merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on It's a fun new game 1 day ago:
Because it would be nice to have a card number that looked plausible that could be used in movies. Imagine if every phone number in a movie had to be (555) 555-5555. It would break your suspension of disbelief.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 2 days ago:
Too bad the Visa and Mastercard ones are so obviously fake.
- Comment on It's a fun new game 2 days ago:
It doesn’t seem to be the case, but it would be interesting if there were CC numbers that were meant to be used in movies, similar to how 555-XXXX phone numbers are never real.
- Comment on Anon is looking for a new video game 6 days ago:
What exactly are you doing with this headset? Are you putting it on the zombie and putting on Joe Rogan’s podcast until the Zombie’s remaining brains melt?
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 1 week ago:
There’s a reason I didn’t say “hairs”. I believe he has one and it gets wrapped around and around and around and around and around…
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 1 week ago:
It’s going to take a while to weed all the competent people out of the secret service.
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 1 week ago:
Many countries saw the US as an ally, they don’t anymore.
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 1 week ago:
What world do you live in where you don’t understand that the US has many enemies?
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 1 week ago:
He’d know what it would do to his hair, he’d never risk that.
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 1 week ago:
What country would want him shot? He’s destroying the US more effectively than any enemy could ever hope to do.
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
No, only in Quebec. There’s a bit of French spoken in Ontario (especially on the border with Quebec), and maybe 30% of the population in New Brunswick, but in other provinces it’s not even the second most spoken language.
For example, Manitoba’s most widely spoken languages are 1M English, 33k Tagalog, 30k Punjabi, 19k German and 15k French.
- Comment on How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy? 1 week ago:
I don’t think it’s at all likely. Trump knows he’s hated, and he isn’t about to go and do a parade in a convertible. More importantly, the secret service knows he’s hated and know they screwed up huge in letting someone take a shot at him, so they’ve dialed security up to 11.
Reagan and JFK were shot at a time when they had extremely high approval ratings. It was probably harder for the secret service to stay focused and for everyone to take threats seriously when that was the case.
This isn’t a Hollywood movie where a billionaire can go on the dark web and hire The Jackal or something. If they were to try to place a hit, most of The Jackals out there are probably feds posing as hitmen.
But, let’s say somehow a billionaire could find people willing to make the attempt. Trying to assassinate the US president is a suicide mission. If someone tries to do it as a lone gunman, they’re going up against the entire secret service. They may get the attack in, but they’re almost certainly not going to get away. If it’s a group of attackers, the more people, the more communications, the more communications, the more opportunities for the NSA to spot them.
And, this is one time we don’t have to worry about nation-states attacking the president. The US is punching itself in the dick over and over right now. If you’re someone who wants the US to fail, you just have to stand by and watch. In fact, if an enemy’s surveillance of the US turned up a plan to kill Trump, they’d probably warn the secret service to make sure Trump stays in power as long as possible.
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
Whatever you say, bud.
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
I’m not defending taco bell, I’m just saying that they serve tacos. Why are you so convinced that they don’t?
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
I have relatives in Mexico, I visit regularly and we go for tacos all the time. There are lots of varieties of different kinds of tacos. Meat-stuffed tacos are not the norm in Mexico. Most of them only have a little meat and a lot of sauce. That’s what allows them to be sold incredibly cheaply. You can easily get a dozen tacos from the taco stand on the corner for what one taco will cost at taco bell. Because they’re so cheap, you can get a lot of variety from just one visit: suadero, lengua, carnitas, etc.
Taco Bell isn’t as good, and the flavours aren’t completely authentic, but it still obviously a taco. When my cousin visits Canada/USA he prefers to get burritos (from Chipotle) because he can’t get them where he lives in Mexico and he loves them. He doesn’t get tacos because they’re tacos, and he can get much better ones in Mexico.
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a joke or something, but yes. More than 90% of the people in Quebec speak French. More than 50% speak English, but for most it’s a second language.
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
Taco Bell sells tacos that are reasonably close to Mexican street tacos. Obviously not as good, but it’s a small soft tortilla with fillings, that’s what you get in Mexico too.
Burritos are also Mexican, though they’re not as common across the whole country as tacos. The modern burrito comes from Ciudad Juarez right on the border with Texas.
Most of the rest of the Taco Bell menu isn’t authenitcally Mexican, but I’d say their core menu items are tacos and burritos.
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
They’re not at all snobby. The French in France are snobby. If you try to speak to them in French and it isn’t Parisian-style french, they’ll try to switch languages on you because they can’t bear to have their dear language mangled like that.
The Quebecois aren’t snobby, they’re just obnoxious about preserving their language and culture. And it gets pretty absurd. Around the world stop signs say “STOP” even in French speaking countries. But, in Quebec they mostly say “Arret”, and when a local English-speaking community has stop signs that say stop, vigilantes sometimes change them to Arret.
- Comment on Genius 1 week ago:
Nope. The Canadian government just sighs and wishes Quebec wouldn’t be such a problem.
- Comment on ain't your buddy, pal! 1 week ago:
Florida has a few bros.
