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shikitohno

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shikitohno ,

The color? No, I’m pretty sure it’s a Henna-based dye.

shikitohno ,

The mainline SMT games all take place in post-apocalyptic Japan

Almost all, except for the oddball that is Strange Journey, taking place in post-apocalyptic Antarctica, instead. It has a lot of elements that differ from other Mainline entries, but Atlus treated it as such and acknowledged it with the recent Mainline 25th anniversary celebrations. I really enjoyed it and think it’s worth a playthrough, but it may not be the best starting point. I also don’t know how the remake holds up, I’ve read complaints about changes online, but SMT fans can be a bit touchy about their favorite games.

SMT 4 is… odd. It starts out looking like a much more generic fantasy setting, but it most assuredly is not. It’s good, but it also very clearly is straining against the limits of the system it’s on. SMT 4 Apocalypse is also extremely good, and I would suggest playing SMT 4 just to play SMT 4 Apocalypse. I won’t say too much about SMT 5 except to note that it’s also good and I recommend it strongly.

I’ll disagree on this one and just add that not everyone who enjoyed 4 found Apocalypse to be that good. From what I saw, people that really just love the battle system and doing things like building out the perfect team for tackling boss rushes and insanely challenging super bosses really enjoyed it. If you go in expecting more of SMT IV’s world and story, you may well be disappointed by it. I found the characters to be unlikeable, personally, and it seemed like an unnecessary rehashing of the story. I also recall some unavoidable boss rushes in the main story that made certain areas really grindy and killed my enjoyment for a good while.

Otherwise, I would say a pretty decent write up here.

shikitohno ,

GM, who just announced a $6 billion stock buy back once they knew tariffs would keep them safe from having to compete with Chinese EVs, that GM?

This sort of stuff is realistically why I have no sympathy for the major US automotive manufacturers. The only reason I don’t just say “Screw them, let Chinese EVs drive them out of business,” is because it would put so many people out of work in their plants who have no role in these decisions. Barring some fantasy where the Chinese companies establish US plants and offer equivalent or better union contracts for current employees at GM, Ford and Chrysler, these companies should simply be bound hand and foot in terms and conditions whenever something is done by the government to help them. Like, make those protectionist tariffs conditional on them hitting investment targets in relevant technologies, raising worker pay and benefits, reducing cost to the customer and a ban on stock buybacks for the duration of the tariffs being valid.

shikitohno ,

Plus often they’re not especially skillfully made and I’m pretty sure some people are reacting to very thin acidic, sometimes woody and vegetal, cups and assuming that if they don’t like this,

Another possibility is just that light roasts can just be too fiddly for most people to want to bother with. Between the money for equipment and time spent brewing it, it’s probably just too great an investment for most people to take something from at least acceptable to them to being great, after a while when you get things dialed in and the stars align.

shikitohno ,

Sure, I was just trying to say that while some people will dislike the flavor of the currently vaunted light roasts, even when properly brewed, I think there is a pretty sizeable number of people who would like them well enough, but just find it too much hassle. Especially outside of the specialty coffee scene, where you see more and darker roasts, in my experience

When Costco or someone puts out a dark roast on the shelves, they generally aren’t competing for customers that drink single lot beans from your favorite café, they’re looking to get the people who find McDonald’s coffee or Dunkin Donut’s good enough, but want to save a bit of money by brewing at home.

shikitohno ,

My first OS was whatever ran on a Commodore 64. I guess the Commodore kernel and Basic?

My first distro was whatever version of Fedora was current in the fall of 2008. I’d gone to university that year and my laptop crapped out. Couldn’t afford a legit Windows license at the time to replace it, and I’m pretty sure I just remembered that Red Hat was a thing and found Fedora that way. One thumb drive and 16 years later, still using linux, so I guess that was about the only good thing to come from my abortive first attempt at higher education.

shikitohno ,

If you read the article, it’s defined purely in terms of income:

The poll, commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition, found that around 65 percent of Americans who are considered “middle class,” earning above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), are in a financial struggle.

