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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Some of the better RPGs allow you to play as an evil guy (equally fleshed out as the good guy playthrough), e.g. Baldur’s Gate 3 (it even has a special evil background storyline called The Dark Urge) or (some of?) the Mass Effect titles.

    Cult of the Lamb is also a great game where you play a cult leader. Although the game’s design is strong on the entertaining/funny side, it’s kind of dark also.

    Stellaris is a grand strategy game where you can play anything, from a ruthless ruler trying to destroy the whole galaxy to a pacifist trader.


  • That’s the thing with the radioactive waste and it being still dangerous for many thousands of years… We humans manage to ruin the planet within a fraction of that time already. How could we ever manage anything correctly, let alone something that requires attention for tens of thousands of years. It’s like the ultimate technical debt. A burden we can’t handle, among many other problems we also can’t handle. Collectively speaking.




  • KDE Plasma is one of the easiest desktops to use for a user coming from Windows, that’s for sure.

    Gnome also has its place. I’ve used it for a few years (up to the Plasma 6 release, where I fully switched to Plasma on Wayland) and I like Gnome in general, its UI is a “modern” mix of the MacOS desktop and a mobile phone UI, whereas Plasma goes the traditional (one might also say boring) Windows desktop look&feel route (although you can also reconfigure Plasma heavily to look and feel however you want, but by default it’s very Windows-like).

    Main difference, if you set aside the UI, is that KDE Plasma offers a ton of settings and features (available easily via the GUI), while Gnome intentionally doesn’t - that means to change some things you need to put in more effort in Gnome (use extensions or change settings via dconf editor, or custom CSS files. and so on).

    Then there’s the factor of stability - Gnome has always been rock-solid stable for me, while KDE Plasma since 6.x release has been very good but still not rock-solid. I’ve had maybe around 5-7 plasmashell crashes so far during the whole time of using Plasma. Plasma has a recovery feature for this integrated now, so it isn’t as bad, but it’s still not rock-solid. The small price you pay for all the great and many features Plasma has is that it’s (still) slightly less stable, but due to it being able to self-recover most users probably don’t need to worry about it. I’ve had it on Windows as well - whenever the explorer shell crashes, it instantly restarts. You might have noticed this when suddenly the taskbar and everything is shortly gone but then re-appears. It’s kind of the same in Plasma, just that you also get a notification that plasmashell has crashed. I’ve never had any of this happen in several years of Gnome usage.

    However, the Gnome devs are doing some weird decisions… they have very strong opinions about things and tend to not agree to things which they should agree to in order to make interoperability with other software easier. There have been a lot of unnecessary discussions about how to handle client-side window decorations, desktop portals, how to implement cerrtain Wayland extensions and things like that and often there are 2 factions at the end: the way Gnome wants to handle it vs. the way everyone else wants to handle it. I don’t like this attitude or selfishness at all from the Gnome project.

    But in terms of software and UI quality, I think Gnome definitely has its place. Whether you like its UI or not, is something that every user will see differently. I’d assume that users coming straight from Windows and who maybe also want to continue to use the Windows UI paradigm on Linux will tend to find Gnome a bit alien. That’s understandable. Gnome has its own UI paradigm that doesn’t try to cater to Windows users. So you need to adapt to it, not the other way around. I also never really care that much about what desktop environment I’m using, because I’m doing so much with Emacs, the terminal and the browser, it almost doesn’t matter much what’s “around” that. So take my opinion with a grain of salt - I can probably use any UI paradigm and be fine with it. So maybe I’m not the best person to judge how well a UI is done. But I still wanted to give credit and criticisms where they’re due.


  • Russia is doing everything they can to destabilize NATO, Europe and the US. With and without actual war. By helping to get Trump elected and by spreading mass propaganda in social media (to get European/US people to vote for their doom) they’ve reached a lot of their goal already. And they also know that the current war in Iran isn’t making USA look good, so they are supporting its adversary so that this war can drag on for longer. If it’s negative for the US or Europe, it’s positive for Russia. Plus, it serves Russia’s economic interests because they are also a major provider of oil and gas.




  • Mint or Fedora(KDE) are great choices. Kubuntu, PopOS or OpenSuSE might also be suitable for beginners. Stay away from Arch-based distributions until you are at least a bit more experienced.

    Intel (anything) works without problems on Linux (in fact, Intel is among the most Linux-supportive companies out there and most or all of their drivers are open source and part of the kernel, as it should be in the Linux world).

    Nvidia GPUs used to be problematic in the past, it’s better now, still not as great as AMD GPUs are on Linux (they’re literally plug and play these days) but I think when going with the distro mentioned above it’s going to be just as easy Just make sure to enable support for NVidia drivers or “enable 3rd party drivers/repositories” (you’ll be asked during setup) so that those distributions will also install those slightly non-standard Nvidia packages which they might not do otherwise for “purity” reasons.




  • I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

    And it’s not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they’re spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

    “AI PCs” will increase your dependency on MS’ online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that’s a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you’re ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they’re doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It’s just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

    I don’t think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They’ve bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they’d have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

    I think we’re currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won’t ever exist in the way they describe them, but they’ll claim it will always happen “in the near future”. CEO brains probably extrapolate “Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years”, so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you’d still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it’s not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).





  • Unfortunately it wouldn’t change much. The current fascism is structural and enabled by many actors, companies and institutions, not tied to one particular person. When he dies, Vance will just continue doing the same.

    The only thing that could initiate real change would be the majority of US citizens revolting (but the majority are currently brainwashed by fascist rhetoric on proprietary social media and Fox News) and/or retaliation from other countries.