AVincentInSpace

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/16695440

Thesis writing

Whenever Reddit hosted r/place, it got instantly dominated by streamers and massive clans covering the canvas in their insignia, anybody else who wanted to draw be damned. I remember in 2022 I was working with a smaller subreddit to try to put a 16x16 graphic somewhere unobtrusive and could scarcely put 3 pixels down before getting overwritten by the German flag that was already taking up 1/3 of the canvas.

On Canvas yesterday, somebody put up a ~50 pixels wide drawing of Princess Celestia fighting Nightmare Moon (something that wouldn't have survived 20 seconds on Reddit before being vandalized) and the people drawing the osu! logo went behind it!

I'm just kind of amazed and stunned and glad that we seem to be infinitely better at silently collaborating and not stepping on each other than the people on That Other Site who are obsessed with pointless internet clout.

Reddit users are called Redditors, Tumblr has Tumblrinas, Lemmy has Lemmings, ~~Twitter has Twits~~...

I feel like Beehaw is separate enough from the rest of the Fediverse both in terms of ideals and the space you're trying to create and in terms of actually being separate (defederated) from many of the most popular Lemmy instances to deserve its own demonym. Beehaw users aren't just any old Lemmings. We should have our own word. What do you think it should be?

I recently tried switching from Arch to NixOS and the experience I had can best be described as apalling. I have not had a new user experience this bad since my first dip into Ubuntu dependency hell back in 2016. I'd like to preface this by saying I've been a Linux user in one form or another for almost half my life at this point, and in that time this may well be the most I've struggled to get things to work.

Apparently they have this thing called home-manager which looks pretty cool. I'd like to give that a shot. Apparently I have to enable a new Nix channel before I can install it. I'm guessing that's the equivalent of a PPA? Well, alright. nix-channel --add ..., nix-channel --update (oh, so it waits until now to tell me I typo'd the URL. Alright), and now to run the installation command and... couldn't find home-manager? Huh?? I just installed it. I google the error message and apparently you have to reboot after adding a new nix-channel and doing nix-channel --update before it will actually take effect, and the home-manager guide didn't tell me that. Ah well, at least it works now.

I didn't want to wait for KDE and its 6 morbillion dependencies to download, so I opted for Weston. It wasn't a thing in configuration.nix (programs.weston.enable=true; threw an error and there was no page for it on the NixOS wiki), but it was available in nix-env (side note: why does nix-env -i take upwards of 30 seconds just to locate a package?), so I installed it, tried to run it, and promptly got an inscrutable "Permission denied" error with one Google result that had gone unresolved. Oh well, that's alright, I guess that's not supported just yet -- I'll install Sway instead. Great, now I have a GUI and all I need is a browser. nix-env -i firefox gave me the firefox-beta binary which displayed the crash reporter before even opening a browser window. Okay, note to self: always use configuration.nix. One programs.firefox.enable=true; and one nixos-rebuild switch later, I'm off to the races. Browser is up and running. Success! Now I'd like to install a Rust development environment so I can get back to work. According to NixOS wiki, I can copy paste this incantation into a shell.nix file and have rustup in there. Cool. After resolving a few minor hangups regarding compiler version, manually telling rustc where the linker is, and telling nix-shell that I also need cmake (which was thankfully pretty easy), I'm met with a "missing pkg-config file for openssl" error that I have absolutely no idea how to begin to resolve.

I'm trying to stick with it, I really am -- I love the idea that I can just copy my entire configuration to a brand new install by copying one file and the contents of my home directory and have it be effectively the same machine -- but I'm really struggling here. Surely people wouldn't rave about NixOS as much as they do if it was really this bad? What am I doing wrong?

Also unrelated but am I correct in assuming that I cannot install KDE without also installing the X server?

I've been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to "voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism" and "the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic" and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.

More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they're replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.

It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling -- in retrospect I'm pretty sure I could've built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that's what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) -- and the only reason I'm not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.

I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?

I don't like Biden either, but anyone with half a brain knows there are two choices in the 2020 election. If we had a sane voting system, voting third party might be worth it, but as it stands, no one but you knows your favorite candidate exists and unless you want to become their campaign manager that will still be true in November. Even if you did, and even if you convinced two thirds of the people who would otherwise have voted for Biden to vote for your chosen candidate instead, Trump would still win because half the country voted for him and your guy only got a third. If you vote third party you might as well stay home.

Not voting isn't going to stop the genocide in Gaza. The US will continue to funnel them arms no matter which candidate wins this November. Trump practically campaigns on how much he hates the Jews and he's publicly told Israel to "finish up their war". He'll also make life a living hell for anyone who isn't a straight cisgender male back here at home.

A vote for a candidate is not an endorsement of them or their policies, it's a statement that you like their policies more than the other guy's, and "sticking it to liberals" and "refusing to support genocide" (that's not what voting for Biden is doing, by the way -- a vote for either candidate is a vote for genocide and a vote for neither is an endorsement of both) is not more important than keeping the furthest right politician America has ever seen out of office.

How incredibly privileged do you have to be to see an entire national election as what will happen in the Middle East and ignore Trump's campaign promises to wipe transgender Americans off the map, and further, to not realize that the same thing will happen in the Middle East regardless of which candidate wins?

I hate Biden as much as every other leftist here. But I'll still vote for him because Trump is worse. If there's a single bone in your body that cares about the lives of your trans friends you will too.

Sauce (Nitter link) is @YateWilliams on B*rdapp

no but seriously how am i supposed to find enough funny memes in the specific 196 genre to post one every time before i leave

Source: https://xcancel.com/Jay%5C_RGonzales/status/1746217816158789849