The Dash Berlin ASOT 600 set (specifically Sofia) got me through my dissertation writing. Even now, if I sit down with a coffee and turn on the set, within the couple minutes I am completely in the zone for working. It’s like a brain hack for me.

I also like the Music for programming site (specifically RITES) which is also good for some focus music.

I’ve tried to get some folks to post their dissertation writing music and form a massive playlist, as it seems really common to have some certain song or album. I’m sure it’s similar for other intense work flows too.

I read left hand of darkness and loved it. It was my first Le Guin. I had heard a lot about the gender themes, and was surprised to find how it does not it you over the head at all. It was a great adventure and just really stuck on your head thinking. The dispossessed was another one like that. Its message is a little bit more obvious, but is an incredibly well built world that really is anarchist. All of her works I’ve read so far are great to read. There are extremely strong themes, but she seems to present it a bit more as a take it or leave it approach than a lot of the other (cough, Heinlein) I grew up reading.

He does get a bit ranty. I still appreciate his take though. Some of the LLMs are super helpful for me for some tasks, but the hype cycle for AI is really a lot to take and it does warrant some actual pushback against it. I can tell I’m becoming more of an old man, but it’s nice to have someone else confirm how bad the Internet is becoming. It’s almost like a hazy dream for me of back in the early days when it was just people sharing weird stuff with each other and not the active battle to fend off ads and scummy sites to find things.

That’s almost the exact opposite experience for me. Maybe there’s been a more recent update, but I remember searching for specific phrases in decade old messages and the gmail (web site) search would just flat out refuse to show things but I could find them from my phone. I’ll try again, but to be honest, I’ve somewhat given up on google search in general for results that aren’t recent.

The search has been broken for me for a while. I get better results in the iOS mail app. Searching from within gmail will just flat out not show old results.

Similarly, in the midst of historic layoffs in the tech industry, no one blames the CEO for horrible management leading to the over hiring or bad management that led to this. O one blames Zuckerberg for renaming his company and betting an an absurdity that is already being scraped off of PR releases. All because some growth number goes up. It’s insanity.

I have an lg tv that I route through a pihole that blocks most stuff. I wasn’t going to connect it to the internet, but it had airplay support. I think I’m using this list: https://github.com/TheShawnMiranda/LG-TV-Ad-Block

Snaps just act strange. They update in weird ways, it’s always automatic and it’s confusing how to keep something in a version that won’t auto update. It’s been a bad experience for me.

I used to go backpacking in the gorge like every spring break through hs and college, and I loved seeing Miguel stickers show up all over the country. An ale 8 and a slice of Miguel’s is a fantastic way to end a trip

I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.

Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. 2-in-1 from dell.

Touch mostly worked fine. Xournalpp detected pen fine too. When I flipped the screen all the way back, things get wonky though and I have to reset the Wacom drivers. Sometimes it’s fine. I also had to write a xrandr script to rotate the screen to portrait.

In general, it’s mostly alright. I hear that Wayland is much better but I haven’t tried it yet. I do use the stylus quite often for marking up PDFs though and it works well.

This has been my main observation with Amazon over the past few years. It’s just cheap knockoffs that have gamed the system. It’s frustrating to shop there and a dice roll whenever you order something.

It’s been getting absolutely worse and worse with hardware as they shovel crap at you and then also expect you to buy subscriptions to make it usable. Keysight/agilent/ whoever they are had been really annoying about this.

We have a piece of test equipment that runs windows 2000. It has to be quarantined on its own subnet isolated from the rest of the network.

There are also Mario videos and Suika. It’s not just nips or Bloodbath the Incinerator HD.

It’s hard parenting because the platforms change quickly and navigating when and how to have impactful conversations with kids is hard.

Not OP, but I’m excited about the baked in tiling. Nervous about Wayland as I think I have some stuff that will break, but we’ll see.

I completely agree. I bought one in the preorder days and was a bit nervous. It came in, and it was so much better than I thought. It works and it works well, and is fun to use. I’ve connected to a tv and done “real” work on it to boot. It is some hardware I highly recommend to anyone if they can afford it. The other cool thing is my whole library of steam games are there and still playable.

Yeah, it is a bit strange. That was a central hub of where I got news, jokes, stayed connected with internet culture. That’s mostly gone now. So many things feel splintered anymore. I’m old so I don’t keep up with the latest games, but that feels all over the place—too many games, too many communities. Streaming/TV stuff—very few people I know watch the same things I do, and I miss the joy of watching something new and then talking about it the next day moments. Worse now is that most people can’t even access the same content since there are too many services. Music is strange now too. Partly, I’m just not connected to pop culture, but also everyone is listening to VERY different stuff (referring to college-age folks—most other millennials I know just listen to NPR, podcasts and 90s mixes). There doesn’t seem to be any monolithic music culture at all anymore. Everyone has super customized spotify playlists. I know a big part is just millennial aging, but also reddit kept me connected to broader things, and now its just like everything else and enshittified and disappearing. sigh … get off my lawn I guess :(

Oh I agree it would be utter chaos! The idea that “why does it take an act of congress to change time” on the one hand sounds crazy, but I think what I’m trying to point out is why it takes an actual act of congress — we are coordinating lots of services and activities, and no one wants to descend back to the days of no one agreeing on noon!

I completely understand what you’re saying. It works for synchronizing well as things run on an absolute time. However, you are still going to do a localization shift, and you end right back up with time zones.

In your example, you work at 1500. Cool. I need to coordinate with Bob from Bulgaria. Its also 1500 there. Is he working? Who knows. I need to get out ye old solar map and find out. Or, I’m flying to Tokyo. My body is going to follow its diurnal cycle and want to wake up when the sun rises. We are still going to have a local abstraction of what the day hours are that shift with respect to longitude. A universal time doesn’t get rid of that. I agree that flight coordinating would be easier. But, if I know I want to arrive somewhere in the morning, right now I sort by AM arrival, and boom I’m done. In a UTC system, I now have to go look up the solar morning hours for my destination sort by time, find the window I want to arrive in, and then I can be good. I still might not have a good sense of what is super early versus what is closer to middle of the day.