In a way, it kind of proves the point that we need to reevaluate what the actual cost of living is in the modern age. For a family of 4 to be considered middle class by this metric, they would have an income of $62,400/year or higher. For a single individual, it’s just $30,120/year. I don’t know anywhere in the US where making $15 an hour means you’re in the middle class, yet the federal government wants to keep acting like it’s the 1980s and you can live it up to an extent on such a meager income.

That being said, financial struggle doesn’t necessarily mean they’re one step away from being destitute. It could just be a struggle to maintain their current standard of life, where is used to be taken as a given that this would improve over time.

shikitohno ,

Perhaps, but they could minimize the damage from that if it was paired with a comprehensive plan to improve living standards that people actually believed would get passed, and following through on that. Meanwhile, the longer they go on denying the reality voters are experiencing daily, the more they undermine their credibility. At best, they come across as out of touch or incompetent, at worst as outright malicious.

shikitohno ,

I would wager most people don’t actually have no choice but to make a massive commute. Often it just comes down to policy choices. As a country, we’ve made deliberate decisions to ignore developing mass transit, just as we’ve decided homes should be treated as investment vehicles. If we built out and maintained more trains, buses and light rail, congestion could be cut down and more people could travel much more rapidly and efficiently. If we didn’t obsess over the idea that property values must go up without fail and encouraged building affordable housing, people could actually afford to live closer to where they work, rather than being pushed ever farther into the suburbs and countryside in search of a place they could afford to live in. Some people make insane commutes chasing higher pay in a neighboring region. I knew of people at one company who commuted from Philadelphia to Brooklyn every day, because NYC pay was higher and Philly rents lower. That said, that’s absolutely a conscious choice those people make.

Likewise, not every job is capable of being done from home, but many are, yet workers are still forced to come into the office anyway. This is a choice by company execs, not an inevitable fact of life.

I’m sure there are some jobs that are relatively remote, yet need to be done in person despite the long commutes. Let the people doing them be compensated accordingly, but this is absolutely not something that should be normalized for the population at large.

shikitohno ,

Individually, no, but this is the decision people have been making in aggregate for decades with the people they vote into government to represent them. You can still see it happening when people oppose any attempts to build out public transportation when they believe it would either personally bother them in some way, or give poor people an easier way to access their communities.

Heck, you saw it earlier this year where municipalities around NY have fought and ignored the mandate to build up more dense housing, or the congestion pricing being walked back now. Housing costs being unaffordable is a serious issue when it impacts them or their acquaintances, but that’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make if it keeps poor people and minorities from also being able to afford to live in their town. Something needs to be done about traffic and air quality in Manhattan, right up until it means they would either need to pay up or take the train.

The governor is taking most of the heat for these policies, bud meanwhile, people keep reelecting the same local and state officials that aggravate the problems that the public is chronically complaining of. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot if it means they can hurt others too.

shikitohno ,

I would have more sympathy for them if these were new issues, but they’ve been perennial problems for more than three decades at this point. There comes a point where it’s either willful ignorance, or being so woefully stupid you probably ought to be declared a ward of the state and get a minder to make sure you don’t get caught off guard by your own saliva and drown in it.

Like, it’s utterly stupid on its face. If you have the right to vote, you’re struggling to afford to keep a roof over your head, yet you keep voting for the politicians who block the very affordable housing that your continued ability to live in your community depends on because it’ll let the “wrong kind of people” move in, or “dilute the character of the neighborhood” and bring down property values, yet you cannot understand how this is voting against your own interests without someone breaking it down for you, you make a very compelling case for the shortcoming of democracy with universal suffrage. Even then, these are topics that have been gone over to death

Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

Emphasis mine, but the public has been told over, and over, and over again. At what point does it stop being everyone else’s responsibility that they just don’t want to hear it, or are willing to ignore it if it hurts someone else?

