I also only went to Saint Petersburg in Russia and New York, Philadelphia and DC in the US, of which I guess Philadelphia felt somewhat alright and New York was a bit of a strange mix. DC was weird, but I’m sure Moscow would have been back in the day as well. Maybe not a fair comparison.

Going to the US for the first time as a European this year, it felt like what I would imagine the Soviet Union to feel like (which ended before I was born, though I have been to Russia). Capitalism and not communism is the state ideology, but propaganda for it runs through every layer of society and hypernormalization runs wild.

America today felt more opressive than Russia did a bit more than a decade ago. Which may or may not be a surprise to anyone.

My work Microsoft account doesn’t work at all with Thunderbird. With my previous employer it did, but now my only option has been webmail.

I really hope this fixes that. Haven’t looked into it yet.

What is this post?

It seems to be an RSS feed showing this post, which is then bridged back to the fediverse by web.brid.gy, which then posts itself back into the fediverse.

Could this create a recursive loop? Whatever is going on here it looks a bit messed up, but if this post itself makes it back to the RSS feed and then becomes bridged things get messy real quick.

@[email protected] - this might be worth for you guys to be aware of, even though I guess the bridge is technically working as intended.

Bluesky hardly challenges the establishment as far as I can see, they’re just more venture capitalists waiting to enshittify.

Task failed successfully, I guess.

What I hate about it is that this unwillingness to be in a position of power is so correlated with actually being suited for it.

I also recommend reading Eugen Rochko’s own post about it, as Andy Piper linked to as well.

I love and hate how Eugen starts this whole project, leads it into being something truly unique and wonderful that directly challenges some of the most evil and wealthy people on the planet, sets up institutional guardrails to make sure it will not be corrupted by any one individual gone mad with power, gives away his position after 10 years once he’s sure the organization is in good hands, and then concludes in reflection that he does not “have the right personality” for running a project like this.

I hope it has not been to hard for him, and that he’ll look back at it all as a positive experience in spite of the negative interactions. I don’t think any sane person has a personality that is “right” for the kind of abuse public figures receive on the internet. But from the perspective of Mastodon and the Fediverse, it seems pretty clear that he was exactly the right type of personality for the job—including by stepping down when the time felt right.

I wouldn’t say art is subject to facts in this way. Some of us enjoy art that is produced through skill and intention rather than some idiot shitting in a jar. The meta debate is just one incredibly lame branch of art that incompetent snobs manically jerk off to while outbidding each other for a fucking banana.

Of course, context matters for interpretation. Guernica is a more meaningful piece with the background of civil war; dadaism only makes sense in opposition to fascism. But both depend on skill and intent to become impressive, not merely the meta context of positioning in art history.

I hate this discussion and I hate that by interacting with it some idiot in a beret will tell me “AHA! So it did provoke you!!”, as if they were making a point or ever had an original thought in their lives.

Opposition to this bullshit is not a problem of the “tech world”, it’s a problem of the art world having obsessed over the same idiotic joke for a hundred years because it’s harder to appreciate something that contains genuine intent and talent than it is to pretend like you understand the genius of stapling a piece of crap to the wall of a gallery.

Oh yeah. This is not an attack on mediocre white men—I’m one of them. We just have to learn to get over ourselves.

Whatever it takes to keep hiring mediocre white men, I guess.

I hate the debate over “what is art”. Honestly I think the best answer I could give to the question is “something that was ruined by a bunch of idiots asking ‘what is art’”.

That said, and not wanting to go into that discussion, calling this guy an “artist” seems like a mockery. He’s not an artist, he’s just some idiot with double sided tape.

I’ll give it a shot, thanks!

It seems the running application remains responsive, but not anything else.

I was running RStudio on an external monitor once when it froze, and I could keep using the window. Even when I used touch gestures to “zoom” the window out, I remained in control over it and could execute code in the smaller window. But I could not interact with GNOME at all, including changing to another program on the same screen.

Another time it froze as I wrote a PieFed comment, and I pressed tab and enter a few times. The comment was published so I could continue where I left off.

First time in almost 20 years of Linux usage I’m encountering real problems, and I’m much too primitive to do anything clever about it.

Does it seem to be a Fedora problem?

Well, yeah, they’re run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they’ll turn on their customers. So fair enough.

I think that’s part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that’s not possible.

Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.

I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it’s prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it’s the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.

Their search results were good though. I wouldn’t mind supporting a subscription based model, but I’m sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.

There are some user friendly Android based alternatives out there, since it’s based on open source. Personally I’m running a device with /e/OS, which you can either install yourself or buy a phone with it pre-installed. There are also some other user friendly options out there such as the Volla Phone.

But yeah, iOS is probably a better bet than stock Android, as Apple has a history of being abusive towards their customers in other ways than by selling their data. But crucially both Google and Apple are American companies, so you should avoid depending on their cloud services to whatever degree possible. There’s no such thing as safe data if it is stored by an American company.

If these assholes get bailed out by American tax payers when this shit crashes and burns I’m gonna get real mad.

Well, I’m pretty angry about everything happening in the US already, come to think of it. Oh well. I guess it’ll all just crash and burn.

Historically death camps tend to start out as mere camps, but then suddenly they are full of people who are deemed unwanted anyway and keeping them alive is expensive and difficult so why bother.

On its current trajectory there’s no US camp that shouldn’t be expected to turn into a death camp. And as others have pointed out, thousands “missing” from a huge, poorly managed camp in the middle of a swamp is worrying to say the least.

Americans today are like Germans in the 30s, watching the trains roll by.