absolutely. I had tried Linux on various machines long ago but was one of the people that was put off by older distro’s learning curves - I’m now daily driving Linux on both my laptop and desktop and the main push for the switch is microsoft fucking around with settings, installing candy crush after updates (on a paid OS), adding more and more dumb, unsolicited, privacy invading AI bullshit with every feature update, and running like shit on a perfectly adequate machine.

Modern Linux, with flatpak support? I haven’t looked back once - had to help a friend fix something on a win11 desktop recently and was reminded of every reason I made the switch. Even if I had to jump in the terminal every day like long ago, it would still be worth it to not have bing, copilot, and edge rammed down my throat, whether I want them or not.

Windows is getting so shitty that completely non-technical users are tired of it… as soon as somewhat open minded users start to experiment and realise that Linux feature and UX parity has been achieved - I hope microsoft fucking collapses and we can all finally walk into the sunlight that open source OSes and software represent.

96% of perpetrators are men. It’s a statistic that goes against their “women are abusers too!” defense they have to protect their own egos from the reality that one of their friends is likely an abuser.

literally rape apology from you here.

The provocative and stupid sign in the article has completely derailed a potential discussion about fixing this problem and the exact nature of the problem - because it says something that denies anybody experiencing something outside it’s narrow statement their lived experience. It’s also not a men vs women issue - there are women that are assaulted by other women, who are equally silenced by this stupid sign. If you believe that a single rape is one too many (as any person on the fucking planet should), then explain to me how 4% of all rapes simply don’t matter - and how it isn’t offensive at a movement which is borne of abuse victims fighting against the system that facilitates it, and silences victims - to not only completely disregard men that have been victims of women (or women which have), but to then say that anybody who highlights the fact that rape can be perpetrated by a woman, even if it isn’t the majority of the time - must therefore be a rapist or friend of one. Fuck that noise.

stop making dumbass generalisations that paint those of us who make active choices to support women and act decently, being an ally as “probably having rapist friends” because of our gender - like seriously what the actual fuck is wrong with you?

Nobody is denying that the majority of rapes are men against women, but the disgusting attitude you have here that all men are automatically rapists, when there are people that want to fix this culture and stop the problem - but stupid nonsense like this pushes so many people down the alt-right pipeline and sets the entire movement back decades. Literally all you have to do to defuse this entire fucking issue is acknowledge male victims instead of pretending they don’t exist, and then link arms with them when they support the same reflections and changes to society and behaviour - instead it’s been turned into a stupid ‘men vs women’ fight by people that assume all people of one gender are perpetrators and all of another are victims, instead of the much more simple universal truth that rape is evil and you should just be able to accept that without adding qualifiers.

Whether they were condescending or not “militant athiesm” is a ridiculous hyperbole - people are free to believe whatever they want, just as anybody else is free to comment on that belief system when theyre not a part of it.

I mean, technically - the most secure option is irrevocably destroying the laptop everytime you have a break.

absolutely fucking insane - imagine suggesting a pet could “leave if they don’t like it” for any other form of animal abuse.

I’m not saying that all the women need to wear ‘skimpy bikinis’, I’m just making the point that the teams that are wearing the ‘sport hijab’ aren’t doing it because they have any kind of freedom, but because there is enormous societal pressure and political/legal/religious oppression, that extends beyond the games into their daily lives. Calling that ‘freedom’ is unreasonable, because the choice is either ‘wear these specific clothes (men-excluded) or face social outcast/death’

I completely agree that the frequent sexualisation of women’s sporting outfits is something which is still shitty and I’m not defending the objectification of talented athletes who want to be seen as skilled, rather than oggled for their body - but claiming that because the voluntary admission sports-team outfit is more revealing than necessary, doesn’t mean the athletes were forced into wearing it, and in the broader society, people in those same countries actually have the freedom to wear whatever they please, whether it’s ‘skimpy’ or not.

Sure, the women on the western team are perhaps pressured into the bikinis from decades of objectification and commercial sex-appeal underwriting womens sports, but in their daily lives outside, they aren’t beholden to a religious dress code, and consequently have much more ‘freedom’. The argument can also be made that even though the ‘skimpy’ outfits are objectifying, the athletes would have known what the prevailing dress code at the sport was before they signed up, and were ‘okay’ with it - at least to the extent that they still participated.

well nobody is forcing anybody to wear anything in the western countries - the huge difference is that outside of the sporting environment, women can choose to wear or not wear ‘skimpy bikinis’ - but in a sharia observant country, there is no such allowance made, so the sports team outfit actually is indicative of the dress standards forced upon women and expected by society.

Some cultures allow women to cover their bodies. While others allowed them to show as much as they’d like. Oh they’re allowed to cover themselves? They’re forced to wear it.

A truly insane way of phrasing repression - I guess Jews in nazi Germany were allowed to wear a star of david? No, I don’t care how liberating some women say the enforced coverings are, when there isn’t a choice - it’s repression. Plain and simple. Try being a woman in saudi wearing normal clothing in public and see how permissive the regime is.

