I’ve never talked to an Arch user about Linux, so I dunno how toxic their community is. But I do read Arch documentation, and it’s fantastic. Arch’s documentation has (for me, anyway) taken the place that used to be held by the old HOWTOs back in the early days.

The kind of cooperation required to accomplish this doesn’t speak of a toxic community to me. I didn’t watch the video since I don’t watch YouTube on my phone, but I’m guessing it’s not the Arch community that has issues but annoying teenage “I’m more 1337 than you” jackwads that are the turd in the Linux punchbowl. Those little cretins are drawn to distros like Arch because they like feeling superior to the “normie” users.

I should know, I used to be like that thirty years ago. Most of us grow out of it after we start getting laid.

Install xterm. Bam, you’ve got sixel support.

So it did. That’s interesting.

It was the fact that they used RPMs that made me think they were a Red Hat derivative. I didn’t care for Red Hat (I ran Slackware back then, switching to Debian around Hamm) so I never gave them a chance. Pity.

It never caught on in the states.

IIRC it was originally based on Red Hat (back when Red Hat Linux was a thing), wasn’t it?

Instead of Satanic rituals, it’s improvisation and arithmetic.

Not in my experience. It’s all just “go out and vote!”

I’m not arguing against people being informed. I’m arguing against uninformed people being encouraged to vote.

High voter turnout does change the results in many cases, but generally that’s simple negative feedback. Average Americans didn’t have to be well informed to vote against Trump in 2020, for instance - Trump saw to that when he made an ass of himself publicly on a regular basis. And people notice things like wars and recessions and whatnot. That’s not the same as an informed voter base.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating tests or anything for voting. We’ve seen what that leads to.

I’m thinking more along the lines of self-determination. If someone has no interest or knowledge of politics, they should refrain from voting.

Now, continue that train of thought. Imagine that the person not voting is one of the politically ignorant mentioned in the quote.

What are they going to do at the polls? Are they going to add signal or noise? What is accomplished by them choosing a candidate at random?

Letting people who are informed make decisions for you happens all the time. Engineers and safety officers determine speed limits. Architects determine how the buildings you enter are constructed. Panels of electricians, firemen, and manufacturers determine the electrical codes that keep your house from randomly catching fire or electrocuting you. Interested people organize community events you attend. What makes politics any different?

My personal ideal would be that only the informed vote. Anyone has the right to become involved, as well as the right to abstain and accept the choice of their peers. Unfortunately, many people form their political opinions in echo chambers and are less informed than they think.

It’s just little girls that will try to eat those. There seems to be no gender barrier to toddlers trying to eat little plastic pieces like this.

Edit: bah, I meant it’s not just little girls.

Turns out being an idiot isn’t a barrier to home ownership.

As long as they don’t vote, who cares? It’s the imbeciles that vote that cause the problems.

I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.

It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.

You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.

Yes.

Only for lazy shits.

I had a gallon bottle that I used. I only filled it completely maybe twice in seven years. I’d pull over on the shoulder in the country and pour it out the passenger window. Give it a good rinse every few days and a thorough washing every month or so and it wouldn’t even stink.

Even for the people that use small bottles and throw them out, they can save them long enough to throw them away at a truck stop. There’s no excuse for throwing your full piss bottles and other trash on the side of the road.

This pissed me off so much when I was a trucker.

Businesses don’t have to let you park in their lots. Cities can put up no truck parking signs. States can restrict parking on entrance ramps.

Stop giving them excuses to do so! You’re just making things worse for drivers out of sheer laziness. Truck stops let you throw away your trash in dumpsters.

I miss Wordperfect, although I don’t miss the templates everyone had on their keyboards.

I mostly wish Word had “show codes.”

That’s why I use it too. Netscape was hopelessly outdated and Internet Explorer didn’t run on Linux. Once Mozilla was stable enough to use, I switched. I’ve never had a reason to change.

Lennart Poettering has entered the chat