As an American close to the tech industry, I’m often jealous of the GDPR. I understand it may not be perfect and often feels restrictive, but I think we’re seeing the results of unfettered “innovation” here in America right now and realizing that most of this “innovation” is not anything any of us ever wanted or needed and not nearly worth the price.

At some point in the past I noticed there is no longer an option to even opt-out of most emails. When purchasing something from a site, they’ll usually get my email as part of the ordering process and while I have searched and searched, most don’t make any indication for opting out. You’ll only notice days later when you’re getting spammed with promotions, sometimes daily.

As well, further restrictions must’ve been loosened because there are companies I’ve dealt with years ago that have begun emailing me promotions. Just the other week I got an email from a company that sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn’t recall. When I searched my inbox, I had bought a custom USB cable from them nearly 6 years ago.

Complete and utter lack of respect for consumer privacy. Disgusting. I hate it here.

“It trivialises what we’re facing,” says epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.

Oh, OK. So it’s worse than “zombie deer disease”. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

I cannot upvote this enough. “Just migrate to X, it’s every bit as good!” when end users know it’s not is a disingenuous argument and even if they don’t have the technical know-how to explain exactly why they feel this way, they’ll feel the deception. It only reinforces a growing distrust in tech.

The argument has to be made honestly. It’s not quite as good, but almost. Those few things you’ll miss will require an adjustment, but the overall value (a lot of times just literally, it costs less!) will become evident.

I know we’re all Linux nerds here and enthused to get people onboard, but the battle right now we’re facing is one of trust and security and must be grounded in those notions because while great strides have been made in convenience and accessibility, big corps will always be able to bankroll themselves over those points.

As someone who has worked in the tech industry near Seattle, I don’t know how well known it is to the wider populace or people in Europe, but open source is absolutely anathema here. It’s seen as insecure, unstable, and unreliable.

I work in IT so I’ve tangentially worked across a number of sectors supporting their stacks and it’s pervasive within the American culture. There is a major de-prioritization of in-house IT knowledge and sysadmins in favor of enterprise support contracts. When shit hits the fan, it’s less important to have a knowledgeable team and more important to have a foot to stamp down on until the issue is resolved. Often that foot has another foot that stamps down, onward and onward until someone manages to engage the MSP or cloud provider that set the service up initially with their scant documentation.

It’s a nightmare both for tech workers and from a cyber security perspective. A lot of this contains my own personal bias and perspective on the matters, but let me say, I have stared into the void and I can’t stop screaming.

I think one of my favorite examples was using simple salt to trap them within the confines of white lines that they didn’t think they could cross over. I really appreciate the imagery of using salt circles to entrap the robotic demons …

No, I get it. There’s this unspoken understanding that barcodes are strictly utilitarian and unobserved as their nature. In stylizing them, there’s an acknowledgement of being unexpectedly seen by the human consumer and not the intended digital scanning device.

Not quite, but this did lead me to my answer, thank you.

Very confusingly, EmulationStation and ES-DE are more distinct now than you might suspect, this is a problem I keep running up against. I found my answer in the ES-DE documentation for Steam Deck/SteamOS, https://emudeck.github.io/tools/steamos/es-de/#es-de-folder-locations (note that EmulationStation uses .cfg in the format of XML I guess whereas ES-DE uses .xml files directly)

The solution was to take my currently working /usr/share/es-de/resources/systems/linux/es_systems.xml file and copy it to ~/ES-DE/custom_systems and now it looks like the AppImage has fully picked up all my systems and configurations from the AUR install so I can safely switch over. I’d still like to resolve the AUR issues, but we’ll treat that separately, I’m just happy to have a working solution right now 😊

Sorry, to clarify, the AppImage resolves the original audio/video stuttering and crashing issue. However I’m unable to modify the es_systems.xml configuration file to point to my pre-configured ROM directories.

It appears as if the original issue is present with the AUR package when using both X11 and Wayland, though I primarily use Wayland.

Good call, AppImage works (https://www.es-de.org/) although I have a few reservations before switching over to this solution. I’ve updated the post with more information.

I have an ultrawide so I like splitting the panels WAY up. It’s just so much wasted space, otherwise. Lumping it all together in the center makes it intrusive again, but pushing everything out to the side and along the bottom are the areas that are most out of focus but still at-a-glance.

The App Launcher is set to autohide. In order to get this to work, make sure you set the Visibility for the floating panels to “Windows go below”, otherwise it stacks them out on separate rows and looks awful.

