A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

Yep, crack economics. Give product out for free until they’re dependent, then exploit them.

I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

As for games, I admit I haven’t tried many of them but the Explorable Explanations I have tried are great, particularly the ones by Nicky Case (Parable of the Polygons , the Evolution of Trust , the Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds). I’d call these short games even though they lean strongly towards elements of education and simulation.

Rat

Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

• People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
• I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
• Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

xcancel is just one Nitter instance (just like lemmy.ml is one Lemmy instance). I recommend sharing the load around to other working instances, or better yet, as Avatar of Vengeance mentioned, use the LibRedirect browser extension which automates this for a huge range of other websites.

The simplistic ‘left-right’ spectrum isn’t particularly useful when it comes to something as complex and location-specific as politics, left-right is really just vibes in the end. You’re on the right path by comparing policies, and it helps to understand the different contexts they’re in (e.g. US red scare culture), along with the similarities you mentioned.

I think this exercise could be fun and deepen you/our understanding of politics, but at the end of the day, different cities have different material conditions (circumstances) which means the same policy may make sense in one environment but not the other. I think an insightful exercise would be to compare the DSA to your country’s main demsoc parties (PvdA/GL?) and figure out the main differences and why they’re different.

I wonder if it was a romance scam.

There was a person last year going around to websites posting a whole bunch of hastily-made .onion single-page scam websites that essentially just say “Pay $10 to this bitcoin address for the service”. They’d post a series of links, like:

Facebook hacking:

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14h3kjfu4.onion/

Love potion spell

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14hfspopd.onion/

Mystery box

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14fine9ffewh.onion/

[…]

Not only are many of these scam services played out and pretty obvious, like pretending they will hack facebook accounts for $25, and not only were many others ridiculous like a love potion spell, satanic spells, a “mystery box” that you pay $10 to find out what’s in it, but their shotgun approach of listing them all in a single post makes it obvious how fake and desperate it is. I’d be amazed if anyone fell for it, but they kept hand-posting these for months until site owners manually blocked them.

Here are three variants of Linux Mint with different Desktop Environments: (click their example image to make it larger)

• Linux Mint (Cinnamon Edition) - the default, I’d use that until you have a reason not to
• Linux Mint (MATE Edition)
• Linux Mint (XFCE Edition)

All of those are Linux Mint, they use pretty much the same core tools under the hood, but the desktop environments change how you engage with them. Mostly the way things look, the way you organize programs on your screen, and the default apps (like which text editor it comes with by default). This can change your experience a lot, I think Cinnamon looks nice and is smooth, while MATE and XFCE are more lightweight and might be better for older computers or if you don’t like something about Cinnamon.

Now, those are all somewhat similar, they have a program start menu in the bottom left, a taskbar on the bottom, the basics are familiar. There are some (not officially supported by Mint) which are more different, like GNOME (Ubuntu’s desktop default) which has a different app launcher instead of a start menu and a different way of switching between programs. Then, as others mentioned, some people choose to not even install a pre-designed Desktop Environment and only install some of the more core components of a DE, like the Window Manager. People who really love the keyboard might use a tiling window manager, these tend to make you think “wow, this person’s a hacker”, where they’ll rapidly switch between programs using keyboard controls, with the window manager automatically shifting and dividing new windows so that they tile together to fill the screen. Loosely speaking, the opposite of a tiling window manager is a floating window manager, where windows just float and you move them around with your mouse, just like Windows (well, apart from the tiling options in more recent Windows versions when you can drag a window into the corner and it tiles to fill the screen.) I think the “best of both worlds” midpoint is a dynamic WM? I’m not sure. hyprland is an example of that.

Not who you asked, jumping in until they reply: Windows and most GNU/Linux distros are much further apart than most GNU/Linux distros are to each other. Unless you’re doing a lot of manual meddling or using hacky tools, the biggest change between Mint (Ubuntu/Debian-based) and a Fedora-based distro, in my experience, was that apt is replaced by dnf, so if you install apps from the command line instead of a prettier software manager (I did lots of programming so this was normal for me) then the names of programs and libraries were a bit different. I’d also make a list of things you’ve installed (VPN software, chat apps, etc.) and look them up in the Fedora packages site or their own website and make sure they’re all available. I would assume they would be, Fedora is popular enough.

The desktop environment (Cinnamon vs. KDE) will be an initial change, but they’re both familiar enough with a program menu, task bar, like how Mint lets you carry over some of that same basic surface-level intuition that Windows taught.

Yep, if you have the means, I recommend having two SSDs until you feel confident using one of them full-time. The only downside is that if your computer is so small/cheap/old like mine was all those years ago and doesn’t have enough cables to keep both drives plugged in, switching between them can be annoying for a while.

Yeah, props to the Nanoleaf team for helping the author out. Win-win. The author says at the end that they intend on sharing it around more once it has more polish, so I hope they upstream it properly and demonstrate to Nanoleaf that helping out volunteers helps their product reach more customers. (I know it’s iffy to suggest it’s ok to neglect Linux and let us sort it out ourselves, but if we get open-source drivers in the process with the help of the company, I think that’s a net win)

A good thing about tech is that if you have a spare device (even a cheap single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi or similar cheaper one, or a partly-broken laptop) or a working virtual machine, you can break things. That’s a core characteristic of the old-school hacker mindset, to try stuff and break stuff until you understand stuff. Usually, the worst case, you just reinstall the operating system and have a fresh clean environment (or, better yet, you restore a backup you made! Learning how to fail gracefully is a great skill)

I bricked a certain wacky laptop setup twice and had to start over (luckily with backups) just trying to get a custom startup loading screen. But once I realized why it was breaking and how to avoid it, I had a cooler looking computer!

I know it’s been said, but Brave is a hard no. Replace it with Ungoogled Chromium. I haven’t seen the video so I don’t understand why it’s in the “not ideal for a normal human” list, and I am biased since I use plenty of “not for normal” tools.

Good to hear. I was very very slightly disappointed when I read Pelican was a Python tool. I’m also a Hugo user.

Take pride in a minimalist webpage.

Last week I was thinking of making a meme pointing out how all the famously ultra-minimalist http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and its many rebuttals are really put to shame by this one. Also, you’ve reminded me of some of those little webring banners people would put on their site bragging about being minimal, which are fun.

Keyboard has too many keys, bloat/10

probs don’t need that mouse either

I haven’t been around these communities in a while, so I can’t really speak for /c/privacy as much as /r/privacy and other communities, but I’ve noticed far far far far too many posts which are blindly perfectionist, with no consideration of threat capabilities or their motivations. Privacy is futile without a realistic threat model, that’s how you get burned out solving non-problems and neglecting actual problems.

My threat model is largely just minimizing surveillance capitalism and avoiding basement-dweller neo-nazi stalkers from connecting any dots between my online personas and real life identity. Even for that, my measures are a bit excessive, but not to the point where I’m wasting much time or effort.

Daily reminder: “more private” and “more secure” are red flags. If you see or say these, without a very specific context, it’s the wrong attitude towards privacy and security. They’re not linear scales, they’re complex concepts. That’s why Tor Browser is excellent for my anonymity situation but atrociously insecure to anyone who is being personally targeted by malware (tl;dr monoculture ESR Firefox^[1]). That’s why Graphene is not automatically anti-privacy simply because it runs on a Google Pixel and Android-based OS. (Google is one of my main adversaries.) And I think this simplistic ‘broscience’ style of “[x] is better than [y], [z] is bad” discourse is harmful and leads people into ineffective approaches.

Tor Browser (daily driver) because I really hate surveillance capitalism. I have fallbacks but rarely need them. Can recc LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium.