I can’t stand ads. It’s even worse on TV when they yell them at you. So I actually stopped watching TV in 2009 because I couldn’t stop the ads, and I was tired to have the TV trying to convince me to buy a car every 15 minutes.

If I want to watch something that was on TV, I download it from… * the internet *.

My parents still watch TV and just let the ads blast in the background, and we need to yell over them to talk. I hate it. Then they’re like “oh it’s just like in the ad”. I don’t know how they can tolerate this. I did when I was younger but when I realized that the TV was trying to sell me twice a car in 15 minutes, or about 8 times an hour, I couldn’t help but notice and it’s just really annoying.

I face the same specific issue. I started with the French (Canada) layout years ago but now Windows sets the default to Multilingual/CSA because it has been made the official one by the government a number of years ago.

So now everyone that got used the “old” one has to fiddle with keyboard settings every time they use a new Windows session/computer.

And it’s not exactly a breeze to switch, as Windows often keeps the multilingual one and switches back to it when you use a different application. Gotta make sure to delete the multilingual and leave only one layout. It’s a real annoyance.

Why is it sad? No lawn to care about. No snow to remove in winter. No garbage day. No electricity bill. No roof or windows to change. No water heater to worry about.

I much prefer to rent than be stuck owning a condo where I have to deal with the other owners and plan maintenance. And I wouldn’t want an “affordable” house that is much too big, in a suburb or in the middle of nowhere, where a car would be a necessity, and another thing to own (or rather pay for).

As far as I am concerned, owning a home is a social construct. A goal imposed on us by capitalism. Our collective dream, should be to own a home in the middle of nowhere before we’re too old to have a family, with obviously, a car! But I never wanted to have a “death pledge”, nor a family, nor a house, nor a stupid condo. Renting is perfectly fine for a whole lot of people. It’s not something to be sad about. The only sad thing is that we don’t have enough cheap housing of any kind for everyone.

Around here we have “half furnished” apartments that include appliances.

I’ve always lived in a place where they are included with the rent. So I don’t have to move them up and down the stairs or the elevator every few years. Also, if they break, the landlord just change them.

To me, winning a refrigerator would be a burden. I’d have to store it and sell it. I’d prefer what it’s worth in money.

Unfortunately this one depends a lot where you live.

I never owned a car but I live in Canada and public transit sucks. Our provincial government is actively cutting funds to cities’ public transit. And intercity routes are detained by VIA Rail or coach buses >!!<that sucks.

It’s easier for me to go to the airport and in another country than move in my own province.

VIA Rail trains are infrequent, always late, pricey and most employees are jaded. They also don’t take bikes. It’s a problem. Sometimes you can get stuck as a prisoner on the train, without food, water or toilets for multiple hours.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/via-rain-passengers-stuck-1.7311176

Another one was stuck for 12 hours last year.

Coaches are cramped and also have very limited intercity services. The city I need to go to frequently only has three coaches a day at inconvenient times. They are usually full and they charge $15 to bring a bike.

I’ve been car free for 20 years but I’ve come to hate taking the train or coaches here. I’m slowly realizing that my province really really wants me to get a car.

No thanks, I’ll keep pedaling.

I am fortunate enough to know how to set up VMs and use Linux, so I run my own IRC server with a web interface (TheLounge). I can set the upload limit to what I want and settled for 100MB. This way my friends and I are not at the mercy of some proprietary software.

I do pay for a dedicated server that I also use to host my games’ servers and also a mumble server, but it’s so worth it, just to have control over our stuff.

Not in rescue mode. If you can’t mount your root partition because something was fudged in /etc/fstab, for example, you may be stuck in recovery and depending on your distribution, it may not have nano in that minimalist mode.

For me it also happens when I install a VM of Debian using the small image, on my dedicated server in a data center. The company hosting the server requires a special network configuration and AFAIK, there’s only vi. So i need to use the console to access the VM and from there, edit /etc/network/something with vi to setup the network. Once done I can reboot and install the rest of the software over the network, including nano.

I’ve been using Linux for more than two decades. Before nano I was using pico, but it also required to have pine/alpine installed. So knowing the basics of vi has often been helpful over the years for me.

Maybe it’s because I like tinkering with VMs and SBCs, and most people will not encounter situations where they don’t have nano, but it can happen. And you’ll be glad to know at least “i” and “:wq!”.

Sometimes you don’t even have the luxury of nano. Any moderately advanced Linux user should probably learn the basics of vi. Just knowing how to insert text and save it can fix a system that’s stuck in recovery. Even if it’s just to add a comment in front of a line in a config file.

How do you use these when you are connecting via SSH? You enable X forwarding?

It’s fine when you have a graphical environment, but what do you do when you dont have one?

Reminds me of my father. He’s up super early, like 4 am, and to him 7 am is perfectly late enough to run the wood planer on a weekend day.

Pourtant c’est plutôt commun au Québec. Ça s’enchaîne pas comme les sacres liturgiques mais c’est bien utilisé. Quelque chose peut être fucké. Une personne peut être fuckée. C’est fucking chiant. Fuck ça! Juste, fuck!

I wasn’t aware of her comment. Googling for it showed me an article in English saying she dropped the F bomb. I thought it was in an interview in English but no, she used it in French, which makes it a bit less impressive.

