability. Waterfox works on PC and Android, but I only use it on the latter so can’t vouch for its performance on the former.

There are even more Firefox forks, but these are the one’s I use.

What the fuck indeed. I asked why in the comment section, because that’s her YouTube channel.

About 10 years ago a friend discovered Linux during his studies and suggested I try it out.

I haven’t looked back ever since.

Liked, bookmarked, installed. Can finally start using GIMP.
On Arch Linux pacman -S gimp will do, run and close, and then overwrite as instructed above. No need for Flatpak.

God I can feel that Charizard Pokémon Red cover in my soul.

To those who sometimes feel bad by comparing themselves to “more accomplished” peers, the one-page CV on her website is clickable, it’s actually six pages. Then realize your peers or you will never match Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, so be kind to yourself. You do matter too, firefly: https://ncase.me/fireflies/.

She’s a one-in-a-century human such as Leonhard Euler: brilliant scientifically, ethically, and most importantly, still kind.

Quote from her talk Exploring Many Worlds at 35:31:

Q: “Graduate school is hard. I was once told by my dissertation advisor that it’s not how smart you are, it’s really how disciplined you are. And I was wondering if you could give us your reflections about persistence and tenacity in the context of advancing in your field.”

Sabrina: “I think the craziest thing is that you actually get advice like that. You get told things that no one should be telling you, that you’re doomed or whatever. So if I wasn’t happy doing this more mathematical research, that I should leave, and not that there’s, maybe, ways to change it. So I think that persistence is a tricky thing because, again, it’s like this cost-benefit analysis of where do you want your future to be, who do you have to deal with in the meantime to get there and whatnot. I think that maybe the sociology needs to change in that it shouldn’t be like “this is the way things are”, kind of that tough advice [tough love] type of thing. I don’t like it because it sucks, it gets rid of diversity of thought.”

PS Sabrina didn’t actually say “no” to Jeff “the unethical” Bezos, because she wanted to work for Blue Origin and held an internship there. Choosing theoretical physics instead doesn’t mean she flipped him off—however nice that would’ve been indeed.

“‘F the Police’ but who’s stopping you from killing me?” ―Harder Than You Think - Public Enemy

I do believe about 20% of police officers have good intentions and significantly more signed up with that attitude, not knowing that they protect the wealthy elite and crooked politicians more than they uphold democratic values and ethical standards in society.

Unfortunately, probably more of them consider such a career because of the authority it gives them. Therefore I prefer to say that “many cops are bastards”; granted, it doesn’t have an equally nice ring to it.

In the grand scheme of things, from an ethical point of view, they’re worth nothing as they don’t contribute anything of true value to societal change. In other words, pure entertainment, bread and circuses.

“Soccer is a gentlemen sport played by hooligans. Rugby is a hooligan sport played by gentlemen.”

While I’d enjoy playing soccer myself, the competitive scene is completely bereft of soul; a front for gambling and advertising. It’s despicable and unethical that professional soccer players earn as much as they do.

So far I’ve encountered the smoothest OS experience with Arch-based EndeavourOS. Perhaps twice a year something breaks for which the forum or Arch Wiki usually provided the fix within a day. The other 363 days I simply update in the morning/evening and all is well—sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm and yay --noconfirm.

Conversely, on Debian, it drives me nuts that one is prevented from updating even if one public key from one unimportant repository is missing or something. This troubleshooting is way harder for beginners than most things I’ve needed to do to fix my EndeavourOS install.

I’ve got a complete Linux beginner to start off with EndeavourOS without problems. She’s even troubleshooting and fixing suddenly non-working Steam games by herself.

In any case, any Linux is better than Windoze. Try different distributions if you’ve got a spare PC to test with and see what fits you. For the greatest peace of mind, always have two or more hard drives or have a directory that instantly syncs to a cloud to separate the OS from crucial data one cannot lose in case something goes awry. As for desktop environments (DE), I started off with Xfce about ten years ago, used that most of the time. Then fell for the KDE Plasma hype for about year—they’re doing great stuff, but a bit too bloated and buggy for my liking, as well as trying to have a KDE app for everything instead of acknowledging some other software is simply better. One can’t be the best at everything. Anyway, then I tested multiple DEs because all of them have exclusively useful features, and the perfect mix between the most prominent ones (Xfce, Plasma, Gnome) I’ve found to be Cinnamon, the default on Linux Mint. For me that’s the perfect beginner friendly DE that also remains highly configurable/extensible to suit experienced users, without being overwhelming/bloated to anyone.

Have fun and build whatever you want in your new awesome sandbox. Screw M$ without restraint nor compassion.