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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • I remember my 6th grade science class having a lively 15 minute discussion about whether or not rockets can work in space since there’s no air…. We’re looking at videos of rockets working in space and then debating whether or not they do. 🙄

    This feels a tad different than the person in the screenshot. Screenshot person fundamentally misunderstood how radio waves worked. Meanwhile, 6th grade you absolutely understood how rockets worked, at least to the level of understanding that they need air to work. Because you were right the whole time, those kinds of rockets can’t work in space without air. The slightly absurd solution that you wouldn’t readily know without a deeper understanding of how the rocket is built is that a rocket literally brings its own air with it!





  • it’s a venture capital-backed startup that has been very eager to exit its growth phase and enter its aggressive monetization phase so it can start making its shareholders some money. They’ve already tried a few things that didn’t work, like trying to turn it into a Steam competitor.

    The service to date is mostly fine. If you’re like most people who don’t mind exchanging some privacy and control for access to an app that has a nonzero professional UX design budget, it’s pretty fantastic. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that enshittification is near on the horizon. It’s not a question of if, but how soon.


  • I remember grinding my way through Pokemon Conquest, having a decent time but also kinda wanting it to reach its conclusion. I get to the end of the main campaign, scroll the credits, and then it tells me on next boot that there’s now some more content to play.

    “Oh cool, a postgame,” I thought.

    No. There was not a postgame. There were something like eighteen new campaigns to play.

    To a certain kind of person this must’ve felt like Christmas morning. I put the game in a drawer and didn’t turn it on again out of sheer intimidation.






  • It’s even worse than that. Paying private insurance pays for other peoples’ healthcare and the paychecks of MBAs and C-suite execs on top.

    I genuinely don’t understand how some people can’t seem to grasp the business model here. For anyone to get any net value out of insurance, by definition, there has to be at minimum an equivalent number of people who pay in more than they would than if they didn’t have insurance at all.

    This doesn’t change whether it’s a government-funded single-payer system or a private corporation. The only thing that significantly changes when it is made a private corporation is it (theoretically) permits it to be nimbler to adapt to change by slicing out all the red tape a government-run entity would have, at the cost of shifting the focus from maximizing benefit to the public to profit-seeking that may incidentally also benefit the public from time to time as an occasional side effect.

    Insurance isn’t a magic subscription that pulls money out of thin air to pay for everyone’s whatever as long as one is a member, it fundamentally comes from other people getting short-sticked. That is the whole point. You throw money into the abyss when you’re doing well, in exchange the abyss won’t swallow you whole when you’re not doing well. That’s the contract. If everyone who joined was entitled to more than they paid in, we’d call it a Ponzi scheme.

    I’m sure you know all this, just venting a rant to no one in particular…


  • I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.

    If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

    There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

    If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.




  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlDo you use Gnome or KDE Plasma?
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    14 days ago

    Five years of Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2 on life support) replaced by a couple years of KDE Plasma.

    Mate treated me well enough, it was mostly stable, capable, and competent. But it was a bit crusty around the edges, and being so niche meant search-engine-visible help resources for anything than went wrong were virtually nonexistent. In hindsight, using it as a beginner’s DE was probably a mistake. I suppose in being so austere and devoid of resources it taught me to develop more of a “get to the bottom of it yourself” attitude to debugging and have humbler expectations about form versus function, but that’s a pretty rough sell to most people. Mate is definitely better as a drink than a desktop environment.

    I don’t need to talk about KDE Plasma at all because the rest of the thread already has. I have nothing new to add beyond the comment that I like their mascot character.

    I have no informed opinion on Gnome 3. All I’ve gleaned about it is that it’s supposedly “my way or the highway” by design, and the “my way” in question is controversially counter-grain to a lot of established expectations (e.g. it’s literally why Mate exists). Which is neither here nor there to me, objectively. But I will say I have no interest learning a new way of doing things, even if it’s theoretically superior, when a conventional system still exists, is viable, is highly polished, and is kept sharp-edged. Hence, KDE Plasma.


  • I took up enough precious space on this bitch of an Earth in life, so my only wish is to take up as little of it as possible in death.

    No giant overpriced wooden box in a concrete case on a dedicated plot of land, filled with fanciful linens to wrap my lifeless husk specifically treated to rot away as slowly as possible. Not if I get a say. Burn my dead ass to ashes and preferably scatter them to the wind, I don’t care where. Or, as a wise Danny DeVito said, throw me in the trash. Nature will have its way with what’s left. I’m crumbling to entropy anyway, might as well get it over with as efficiently as I can.

    I will not ““become”” a tree, or ““return to”” anyplace. I want to be gone. My lease on this world is over. I explicitly want that lease returned, to the fullest extent it matters.

    Not like I’d necessarily get a say, though. Funerals and their rituals are for the living. The ultimate conclusion of my wish to command nothing of the world after I’m gone is that I also can’t command what happens to my remains after I’m gone. I can express my wishes, but if no one agrees to honor them, so be it.

    If my loved ones want to stuff my corpse in a monkey suit and bury it in an expensive box on a dedicated plot of land for 100 years because that’s how they want to greive my passing, who am I to stop them? I’m dead.