The more you know! 💫

Powerful oxidizers are dangerous stuff!

One I’ve learned about recently (and used) is potassium permanganate. One of its uses is for improving water quality in fish ponds. It oxidizes basically all organic matter. It can simultaneously knock out algae, bacteria, parasites, hormones, and other excess organic waste. And the pathogens it kills can’t build up resistance to it like they would an antibiotic or poison, so it can be used preventively without creating stronger bugs. You can’t really build resistance to BURNING outside video games.

But that also means that if you add too much, you can just as easily sterilize all life in a body of water, including fish and anything else you want to keep.

AND it means you need to be careful when handling it. If you burn your eyes or your lungs, it makes them stop working!

A full English breakfast ain’t shit once you’ve had the full platypus breakfast!

Fair enough. Thanks!

Fortunately with Linux, choice is the name of the game!

I’m curious why you wouldn’t recommend mint. Is it due to some kind of problem, or is it just a personal taste thing?

I use mint daily so if there are potential issues I just want to know!

I might have the exception to this. I’m able to dual boot my work laptop, as can the other engineers in my department. So it’s effectively a Linux machine under my exclusive administration. The only request from my IT department was how to format the host name.

I’m still not taking chances with that thing though, even when on my home network. The rules exist even if there’s a 99.99% chance they won’t be enforced. I have nothing to gain from doing nefarious shit on it just to prove a point, lol.

We should all be decent, empathetic, and compassionate enough people that the demographic breakdown doesn’t create a negative effect like that.

I’m one of the many cis dudes here, and I just cannot get offended when it gets pointed out that other dudes can be assholes. Or that other Americans can be assholes. Or other humans, for that matter.

Can’t take calls? Don’t threaten ME with a good time!

This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.

Yeah it’s right up there on the list of what shareholders need to survive:

Water

Food

Solid CAGR of investment portfolio

Shelter

Human contact

Etc

(CAGR being Compound Annual Growth Rate)

That’s a good point. AIs/LLMs will exist and will necessarily learn from copyrighted materials without traceability back to the copyright owners to compensate them.

Sounds to me like AIs/LLMs can’t and shouldn’t be proprietary systems owned by private entities for profit, then.

They have LMDE that they maintain so that Mint can continue if Ubuntu ever goes away. And of course, some people choose to just run LMDE now.

Mint is great.

I use Linux Mint cinnamon on a daily basis, typically with one or two command line terminals open at all times (one normal and one in a docker container), and with some kind of code always open too. I use 4 monitors as well, which the same machine can’t handle when I boot into windows.

No apologies and no regrets. Being user friendly doesn’t mean it’s limited. It uses Ubuntu and Debian stuff after all, just with the controversial Ubuntu stuff removed.

The size of Twitter’s user base and its ubiquitous use by celebrities and the media gave the platform an air of legitimacy that is what Musk vaporized his billions to get. He obviously didn’t value the brand or the workforce.

We need that false sense of legitimacy to keep getting chipped away in the eyes of mainstream society.

And WSL is pretty good according to one of the other guys in my department that’s been using it.

The problem for Microsoft is that my entire user experience is better when I boot straight into Linux and use all their software (except vscode) in browser tabs.

If you have a USB stick handy, you could probably be dual booting into Linux Mint within an hour.

No need to fully learn Linux before moving to that. You can do your research using Firefox on your Linux desktop. And by “research” I mean googling/DDGing things as you need to know how to do them. It starts to stick.

Perfectly put. The product is great and I love how it democratizes “being on TV” and lets some people make a living doing their own thing.

But I do not like where YouTube’s cut of that ad/sub money goes, and the enshittification pushed into it.

Unfortunately, YouTube is not unique in that regard. It’s a sucky fact of life that just about any complex product you spend money on will benefit a collection of rich sociopaths skimming as much as possible from the incomes of the people actually making the thing. Gotta vote with your wallet where you can, and vote the traditional way for the systemic issues.

I’m getting vibes of “Yet you participate in society. Curious!”

Can’t disagree there. It’s not like Google is trustworthy or resists the govt/CIA. But I do still think the official change in ownership would hit people differently.

Unfortunately one of the big ideas republicans have conditioned half our population into believing is that government itself is basically a flawed idea and that our government will not ever be able to do anything right. So it would be a tough sell to say the least.

And also as an American, I imagine many people around the world would not be thrilled with the prospect of the US government owning the web browser they use.