• 1 Post
  • 96 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle
rss












  • Woah there chief! Lemme tell everyone a little story…

    Back when I was on Reddit, I followed any and all Trump news (and especially Jan 6 investigation news) on an unhealthily regular basis. These kinds of Eeyore comments were extremely common and usually voted up to pepper through the top ⅓ of all the ‘best’ comments. It got so bad that some subreddits explicitly banned them, though it didn’t really end the practice.

    Then Russia invaded Ukraine. All the disparaging comments ceased immediately. The frequency absolutely fell off a cliff, because all those comments were being served up to us by Russian bots. Russia wants nothing more than to further destabilize the US as well as any other democratic institution.

    I’m not saying this comment right here is a Russian bot, but it’s definitely doing a Russian bot’s job by trying to undermine any confidence we might have in the concepts of justice or democracy.





  • I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I’d heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that’ll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.

    I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.




  • What amazes me is that we pretty much are converting, just very slowly, one thing at a time. In school we all learn the metric system, and it’s used all over in industry and government. At the supermarket, everything is labeled in both systems, and some things have started trending towards metric as the default. We are all used to the 2L bottle size. The old fifth of a gallon bottle, though some still call it that, has been replaced by the 750ml bottle. More recently the 20oz bottle has been phased into the .5L, mainly–I’m sure–to shrink the amount while keeping prices the same, but still it’s progress in this regard.

    I think the transformation will be effectively complete when highway signs use kilometers. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.