Employee at the Black Mesa research facility in New Mexico. Recently we’ve dealt with 2 aliens trying to steal snacks out of the pantry outside the laboratory.

Hope your day is going well.

  • 2 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I don’t personally use Linkedin so I can’t really comment on how a federated alternative would work or be useful for professionals and networking.

    What I will say is that paid/business-related and the general fediverse culture/design seems like oil and water. Especially the paid part. It simply won’t take off unless there is a mass exodus of people from Linkedin (very unlikely). And even then, having multiple instances for something as focused on Linkedin doesn’t seem viable. It’s probably better off centralized and disconnected from a large network like the Fediverse, in my opinion.

    The closest the fediverse can get to this is professionals using Mastodon or something in the same way they used Twitter before it imploded. Interesting idea though.


  • I really don’t understand why so many advocate for Linux, FOSS, and an overall open web while actively making Linux and other free software as complicated and “tech-y” as possible.

    If Linux isn’t growing, what’s the point? If it remains stagnant, its getting closer to fading away. We’ve seen the impact of Linux becoming more mainstream and known to the general public through the Steam Deck, and it has done wonders for the platform. Why do people actively not want it to grow?

    Helping it grow doesn’t mean being annoying like Edge pop-ups, simply throwing out suggestions to try easy-to-use distros here and there. And let’s be honest, the average internet user can use an easy distro like Ubuntu or Mint proficiently after 20-30 minutes of playing around with it. We need to make it seem accessible so that more people will actually be interested in the first place.

    Really happy to see a post being made about this.


  • Same here. Been stuck with Windows on my *main laptop for about a year now. For about a year, I had a dual boot setup with PopOS as my main OS and Windows for gaming and apps that don’t run on Linux. Unfortunately, the battery life and hardware support on PopOS was subpar. Battery life decreased as well despite me running TLP and auto-cpufreq in the background, and given that I have a gaming laptop (Lenovo Legion 5) I need every minute I can get.

    Just a week ago I started thinking about switching back to Linux, likely Pop with KDE rather than Cosmic/GNOME. Spent my 1st year with this laptop on Windows, 2nd on Linux, and the 3rd on Windows. This may be the year of the Linux desktop for me, especially if hardware support has gotten better since then.




  • Tech geeks and nerds (no offense, I’m one too) tend to be the first people to populate any sort of new online social network. Just the way of the internet.

    While I do like Linux and talk about it pretty often on the fediverse, I do realize that 96% of internet users don’t care about it and the lingo is…incomprehensible for most people. Even I get kind of sick of talking about Linux on here sometimes lol but unfortunately many of the things I wish I could build a community around simply don’t have the fanbase needed on the fediverse to begin a community for the moment. While not impossible, building a community for relatively niche subjects on a small platform like this that is in direct competition with sites like Reddit is very difficult and easier said than done.

    My advice is just try to search around and find things as close to your interests that have active people as possible. Looking for broad communities can help out here, for instance, just go to /c/art of whatever instance instead of trying to find a /c/painting. Also, for Mastodon especially, use hashtags if you haven’t begun to already. Mastodon was wack until I started using hashtags extensively, they somewhat make up for the lack of a recommendation algorithm.

    Its pretty rough around here if your interests aren’t related to tech/FOSS/linux, but that should make things a little better. Hopefully there will be more diversity in subjects on the fediverse in the future.


  • I’ve been using it for a couple years now. It’s been a good experience, and it works completely as a keyboard. Customization is great, and there are a lot of implemented features thay have made it my go-to Android keyboard.

    I switched from Gboard since I wanted to use an open source alternative for something as simple as a keyboard. It works fine as a basic keyboard, although its a bit unpolished otherwise. Swipe typing is buggy and there hasn’t been many updates recently. I don’t expect a ton from an open source keyboard to begin with, but this one provides a lot and could be even better if it starts being developed often again. It feels unfinished in its current state.

    It used to have text suggestions, but now they are gone for me. Not sure what happened. I’d have to check again, but I’m not sure if they were taken out a while back or something.

    Flawed, but it its awesome to have an open source keyboard with this much capability.


  • CPU brand choice doesn’t really matter a lot.

