And he chose that picture of himself?

I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

I couldn’t tell you specifically why, but I would question the value of such a project. Project 2025 undermines the foundations of the United States and moves the US towards authoritarianism.

Red versus Blue was an entertaining web series, but not an effective system of governance. Things like project 2025 are symptoms of a deeper sickness in the United States. Democrats shouldn’t be playing the same game as fascists, once you play by their rules, you’ve already lost.

The United States is an Oligarchy, the will of the people is almost entirely eclipsed by the interests of capital. Democrats don’t need their own project 2025, the people need representation in government regardless of what color flag their elected officials fly.

Fun real fact: You can strike elements from any contract you sign if you draw a line through the text and initial it. Half the time the account person catches it and rejects it, but sometimes they don’t and you can have some fun. If they took it to court a lawyer could easily argue that both parties would need to have initialed the change, but it’s a lot of trouble if you haven’t done something insane like struck the interest section of a purchase agreement on credit.

I once did it on an employment contract and struck the section that stipulated availability outside of normal working hours. Just don’t expect it to go well once you flex your power.

I don’t buy it. If you were trolling, wouldn’t you want them to whine and complain to you that the account manager rejected their addendum to the purchase agreement?

It depends on how things go with Threads and BlueSky. If either one were to gain a significant market share of the fediverse they could capture the ActivityPub protocol and add poisonous elements to it and require anyone federating to comply.

Under normal circumstances, a fediverser could switch instances, but that entirely depends on the platform continuing to allow users to export their accounts. Unless servers stop costing money, it’s only a matter of time before the fediverse is polluted and fractured.

Creditors and debtors of what? Cause it kind of sounds like if you issued the government your birth certificate that would mean they purchased it and you sold it to them on credit.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

Well yeah, I mean do you think smart tv’s are smart out of the kindness of the shareholder’s hearts?

I’d recommend trying it with a real conspiracy theorist, it’s hilarious. It’s basically the improv game “yes, and…”

In 2014 when Russia invaded Georgia, my grandfather rushed out to the gun store to stock up because “it’s only a matter of time before they get to Texas.” It took about a week to convince him that there was a country in Europe that was formerly part of the soviet union called Georgia as well and I don’t think he ever really believed it.

If HAARP can control hurricanes, why do we have to deal with them at all? Wouldn’t any shadow government secretly controlling the weather have a strong incentive to divert any dangerous weather away from the US? The loss of life is low enough in each hurricane that a few black ops soldiers would be far more cost effective for eliminating enemies. Show me a power hungry autocrat that is going to feel okay funding fema knowing they could have just kept those funds for other things by preventing those disasters.

Or even better, direct them at our enemies and countries we don’t like. Why hasn’t Cuba been ravaged by decades of severe hurricanes leaving the country in shambles? HAARP has been around long enough they could have destroyed dozens of enemies of the US.

It’s not like anyone could stop the US. It has the most powerful military on earth, most of the world’s nuclear weapons, veto power in the international organizations that matter, and provides defense for most of the western world. What is the shadow government waiting for?

Calling Trump weird worked really well. Maybe some religious Democrats can claim the hurricane is god’s divine will for straying so far from biblical teachings and raising Trump as an idol.

Honestly though I think we’re all better served trying to come together against the real threat to our lives, Oligarchs living in a second gilded age.

It’s true enough that most people would only object to the hyperbolic phrasing, but conspiracy theory sounding enough to give the fantasy prone among us something useful to obsess over.

And bonus points, their power is woven into the country so profoundly we’d never agree on what to do about it. But at least we’d be all having the same conversation, which will lead to better outcomes for everyone, even the poo-brained among us. Except maybe the Musks and Bezoses of the world, they’d hate it.

Eh, technical merit is only one of many factors that determine what language is the “best”. Best is inherently a subjective assessment. Rust’s safety and performance is the conceptual bible rustacians use to justify thier faith.

I also know religious people who have written books about their faith too (my uncle is a preacher and my ex-spouse was getting their doctorate in theology). Rust has the same reality-blind, proselytizing zealots.

The needs of the project being planning and the technical abilities of the developers building it are more important that what language is superior.

I like rust. I own a physical copy of the book and donated money to the rust foundation. I have written a few utilities and programs in rust. The runtime performance and safety is paid for in dev time. I would argue that for most software projects, especially small ones, Rust adds too much complexity for maintainability and ease of development.

I know religious people who could not explain their faith so specifically.

Is it really just old men saying stuff should remain in C/C++ to preserve their nostalgia? What a bunch of petty bullsh!t.

Oh right, I hadn’t considered that. Nevermind then.

Sovereign citizens are the fucking best.

They live in a completely different reality from the rest of us. In what world do you think someone whose job it is to enforce the corporate laws of the united states is just going to be like, “Apologies citizen, be on your way here’s $20 for your trouble.” None, not even coo coo crazyland where they live. Maybe in like Maybury. But the cops patrolling american streets in 2024 have AR’s in the trunk and cross train with the military on urban combat maneuvers. They’re all Judge Dredd cosplayers or zealots of the law and the perverted sense of justice america has. It’s not going down like you think it will. Barney Fife isn’t going to call you a rascal and tell you to fix it before he sees you again. He will grind your face into the asphalt while he cuffs you after you tell Mr. Qualified Immunity himself he can’t do something a secind time.

The driver of that car is going to jail if this car isn’t sitting in their closed garage. If it’s out and about and Porky catches you, especially if you also do not have a driver’s license and insurance, you are looking at class a misdemeanors. If you start talking about maritime law, felonies.

But they can’t see it or don’t care to. We certainly do live in interesting times.

News headlines won’t change national culture or policy. The pro-policing subset of America is large and has a lot of dark money supporting. Private prisons and the handful of companies that support them, weapons companies who have seen record profits because we militarized our police after 9/11, and fascist sympathizers and supports all want things like that to happen.

Unless you, me, and everyone else who cares about the issue called our representatives daily to demand action, nothing will change. Even if every single person who wanted police reform in the US called their federal and local representatives demanding change, there is still a good chance the pro-police-brutality club would still have more influence.

It’s the perfect crime. Most people don’t realize it’s illegal and those that do either don’t have the resources to fight it or don’t want the exposure.