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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I mean that an individual folder will always look the same (consistent), and also look distinctly different from any other folder (unique) if that’s how you arranged it. So you could identify a folder instantly.

    Everything in list view looks the same at a glance, and most file managers don’t retain a folder window’s size and placement. Modern macOS kiiiind of does but you have to fight it if you don’t want a single-window browsing UI.


  • The last time I found icon view useful was in Mac OS 9. There were three main characteristics that made it useful that no current systems have AFAIK:

    1. The icon grid was tight (32 pixels) and you could either snap items to that grid or place them freely.

    2. Window sizes and places were directly associated with folders. (There was no “browser-style” single-window mode.)

    3. File names used dynamic spacing. Longer names would occupy multiple grid spaces as needed.

    These factors meant that every folder had a consistent and potentially unique size, placment, and layout.

    OS X took the Finder and either ruined or neglected everything good about it. Windows explorer has always been garbage. Never found a Linux file manager with a compelling icon view either (though to be fair, I’ve never looked all that hard). The lack of system-level metadata for layout kind of mandates an abstraction between a directory and its display.



  • Nobody should feel a strong need to upgrade after only two generations. Same deal with most tech like GPUs and CPUs.

    I use my phone a lot and my Pixel 7 is fine. The primary factors driving my last couple upgrades were battery degradation and software support. Neither should be a big problem with a Fairphone.

    I’m also trying to decide whether to stick with the Pixel/GrapheneOS ecosystem or go for Fairphone.

    How hard/expensive was it to replace your battery? I looked on iFixIt and it seemed a lot harder than my orevious phones.





  • 20 years ago I would have taken this as satire. Today, reality is far more absurd.

    They clearly don’t understand what pride is about, or why it’s needed in the first place. I don’t go around showing my “straight pride” because there is literally nobody out there trying to make me ashamed of being straight. Never in my entire life have I felt unsafe because I was straight. I never had to worry about my family rejecting me if they learned I was straight. Being straight has never affected my housing security. I have not been subjected to verbal and physical assault because I am straight. Nobody has ever, to the best of my knowledge, been sent a brainwashing camp for being straight. There is not a single country on earth where it is illegal to be straight, and there never has been.

    You cannot say any of those things about being gay. That’s why gay pride matters. These are not problems of the past. They are all problems today.









  • There are two potential show-stoppers.

    1. Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.

    2. Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.



  • It ranges from “automatic” to “infuriating”.

    If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.

    Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.

    If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).