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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • It’s a good question, though people tend to treat it as a thought-terminating cliché rather than exploring the implications. Why should murderers be punished, actually? Enacting punishment is an external incentive, a stimulus, supposedly structured to make the cost to the potential murderer higher than the benefit they hope to get by killing. Belief in punishment, therefore, is consistent with the non-free will position. But if there’s no free will, then why not instead try to “solve” murder, and not have murderers anymore, by discovering the root causes that drive people to murder, and mitigating them? We’d all be better off!

    On the other hand, free will implies that the mechanism of punishment may or may not be punishing to the murderer. We don’t know what they feel in response to stimulus; they have free will! Like in the story of Br’er Rabbit, trying to determine a foolproof method of punishment that’s hateful to the murderer is an exercise in futility, since we can’t know their mind.


  • Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.


  • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSnap bad
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    1 month ago

    Has it? My complaints are: I have to use VPN software for work that replaces /etc/resolve.conf with a symlink to another location, one that sandboxed snaps can’t access. There’s no way to grant them access; the “slots” that you can connect are fixed and pre-defined. You can’t even configure the file path; it’s defined right in the source code. Not even as a #define, but the string literal “/etc/resolve.conf”. That seems like poor practice, but I guess they’re not going for portability.

    Also, I have /usr and /var on different media, chosen for suitability of purpose, and sized appropriately. Then, along comes snap, violating the File Hierarchy Standard by filling up /var with application software.

    Minor annoyances are the ~/snap folder, and all of the mounted loopback filesystems which make reading the mtab difficult.








  • I have a couple of suggestions to add:

    I was considering leaving the other site before the API fiasco because it felt like so many users approach engagement as rhetorical combat, that is, the point of discussion is to defeat the other person. Instead, think one of Covey’s habits of highly-effective people: “Win-win, or no deal.” Approach discussion on the Fediverse as a collaborative act, in which you’re exchanging ideas with another person. Even if you disagree, you can both win by respectfully hearing out the other person. And if the other person won’t collaborate? No deal! Just disengage.

    Just like in intimate relationship, use “I” statements instead of “you” statements. Telling people who they are and what they believe is not only disrespectful, but probably wrong, often exaggerated or distorted for rhetorical combat purposes. People get angry when their identity gets poked at. One exception, of course, is when giving advice, like, stick to what you know, and share your thoughts and your reactions to a topic.


  • It wouldn’t be wild, it’d be accurate. The man has dementia. I’m on mobile and not inclined to tap out all of the indicators, but remember when he abruptly stopped speaking at a campaign rally, and just kind of swayed to his music playlist for 39 minutes, or when he described in detail the literal, giant faucet in British Columbia that he seemed to think that Canada uses to control water to the West Coast? (Or the literal dome over Israel?) Both losing track of time and losing the ability to process metaphorical speech are symptoms of dementia. Why else would his doctors have administered that cognitive test that he bragged that he aced?


  • One that Linux should’ve had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.

    A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they’re backwards-compatible with, so new versions don’t necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren’t present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn’t need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.

    Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.



  • Bigger picture, what’s your current facial skin care routine? If it includes a lot of cleansing, exfoliating, hot water, strong soap, multiple daily washings, et cetera, dial that all wa-a-a-ay back. All of those things strip away the natural oils quite effectively, which leads to that red, inflamed look in the cold. The best way to keep your skin moisturized is to keep the moisture it naturally has from escaping, and that’s 10 times more important in cold, dry climates.

    Be sure to drink enough water, too. It’s deceptive, you lose a lot of water through breath in cold, dry air, so you can be dehydrated even without sweating.





  • Very few food products have an expiration date printed on them. A lot of them have a “Sell by” date, which is not an expiration date. We have a local milk producer that prints a “Sell by” date on their bottles. The rule of thumb is that if it’s stored in proper refrigeration, unopened, it’ll keep for 2 more weeks. (Plus another week to use it up.) But it’s impossible to explain that people. The disgust reflex is strong, and you can almost watch it on their faces as it overrides people’s rational faculties. (Honestly, that experience helps me understand the recent election results.) As a result, the store that I worked in would as a rule of thumb take the milk off the shelf 3 days before the “Sell by” date, even though it’d be good for another 3 weeks. Milk that didn’t sell, we had to pour down the drain.

    One time when I was working there, I had to deal with an irate customer who returned some fancy cheese hors d’oeuvres that she’d received as part of her pick-up order because the package had a “Sell by” date on it that was a couple days past. I refunded the cost of the item, and when I took it back to the cheese department, our cheese monger explained that the date was really only useful for the store to keep its stock rotated. The product didn’t spoil after that date; in fact, it got better for several months as the cheese aged. But, we agreed, it’s impossible to explain that to people.

    So, to the question, also while working there, I made a delivery to an elderly woman whose son ordered groceries for her. She had a number of items that she didn’t use before the “Use by” date, and asked if I’d take them. One of them was a container of plain yogurt. I don’t use a lot of yogurt, mainly as a condiment for Indian dishes, so I didn’t even open it until about a month after the “Use by” date, and finally finished it probably 3 months after. (Just don’t let it warm up, open only briefly, and always use a clean utensil to scoop it out.) It still tasted fresh and enjoyable.

    I still have butter in the refrigerator with a “Use by” date in 2023, because I bought a lot of it when it was cheap (on sale and employee discount), and put it in the freezer. I have eaten canned food several years after the “Best by” date. The heuristic is easy: It it smells good, it’s edible. If it smells off, toss it. But I know that there are plenty of people out there with a hair-trigger disgust response, who are convinced that the moment the clock ticks over to the date printed on the package, the contents turn to poison. This heuristic probably grosses them out. Oh well, people aren’t rational.


  • In a nutshell, the Democrats can’t convince people to vote against the dangerous candidate because right-wing populism inoculates people against facts and logic by making those things out-group markers, per se. Identity is powerful, and the human brain treats threats to identity in exactly the same way as physical threats.

    And, on the other side, Democrats can’t recognize this and respond appropriately, because they’ve made not-recognizing-it a marker of in-group identity, and they are thereby unable to decode what would make an attractive policy plan.