[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 65 points 5 days ago

The town of Chimney Rock is gone.

No hyperbole.

It's gone.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don't remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.

Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.

In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That's it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.

Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.

It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.

Just use Debian.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 4 points 6 days ago

That thread is just the result of a search today to see if the situation has changed.

When I tried it, we were still trying to figure out how the two displays worked. It looks like that link has a solution. It would have been great to try back then, but I wouldn't go out and buy a 5k iMac or LG monitor just to try it out now.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 11 points 6 days ago

I never got it to work at anything over 4k several years ago.

I went down the rabbit hole and ended up just selling. Apple only ever released the driver for macOS and for Windows 10 with Bootcamp.

Apparently it will work in X11 with a few setup changes per this thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=6477626#post6477626

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 42 points 3 weeks ago
  • Pwm flicker should be regulated on all LED devices, from smartphones to household bulbs and car turn signals.
  • Price displayed is exactly what you pay. With tax, no credit card or smartphone surcharge or "cash discount"
  • Tip screen on POS cash registers is displayed before you swipe/tap your card, not afterward.
90

Two brothers in town for their sisters' wedding were killed while riding bikes last night. One is an NHL hockey star. Fuck cars. Also, sorry for linking TMZ, it's more detailed than the SI article.

74

From Android Police.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 38 points 1 month ago

It hypes investors. Investors are the customers.

136
Minetest 5.9.0 released! (blog.minetest.net)
86

Originally posted at Hacker News.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 39 points 2 months ago

I want AOC on the ticket.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 43 points 2 months ago

This should be a national law.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 37 points 3 months ago

He had nothing to gain from agreeing to this debate.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 45 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Oh. So the problem is the people who have been in the workforce all of two fucking years and who are likely so low ranking that they are nowhere in any position to make a difference even with their own work schedule.

Not the people who have been in charge for decades, dragging their feet, misleading, buying/funding shit candidates, gaming the market, and who still openly deny climate change.

Fuck outta here.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 37 points 3 months ago

It's funny that we buy these metal and glass phones and then protect them with rubber and plastic cases.

New phones are made to show wear so that they lose resale value.

[-] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 33 points 4 months ago

People used their real names, and even posted where they were from on Usenet. There was a sense of community and there was a term -- netequitte -- that described how we would act towards one another. If you used a handle, watch out, you might be a troll, and you certainly weren't going to be immediately trusted and had to build your reputation.

Replies went below the body, not above it, and everybody hated Microsoft Outlook for unilaterally deciding that replies go at the top of a message. Similarly, people hated WebTV users for just bringing the level of discourse to the gutter.

Web forums were fast and also a good place for community, kind of a gateway from Usenet to modern discussion forums. When people passed away we would all attend the funerals or whatever if we were close. There were 56k warnings in the subject line if a post had embedded images.

In the metal scene, maybe other places too, you would trade CDs. So like you had a burner and someone else had a burner and you would swap copies of CDs that you had for something they had. So you could build an entire huge collection of CDs and demo tapes cheaply. There were trading lists and people had reputations and who was reliable, who was a rip-off, and who was an idiot for burning 256kbps MP3s and selling them as CD quality (yes, you could tell a difference back then; something we still haven't recovered from now that everyone is streaming). If you didn't have anything to trade, you would pay like $8 for a CD. Black Friday 2000 was huge because burners only cost a couple hundred dollars that week, so it was a wise investment.

Sometimes the traders of new music were the band members themselves, and that was always fun to find out. I got Sons of Northern Darkness from a guy who was in the studio. I got a copy of another highly respected album from the bassist of that band who just wanted people to hear it. They would just mail it your house and you would receive a CD in an envelope with chicken scratch handwriting on it.

When Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia was leaked in the trading community, it blew people's minds. People were like holy shit this meme band that everyone hates just got serious and took our entire genre to the next level. I cannot understate how big that album was.

People sent checks via the mail in exchange for goods. Online transactions were still done this way instead of all electronically. So you would purchase online, get an order number, put that order number on a certified check, and mail it off. And a week later you had your stuff.

Also everybody had a customized desktop. Not just the wallpaper, but the themes, the colors. There might be a talking cat that sat on the desktop and would get up and walk around and poop and tell you what time it was. Everybody had unique desktops. Everybody had different fonts. Maybe cursive, and in pink and yellow and that was what the entire interface looked like.

Slashdot was huge and the original Reddit. There was a Slashdot effect where if they linked a site, that site would suddenly get so much traffic that it might die. Also in those days you could tell if a webpage was using IIS or Apache because the Windows server was always slower to serve webpages. When Dell entered the server space people laughed because Dell was not an enterprise brand and who would ever seriously use x86 or Windows on a production server?

Online chat was a thing with a/s/l and everyone had an online significant other with whom they would chat about things daily, but who lived like 5 states away and no you would never, ever go meet them. Even suggesting such an idea would usually end the friendship. Everybody had an online diary with a guestbook and a stat counter -- showing how many page hits you had.

There was less corporate ownership and more independence back then. It was okay to be different and unique. The Internet wasn't just like 5 websites.

I think the Fediverse -- Mastodon especially, comes closest to recreating that turn of the century feel.

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SeikoAlpinist

joined 8 months ago