Just a basic programmer living in California

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Cake day: 23. februar 2024

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  • hallettj@leminal.spacetoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux Users- Why?
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    I also use Niri. Previously I basically used maximimized windows on dual monitors. But I really liked the idea of switching to one ultrawide display. Maximized windows wouldn’t work well in that setup. Tiling hadn’t really worked for me because you end up with a screen full of awkwardly skinny or short windows, or windows hidden away in tabs. I also didn’t like the idea of managing floating windows with… a mouse.

    So I looked for a better option. I found PaperWM, and I loved it! Exactly what I needed! But it has a number of quirks, being an extension that entirely reworks Gnome’s window management. For a long time I wished for a native scrolling wm. And then Niri came along! And it’s so polished!


  • You might be interested to learn some history of societies without state-issued currency. The book “Debt: The First 5000 years” by David Graeber has lots to say about pre-modern systems of account. I’m aware there are some criticisms of the book so I don’t want present it as absolute truth - but it is an interesting on read, and it cites lots of anthropological studies.

    One of the points of the book - and I see there are also other anthropologists who take this view - is there is no evidence that there has ever been a barter economy. Economics curriculum typically talks about prehistoric barter as an introduction; but it looks like the barter story may have been made up by Adam Smith. Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” is highly insightful, and even predicts problems with capitalism that we currently face. But he probably didn’t have the anthropological background to write authoritatively about economies of prehistoric societies.

    Graeber does claim that there have been times when barter has been a stop-gap when there is a problem with money supply. So that’s a case where something like your app might come in,

    When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to. “In most of the cases we know about, [barter] takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don’t have a lot of it around.

    These were temporary situations. The fall of Rome probably seemed like the end of the world to some people at the time. But new societal structures and currencies filled the gaps.








  • Yes, but it’s the thought that counts. The Bastille had a history of being the place the government disappeared people to. Some of those were nobles who were treated very well. Others were regular people who were… not given the noble treatment.

    From what I understand Parisians didn’t know how much the prison population had dwindled. Either way, the Bastille was a symbol of oppression.

    Now tbf the people doing the storming were motivated to get in to grab the gunpowder that had been hoarded inside. But the unjust detentions were a part of it too.



  • For a moment I thought the lower image was from Les Misérables which would be a fitting singing tie-in. It would also be fitting because Bastille Day is coming up on Monday.

    Les Misérables depicts the June Rebellion which took place a month before the 43rd anniversary of Bastille Day. That would have been prominent in the minds of the people rebelling. Bastille Day is still celebrated as a critical point in the French Revolution when protesters stormed a detention center to free people who had been detained without due process.



  • I was keeping in mind the same caveat, that City of London ≠ Greater London. But still, cycling is up by a huge amount, and car traffic is down. So what they’re doing is working! It’s another example to point to to show that if you build cycling infrastructure people will use it.

    The video also spends a lot of time looking at ridership increases in Hackney. It’s another small part of Greater London (although much larger than City of London), but it’s more progress, and shows off strategies that are working in residential areas. It looks like Hackney has encouraged cycling by creating “low traffic neighborhoods”, where they use traffic filters to close residential streets to through-traffic.

    Sometimes you hear arguments against large investments in bike infrastructure along the lines of, “Biking works for Holland, but we don’t have a bike culture here.” Examples of cycling trending up in more places helps to make the case for infrastructure elsewhere.



  • hallettj@leminal.spacetoLinux@lemmy.mlOkay why is your distro the best?
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    10 dage siden

    Some more points about Nix:

    • It’s a fast way to get to a specific setup, like a particular DE or Vulkan gaming support, thanks to abstraction that NixOS modules provide
    • There are tons of packages
    • Because packages are installed by adding a config entry you don’t accumulate random software you forgot you installed
    • Immutable updates and rollbacks - this is similar to benefits of atomic ostree distros, but the nix solutions are more general, so you have one system that does more things with a consistent interface
      • in addition to updating the base system, rollbacks also roll back user-installed packages, and configurations if those are managed via Nix
      • devshells provide per-directory packages and configuration using the same package repos as the host system, without needing to manage docker images
    • Nix is portable - much of what it does on NixOS can also be used in other distros, or even on Macos or Windows with the Linux subsystem
      • Configurations often combine NixOS and Home Manager parts. The Home Manager part can be used à la carte on other OSes is a way that is fully isolated from the host OS package management. For example on Macos this is a much nicer alternative to Homebrew.
      • devshells also work on other OSes
    • similar to Guix - but NixOS uses systemd, and is (from what I understand) more tolerant of non-free software (whether these are pros or cons is up to individual interpretation)




  • Hey, I’m sorry that “Jesus Christ” as an expletive feels alienating to you. I hadn’t thought about that perspective. As a lifelong atheist my feeling is that Christianity, and by extension blasphemous expletives, are so thoroughly enmeshed in Western culture that that’s what comes out when I’m startled. I don’t feel like I’m using the words to show distaste for another group; I feel like the words are part of my culture even though I’m not religious. My guess is that saying"Jesus Christ" is generally not intended to be a statement on Christians. But I can see how someone who is religious might see it differently. I suppose lots of people see their relationship with Jesus as a part of their identity that distinguishes them from people who don’t believe, and from that perspective I can see how a perceived attack on Jesus feels like a personal attack.

    I’ll also mention that since I didn’t have a religious upbringing I was never taught to have any particular reaction to blasphemy, which tends to make me see those expletives as less-offensive alternatives to scatological or sexual expletives. I don’t have a good perspective of what such language feels like to someone who was taught that blasphemy is bad.

    And why not add one more paragraph - I agree that when I view him as a moral philosopher and proto-socialist I find a lot of what Jesus said and did to be admirable.