shikitohno ,

At this point, you’re just being disingenuous. Like, where have you been? Two seconds searching will give you article after article after article on this very topic. This has been a subject of public commentary since before people fell for trickle-down economics, and to pretend otherwise is to be entirely dishonest.

shikitohno ,

So…when they won’t read articles on the topic and won’t listen to news coverage outside the very media that’s designed to convince them to vote against their own interests, it’s still other peoples’ fault for not educating them, somehow? That is just willful ignorance on their part. That’s like saying nobody has tried to educate young earth creationists on the Earth being older than 6,000 years, because we just have articles in text books and scientific journals they don’t trust, but really, we need to get it into the bible for them to read.

Also, way to move the goalposts there. We went from

Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

to, “Well, yeah, someone asked them to read, and people they don’t like tell them, but you need to get the media empire that convinces them to vote against their interests in the first place to tell them that’s what’s happening, or else it doesn’t count.” At what point are good faith efforts enough for you, when these people aren’t interested in them to begin with? Do we need to strap them into one of the rapid-learning machines from Battlefield Earth and just shoot the knowledge straight into their brain?

shikitohno ,

You cannot endlessly blame other people for failing to undo that indoctrination. They need to be open to at least considering other view points, you cannot enter their mind and flip a switch for them. Either way, that’s an entirely separate matter from your original claim, that nobody has told these people.

shikitohno ,

I do, you’re just taking an asinine position on the topic. Society should absolutely help these people to the extent they can, but we cannot change someone’s mind against their will. We can’t just go committing people to a mental hospital for being misled into believing stupid stuff, or even actively harmful stuff. They need to be amenable to at least listening to other people with an open mind. Beyond a certain point, the best we could really do would be implementing measures to be able to disregard them, but that’s predictably a rather unpopular idea, given how anti-democratic and open to abuse it would be.

Answer me two questions. First, what, if anything, could other people do that would be enough in your mind? You’re real quick to shoot down everything and anything as insufficient, so what do you propose would be adequate? Next, at what point does the obligation to help such individuals get outweighed by the harm they do to the rest of us by holding everyone else back?

How to fix Korea's birthrate? Put girls in school earlier, controversial report argues (koreajoongangdaily.joins.com)

“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and...

shikitohno ,

Not just work life balance, but also the cost of living. I can barely afford to take care of myself, so I’m completely disinclined to go and create a whole new person that will be absolutely dependent on me to provide for it for years. If people can afford to live reasonably comfortably and conditions give them confidence that conditions will remain stable for the next 10-20 years, I bet you’ll see them start having kids. When they’re worried they could be homeless next year if things worsen and their retirement plan is advocating for the right to end one’s life on their own terms, it shouldn’t be a shocker that people don’t want to add kids into the mix.

Also, perhaps decades of social stigma that said having a bunch of kids is something only poor, ignorant people do that represents a moral failing amongst the upstanding daughters of decent society is a bad thing to maintain when you want folks to keep cranking out more kids to feed into the meat grinder of the workforce.

shikitohno ,

I hope they come through for him, because the video of a bunch of his fans being arrested and him hauled out would probably be hilarious.

shikitohno ,

I can’t understand why anyone would expect most people to want to have kids. I can hardly afford to take care of myself, things look like they’re only likely to get worse, and all indicators are that if I did have kids, they would be facing an even worse future when they hit adulthood. Why would I do that to them?

shikitohno ,

The exam software my uni uses for instance only runs on Windows & MacOS.

I would say this segment of @Iceblade’s post would be the issue, in that people are locked into these systems even if they prefer to use open source software. For example, my university based in the UK requires I submit my assignments in an MS Word format that supports Microsoft’s annotations for the tutor to do all marking up and correcting/commenting on the paper there. There are ways to do the same thing with PDFs, but at least on my modules so far, it hasn’t been an option at all. That’s just for papers and such.

