• ends up asking on reddit
• zero upvote, gets one answer three days later

gonna chalk that one up to reddit

• learn there are two folders, one is in the system the other in home

This is not an immediately obvious thing, but consider this a learning experience. This is the way many things work on Linux. As much as possible, you want to let the distribution manage the files outside of your home folder (occasionally you might tweak some system-wide configuration files). It is possible to install all sorts of software and make a lot of configuration changes right in your home folder, without admin privileges (in other words, without having any impact on other accounts which share the machine). The distro package manager should be the first stop, but if you find yourself DIYing something because a package is not available for your distro, there is almost certainly a way to do it without raising privileges (or if you need to raise privileges, doing so to grant access to specific hardware, or to enable a service on start-up, not to just shit files all over the place and forget about them).

In the case of .desktop shortcuts, you can drop these in ~/.local/share/applications. (more info)

In fact, I realised waaaay too late that the home folder was “~”.

Yeah, this is a shell expansion. You can test it by typing echo ~ in a terminal. It is a shorthand for typing /home/myusername or $HOME. This dates back to at least the 80s, so the syntax is also copied by a lot of non-shell applications or even used in some documentation outside the context of using a shell at all. In a shell like Bash you can also use it as a shortcut for other user’s home directories by typing e.g. ~root instead of ~. Good thing to know, as it will be taken for granted in a lot of places.

everytime I saw a folder path starting with ~ I assumed it was some convention

You’re weren’t wrong

I have no clue; I don’t touch that corpo garbage

Try LibreTranslate. It is a “language model,” but it is not a “large” language model along the lines of something like ChatGPT. I am not sure what the training process entails, but it will run on a 10 year old dual core CPU without GPU acceleration. You can test it at libretranslate.org, or you can install it on your own machine if you have Python by running pip install libretranslate. I run LibreTranslate on a meager VPS (the CPU I just described) and the headroom left over from running Mastodon is enough to handle the translation queries locally, without making any remote requests.

Yeah PET/PETG is good. It is UV resistant and can be used outdoors. I’ve used it to print parts for a hydroponic gardening system. It is a bit more complicated to work with than PLA, but way easier than ABS and like 95% close enough in durability. It is the material soda bottles are made of.

It’s so fucking bad.

Anyone have experience with it?

No.

Is it okay?

Probably not.

Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, the same tech bro who created Twitter. I think it is an absolute farce that we give these morons second chances like this. That said, it has absorbed the vast majority of Twitter’s post-Elon refugees, and with Elon being closely involved with the incoming Trump administration, any Liberal politicians and institutions would be absolutely stupid to keep all their eggs in that basket. Some independent journalists (good ones, who cover free palestine demos and labor issues) I follow have already switched, shutting down their Twitter accounts for good. As time goes on, we will probably have to dip our toes in to keep getting information from some sources. Twitter is only going to become more and more of a wasteland of Nazis.

From outside looking in, the atmosphere on Bluesky seems to be very shitlib. Mastodon has its own problems, but thanks to federation the shitlibs don’t run the whole game and there is somewhat of a radical cohort.

It depends. Russiagate was a crisis of faith in the institutions. People believed we were being ruled by a Manchurian candidate. They thought we had entered a terminal epistemological crisis. They thought democracy itself had been hacked by Cambridge Analytica and their targeted advertising algorithm. This loss of faith was generally harmful. It served as the justification for a massive increase of surveillance and censorship on social media platforms. It disciplined the media to boycott political stories like the Hunter Biden laptop or the leaked J.D. Vance dossier (both rather mundane in and of themselves) if there is any hint that a foreign government was involved. Institutions which once published the Pentagon Papers now wring their hands about newsworthy information obtained by ‘illicit’ methods.

These election fraud cranks fall in the same bucket, but because the loss was so decisive, this shit isn’t gaining much steam. Instead, it feels like progressives are losing faith in the Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, which is more productive (I am, by no means, declaring the Democratic Party dead however).

Is Locke really that noteworthy? I haven’t given him a serious read but from a skim he basically just seems like “The king shouldn’t be allowed to take away my Funko Pops.” Very proto-liberal compared to other figures like Montesquieu (“The Spirit of Laws”) or Rousseau (“The Social Contract”), which, sure, are idealist slop, but actually have something resembling a vision for society.

T-Paine definitely makes the cut.