Pour les gens qui veulent pas googler, voici la citation exacte

« Fuck aux réacs, fuck à cette extrême droite, fuck à tous ceux qui voudraient nous enfermer dans la guerre de tous contre tous ! »

I hope it’s using a shit load of energy, like other “AI” stuff. Because we’re absolutely not in a climate crisis where reducing consumption is necessary. More “AI” that consumes more power, that’s exactly what we need.

Only for Israel…

South Africa did not compete at Olympic Games from 1964 to 1988, as a part of the sporting boycott of South Africa during the apartheid era.

Where is the big LCD screen that I’ve been hearing about?

I’m not a fan but from what I’ve heard they are pretty disappointed that the North American version is displayed on a giant LCD screen instead of being projected.

EDIT: Apparently it’s an LED screen: https://exclaim.ca/music/article/hatsune-miku-downgraded-from-hologram-to-led-screen-at-vancouver-tour-opener

I already replied and I’m sorry if seem to insist but I want to add on the subject and myth of “Elon Musk being a genius” and “contributing to society”, and went over the part about internet, and electric cars in general.

I’m glad you can have internet in a rural area, really. However, doing it via a constellation of satellites instead of having a robust ground network is posing certain issues for the future.

The size and scale of the Starlink project concerns astronomers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe, as well as spaceflight safety experts who now see Starlink as the number one source of collision hazard in Earth’s orbit. In addition to that, some scientists worry that the amount of metal that will be burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as old satellites are deorbited could trigger unpredictable changes to the planet’s climate.

In a paper published in May 2021 in the journal Scientific Reports, Canadian researcher Aaron Boley said the aluminum the satellites are made of will produce aluminum oxide, also known as alumina, during burn-up. He warned that alumina is known to cause ozone depletion and could also alter the atmosphere’s ability to reflect heat.

Whole article here

So as much as this could be useful, it’s also polluting the skies at a very rapid rate, and we’re not sure about the future consequences of it. And depending on where you live, fast and reliable internet in rural areas is often the result of other capitalistic companies not deeming those places profitable enough, and poor governmental regulations on internet as an essential service. We shouldn’t have to launch thousands of satellites in the air for this. But because it’s more profitable this way…

As for electric cars. Call me cynical, and anti car, which I am, but I don’t think the goal is to be ecological. Not anymore. Maybe when the company started with their three first CEOs. But it seems clear to me that Musk used the electric part as an ecological argument for greenwashing and selling to people that want to be “green”.

Electric cars are not to save the climate. They are to save the automobile industry. They want to continue to sell cars because it makes a profit. Electric cars are still posing an ecological threat, are still polluting the environment because of particles from the tires, are still killing millions of animals and people every year, and are still wasting vast quantities of space for parking lots, which are often not permeable.

And of course, people in rural areas will need cars, even if I don’t like them. But most people live in cities and Musk seem to be deliberately trying to delay public transit projects by announcing always soon-to-be-revolutionary technology like the Hyper Loop that has ben watered down multiple times to end up as a glorified LED lit electric car tunnel. Or the FSD which is not “full” “self” “driving”.

Again, I don’t like cars, don’t like to drive, and don’t have one. So I once was excited to see how the robotaxi part of things would evolve. But it’s been many many years and it’s obvious that I won’t be going from a city to a rural area soon, using a robotaxi or a self-driving car. I still need a driver’s licence for FSD. And robotaxis that do exist won’t go very far outside a city.

Also, if Musk is all about the environment with Tesla, why is he now trying to court people on the other side of the political spectrum; the side that doesn’t care about this?

Yes, electric cars are part of the solution, but cities need more public transit and micro mobility, not more cars (but electric and self-driving)! I’m sorry to say but it’s a lot of greenwashing, empty promises, and personality cult. The contributions to society are, I think, exaggerated.

Paypal is not from Musk, and he was eventually ousted when he tried to rebrand it to X.

The company was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Fieldlink, later it was renamed Confinity, a company which developed security software for hand-held devices. When it had no success with that business model, it switched its focus to a digital wallet.

In 2000, Musk had become CEO after the merger of his X.com and Confinity, the venture-backed company co-founded by Peter Thiel that owned the PayPal program that was a more popular money-transfer service than the one offered by Musk. The board ousted Musk as CEO and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.

Tesla is also not of his own. He pretty much just bought an already working company.

He certainly made it his own over the years, investing early on and then overseeing its growth from niche luxury carmaker to mass production, adding on a solar business, and pushing self-driving technologies. However, the tech titan – and now the world’s richest man – was actually Tesla’s 4th CEO when he took that role in October 2008.

I have no idea about Space X, but Paypal and Tesla are absolutely not from Elon Musk. He just happened to cross roads with those companies and invest his emerald money in those.

If he contributed to those companies, it’s via money, not ideas and intellect.

More like it doesn’t want to get the money to maintain those infrastructure by going into further debt.

I’m not following German politics very closely but the article mentions that this restriction is in their constitution.

There was something in that genre in my province decades ago when a government dedicated itself to ‘zero deficit’ by cutting on infrastructure maintenance for many years. A bridge eventually fell. Classic story. It seems like a common thing.