Ziro

I want to talk about trains.

All locked down here in South Portland, which is about 50 minutes or so from Lewiston.

Why am I not having any issues blocking ads in YouTube? I use uBlock Origin and Firefox.

Your mom would do just fine on Mint, and you know it.

Or, please, trains.

Atlantis

I suppose, more specifically, self identity as defined by one’s belonging to any number of a given set of social groups (e.g., fandom. nation, gender, race, religion, socioeconomic class, etc.)

I more or less believe that the concept of the self or of one’s identity is arbitrary: that there really is no self to identify.

I take your point, but that doesn’t mean that I find the left to be much more appealing than the right, at least in terms of its ability to make worthwhile systemic change. The end result is the same. The American “right” and “left” are obsessed with their own flavor of identity politics, and that is what defines them over their approaches to government and economics. America’s “left” is still seemingly anti-socialist.

I don’t think that people should go out of their way to offend others, and the left’s propensity for tolerance is somewhat better than that of the right’s, but the postmodern social construct that is “identity,” at least in American culture, inspires tribalism and disunity. The right, being so opposed to postmodernism, itself, has unwittingly adopted the construct of identity, regardless.

And I don’t wish to invalidate others’ experiences as members of identity tribes, especially those who have been (or still are) wrongfully subjugated by coercive powers in our society that may even force an identity construct upon them, but generally, feuding between opposing identity tribes seems to me to be a distraction from making a systemic shift toward a better society. Identities don’t care about social welfare, though they may claim to; they care about ensuring they remain or grow stronger as modes of personal validation or actualization. They struggle against each other, as if they are, themselves, organisms fighting for survival.

People aren’t defined by the subscription list of their identities (including “left” and “right”). We are not the final distillation of social performance. We just are—a cross section of experience, carried from one moment to the next.

I am a socialist, though I do not subscribe to all of the American left’s social or moral takes. I just want everyone to have a strong government-provided safety net, good social services, and a satisfying life that isn’t defined by the type of work one does or one’s profession.

edit: Having said that, it doesn’t seem like either the “left” or the “right,” at least in America, truly cares about effecting these sorts of changes. They just want to be loud.

Right. So, I don’t get why it should matter where, exactly, the bar of soap goes.

It’s all about feel. Mechanical keyboards just feel so very good.

edit: Actually, I’m wrong. It’s also about sound. There are silent mechanical keyboards. They just aren’t of the Lethani.

Isn’t the soap that touches the body ablated by friction with the skin?

I like Flatpak for what it is. It’s great. But I wish that the application IDs weren’t so long.

It does. I am disappointed in the game studios who refuse to allow Linux players, though, such as Bungie. I’m certain that Destiny would be playable if not for their obstinacy.

I switched to Firefox when I switched to Linux. It’s great. I remember when firefox/mozilla was the go-to browser. It could be again.

Thank you. I appreciate your perspective. Using Linux again has been like a breath of fresh air, honestly. I just love how fast everything is. (Both my Windows and Mint boots live on their own M.2 drives, but Mint is so, so much faster.) And, unlike Windows, I don’t feel like I have to jerry rig it to get things to work. I’m sure there are instances where that is the case, but I haven’t run into them yet.

This is why I had to switch. It was just too clunky to get CUDA and Pytorch and Tensorflow set up in Windows. In Linux, it was a total breeze.

Edit: And then I thought, “well, wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to use Windows to use Linux?”

I know it’s not a very Linuxy distro, but Linux Mint (Cinnamon) is so easy to use, especially for Windows users. I’ve completely replaced Windows (and with better software), aside from using Windows for a few games that require it. I used Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora long ago, but for me, Mint takes the proverbial cake.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag. I do enjoy Lemmy. I think that the conversations that take place here are interesting (though many now revolve around Reddit in one way or another). I don’t really find the front page to be as good as Reddit’s.

And then, of course, I think the most important difference is that Lemmy draws a specific type of person, even after the Reddit migration, and there aren’t as many of us as there are average Internet users. I’m not saying Lemmings are a special breed; rather, I’m saying that we’re the sort of people who might have used Usenet at its peak. We’re the sort who might be Linux users. Many of us are morally aligned with open source technology and the ethics thereof. This makes the discussions a little less diverse on Lemmy than they are on Reddit (which can be good and bad, depending on the sort of conversation).

I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I’m new) smacks of the “old Internet.” I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.