I live in an apartment, so does this even work logistically? I’m aware there are some health hazards with resin/3D printing—how serious should my concerns be about that? (That’s why I’m asking here and not in a 3D printing subreddit, where folks might be biased.)

I live in a 2BR where the second BR is used mainly for storage. I have my printer set up in there. You will need a desk / tabletop to put it on, but it doesn’t need to take up much space - especially if you find / build a shelf to put the printer on with storage above and below.

I have never done resin printing, but from my understanding the resin is typically bad for you. Like it’s the kind of thing you’re not supposed to dispose of down the drain. For FDM, it all depends on what material you’re using. It is recommended to have ventilation when printing ABS (at the same time, ABS is very sensitive to drafts, which will cause warping and premature detachment from the bed). PLA (the easiest material to work with) is pretty benign. TPU will make your apartment smell like beach balls. Attempting to print materials like Nylon on a printer not designed for those temperatures can release toxic gases by burning the PTFE (Teflon) tube which guides the filament into the hot-end.

I started on a Creality Ender 3 v2 (I still use it, but it is barely recognizable). It is rather basic and required a lot of upgrades over time, but it is easy to flash custom firmware on it and there is an enormous aftermarket of replacement parts and upgrade kits. Personally, customization is what I’m interested in, but you may be interested in something with a bit more functionality built in

Rudy Giuliani

They are going to put a legit demon in there. Some absolute grindset freak. They are not going to squander one of the most important offices of the executive.

In particular, it seems like sometimes the argument being made is “democracy is good and worthwhile, but Western countries aren’t really democratic”, and other times the argument is “actually democracy is an illusion and not worth aspiring to in the first place”.

The first is pretty much it. The second is not something I have ever heard in abstract (only, perhaps, that specific “pro-democracy” movements do not have a liberatory foundation). The main problem is that Democracy means different things to different people. In practice, it is pretty much a meaningless term unless it is carefully defined in context.

To the Bourgeoisie, democracy means the freedom to enter markets. To the Liberal, democracy means a subset of society (citizens without a criminal record, for instance) get to vote for representatives, and a greater or lesser degree of civil liberties exist to engage in electioneering. To the US Founders, democracy was a framework for landowners and speculators to organize society without organizing the state around a bloodline. To the Marxist, democracy only exists to the extent that workers are able to decide how society is organized - what work shall be done, who is going to do it, how is it going to be done, to what degree, for what reasons, etc. Democracy itself literally translates as “rule of the people.” The means by which the people rule (which of the “four boxes,” for instance) is not included in the definition. The statement “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” will make a Liberal’s stomach churn, but it is not a fundamentally anti-democratic principle. The question is, who’s holding those guns? Who are they being pointed at?

In the United States, we conflate electoralism with democracy. We’re “democratic” because we have elections. The fact that we have two parties to choose from makes us more “democratic” than countries with a single party political system (ignoring the fact that Congressional approval routinely sits between 10-20%, while many one-party systems enjoy much higher public approval). The fact that we are a largely technocratic society where any decisions not being made by the administration are being made through bureaucracy or in the board rooms of private firms, rather than by the public, is irrelevant.

Please see the announcement: https://hexbear.net/post/3856299?scrollToComments=false

Lesser evilism should be applied along the lines of critical support. This “lesser” evil must actually be an indispensable bulwark against a greater evil. It is absolutely not something you should exhaust yourself on. There is a big difference between critical support and evangelism.

Liberals will readily describe their champions as a lesser evil, and use that as a license to evangelize for evil. As long as Hitler is out there somewhere wandering the globe, they are justified. They also often misidentify the greater evil for the lesser evil because idealism is a purely vibe-based ideological framework.

Welcome back

Though there are MILLIONS of shitlibs out there, this shit is definitely being turfed. The idea that heads must roll among the Democratic party elite is an incredibly dangerous thing. It is an idea which must be strangled in the crib. This was the whole purpose of Russiagate 8 years ago. To absolve the party leadership of their world-historic negligence. Nobody lost their jobs.

People get away with posting literally unreconstructed antisemitic memes day in and day out but if you criticize Israel for the crimes of genocide and apartheid you get the ban hammer.

Reichsbürger

Is this what they call McDonald’s in Germany?

If I wanted to vote for a homicidal fuckface I’d write in Alec Baldwin.

Aside from drastically changing patterns of precipitation, I could only imagine screening 10% of the sunlight reaching the surface would have a negative impact on photosynthesis, with impacts both on natural environments and industrial agriculture.