When it comes to exams where you’re supposed to be answering the questions and submitting them as you go, there are schools that insist on you installing monitoring software so they can make sure you aren’t cheating, which only tends to be available for Windows and Mac. I don’t know how common that sort of software is outside the US, but it’s certainly a thing.

shikitohno ,

Pretty sure you need to file them so long as you remain a citizen in any circumstances you would need to file them while in the US, you just don’t have to pay US taxes on income you’ve already paid taxes on in your country of residence, up to something like $100,000/year for a single individual.

I don’t know if they resolved it, but I also recall it became more of a pain to open a foreign bank account as a US citizen, because they US government was trying to impose reporting requirements on any bank that had accounts held by US citizens, regardless of where they were.

shikitohno ,

The accompanying text is

The human body cannot adapt to the civilized model, which gives us war, hunger, climate change, and numerous illnesses caused by our eating habits and way of live out of measure with our needs.

Our bodies are inflamed, there are plastic fragments in our blood stream. And we’re completely regressing with our habits.

The consequences show with time, and civilizations die out from time to time. Be it naturally or owing to human action. We’re facing a disfunctional and hysterical state, and the populace is incapable of noticing this precisely due to its automatic and simplified lifestyle.

as best I can translate it in one pass, but it’s not my first language. Should do fine in general, I think.

Greater Idaho movement: 13 counties in eastern Oregon have voted to secede and join Idaho (ktvz.com)

On Tuesday, voters in Crook County passed measure 7-86, which asked voters if they support negotiations to move the Oregon/Idaho border to include Crook County in Idaho. The measure is passing with 53% of the vote, and makes Crook County the 13th county in eastern Oregon to pass a Greater Idaho measure.

shikitohno ,

I’m sure it won’t happen, but there’s a part of me that would just love to hear that when the negotiations get to Idaho, Idaho is just like “Nah, hard pass, we don’t want you either.”

shikitohno ,

Yeah, talking about jobs being created without any context on the types of jobs being created is meaningless. Great, there are now more part-time jobs paying minimum wage with no benefits and erratic schedules near me, just the sort of job creation I was waiting for so I could regress in my career.

shikitohno ,

It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.

Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”

shikitohno ,

the will to learn about the topic

I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it’s not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.

Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that

These examples don’t make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don’t produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there’s no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.

Just because I haven’t been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That’s just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.

UAW loses Alabama union vote seen as bellwether for organizing autoworkers in the South (www.nbcnews.com)

Republican officials led a vigorous campaign opposing the organizing effort. In the run-up to Friday’s vote, six Southern governors, all Republicans, led by Alabama’s Kay Ivey, warned about “special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”...

shikitohno ,

Lack of legal recognition and protections? I’m not really aware of any states that have provisions to recognize a union that only comprises a quarter or a third of employees doing a specific job for an employer. Closest I’ve seen was places where different jobs were unionized and non-union positions, like one job where all the drivers got a union, but not any of the warehouse staff.

shikitohno ,

Pakal is just running OpenBSD, he’s committed to the security of his systems.

shikitohno ,

Maybe I would try an Android version, but Linux would be a pass, nothing they would come up with could displace MPD+ncmpc++ for me at this point.

shikitohno ,

It doesn’t really seem too sustainable to have to be so expensive if you actually want people to have kids, especially when the US is so famously allergic to the very notion of social safety nets. Median household income in my county is just under $50,000/year, so lets call it $50,000 to make things easy. Median rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1,588/month, so housing alone leaves you with $30,944. Average cost of child care for my city is $16,250/year for kids 2 or younger, so now we’re down to $14,694 to cover all other expenses for the rest of the year for our average household, ignoring the fact that we ignored taxes on that $50,000 income to begin with. That’s $282.58/week to feed a potential family of 3, clothe them, pay utilities, etc. which isn’t a whole lot.

