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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Lots of enabling in your comment.

    People like you, with no control over the big decisions. Just like Palestinians can’t control Hamas, Russians can’t control Putin, US citizens can’t control Trump, and so on.

    If people can’t control their own governments, who can? Who should? Other people’s governments? Is that how you think it’s supposed to work? That’s why Israel is obliterating Gaza? Because Gaza can’t get rid of Hamas themselves so Israel is going to do it for them? Do you think that is justified and the right way to do things? Is it Canada’s job to rescue the US? Is it Europe’s responsibility to stop Russia?

    Are Iranians responsible for the Iranian regime? Yes, they are, that’s why they’re fucking protesting and dying in the streets right now. Resist, fight back, don’t comply, undermine your illegitimate government until they can be toppled.

    Take responsibility. I am responsible for the actions of my government and my country. And so are you. You will be held responsible. And you should be. Other countries are not responsible for fixing your shit. You are. Fix it. Figure out how. Stop acting like it’s somebody else’s problem and you are just a humble peasant. Humble peasants can start revolutions. Lazy citizens who are happy with the status quo while pretending they don’t agree with it do not start revolutions. Which one are you?


  • It’s basically a free single-player demo with extra steps. Not being able to play on legitimate servers is realistically a huge drawback, honestly. And also, Microsoft knows it’s a huge opening for “piracy” which is why they’ve created Bedrock edition which is where all their monetization efforts and future content updates will be increasingly directed.

    Neither you nor I are supposed to ever care about Bedrock, or are ever expected to pay a cent for Minecraft. We are a tapped resource financially with nothing left to give and trying to get more money out of us and our community would be like trying to get blood from a stone. But that doesn’t mean we’re not important. Our role, even as free-to-play pirates in the Minecraft ecosystem, is to create content and create brand awareness, to keep it trending and on people’s radar, so that when children and whales are drawn to it, Microsoft makes sure the first thing they see is some Bedrock edition thing and they can start shelling out cash immediately.

    The whales, children, and naive parents are where the free money is. We’re just part of the advertising pipeline aimed at those demographics. We create buzz, they buy.



  • I’m really hoping that the magic Carney is doing is all behind the scenes, top-secret, serious powerbroker shit. And if he is, that’s going to be fire.

    But if he isn’t, “meh” is an understatement. Because most of what he’s done in public has been typical neoliberal status quo, rape the environment, fuck the people, while telling them how much they’re both going to be enjoying it.

    I’ve always believed he’s a sneaky snake. I know he was one to get elected.

    The optimist in me wants to believe he’s a sneaky snake working on our side.

    The pessimist in me is convinced he’s a sneaky snake working against us.

    I guess time will tell us which one is the case.







  • The stupidity is happening because it benefits rich people to fill the world with stupid people. Stupid, gullible people are the key to their endlessly growing profits and wealth extraction.

    We already know how to solve stupidity. We have always known it. Education has been one of the core pillars of human civilization since antiquity. It wasn’t the first man to discover fire who changed everything, it was the person who discovered how to teach the next generation to control fire at least as well if not better than they originally did.

    Education has not failed us. Education has been sabotaged and dismantled. By rich and powerful people, for their own purposes.

    First we get rid of those rich and powerful people who have set themselves against us, then we rebuild everyone’s education and if we’re lucky, we might get to move on with our civilization eventually. Nobody promised it’s going to be easy. But it is necessary, if we wish the human race to continue, and traditionally we’ve been pretty stubbornly invested in that.



  • If you need low latency audio (ie, live music) Windows programs have to do a lot of ugly tricks to do this efficiently on Windows, and it’s different from the ugly tricks you have to do on Linux, and even if wine can attempt to translate the tricks from one to the other you may struggle trying to make this work well cross-platform to in Linux AFAIK.

    However if you’re just doing all-digital production I don’t see why wine wouldn’t work. Other people seem to have had success minus the latency issue I mentioned. And most of that was years ago, it mentions people are working on improving it, and honestly, Wine has come a really long way in the last 2 years. I’d recommend giving it a shot and see how it goes.







  • I moved one old laptop to Linux over about a year ago, and committed to an effort to actually make it do the things I wanted to do, like play games, and run Windows-only tools or find viable replacements. To say it went well is an understatement. Within a few months I had switched every computer I owned, and I’m never looking back again.

    Granted, I was already quite familiar with Linux on the server side. This was not my first attempt to use Linux on the desktop, either. But it was my last, because I’m never going back to Windows ever again now.


  • It’s true that the infrastructure is already in place but it is important to understand that it is not simple infrastructure, and with a few exceptions, it is already pretty much fully utilized by Canadian and Mexican heavy crude/bitumen so it’s not like they can just double their capacity and start processing Venezuela too. You’re right about giving an opening to pressure Canada/Mexico though.

    But it’s questionable if there’s really much upside for the US on the financial side. The opportunity to pressure is definitely there, but more pressure isn’t going to get blood out of a stone. Venezuelan oil will still have costs associated with it, and Canadian and Mexican oil is already really cheap.

    The oil itself may be essentially free the way they’re stealing it with military force, but It’s not going to be cheap to build up Venezuela’s production infrastructure and it’s not going to be cheap to transport the oil stateside, and both Mexico and Canada already have all that infrastructure in place too, and already give a huge discount to the US since they have nowhere else to affordably sell or refine their oil as they have effectively no indigenous refining capacity for heavy crude and few other export options. During a few of the oil price plummets around Covid, Canadian oil (Western Canadian Select) was actually selling for negative prices, Canada was paying the US to take it off their hands and refine it for them. With global oil prices already trending relatively low, it’s going to be hard for oil from Venezuela to realistically compete with situations like that.

    The most believable explanation that I’ve heard is that this is not really about directly stealing Venezuela’s oil reserves as much as it is about denying it to Russia and China, and maybe securing them in case of some future conflict. And that, I think, makes an awful lot of sense geopolitically as distasteful as I personally find the whole affair.