• 38 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Sysadmin here. I work with linux every day, live and breathe.

    And both my actual workstation and my home machine are windows.

    Because for tasks that aren’t inherently problem-solvey, I don’t want to have to problem-solve.

    For tasks that need tools and technical skills and poking it with a stick, absolutely do them on linux. Logfiles, strace, tcpdump, your programming language of choice, all the tools in the box.

    But for file/print/email/office/internet/media/video gaem, lolno fuck that. Save your creative ingenuity and mental bandwidth for the things that actually need it; you don’t want to be reinventing the wheel every morning just to make breakfast.

    For the mundane shit where you only care about the content, the UX on windows (or mac, for the people used to it) is just boringly unobtrusive, and thus the better choice.




  • Lie on the beach in winter: the sun is pathetically un-warm.

    Adjusting the angle at which you recline won’t make the sun any warmer.

    So your intuition is off here.

    Imagine someone puts an opaque shell around the earth at cruising altitude, and cuts a metre-square window in it.

    Put that window directly over the equator, wait for noon. You will have a metre-square patch of sunlight on the ground.

    As the sun heads towards the horizon, the patch of sunlight stretches into a long east-west tail, just like a long shadow.

    The same amount of energy is coming through the window, but it’s spread over a much larger area on the surface, so there’s fewer watts-per-square-cm hitting the ground.

    Now move that window north 30 degrees. Wait until noon, and the patch is already smeared into a long tail north-south, and that’s before applying any east-west smear. As the sun heads for the horizon, it’s going to be even more spread out into a great big enormous oblong, extended in both directions.

    Now, entirely replace that shell with windows, and through the raytracing gets more involved, the same principles are at work.

    That’s why mornings and evenings are cold, that’s why winter is cold, that’s why it gets colder towards the poles. You’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the sunlight hitting the area where the earth is.



  • You’re always going to a chunk of political support by oppressing minorities, anyone considered ‘other’. A percentage of people are always going to hate, mistrust and blame the out-group for everything wrong with their lives, and this makes them very easy to lead round by the nose.

    Stoke enough hatred, and people will gladly give up due process, human rights and social equity in the name of oppressing those they see as the enemy.

    And once you can do that, large corporations can exploit the absolute shit out of the population, way harder than they could with all those pesky laws, regulations, oversight, etc. They can use slave labour from the concentration camps, steal the land and wealth from the people they kill or imprison, and they can rewrite laws to suit themselves, secure in the knowledge that anyone opposing them can simply be disappeared off the streets.