“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

  • 27 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • No average user would be able to look up what commands to run? Because newsflash: unlike Windows, searching for a common problem on Linux normally turns up a solution written by a human who knows what they’re talking about.

    “Windows doesn’t even have basic package management like every Unix-like OS does so you don’t have to individually update applications and go find them on the Internet, but this one edge case on Linux requires like two terminal commands (the sudo -i is totally superfluous if you just put sudo in front of commands) instead of installing an entire separate tool you’ll ever use one time like on Windows and which an average user wouldn’t even know exists. Therefore Linux is more complicated.”

    Incidentally, here’s what Microsoft officially recommends for the “average user” regarding PowerToys:

    It’s insane how nose-blind Windows users are to how user-unfriendly their OS is.




  • The Flintstones, for what it’s worth, came out in a time before cartoons were seen as “for kids” by default. The Flintstones is basically The Honeymooners but animated and prehistoric, so while Winston would’ve unambiguously known it was marketing to some children, The Flintstones was an adult animated sitcom.

    The Flintstones is retrospectively seen through the lens of “kids’ show” in large part because of things like kids’ merch (e.g. Flintstones vitamins and cereal), rerunning on stations like Cartoon Network, generally a more heavy “animation is for kids” defaultism, and the fact that later adult animated sitcoms like The Simpsons pushed the envelope much farther.





  • OP:

    Through the years, archaeologists have found similar results at many other sites in Indonesia, India and China. As the evidence accumulates, it appears that people were able to survive and continue to be productive after Toba blew its stack. This suggests that this eruption might not have been the main cause of the population bottleneck originally suggested in the Toba catastrophe hypothesis.

    While Toba might not help scientists understand what caused ancient human populations to plummet to 10,000 individuals, it does help us understand how humans have adapted to catastrophic events in the past and what that means for our future.

    It’s a good article, and I enjoyed reading it, but did you? I think you should leave this post up, but you could instead retitle it to something like “TIL humanity survived an eruption 74,000 years ago that was 10,000 larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption”. (Also, Toba is in Indonesia in North Sumatra.)









  • I literally believe an innocent, defenseless, sentient creature was systematicallty and needlessly tortured and murdered to make this and that my tax dollars paid to subsidize it. If this isn’t triggering to me, I can’t even imagine how fucking stupid this looks to Muslims who think God forbids it. Like should someone fire back a video of themselves disregarding the Sabbath and expect Christians to care?

    And isn’t pork haram predominantly because it was considered by people like Muhammad to be impure? So this sounds more like someone sending them a video of scraping gum off the underside of a desk and chewing it. You sure owned them.


  • They struggled to deliver their ambitious mainline Linux phone on time during Covid yes, but they eventually delivered.

    And for the people who requested refunds who waited months if not never received them? Despite them moving back their timeline literal years with repeated delays? I don’t care what challenges they faced; they knowingly took people’s money and refused to give it back to them when they couldn’t deliver. It’s their responsibility to be prepared for challenges. And in some extreme edge case where they couldn’t have been prepared, it’s their responsibility to be transparent about that to the people who gave them over a million dollars (let alone purchased the product after the Kickstarter was finished). I suppose too that the pandemic affected Purism in January 2019 when they were supposed to deliver their product?

    The fact that they did is a huge win for the mobile Linux ecosystem becoming a real contender just when we need it.

    The Librem 5 is not a contender for shit. It’s so overpriced that it can only be successfully marketed to people who care so deeply about their privacy that they’re willing to use an inconvenient mobile OS, get completely boned on hardware specs, and deal with a company notorious for fucking over its customers. Purism’s behavior is a fucking embarrassment to the Linux ecosystem.

    NXP i.MX family debuted in 2013; Intel i7 family in 2008. Their phone uses a 2017 i.MX 8M Quad, the same year they crowdfunded their phone.

    That CPU is based on the ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-M4, launched in 2012 and 2009, respectively.

    2017 i7 computers are equally not from 2008…

    When I say “2013”, I’m not talking about the debut year of i.MX. I’m talking about the fact that you can compare this phone side-by-side with a Galaxy S4 or S5. 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC storage, a 720 x 1440p IPS display, no NFC, USB 3.0, an 8/13 MP front/back camera (which they inexplicably call “Mpx”; good job, guys), 802.11n Wi-Fi, no waterproofing, and a shitty-ass i.MX 8M CPU. I still remember watching a trailer for the Librem 5’s continuing development, and as they were scrolling through a web browser, it was noticeably stuttering. This was years and years ago; I can’t even imagine it today.

    It still today remains one of the best ARM processors with open source drivers without an integrated baseband. It means basically any flavour of Linux can install on the device, with a significant layer of protection from carrier conduited attacks. Other modules have similar tradeoffs between performance and interoperability/security.

    I do not give even the slightest inkling of a shit try to confirm or deny this, so I’m just going to assume it’s 100% true, because it’s not relevant to the point that the spec is absolute trash and being sold for $800. If you are not absolutely married to privacy, this is not a sellable product in 2025.

    Want better specs? We either need SoC companies to release more of their drivers open source, or more people to patiently reverse engineer closed source ones.

    Actually, if I want better specs, I’m just going to go out and buy a phone that isn’t from Purism. It really sucks that it’s not open, private hardware, but Purism is such a scummy company that so wantonly fucks over their customers that I wouldn’t touch the Librem 5 even if I could justify spending $800 for that spec just for privacy’s sake.