shikitohno ,

Yeah, unfortunately, it just isn’t a possibility for most people in the US, and even in the areas where programs do exist, they tend to be severely underfunded and means-tested like crazy, so only the poorest of the poor will qualify. I’m not interested in having kids, but for those who do want them, it’s just insane the expenses they will have to go through to be able to just keep their jobs and have their kids being watched by someone.

andersr , to memes Danish

Me BTW I use arch

@memes

shikitohno ,

It’s a rolling release with minimal changes to packages from upstream, and generally the latest versions of available software in the repos. I guess you could go through and rebuild the whole system from source if you were determined to, but a quick look at the ABS wiki page doesn’t make it seem like it’s set up to make doing so all that easy. For other software not in the repos, the AUR makes it easy enough to build them from source, though there’s often binary options available as well. The base install is pretty simple, so you can build upon it as you’d like if you really want to go wild on a minimal, highly customized system. Or you can go wild installing what you’d like and trying all the things.

shikitohno ,

You can set general options for all compilations in /etc/makepkg.conf, and package specific options would probably be best handled by just downloading a PKGBUILD for the package in question and editing it to include the option you want to enable. makepkg won’t ask you about options by default when building something, but it’s not that complicated to edit the PKGBUILD prior to calling makepkg.

shikitohno ,

When you think he might finally be correcting course, he just immediately goes and undoes it.

shikitohno ,

And people are gaslighting themselves happily to suck up to the Dems instead of saying: “We will vote for you, but only, when you end this genocide and bring justice and peace to the people.”

Not just that, but they’re twisting themselves into knots to try and convince people that unconditionally supporting Biden is the better option than continuing to pressure him to stop this and calling out his terrible stance here. Sure, everyone can vote as they please come election day, but we’re a touch under 6 months out and people are all over this site browbeating anyone who doesn’t toe the line and going “Don’t you dare criticize our savior, Biden! If you say he needs to stop enabling Israel’s genocide, you’re just a Russian disinformation agent trying to keep people from voting so that fascists take over and murder all the minorities in the US. They’ll probably double murder Palestinians, even!”

shikitohno ,

Damn, you got me, I missed the part where I said not to vote for Biden under any circumstances.

Way to prove the point. Elections are not today, there is no reason not to continue to criticize Biden and pressure him to change his position in a meaningful way in order to make him more electable for those who won’t support him if he continues his current policy, and along you come with the same tired shtick to say “If you don’t bend over backwards to sing his praises, you’re a Russian plant!”

If Biden actually changed his stance in a meaningful way, there’s still plenty of time for him to win back those voters, but you folks come along running to shout out “But Trump!!!” once anyone suggests that maybe giving him unconditional support no matter how shitty his stances are isn’t the best way to convince him to not be just as awful while he still has time to do so.

shikitohno ,

the same reason that you’re better off taking the lump sum vs the 30 year pay out if you win the lottery.

money today that i can use today is worth more than money tomorrow.

You might be theoretically better off in an ideal outcome, but I’m pretty sure taking the 30 year payout is the generally recommended option. If I were to win the Mega Millions at the current level, I would need to make investments that paid $96,244,081 over 30 years just to equal the tax savings of taking the annuity versus the lump sum payment. That works out to a 3.1% return on the initial lump sum, every year, 30 years straight. Granted, this isn’t exactly impossible, but it does require a few caveats. For example, this assumes you don’t actually spend any of that money, investing 100% of it and never having a bad year. Of course, the average lotto winner is not exactly known for their great ability to invest their money. Meanwhile, there’s nothing preventing the person taking the 30-year annuity from investing a portion of their annual payouts, which are guaranteed, while returns on investments are explicitly not guaranteed.

