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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • You don’t think that many people build their own Windows PCs? Linux gaming isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things, and there’s plenty of people who dual boot for various reasons.

    I’d almost be willing to bet that there are more people who’ve installed Windows on their PC than there are people who’ve installed Linux from a pure numbers standpoint.




  • IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.

    Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.

    I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.


  • Since the mid-2000s, most companies expect everybody to be pseudo on-call at all times without any additional compensation thanks to cell phones and the internet making everybody reachable at any time. Your boss calling you after work, on the weekends, or while you’re on vacation to talk about work is normal and they expect you to be accessible at all hours of the day. At shittier jobs like retail, you can even expect to be called on your days off and asked to come in if somebody doesn’t show up or something, even in the middle of the day, and if you aren’t available or “flexible” you can expect it to negatively impact your job.

    At my first job for a small business, I didn’t take a vacation (not even a single day) in 10 years because the boss didn’t give us vacation days and instead said that anybody could take days off at anytime and he’d make the schedule work, but we were always understaffed and he’d make you feel guilty for taking days off. That’s closer to the norm these days in the US than the 6 weeks of vacation time that is the norm in Europe. Large companies are required to give you 2 weeks plus a handful of sick days, and that’s it.










  • Interestingly, underground lines aren’t feasible in my hometown because of how close the water table is to the surface. Any trench deep enough to bury cables in would have to worry about flooding with groundwater or saltwater in some places.

    The water table is so high that not only are there many places where basements would flood 100% of the year, but the majority of homes still have septic tanks instead of town sewage lines, and you can find houses where the lawn has been raised up with 3 or 4 feet of concrete to raise the septic tank to comply with modern regulations to avoid contaminating the groundwater supply.


  • There is an alternative that I wish I could think of the name of that communities have been using for a number of years now to set up cheap, small-scale satellite internet networks. I looked into it once as an alternative for my neighborhood to dealing with the bullshit that is Comcast and Verizon, and ended up getting an ad for milsec strategic level network infrastructure from Boeing or something. Regardless, it’s a known and proven alternative that’s cheaper than the big guys and has hit a point where some places have set it up as a part of local government run infrastructure.