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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Couple months ago I found myself needing to stop at a McDonald’s in probably one of the worst neighborhoods you can find outside of the inner city. Nature was calling and it seemed like my best option.

    It was for paying customers only, fair enough, I made a token purchase of a McChicken and some fries, and got an employee to unlock the door for me.

    I was greeted with that eerie blue light that bathrooms in places like this use to deter drug use because it makes it harder to find a vein.

    It gave off an all-around really unsettling vibe, but I will admit that, at least as far as I could tell given the lighting, it seemed to be immaculately clean.


  • This is probably going to vary a lot depending on where you’re applying, every state has their own regulations and every department their own standards, so there’s probably not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer for you.

    At the very least, if it comes up, it’s probably not going to be seen as a mark in your favor. If, hypothetically, the hiring choice came down to you, or an otherwise identical candidate who isn’t autistic, 9/10 times they’re probably going to go with the other guy.

    If at all possible, don’t bring it up. If it comes up on a form or something, don’t lie, if you get caught in a lie that’s probably gonna be an automatic disqualification, but if they don’t ask, don’t tell them. Don’t volunteer the information that you’re autistic unless it’s specifically asked for. If there’s a question anywhere along the lines of “do you have any conditions that will prevent you from carrying out your duties as a police officer?” The answer is “no” unless you do believe that your autism will be an impediment, in which case, don’t be a cop.

    Also, between stuff like this and the potential of RFK wanting to send people to work farms, I think it’s very important for people to ask themselves before pursuing a diagnosis for autism (and other conditions) “how do I stand to benefit from a diagnosis, and how will it potentially hurt me?”

    If you’re at the high-functioning/low-support-needs/however-you-want-to-phrase-it end of the spectrum, what kind of additional resources and support will a diagnosis actually unlock for you and do you really need them? Or will it just come back to bite you in situations like this? Unfortunately people really do need to be weighing that.




  • Could also just be the rim being kind of dirty and corroded and needs to be cleaned up a bit of bead sealant.

    I’ve had it happen to me a couple times, tires just always lost air sort slowly, I never cared enough to bring it in just for that, not a big deal to stop by the air pump once a week or so when I was getting gas anyway.

    I’m sure if you brought your car in just for that they’d probably slap some token $10-50 price on it.

    But if you bring it in for another service I feel like a lot of places will just do it. I know I brought my car in to pep boys one time for an oil change or something and asked them to look at it and they just did it, no extra charge.

    I feel like it’s one of those little things that no one is quite sure how to write it up in the system, and figuring it out is more of a pain in the ass than just not mentioning it to the boss, not like he’s gonna notice they used an extra scrap of sandpaper and blob of sealant anyway.


  • I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

    But a couple things jumping out at me

    The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

    They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

    And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

    So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

    It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

    Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

    Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

    Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

    *fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.




  • Google photos has a date tag attached to this of 9/10/2008

    A whole lot of stuff has traveled with me through the years swapping SD cards from one phone to another, and eventually things getting backed up to the cloud, etc. this is probably the oldest thing I have saved that can count as a meme. I don’t know if that date is when I actually first found it, when it first somehow got backed up, if maybe that’s just from some metadata left over from whoever made the meme originally, or something else entirely

    But that date does generally feel about right, and the humor feels about right for high school-aged me.


  • As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I’ve found is LabEx, but I feel like it’s lacking in a lot of ways.

    First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn’t too terrible, it’s more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

    Second I’ve mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it’s probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it’s probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

    And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it’s spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.


  • Fondots@lemmy.worldtoMusic@lemmy.worldTear The Facists Down
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    17 days ago

    My buddy works security at a bar. Last night he sends me a picture of a guy sitting there with some SS lightning bolts on his shirt. Bar manager wouldn’t let my friend kick him out because he wasn’t otherwise causing a problem.

    I hatch a plan, I pull up the jukebox app on my phone, turns out you don’t actually have to be at the bar to queue up music there (I’m pretty sure that used to be the case, I’m pretty sure at one point a decade ago I had to spoof my location on a rooted phone to pull this kind of thing)

    And I start queuing up as many anti-fascist songs as I could think of. Cost me a few bucks but I considered it money well-spent.

    This and a few other woody Guthrie songs were of course some of the first things I thought of but sadly were not available on the jukebox.

    But I managed to find a good handful.

    According to my friend, he got visibly frustrated when the Billy Bragg & Wilco cover of All You Fascists came on and left the bar to have a cigarette.

    And when he came back in he was greeted with Youth Against Fascism my Sonic Youth

    Only took about an hour of that before he packed up and left.

    Apparently someone also left a review online complaining about Nazi boy, and after the owner saw it my friend now has more authority to take out the trash.


  • Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as “obvious.”

    I’m a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

    I’m a reasonable tech-literate person, I’m no sys admin but I’m the family “guy who’s good with computers” I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

    And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I’m in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I’m back to being a kid with my family’s first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there’s more cool stuff I can make it do but I don’t know how yet.

    I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don’t have that for Linux yet, and it’s not exactly a great feeling.

    And I feel like there’s sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

    Like there’s a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

    And then a big gap

    And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

    And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

    And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

    And I’m slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that’s a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

    Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there’s a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through “this is your start menu,” “here’s what click/double-check/right click/etc” means," “here’s how you turn your computer off” kind of stuff.

    And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who’s going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

    Also don’t get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don’t want it to go anywhere, when I know what I’m doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

    Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven’t found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don’t exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.



  • I understand that oil isn’t just sitting around in big empty voids in the rock, and that those voids are full of gravel and such, and that we’re also injecting water and such into the wells to maintain pressure, etc.

    But I’d be willing to bet (a small amount, maybe like $50 tops) that out of the thousands of oil wells we’ve drilled over the years, that through some quirk of geology, some void has opened up somewhere down there with just enough liquid oil and open space that you could probably get a kayak on it and paddle around in a small circle.

    I’m thinking probably more like the size of a smallish above ground swimming pool, not a decent sized lake that would actually be worth paddling around on.

    Of course there’s also the issue of the pressure at that depth, and the fact that any atmosphere down there is probably gonna be natural gas and not breathable air, so you’d probably have to do it in a hard diving suit


  • I’m all for splitting hairs over semantics, and I’ll agree with you that “fascist” probably isn’t the best label for Iran

    But if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it does look a hell of a lot like fascism.

    Extreme right wing, militaristic government, social and economic regimentation, charismatic, authoritarian dictators, focusing a whole lot of hatred and blame on people in the nation who don’t conform and towards external enemies, etc.

    I don’t know that they’re exactly nationalistic, but they do have religion filling pretty much that same role, and let’s be real, the line’s pretty damn blurry between religion and government there.

    And they don’t exactly make racial/ethnic superiority a centerpiece of their identity, but they’re certainly not exactly sitting around singing “Kumbaya” with their minorities either, and again we have religion filling a pretty similar role in other ways.

    You can get into the weeds about the specific philosophies at play here and about the history that led them to their current situation, and there’s certainly merit in doing that, but as far as the casual observer is concerned, they do look and quack a hell of a lot like fascists, and while it’s not the best label for what they have going on it’s certainly not the worst either. I’d maybe prefer to slap a qualifier on it- something like pseudo-fascist, islamo-fascist, maybe something like “Farscism” if we want to get a little cutesy with the wordplay to separate it from “classic” fascism.

    And similarly I’d probably want to slap a few qualifiers onto the term “theocracy” as well before applying it to Iran, I don’t think that just that one word really points the whole picture.

    And now that I’m looking at it, “fascist theocracy” might be a contender for how I’d label them.