OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it’s very up to date yet reliable, package management doesn’t require me to get my head around anything complicated, automatic btrfs snapshots allow me to rollback if I mess anything up, and I like KDE Plasma and the YaST utilities.

For me the recommendations have been circling the drain for a while. It’s just the same songs over and over again, and it seems to have decided that I only like ambient electronic music and indie pop, both of which I actually find quite boring. No matter what I do, and no matter how much I like songs in other genres, that’s what it serves me, along with the occasional '80s hit because it has figured out I’m old. It was good for a few years but then seemed to get stuck in a rut.

Hairdryers are quite loud too. It’s a stretch to describe even the sonic boom as “silent”.

Yes, I feel like Spotify’s algorithms have become good at giving more of the same but worse for discovery. I don’t find as many new artists as I used to. And some songs just come up again and again, which I guess are paid promotions.

I’ve mostly switched to Qobuz, which doesn’t have as many auto-generated playlists as Spotify, but can auto-play similar music once your selection has played. Qobuz’s emphasis is more on listing albums you might be interested in and having you choose which ones to listen to. I’m discovering more new music this way than through Spotify.

The headline is misleading. It’s quieter, but far from silent.

You have to factor in the cost of living under a fascist autocracy too, where you can get kidnapped and sent to a secret prison for life because you didn’t respect the leader enough, even though the leader is a corrupt moron. Which is a pretty damn high cost, and $10,000 doesn’t even begin to balance it out.

“Oh shit, this is bikers against child abuse? Sorry, I’m in the wrong room.”

I often see people saying Linux is difficult to install and use, and when people ask for more details it turns out they’re describing an experience from 15-20 years ago, and they haven’t tried using it since. There are several very easy distros around now.

I think people that talk like this overstate the difficulty of Linux. There are easy distros that won’t trouble the average user.

And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.

I don’t think this is true unless you’re digging in. For the average person doing everyday things, using a Linux Mint installation isn’t going to be any more complicated than using Windows. Just different, with some new patterns to learn. I don’t know about MacOS since I’ve never felt moved to pay the entry fee to use it.

Yes, apparently their protocol sends everything to every node, so it would overwhelm anything but a very powerful and expensive server. The Fediverse’s ActivityPub protocol is more efficient and only sends traffic where it is needed.

Not sure he even knew in the first place.

All the US horse exporters are busily painting stripes on their animals right now.

We need more of this in all countries.

Meanwhile Trump is doing his best to force everyone to use coal. Maybe it’s an employment program for the under-10s, with so many new chimney sweeps needed.

Superficial? Quite possibly.

He has really changed a lot too.

Many conservative American women strive to look like this, not just the news anchors. Among the women in orbit around Trump there are several with this same look. It’s all very artificial, with lots of makeup and plastic surgery, but apparently it’s an ideal in Republican circles.

I don’t believe it’s good faith. Google is trying to curry favor with the emperor, and if that means throwing women and trans people under the bus then so be it.

It’s worth reading the whole article, because it makes pretty clear that it was Israeli forces that did this, that they initially struck the ambulances and then proceeded to execute the people in them, and that there were other slaughters of civilians involved in the same action.