- Comment on ain't your buddy, pal! 1 week ago:
People in Georgia and Washington State apparently don’t have friends.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
The thing with autocorrect is that you don’t have to accept the correction.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
If it’s a her, you mean fiancée, fiancé is used only for men. And, it’s basically a chromebook in how she uses it. But, chromebooks are designed so that you never have to do any system administration. You never have to upgrade drivers or figure out how to get to the next release.
She probably hasn’t had to deal with that yet, but eventually the system will have to be updated. Over time, cruft piles up and makes it harder and harder to upgrade and manage. Atomic distributions are designed to be much more like chromebooks. Someone else manages the upgrades and the tricky choices, and then you just install their base image.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
Until I realised I should just work inside a container.
Yeah, it’s a game changer. Especially if you have different projects on the go. I’m used to having to deal with an ugly path with all kind of random things in it because I need them for one project. But, with containers / distroboxes / toolbx you can keep those changes isolated.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
Yeah, I only use flatpak for GUI apps that don’t need any special handling. To be fair, that’s a decent number of the things I use most often: Firefox, Thunderbird, Signal, Kodi, Discord, Gimp, VLC. I think it’s also how I installed some themes for KDE / Plasma.
Console stuff I’ve either done in a distrobox using the conventions of that OS (apt for the Ubuntu one, DNF for the Fedora one), or I’ve used homebrew. But, I haven’t used too much homebrew because I want my “normal” console to be as unchanged as possible.
There are a few things I’ve used distrobox-export to make available outside the distrobox.
It took me a little while to understand how you’re supposed to think about the system, but now that I think I get it, I really like it. My one frustration is that there’s an nVidia driver bug that’s affecting me, and nVidia has been unable to fix it for a few months. I think I’d be in exactly the same situation with a traditional distro. The difference is that if they ever fix it, I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks until the fix makes it to the Bazzite stable build. I suppose I could switch to Bazzite testing and get it within days of it being fixed instead of weeks. Apparently just use a “rebase” command and reboot. But, I’m hesitant to do that because other than the nVidia driver, everything’s so stable.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
So, there are multiple ways of installing things. For GUI apps the standard way is flatpaks. Some non-GUI things are installed that way, but it’s less common.
For CLI apps, homebrew is installed by default and it’s recommended as a way to install CLI things.
The method I like for apps that have a lot of interdependencies is to use a distrobox. If you want a development environment where multiple apps all talk to each-other, you can isolate them on their own distrobox and install them however you like there.
I currently have a distrobox running ubuntu that I use for a kubernetes project. In that distrobox I install anything I need with apt, or sometimes from source. Within that kubernetes project I use mise-en-place to manage tools just for that particular sub-project. What I like about doing things this way is that when I’m working on that project I have all the tools I need, and don’t have to worry about the tools for other projects. My base bazzite image is basically unchanged, but my k8s project is highly customized.
If you really want to, you can still install RPMs as overlays to the base system, it’s just not recommended because that slows down upgrades.
More details here:
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
Has your fiancé had to update drivers? Has he had to upgrade to a new release? Has he had to figure out how to install a version of something that isn’t in the Debian stable repositories?
If the only application your fiancé uses is Firefox, then he might go a long time before having any kind of problem. It all depends on how he uses it.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
Debian is fine as an introduction to Linux, if that’s what you want. But, as a beginner, you’re going to screw up, and Debian doesn’t do anything to protect you from that.
Atomic distributions let you use Linux but make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. It’s much harder to break the system in a way you can’t just reboot to fix it.
It all depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to learn Linux by using it, then by all means, go for a traditional distribution. Debian is nice, but I’d go for Ubuntu. But, if your goal is to have a stable system that you can’t screw up as a beginner I’d go with an atomic distribution. If your goal is to play games, Bazzite is hard to beat.
You can still learn Linux if you use an atomic distribution. Configuring and using the desktop environment is basically the same. But, you don’t need to worry about your drivers, and you don’t install packages the traditional way. If you want to learn those things, you can run a VM or a distrobox.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 week ago:
I completely disagree. Debian is not beginner-friendly. Go with Bazzite if your focus is gaming.
It is a gaming-focused distribution. It’s also an “atomic” distribution, which basically means it’s really hard to break it. It’s more like Android or IOS where the OS and base system are managed by someone else. They’re read-only so you can’t accidentally break them.
For example, instead of trying to manage your own video card drivers, they come packaged with the base system image, and they’re tested to make sure they work with all the other base components.
I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s, so I’ve run my share of distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Even for someone experienced, atomic distributions are great. But, for a newcomer they’re so much better.
- Comment on At this point I think I would 1 week ago:
I don’t know if it’s exactly the same, but they definitely have a limited number of loans before the library is forced to buy another copy.
Here’s an article from 2023 by a librarian with more details:
Other titles are metered. This is essentially a lease. Libraries purchase a title for time, 12 to 24 months or by checkouts, usually 26. When the terms of the lease expire the item is no longer available and has to be repurchased.