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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I think the Thinkpad X130e with the AMD E-240 CPU. That processor, really, was the bad part. Every little single thing you wanted to do was absolutely CPU-bound, even when it was contemporary and new (c. 2011-2012). The amount of time I wasted waiting for the fully hammered CPU to do literally anything was too much.

    I bought the laptop used because I figured a tiny Linux laptop would be great. And other aspects of it were fine, such as the display, keyboard, trackpad, build quality, etc. But that stupid CPU totally killed the device. Such a regret.








  • Just the other day I got downvoted for posting that it’s stupid that 8GB of RAM in laptops is not enough. Software like Synapse, trying to lift the load that it does in Python, is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.

    the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

    The college tries to just shut off the WiFi at night??










  • Private health insurance is the biggest fucking scam ever. The private insurance companies benefit by getting the aggregate healthiest population into their plans (working adults). The most likely to be expensive people, i.e. old people (on medicare) or poor people (on medicaid, or not even on an insurance plan) are on government, tax payer insurance plans. There is literally no reason except for corporate profiteering that Medicare should not be expanded to cover all people.

    Also all those conversations, especially in the 2020 election period, were totally bullshit. You say something like M4A will cost 44 trillion dollars or whatever, which sounds like an insane amount of money. What is often left out of the discussion is that estimated cost was 1) over 10 years and 2) has to be weighed against the current costs we already pay for insurance. So the deal was very simple: the overall costs would go down because the overall spending would be less, and at the same time millions of people without coverage would be covered, and at the same time you don’t have to contemplate stupid bullshit like in network, out of network providers. Or ever again talk to your insurance about why something is or isn’t covered. Boils my blood when I think too much about this.

    Not even gonna weigh in on things like how medicare can’t negotiate prescription drug prices (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/politics/medicare-drug-price-negotiations-lawsuits.html), or how dental, vision, and hearing are treated separately from general healthcare, or how med school is prohibitively expensive, or how the residents after med school are overworked because the guy who institutionalize that practice was literally a cokehead. Those are all just bonus topics. The point is we are getting fleeced.


  • I have almost completely dropped reddit. I’ll check it once every few days on old.reddit for a few niche subreddits, or as I do regular online research on a topic, because it still has a long history. In the end, I never liked Reddit as it’s just a silicon valley-based social media tech company that is designed to track users.

    Lemmy itself is going great. I, for one, am happy that there are way more socialists here as a proportion of the population, and it makes me more comfortable as a user. And ever since Reddit killed 3rd party apps + ever since the lemmy web UI dropped websockets, actually visiting the Lemmy page feels much better. I didn’t create an account on Lemmy for years because I really hated that websockets thing and seeing posts just appear randomly while leaving the site open.

    My wish for Lemmy is a common sentiment: I would like to see more people with an easier way for them to get started. And I’d like to see less defederation. Lemmy.world performing preemptive defederation from Hexbear was a really bad move, IMO.

    Someone mentioned how Lemmy draws a tech enthusiast crowd, and I think that’s true. But that was also true for Reddit in its early days, as well. I think so long as the posting quality here is good, more people will eventually find their way in. If I can start seeing some cool home DIY stuff (to inspire the fortunate future day where I can finally be a homeowner myself), that is when I know Lemmy as a social platform has made it. I don’t have the heart of a true poster, but I hope that if I have useful information to share and post that I’m doing my part in helping the community grow a bit larger.


  • PikaBackup is more of a Time Machine style backup system. Not just for Gnome, it simply is made with the GTK.

    Ultimately, I went with a Sony DualSense for my latest gaming controller. It has low latency when wired and the buttons are not clacky. Solid construction. I also have an 8BitDo Pro 2, which has one thing I especially like – hardware turbo buttons. The rest of the controller is merely OK, and IMO not worth the extremely high praise it otherwise receives. Serviceable controller.