And if that isn’t enough, I know a few good dakimakura shops.

People who know damn well they have a right turn coming up in fewer than 30 seconds, but are perfectly comfortable riding that left lane until the last possible second before they violently swoop cut across all lanes of traffic at once to make their turn.

Bonus points if that turning lane is swamped with other cars, but their tunnel vision was so deep they don’t notice until they attempt to merge, and they become frustrated that they either can’t make it, or they have to aggressively steal the right-of-way to force themselves in.

Is this another one of those “by law, the addition has to look visibly distinct from the historical structure” renovations?

Same thing that allegedly happened to this one?

You can even have the same off-grid experience!

20-something English-speaking cis hetero white American male, stable supportive family I keep strong ties with, four-year university STEM degree, gainfully employed at a low-stress job full of people I like that affords a comfortable, reasonably above modest lifestyle, no outstanding debts, no severe health issues or crippling disibilities.

I’ve certainly won more than my fair share of cosmic lotteries, all things considered.

Only thing I guess I’m missing is a partner, which is entirely due to my own lack of effort. So far sailing solo hasn’t bothered me any. But I do occasionally daydream about what I might be missing out on…

Florida has only ever been a punchline for as long as I’ve been around.

There are many amazing things that came from Florida and are still in Florida right now. But as a package deal, I certainly haven’t heard of a time where they’ve been above par.

Or would that technically be “below par”? Isn’t being under par the objective? I don’t know, I don’t play golf. Florida’s got acres of fucking golf courses, surely someone there could tell me the answer.

It’s even worse than that. Paying private insurance pays for other peoples’ healthcare and the paychecks of MBAs and C-suite execs on top.

I genuinely don’t understand how some people can’t seem to grasp the business model here. For anyone to get any net value out of insurance, by definition, there has to be at minimum an equivalent number of people who pay in more than they would than if they didn’t have insurance at all.

This doesn’t change whether it’s a government-funded single-payer system or a private corporation. The only thing that significantly changes when it is made a private corporation is it (theoretically) permits it to be nimbler to adapt to change by slicing out all the red tape a government-run entity would have, at the cost of shifting the focus from maximizing benefit to the public to profit-seeking that may incidentally also benefit the public from time to time as an occasional side effect.

Insurance isn’t a magic subscription that pulls money out of thin air to pay for everyone’s whatever as long as one is a member, it fundamentally comes from other people getting short-sticked. That is the whole point. You throw money into the abyss when you’re doing well, in exchange the abyss won’t swallow you whole when you’re not doing well. That’s the contract. If everyone who joined was entitled to more than they paid in, we’d call it a Ponzi scheme.

I’m sure you know all this, just venting a rant to no one in particular…

I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.

If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.

Yeah, it was a real bummer for me. Felt like a match made in heaven, but I was too late to the party. :/

Well, your instance also doesn’t, as of my last check in mid August, accept new accounts, sooo…

Five years of Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2 on life support) replaced by a couple years of KDE Plasma.

Mate treated me well enough, it was mostly stable, capable, and competent. But it was a bit crusty around the edges, and being so niche meant search-engine-visible help resources for anything than went wrong were virtually nonexistent. In hindsight, using it as a beginner’s DE was probably a mistake. I suppose in being so austere and devoid of resources it taught me to develop more of a “get to the bottom of it yourself” attitude to debugging and have humbler expectations about form versus function, but that’s a pretty rough sell to most people. Mate is definitely better as a drink than a desktop environment.

I don’t need to talk about KDE Plasma at all because the rest of the thread already has. I have nothing new to add beyond the comment that I like their mascot character.

I have no informed opinion on Gnome 3. All I’ve gleaned about it is that it’s supposedly “my way or the highway” by design, and the “my way” in question is controversially counter-grain to a lot of established expectations (e.g. it’s literally why Mate exists). Which is neither here nor there to me, objectively. But I will say I have no interest learning a new way of doing things, even if it’s theoretically superior, when a conventional system still exists, is viable, is highly polished, and is kept sharp-edged. Hence, KDE Plasma.

+1 for Reddit API exodus.

Lemmy was sold to me as a Reddit replacement. And it is, superficially. I knew it wasn’t going to be drop-in going in. But the longer I use it the more I think it’s not really quite like Reddit, and never will be. And that’s fine. Lemmy is its own character and I like it for what it is.

I still use Reddit. Lemmy doesn’t scratch all the itches for me. But only old.reddit on the desktop and on mobile with a UI de-shittifying extension. I’m amazed they still offer it at all. Once that’s cut off, something I’ve been bracing myself for for years, I’ll consider the UX enshittification to have fully completed and I’ll truly bail. I simply refuse to use their gentrified UI. And I’m tired as it is having to slap on compatibility layers just to keep their less terrible alternative on life support; I’m not going to do the same thing to make their mainstream UI somewhat more palatable.

The scenes of Clooney as the President in Spy Kids 3 were allegedly shot by Clooney in a day in his own living room with a camcorder he just had lying around.

My shortlist, off the top of my head:

• Trying to solve screen tearing with Nvidia drivers.
• Trying to get LightDM to show me my god damned profile photo on login (still have not succeeded)
• Debugging a problem where my DE fails to come up on login unless I manually hop to TTY7 myself
• Endlessly forgetting which of the two or three different directories my .desktop files actually live in, and navigating the poorly-documented format for modifying them
• Fixing apps in my taskbar showing generic Wayland icons
• Trying to have any consistent success at all with Bluetooth
• Trying to figure out which fucking audio stack my distro actually uses so I can know for sure whether the magic incantation on StackExchange will fail because it’s for the wrong stack or fail because it’s the correct stack and the stack is garbage
• python2 and python3 symlink hell
• Faffing around with WINE settings

I thrive in the pain. But yes, there is plenty of pain.