Notices by FoolishOwl (foolishowl@social.coop)

@gwynnion I am, honestly, very worried about what is going to happen in Portland in the next few days, given the extreme hostility from the White House.

There's been a protest strategy of wearing costumes, being very obviously not violent. I was talking about Banana Block a few days ago, and then they made an appearance! And then the Feds beat up a marching band in banana costumes.

It doesn't matter if we do anything provocative. The White House will just lie about it either way.

@hellomiakoda I'm honestly worried about when XFCE adopts Wayland, and I will no longer be able to use graphic desktops.

@hellomiakoda I don't play any games with anti-cheat, so at this point there's only one game left that I used to play on Windows that I can't get to work on Linux, and that one was turned into a cash cow for the CEO's passion project, AI research, so good riddance really.

Anyway, most games run better under Linux, though it may be worth noting I'm using XFCE, so still on X11, because Wayland seems to render my systems unusable.

It is true both that the US has always been profoundly unjust, and that it has recently gotten much worse, and emphasizing one of those two points should not imply a denial of the other.

I read this interview between Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel, and honestly, Thiel made a lot more sense than I expected. Which is *not* to say that I agree with him.

Thiel doesn't much use the word "capitalism", and he doesn't use the word "democracy" at all. He talks a lot about stagnation, and frustration that "AI" is the only exception to general stagnation, which I think makes it clear that by stagnation he means the declining rate of profit -- stagnation of capital.

https://archive.ph/Xo86G

At this point, why on Earth wouldn't we want the federal government shut down?

Among other things, how long will a fascist government last if it won't pay its soldiers?

@hellomiakoda @JessTheUnstill There's been a trend towards hiding filesystems from users. I don't like it.

I was reminded that the thing I don't like about post-apocalyptic survival stories is that I don't identify with the survivors; I identify with the dead.

@megabyteghost @thomasfuchs I programmed in BASIC as a child. I've taken some classes, worked a bit with Perl and Python, but mostly shell scripting.

But when I read software developers talking about what they do, I barely understand it.

Many social problems seem to have at their core some form of a refusal to acknowledge mortality.

@SuperDicq @sodiboo Firefox and Joplin.

@SuperDicq @sodiboo Some of the FOSS software tools I've used have been promoting LLM plugins.

FOSS isn't as independent as we'd like it to be.

@futurebird @PallasRiot I've thought Buttigieg had some good moments, and then he'd go out of his way to show how he highly values bipartisanship.

He's just fundamentally not on our side.

@kaia That... was not my experience of working at Microsoft.

@carnage4life People died fighting for the eight hour day.

@cwebber I've seen some arguments that it's a false claim that stories are always fundamentally about conflict, that in many cultures it was common to have stories without conflict. It might do us all some good to explore that idea.

@eevee I was a college student in the 90s, and a cultural shift I was aware of at the time was outright hostility towards teenagers, particularly noticeable from TV news and politicians, who'd treat teens just hanging out in public places as some sort of violent threat. It's hard not to see that connected to the elimination of public spaces for teens and pushing social contact to the early Internet, especially for anyone with any subcultural connections.

@hellomiakoda Squatting as a political tactic was a thing in the 90s, though marginal. But that was before decades of waves of construction of housing, kept off the market to inflate asset valuation.

@typeswitch This reminds me of Murray Bookchin's idea that usufruct should be primary: that property should belong to the person who uses it and only insofar as they are using it.

As I understand it, that's in contrast with the concept we inherited from ancient Roman law.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-janet-biehl-the-murray-bookchin-reader#toc18

@azonenberg @mcc @dalias @whitequark @becomethewaifu It's not even that it's awful in itself, so much as systemd developers seem to assume that they're entitled to decide the future of Linux themselves.

For instance, there's that passive-aggressive 'Tainted: unmerged-bin' that 'systemctl status' produces on Debian systems.