These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

Probably Janelle Monae - Archandroid. I love Afrofutrist funk like (Parliament-Funkadelic). It appeals to my 2 identities as a space nerd and the funkiest of the funky. Archandroid was sort of the peak of her sticking close to that genre. (Her three early works called the Metropolis Saga — Metropolis, an EP, Archandroid, and The Electric Lady — form a whole story.) The albums have multiple Suites like classical works so the themes change even within the albums. But Archandroid is my favorite part. And you can totally nerd out on it forever and still find new things.

For a long time — like probably into the 2000s — LSU’s Tiger Stadium had dorm rooms because when Huey Long couldn’t get funding approved for a football stadium, he got money for dorms approved and built one dorm in the shape of a football stadium.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

Apparently, there’s an obsolete English word “smitham” that means (or meant) “small lumps of ore random people found.” They were exempt from taxation by English nobility so large mine owners started breaking up large chunks into “smitham” to avoid taxation. Apparently, the Duke of Devonshire put a stop to that in 1760 and the word fell out of use.

So, I think rhythm still counts as weird. Noah Webster was 2 years old in 1760 and the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t have it.

“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.

I got a relatively inexpensive espresso machine for like $100 with the main downside being it’s not very tall (so putting a mug under it is out). It’s been perfectly fine for like 8 years, though. I’m sure for $500+, I’d get a slightly better espresso but I’ve found buying good coffee beans and grinding them fresh — basically getting the other steps right — makes more of a difference than the machine.

I imagine the expensive machines are more foolproof or consistent or flexible? But it was just me making espresso before work basically every day. It didn’t take long for me to get the timing and stuff down. (I have a De’Longhi one, for the curious, but I don’t necessarily want to steer anyone to that particular brand since it’s been so long. The brand might be owned by some Private Equity firm or something called like “Guangzhou Plastic Manufacturing Concern” and the quality parts were replaced by lead pipes with arsenic in them.)

I don’t know what kind of neighborhood it is but sprinkling cat food or something like that everywhere would probably attract something. Your friend could even do it to his own yard. I’d be weirded out if my neighbor moved and suddenly his yard had 25 raccoons in it.

Assuming no one nukes the world or that all air defenses work, it’d be a mess. There’s no force in human history that can stop NATO in a traditional war. (Maybe the Mongols because they’re always the exception.) But it’s very likely China, North Korea, Iran, and others would be much harder to conquer/occupy at the same time.

It would be widespread suffering in most of the world. The truth is that war is obsolete as a means of accomplishing 99% of political goals. Most of the world would descend into chaos and civil war. Food would be scarce and in times of scarcity, the drunkest, most violent people usually end up in charge. You’d have warlordism in the vast, vast majority of the world.

The natural state of humanity isn’t trade and property rights. It’s warlords offering protection in exchange for whatever they need. No one “wins” wars in 2024. Groups like ISIS would thrive, not law and order.

It’s called “brokedishing” and choosing the right dish to break is an art form.

You should ping CERN or Fermilab about this. Or maybe the Event Horizon Telescope team but I think they used sneakernet to image the M87 black hole.

Anyway, my answer is probably just a SQL backup like everyone else.

Look, I started c/TrumpStandingNormal with good intentions and we’ll get a post eventually. All he has to do is stand normal for one photo and I’ll get the community going.

Sorry, I was in a coma. I hope nothing bad happened after the 90’s. I’d hate to wake up in 2024 and learn basically everything is kind of shittier except portable music players and street food.

Where is swearing not normal? I don’t live in a preschool. It’s the 90’s. We have internet and everything now. I can say the “fuck” word.

https://www.theonion.com/im-getting-pretty-good-at-masturbating-1819584112

This is something Apple got right. OS X 10.0 was good and they’ve made lots of incremental changes but didn’t just arbitrarily change the whole “centered application dock at the bottom and menu bar at the top” situation. When new form factors emerged, they just made a new interface and didn’t try to hot glue a mouse/touchpad OS and touchscreen OS together for the fuck of it.

For the most part, it’s probably better for me. I never really got into the big subreddits that make the front page anyway. It was mostly a place for me to nerd out on small, more academic or hobby subreddits anyway. (I’m a Linux user and software developer so that all pretty much transferred over here fine.)

I find the quality of posts/replies here to be better in terms of quality but, obviously, sometimes there’s fewer (or, worse, zero). I like Voyager as an app (or web interface if your instance supports it). And I’ll pretty much always accept the less and the more to support open standards/communities/software.

I switched over when I read an interview with the CEO — I think with The Verge — and figured it was over. It was obvious he was juicing numbers to go public and there was no point investing time on a platform that would only get worse for users.

Depending on how much you know already, the Crash Course Computer Science videos are an excellent place to start. It’s obviously an intro course but, like most Crash Course stuff, it does a good job of explaining the basics and also giving a bit of context and history.

Well, the 14th Amendment says insurrectionists can’t run but we arguably have the worst Supreme Court since before the Civil War. And conservatives have always hated the 14th Amendment since all the other clauses stop them from being local fascist dictators.