• 8 Posts
  • 336 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’ve got the complete opposite to you. I’m in a household of 3 gaming desktops and 3 laptops, plus family who need help. I’ve been daily driving Linux for about a decade now and keep duel boot around just for Adobe products.

    On all these machines, Linux hs been rock solid and never had issues that wasn’t user caused. Windows on the other hand drives me crazy with how much it fucks out. I have next to no control over it. It updates when it wants. I have no control over what’s updated. I hate the gods damn ads (and that’s on Windows 10) despite running de-crappifying software. I hate how many errors it has and how long it takes t troubleshoot them. I hate that if the system borks itself enough, it’s faster and less insanity inducing to just reinstall the whole os than try and fix it. I hate that Windows just gets progressively slower and laggier over time whereas my 6 year running Arch install was as fast as the day I installed it.



  • OP wants to avoid Amazon. This is still giving Amazon money and therefore encouraging Amazon’s greed, walled garden and dark patterns.

    A better alternative would be using almost any other digital book seller. There’s plenty. And if the author chose or was forced to only sell through Amazon, then you can try library sources (like Overdrive) so the author at least gets something. And if you still can’t get what you’re looking for, then it’s time to sail the high seas.

    At least make Amazon the last resort option.







  • Actually being paid is one of the biggest reasons for a lack in volunteers (the other is people working more than they used to). So many volunteers have been replaced with paid workers. Many charities aren’t volunteer run organisations anymore but run more like not-for-profit businesses. As a result it’s harder to get funding and donations. And people are less interested in volunteering unless they can be paid for it.

    It’s a vicious cycle and I’m watching more and more local, community organisations get eaten up by massive, centralised non-profits; and more and more local volunteer organisatns struggling to get off the ground. 😞



  • ”Finding a co-maintainer or passing the projects completely to someone else has been in my mind a long time but it’s not a trivial thing to do. For example, someone would need to have the skills, time, and enough long-term interest specifically for this.” - https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00571.html

    As someone who runs a charity almost completely solo because of a lack of volunteers, I feel this so much in my bones. It’s one thing to say, “Hey folks, I can’t run this on my own, I need help” but it’s another to find people who actually have the level of skill, committent, passion and integrity to contribute in a meaningful way. I can get people putting their hands up but I’ve lost count of the number of people who have then turned around and said, “Oh, actually I realise now I don’t have time for this” or start in great and then just ghost me. It also takes more of my own time and energy, on top of what I’m already doing’ to onboard and train people and it sucks so hard when I do that and then people disappear shortly after - I constantly have to question whether the time it takes to do that will be worth it vs just continuing the struggle by myself.

    When you get consumers being arrogant and demanding, getting angry at you for taking too long to respond to their messages or not work fast enough… it’s soul crushing. Way too many people take volunteer work for granted or assume you’re getting paid for your time and can therefore treat you like a working-class pleb or are plain just fucking rude and entitled. :( APPRECIATE YOUR VOLUNTEERS FOLKS! We need more volunteers, and appreciation. Many hands makes light work.




  • This only really works in cases where people are making a free choice. But since people don’t live in a vacuum where consumerism, capitalism, advertising, greed, power imbalances, class divides, poverty, platform decay, planned obsolescence, geoblocking, price gouging, etc. don’t exist, a significant portion of piracy comes from either having little choice (I’m poor and I either pirate or I miss out) or making a choice based on ethical considerations (such as not giving money to a corporation that is known to engage in unethical behaviour). Or that we’ve had decades, if not hundreds of years of elites/corporate propaganda telling us that poor people are poor because they’re bad and we must listen with zero critical thinking to our capitalist overlords who are wealthy because they’re smart and know what’s best for us stupid plebs and here you go, have some bread and a circus so you can ignore your long work hours for pittance pay which is totally your fault for being dumb and not because the system is rigged against you, also don’t ever cross us because we control the politicians that make the laws that say piracy is worse than corporate fraud, even though corporate fraud and tax evasion costs countries and communities infinitely more than piracy ever did…

    Yeah, piracy isn’t simple.



  • I used to be one of those people. It was a much different place then. It genuinely felt like a place to share useful information and help others or connect with folks from all over the world. If you had a question, or needed to fix something, it was usually pretty easy to find.

    I used to prefer Altavista over Google as I found it served results closer to what I was looking for.

    Now most of the internet is trash - pages and pages repeating the same crap, useful information or tutorials are hard to find without first wading through irrelevant search results or tutorials that are unhelpful but know how to capture the algorithms to generate cash, my ad blocker now telling me it’s blocking hundreds of ads instead of just a few, tracking and spying almost everywhere, clickbait hot takes, artificial and disingenuous lifestyle filtering, information desert eeeeverywhere…

    Many days now I long for the internet of old.