A guaranteed $96,244,081 return is a better investment than a possible $200,000,000 that’s continent on absolutely nothing going wrong for the next 30 years, but the sort of people who run companies seem to forget about this these days.

shikitohno , (edited )

When your justification is an uncertain investment, it isn’t that hard of a concept to realize you’re wrong. You’re literally the only person I’ve ever seen advocating for the lump sum payment as the financialyl sound move when it quite nearly halves 100% sure income.

Inflation is also much less of a concern when you’re talking about literal millions of dollars, unless you’re talking about the Zimbabwe national lotto. If you’re living in a way that your ability to live with $15,000,000/year towards the end of a 30-year annuity payout has materially changed, you have bigger issues than inflation going on.

shikitohno ,

Especially if you aren’t financially that well off or on a good career track, I think it’s really appealing just for the stability it affords. My current landlord has been a pretty good guy for us, but if I owned my apartment rather than renting, I wouldn’t have to worry that I’ll suddenly need to pay a ton more money if he dies and his kids decide to jack up the rent, or worse, having to uproot my life entirely and move out because of someone else’s whims.

shikitohno ,

I think at this point, all of us poors are just crossing our collective fingers and hoping the rent doesn’t go up, we don’t lose our jobs and we don’t have to move for any reason. I’m hoping my landlord turns out to be immortal right now. “Affordable” units in the hood here are going for $3,000+, and you need to make less than the equivalent of minimum wage at a full-time job each to qualify for them. We stumbled our way into a three-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood for $2,200/month, and he hasn’t raised the rent at all. The people who lived downstairs before said he charged them the same rent for close to 10 years before they moved out, so hopefully that streak will continue. Just have to worry that he’ll die and whoever inherits the house comes in and jacks up the rent once they can, in which case we’d definitely need to move pretty far away to be able to afford something.

shikitohno ,

Given how it can be circumvented by fiddling with DNS according to the article, I doubt it’ll really do anything besides stoke negative sentiment towards Vietnamese studios. Besides, you can buy plenty of the games elsewhere, so even if it worked, all you’re accomplishing is making it slightly more annoying for gamers to buy what they want, rather than having it in one place.

After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

shikitohno ,

And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.

It’s probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won’t make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That’s something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.

shikitohno ,

Sure, but the barrier to entry is significant enough to still deter most people. Even assuming they aren’t bothering with port forwarding and seeding, most people seem like they can’t be bothered with any pattern of consumption more complicated than finding content on major streaming platforms, and the music streaming services haven’t yet gotten annoying enough for most people. They’ll take a peek, go “Do I want FLAC, V0 or 320? WTF is an APE?” and bail again.

We can disagree as to whether it should be that way or not, but I’d wager that the reach of streaming services for a new band far exceeds that of uploading a torrent to a random tracker and hoping it takes off. Unless people already know of you to look for your music, you need to hope a huge number of them are just auto-snatching anything new. On private trackers, sure, you’ll get a bunch of people who auto-snatch any FLAC upload from the current year, but you’re talking about <50,000 users in those cases, and a good chunk of the auto-snatchers are just people looking to build buffer who won’t even listen to most of what they snatch. On the other hand, nobody is auto-snatching all the torrents going up on public trackers, they’d run out of space in no time at all.

shikitohno ,

I think curation implies more depth and selectivity to the collection and perhaps a certain amount of active effort to obtain and maintain it. You’re talking about hearing a song you like on the radio and clicking “buy,” where the sort of person who would talk about their curated library would spend their weekends digging through crates looking for the final LP released on some random record label in 1985 they need to complete their collection of what is, to them, the pinnacle of early house music as released in Yugoslavia prior to the fall of the USSR. Even if it’s not as hyper-specific as that example, I would expect them to at least have things meticulously tagged and organized.

shikitohno ,

I wouldn’t really say it’s anything beyond normal consumption, just like I wouldn’t say someone who buys a hat or jersey once every few years when they see a sporting event live has a sports memorabilia collection. Sure, technically, any quantity of something united can count as a collection, but I think plenty of purchasing just falls within the normal bounds of average consumption and doesn’t rise to the level of meriting a special term for it.

