jwiggler

Playing guitar. I’m bad, can’t really play with others, couldn’t play live, but being able to sing and play along to songs I love, putting my own spin on them, or getting into a rhythm and making up silly lyrics is one of the most valuable things I ever learned to do. Probably the single best thing I’ve done in my life is learn to play.

The proof is in the pudding folks

I would recommend reading or listening to Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power. It is a compilation of several of his Q and As about his ideas about the US political and media systems. He has a whole book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, but Understanding Power will give you the lowdown.

Essentially, all mainstream US media is beholden to capitalistic (for advertising) or state (for funding) forces, so a person should always be aware that news sources are never going to print something that is against its own interest. Things like LGBTQ rights and right to abortion don’t put news outlets sources of money at risk, so they’re safe to print, but you’d be hard-pressed to find something that challenges, for example, the military industrial complex.

I’m not doing it much justice but that’s a very very general and incomplete jist of why it’s good to be skeptical of the mainstream media in general.

it’s mostly political

Oh I gotcha. Interesting. I don’t follow FSF or GNU or anything, do you know if they tend to be antagonistic toward nonfree devs who still try to be as free as possible? Honestly, I read the Stallman quote about FreeBSD in this thread, and a statement from GNU that acknowledges the impracticality of their philosophy, and I kinda agree with their ethical takes. Except, I also think people should be able to install nonfree software, because otherwise you have a pretty bad dilemma with the word “free.”

Ultimately, if they are actively antagonistic toward those who don’t share that philosophy, I think that’s not great. Sure, free software according to the GNU project may be the only ethical one, but we live in a culture that promotes the exact opposite idea, so why would I be surprised and upset when an otherwise ethically acting person doesn’t conform to my own ethical framework, and they go on and create nofree software. I’m still going to get a beer with that person because at the end of the day we probably have common values and how else am I going to sell them the idea free software

I’m afraid to ask this because I’m not a dev, but I have a fair amount of linux experience. Why is it that the ability to install Google Play Services on GrapheneOS makes it not FOSS/open source, while the ability to install Google Chrome (or any proprietary software, I guess) on Linux doesn’t make is non-FOSS/open source?

I’m not articulating that question very well, and I’m assuming I’m missing some key component, but they seem comparable to me, as a regular user. Is it something like the level of access that GPServices has to the kernel?

I discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.

Ideologically Ubuntu makes me cringe, but I also use Google and a host of other technologies that fuck my privacy, so I guess I have accepted the world we live in.

In the same way that I think it’s noble when people try to live waste free, I think it’s noble to use things like GrapheneOS, or selfhost all your services, or de-Google your tech. But it’s unrealistic for all of the world to live waste-free or customize their tech so as to be private. In the end, the government needs to step in and force these giant-ass companies to behave better, because they are the primary forces pushing forward the destruction of the environment and personal privacy.

I dont really fuck around with the GUI stuff tbh…I’ve always just done ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

I guess my issues with the installer have mostly stemmed around the software raid and manual partitioning. Simply installing on a single drive isnt bad.

Hate saying it, but Ubuntu just works for me. I’d rather focus my computer configuration and maintenance efforts on clients rather than my own laptop. If I have to reinstall for whatever reason, its pretty easy because I’m already very familiar with the (shitty) installer, and I don’t do much customizing because I’d rather not have to go through that every time I reinstall.

Granted I’ve never even bothered to run Arch, or any really other desktop distro for that matter. Ubuntu + Gnome looks nice, seems to just work, all I need to do is apt install nvidia drivers and firefox post-install and I’m up and running. I don’t want to do work on my laptop, I want my laptop to enable me to do work.

I don’t know, unfortunately. GF watched it on Netflix while she was in Portugal. Then we watched it together in the States, by means of the high seas. Matey.

My GF recently introduced my to a show called Please Like Me. It’s out of Australia from a comedian named Josh Thomas.

Don’t look at the IMDB score or anything like that – this show is pure art. It’s got a lot of heart and the cinematography is better than it has any right to be.

Please Like Me is honestly better than Fleabag in that it is a dramedy that covers real issues, but it resolves more satisfyingly and feels more grounded in reality. It is so good and nobody has heard of it.

I love Ted Lasso season 1, and season 2 to an extent is also very good, but it kinda lost its footing in season 3, IMO.

The longer episodes are not as tight, writing-wise, and the story suffers a quite a bit because of it. Still a good show, but it went from “This might be one of the best shows I’ve ever seen,” to “Yeah it’s not bad, but…”

Hey! I’m not on the toilet.

right now…