I don’t think anybody is expecting Wikipedia admins and contributors to directly affect the outcome of conflict in the middle east, but deliberative discussions of how the events are documented can only be a good thing.

The site acts as much of our ‘record’ in the modern age - and is ideally less eager to throw out hyperbole or speculate too readily.

Arriving at that title and nomenclature needs to be seen as a reasoned approach, and not “crying wolf” so that the impartiality of the articles can be upheld - by being careful about their decision, it is a better outcome for everyone.

do you need to condescendingly question other people’s freedom of expression? if you pearl clutch over seeing a comment which says ‘fuck’, maybe the internet is a little much for you to handle.

dude what are you even talking about - corporate meddling and billionaires aren’t the topic of discussion here - you seem to want competency in leadership and that’s absolutely a good quality, but its genuinely confusing how competent leadership which also better reflects the demographics of the population isn’t in the interests of a better democracy? more representative politicians aren’t mutually exclusive from competent ones

you’re not hearing me - Its fine - please stop trying to convince me how difficult millimetres are, I went to school, I use them with no difficulty It’s really not rocket science to say ‘1.75m’ - we’re all surviving just fine. (Believe it or not, there are even craftsmen using millimetres! 😱) Base 12 is lovely, it’s very cute that you can say ‘3/8ths of an inch’ but it isn’t some universal human truth that fractions are easier than decimals - wait till you see that you can express inch subdivisions as decimals, and metric subdivisions as fractions!

SI is more logical in paper, it is also still more logical in practice. A base 10 unit I have never heard of before intuitively tells me what it measures and how big it is by the word alone. “Decilitres” is not really used outside of europe, but I immediately know it’s volumetric and 10x the scale of litres. Inherently logical. How many fluid ounces are in a liquid gallon? The answer is ‘good fucking luck’ or ‘12 is easy to subdivide by, but now I have to remember every single measurement relation by writ’

The most commonly used “standard” measurements are the way they are because they were the most useful measurements for actual craftspeople to standardize to, while the SI system was dreamt up by a bunch of rich French people.

The ‘S’ in ‘SI’ literally is the standard measurement system. It is the only universal and internationally standardised system. US feet are slightly different to UK feet, and Australian tablespoons were different to german ones - and if you think SI was dreamt up by a bunch of rich French people, firstly, that’s a bit disingenuous - not how that happened at all, but secondly, you’re going to absolutely lose your shit when you find out the basis of the ‘foot’ (it was the kings fucking foot, a super standardised unit of measurement)

As I said before, I’m not forcing you to use the dreaded centimetre - but please stop advocating against SI units because of hOw hArD tHeY aRe - it’s fine, complete idiots use kms without issue, we’re all gonna survive without reverting to fucking cubits.

For science? Metric is fantastic. For literally everything else - us customary is faster, easier, more understandable, and actually more approachable in terms of trying to actually build something.

Americans keep saying this shit as if the vast majority of the world doesn’t use grams for baking, celcius for temps, and cm for height daily - nobody is imposing anything on you guys, but you are going to continue to be ridiculed for using the dumbest measurement system. Yes, some systems absolutely make more sense than others - having even division of all orders of magnitude is a good example of that.

One could easily spend more time trying to measure 1.905 cm vs very quickly dividing 1 into 3/4". This is purely a skill issue. You’re also clearly being biased by picking a rounded imperial fraction as the basis of comparison, and complaining the metric equivalent is unwieldy. (50mm is 1.968504 inches - oh wow! oh no! how will anybody figure it out?) Of course they don’t neatly line up, they’re not meant to - it doesn’t make working in metric harder because I’m not using both systems? If I need hardware, I have M3 through to M8 for normal screws, bolts, washers, etc. - trying to use imperial is a clusterfuck - they don’t even use the same fucking denominator, thread pitch is not standardised, nothing makes sense, it’s a garbage system.

How many inches in a foot? thats easy - how many feet in a yard?..uh okay a little weirder, yards to a furlong? the fuck - furlongs to fathoms to miles to -… its inconsistent unpredictable garbage because it’s not in any way related to the units above or below it. That’s all WITHIN DISTANCE - good fucking luck if you want to convert that to volume or energy or anything else. mm > cm > m > km - all base 10. Predictable, consistently divisible.

There is no persecution here - you can use fucking apples to measure distance if you like - but please stop portraying SI units as this scientific conundrum which is incompatible with daily life or professional ease. Imperial isn’t actually any easier, americans are just familiar with it All but 2 countries in the entire world have switched over because the benefits self-evidently outweigh the costs…america acts like using dumb dumb units is a patriotic holdout but it is such an ongoing own-goal.

To be clear, I think Assange definitely behaves as a russian asset - but democrats will do anything except admit that their candidates are awful. Leaks as mundane as the 2016 ones were capitalised on by Trump, of course - but it still shouldn’t have made a difference, and the race wasn’t as close as it was due to wikileaks.