shikitohno ,

I see what you’re saying, but I also think it’s actually a mark in Linux’ favor that is continues to run so well on older or underpowered hardware. It’s how I really got into it, being broke and able to eke out years more life on older computers when I could ill afford upgrades. These days, I’m happy that I can get off the upgrade treadmill for longer. The most demanding games I’ve installed are the Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters and Grandia. I’m not a programmer, don’t have to render graphical stuff for work, etc, so it’s pretty great that I don’t have to worry about my budget desktop being unusable in 4 years because the OS devs have made it a practical impossibility to run on older hardware. I’ve got 32GB of RAM, and my biggest threat to usability is leaving Firefox running with a ton of open tabs for weeks on end, which can conveniently be solved by closing Firefox and watching my RAM use plummet.

Not everyone is going to be a gamer, graphics designer or programmer that really needs the latest and greatest in hardware. In fact, I’d wager the majority of people won’t notice an improvement outside of a few cases. Upgrading from an HDD to an SSD, <16GB of RAM to >16GB of RAM and from an older graphics card to a newer one that supports 4K are pretty easy differences to note in normal use. Those aside, I think most people would be hard-pressed to identify an objective difference in the quality of their browsing and word processing experiences. Depending on how flexible people are with adapting to different workflows, even those could be minimized, to an extent. I have a desktop I bought second hand twenty years ago that served as my main computer into and beyond my initial forays in university. It has a whopping two cores, and I think I might have managed to get 16GB of RAM into it. It’d probably suck for web browsing and wouldn’t be terribly efficient for power use, but I bet you if I reinstalled things, it would work just fine for serving up my music library via mpd, playing it with ncmpcpp and writing term papers in Auctex, same as it did back then. Even if I put an older version of Windows on it like Windows 7, I bet it would struggle to run those same programs on top of the base OS. That’s legitimately impressive, when you think about it.

shikitohno ,

And if the demands of the protesters are unrealistic or out of the hands of the institution, then there is no other real recourse but a police response.

Generally speaking, the demands have been neither of these things, though. The media framing them in ridiculous terms like “Israeli-Hamas war protests” certainly doesn’t help anyone who is unaware to realize what the demands have been. They aren’t demanding the universities end the war somehow, but asking them to stop actively funding, assisting and profiting from the Israeli government and its policies, which is a pretty fair ask to make of most schools. Stop investing in Israeli companies and stop working with Israeli groups that contribute to the military, police and prisons. It’s not that hard.

Aside from the completely disproportionate police response, schools like Columbia don’t really help themselves with how they want to glorify their history of student activism to draw in new students, but turn their backs on those principles once the students are protesting in favor of causes that the school administration decide are the wrong causes.

I would go as far as to say this is a failure of the schools that the protests lasted as long as they did, not because of any particular fault of the protesters, but because the schools had largely made up their minds from the very start that they wouldn’t engage in good faith with the protesters due to financial and political interests. Even for the ones who have stated they’ll have talks are viewed as just stalling for time with it in the article.

shikitohno ,

True, but you also need to get enough people with the right skills/knowledge who want to live in West Virginia or Oklahoma when those same skills and knowledge likely make them highly employable in markets with more amenities and greater job opportunities without needing to uproot their life and move to a new town/city when the time comes to get a job with a new company.

shikitohno ,

Pretty sure they are saying that if you have 10 days PTO and you use one of them when sick, you no longer get a full two weeks’ vacation as you’ll have an uncovered day. With a full 10 days, I could clock out Friday evening, get on a flight to my vacation destination, catch a return flight the afternoon of the 19th and be back to work on the 20th. With only 9, I either need to work until next Monday and get on the plane that night, or cut my vacation short to fly back in the 16th and work the 17th. You effectively lose up to 3 whole days of downtime on vacation for being unable to work due to illness once a year.

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