Let’s see what’s up on the site now … https://www.kohney.com/comic/rat-problem-pt2/

I stand by my statement.

The Other End has been becoming one of my favorite webcomics for awhile now. Every time I start reading a strip I have no idea where it’s going and it’s usually terrifying. A+

Hey, fair. I know the overall political left has always been plagued with infighting and purity testing. I’d like to at least do my part in bridging the gap between leftists and liberals by not getting in your face about not panicking over this shit if you’ll still allow me the same space to entertain my concern without calling me hysterical. Deal?

There have been growing criticisms of him coming from the left for a bit now on how some of his tendencies to diffuse situations learns more towards liberalism than leftism. This isn’t an outright attack on him or to say he’s moving rightward overall. I need to watch this video again but I think this is the one that touches on a bunch of the points, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hCxHvogsTY

From a comment on the video, “Jon Stewart made me a liberal as a child, adulthood made me a leftist.”

If you like Jon Stewart I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t. But as someone who has continually been moving left, I do feel more distance from him than I used to is all.

After everything, I do still generally respect and like Jon Stewart, but even I found his piece this week on the Daily Show to be some real weak ass shit. I try my best to keep ahold of myself, not run away too much with assumptions or conspiratorial thinking. But you don’t have to wait for them to do 100% fascist shit to start calling them fascists.

The White House defended the firing of Fong and the other inspectors general, saying “these rogue, partisan bureaucrats … have been relieved of their duties in order to make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

This. This right here. They are screaming their intent at us and we don’t need to wait for them to do it to respectably call them fascists. Like to be clear I guess he can do this but the way he did it is potentially incorrect? Regardless, that’s not what I want to hear you say when you do it to a 22-year veteran of the department.

Real talk: so do I. Part of it is just being a computer nerd, part of it is working in IT, part of it has just been curiously testing Linux.

I have had more stability doing this over the course of a year than I had running the monthly Microsoft updates on Windows 10. On the rare occasions something broke (usually my own tinkering and not the update process) simply reinstalling it actually fixed the problem 90%+. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I was legit surprised and thought I would have slightly more problems with a bleeding edge distro.

As well, it’s great to be able to just update everything with one simple command on the command line rather than having each application install an updater task that sometimes sits down in the system tray doing nothing but nagging you. Or having a program prompt you for an upgrade only to take you to the download page and make you basically reinstall the app over the old version with questionable results every time …

staring at save screen

Wait, did I just save, or do I still need to save?

zones out while processing save again

I don’t even know what to say about this mess, but yes: that’s enterprise pricing. It doesn’t need to be that way, but it can be because those are the kind of prices you can charge businesses. And really, just as a pleasant capitalistic side effect of this, is that the lower classes are completely locked off form this technology. It’s not a mystery, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s business. And I hate it.

History from someone who moved to the platform early on:

A lot of the early adopters were the queer and trans community, first to leave Twitter after Musk’s meddling and most sensitive to the changes he was making. (In this context I don’t mean sensitive as in “snowflake”, I mean sensitive as in “aware of inevitable changes and resultant catastrophe” - when someone shits in the pool you don’t wait wait for the water to turn brown). They took the gross out humor and used it as a ward to keep some of the other elements from following over. Now they defend the term as history.

I don’t particularly agree, I understand the basis for it but ugh, it’s still gross. I keep advocating for “bleats” which kind of works as “Bluesky tweet” and leans into us all being sheep; something I find cute and take no offense at because it’s a toothless insult wielded by deeply unserious people. Alternatively, I think we should’ve just straight stolen tweet since the trademark or whatever has been abandoned at this point (???). Failing that, I’ll probably resort to just calling them posts, there’s no point in fighting momentum like this and I imagine it’ll probably settle down onto something else once the platform gets over its first wave of serious growing pains … if it lives that long.

Of course you’ll still meet individuals with a wide range of beliefs and I don’t think you can boil a complex group down to a simple answer; but yes.

A few years back now it came out that Violent J’s daughter was a furry, and like a good dad he supported her and at least tangentially got into the furry community which is very LGBTQ+. This opened up a really weird friendship between the groups, but from what I understand the Juggalos also have a history of being very anti-fascist which also jived with the progressive furries.

While I haven’t met many myself, I fully accept the alliance. They’re both alternative cultures which can look odd from the outside, but as you pointed out I think they both heavily focus on acceptance, respect, and support. It’s a good unifying thread! Juggalos and furries will show you who they are without shame, I trust and respect that.