Trying to motivate an increasingly disengaged and disappointed electorate by being the lesser of two evils simply isn’t good enough - and ‘useful idiots’ like Assange (although acting recklessly and causing damage) aren’t the reason Hillary lost, or that Trump has support.

dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.

Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.

The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.

as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users. While the rest of us might be comfortable cloning a repository and building from a tar file, expecting the average person who wants to talk with friends and family to jump through those kind of hoops is exactly what has held back wider adoption of better standards.

Things like flatpacks and snaps have gone a long way to making this less daunting, but when matrix isn’t a ‘self-hosted decentralised chat’, it’s a *‘version of whatsapp that isn’t always online, and i don’t know where to download it and have to learn what the terminal is to even get it on my laptop’ * - we can’t be surprised people stick with the less secure, private, easy options. That’s why I’m a big advocate of signal - it’s not perfect and part of me wishes it was matrix or threema or one of the other standards, but getting people comfortable with the idea of free and open source software, while making it as simple for them to install on their phone or computer as anything meta makes is a really good first step - in the meantime, it’s up to us in the wider community to make the other solutions more intuitive, simple, secure, and trust that if a good enough job is done of that - they will come.

The issue is WhatsApp from a few years ago versus WhatsApp today - meta/favebook is probably the worst possible company to have bought it, their record on security, privacy, and features is horrible.

The app today is full of enshitification (meta ai being shoved down my throat by the communication monopoly) and nobody can ever fully trust their security or privacy because its not open source.

Signal sadly doesn’t yet have the ubiquity of whatsapp - but for everyone that has it (now I’m finding even non tech-savvy family are switching over) use signal, and where you have to, use WhatsApp.

imessage is no better in that case - and outside America barely anybody still uses either SMS or RCS, apple is a smaller share of the market meaning the ubiquity of imessage isn’t there.

If you want anything beyond SMS which is a universal standard, you both have to be using the same service - I’m just saying that signal is available for anyone who wants to use it.

I was also upset at the removal of texting from signal, but in hindsight its for the best - if its a secure message service that youre not charged per message to use, the support of a dying platform which is difficult to distinguish when in use is an issue - now its extremely clear whether youre reaching someone through signal or text, cause signal only sends signal messages.

Signal is better than any other common alternative, and its on both android and ios

if the market allows it. That’s the point, the market works fine to incentivise me in choosing fruit loops over other cereals - but if the market is captured, monopolised, or poorly regulated, market forces don’t apply properly.

I don’t hold off renting because it’s a luxury I can do without, I rent because it’s an inelastic need for shelter, and I don’t have anywhere near enough capital to pursue ownership. The issue is that landlords are not just an enterprising part of that dynamic, they knowingly and maliciously gouge prices far in excess of any actual tangible value of their shitbox studio, because they know that if it’s difficult to move and everybody else is doing it, they can bleed their working single-mother tenant dry. At the end of that transaction, the mother has invested in the owner’s 4th mortgage and gets evicted when she falls a week behind, with less wealth than she had to start with. That’s why there was this article about capping RAISES to rent in an LA county.

Here in Australia (we’re not all american), it’s becoming a really significant problem - housing has been nearly entirely commodified since the millennium, while social housing and support services have effectively crumbled. My rent in Sydney is now 80% of my income alone - and that’s for a below average rent and an above average income - I’ve been fortunate, and I’m still at the point of having to sell assets to keep dry in the rain. The days of a single income blue collar family owning a home outright in less than a decade are long gone, and I know of 190k household couples now priced out of crappy suburbs.

It isn’t going to change until God changes it.

There is no god, so he won’t be changing it - but well written legislation might. The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging there is one, and to that effect calling a spade a spade - of course it’s human nature for those who can to maximise their wealth, but I’ve also got the right to treat them like the parasites they are when they claim to be ‘providing’ anything after they hoard it all, then earn a living by exploiting multiple people’s need for shelter who, without multi-property scabs like landlords, would be buying and selling less affected by speculative values. Landlords don’t provide a service, they’re a cartel keeping house prices high.

people don’t need cars the same way they need shelter and food. I’m sick of landlords acting like they’re providing some kind of social service when they financially benefit from the arrangement at the expense of the tenant, whom unlike the landlord has nothing to show for years of renting, where the landlord has now paid off their mortgage and has more capital to purchase further properties… Its an inherently self concentrating system - a renter will struggle more to buy a single property than a landlord does to add “another investment to their portfolio” through more favourable loan securitization and asset evaluation.

Landlords provide housing the same way scalpers provide tickets - considering they amass a huge majority of a working individual’s income despite contributing nothing themselves and sitting sedentary for their serfs to pay their wages, I dont really give a shit what income maximisation they pursue. Anything more than a dollar is a profit, and one which they are just as likely to have “earned” from inheritance as they are from any actual hard work and skilful property quisition.

If it’s so tragic and unprofitable to be a landlord, might I suggest selling up and getting the fuck out of the equation, instead of playing monopoly with the housing supply and acting like you’re a saint for refusing to fix the fucking mould problem, so I can pay for your ugly family’s next holiday instead of having a stable roof over my head.