    In general, I’d say go with AMD if you can afford it, but otherwise Intel is fine. Intel has caught up slightly the past couple of years, but AMD APUs are still at the top in terms of what you get for the money. If you can’t get an AMD laptop because of low stock/price or see an Intel laptop with more features you like, just go for that instead. I have an Intel laptop and the CPU worked fine on Linux (running Windows right now since driver support for other parts of the laptop like speakers and the display were a little shoddy because of how new it was).

    I don’t know if this still remains true (if not, please correct me), but AMD will be marginally better for productivity and programming because of the multi core performance. They are also slightly more efficient than Intel in terms of power usage, although I’m sure any laptop besides a gaming laptop will give you solid battery life in 2023.



  • Saying this as somebody just reading the post, I don’t know the whole context.

    Being somebody who is BIPOC, you’re not doing us much of a favor either by having an outrage across multiple corners of the fediverse. Take a breather. Seriously, zoom out and just consider what you are writing right now.

    Hatred of politics is a transphobic, sexist, and racist trope.

    …what if I just don’t like seeing news that only makes me feel angry or bad on my feed. People have different things they want to participate in and see. Just because you like it to discuss it doesn’t mean you should jump to accusations when someone doesn’t want to. Its a sensitive topic to begin with. I just come here to see tech, cars, and art.

    I started out by attempting to educate them on what politics actually means.

    This comes off very pretentious. Just let this one go bro.

    Look, I don’t know what’s going on with this blahaj place’s moderation or whatever and its not my business. Just based on what I see here, you may want to take a good proof read at what you are saying and spreading around before you lead yourself somewhere that you regret. If you don’t like this blahaj server’s rules or anything, just leave. Its just the internet. You might find somewhere better suited for you if you just move your account to another instance. If you want to voice concerns, spreading posts like these across multiple communities isn’t the way to do it.


  • I always love to see attempts to see people making the Fediverse more friendly and open for all, but I can’t see this one working.

    I’m not really a huge fan of the name Mastodon personally, but I don’t have any other better ideas. The branding right now works, there just isn’t enough people actually hearing about what Mastodon is to begin with. We need to push Mastodon, the name that people may have heard of before but never bothered to look into. Changing it now won’t really do a whole lot. If they wanted to get the name out there, I feel this could be done through other ways like a massive update or something.


  • I’m for this idea. Large sports communities could bring multiple new instances and also just a flood of active users in other communities. If we were to pick a specific community to come join, these guys and people in tech communities should be the first choices.

    Communities centered around sports teams like r/chelseafc or r/lakers could warrant an entire Lemmy or Kbin instance with separate communities about that particular team (trade/signing rumors, live games, social media posts, etc). For them, federation actually has some huge benefits.

    Plus as a side note, I’d love to have the regular diehard sports bickering on the Fediverse. Seriously. They’ll be quite the counter to the current culture of the Fediverse, however. Arguing about Mbappé’s longevity or whether the current NBA champions will win again would drown out the politics anyway, which is a massive plus in my book.


  • It is social media that allows privacy and stops Corps selling your data is its USP.
    If the person you are talking to does not care about the above, they have no reason to move.

    Seems like the Fediverse’ existence is trying to to send a message at the end of the day. If I were telling somebody about it and stopped as soon as they said the good old “I have nothing to hide” it would be kind of pointless to begin with. Might as well give the whole spill since that phrase likely is to be a given anyway.

    The problem is that in all other aspects of social media: ease of use, userbase etc the various flavours of federated social media are last.

    I do agree, they are behind the centralized social media. However, I don’t think it would help federated social media’s case if we didn’t at least try to simplify it somewhat and show the appeal.

    Personally, I am a bit sceptical about the long term sustainability and scalability of data storage for data intensive (images and video) federated services.

    For images, I suspect that something like this would only be a major issue for federated platforms (besides Pixelfed) in the case of a massive influx of users from another platform all at once. Otherwise, the infrastructure would likely catch up eventually. Kbin, for instance, eventually scaled despite at one point being run by a single person on software absolutely not meant for that many people. Video, on the other hand, I do also feel skeptical about on the Fediverse unless a massive organization were to host an instance.