I wouldn’t say art is subject to facts in this way. Some of us enjoy art that is produced through skill and intention rather than some idiot shitting in a jar. The meta debate is just one incredibly lame branch of art that incompetent snobs manically jerk off to while outbidding each other for a fucking banana.

Of course, context matters for interpretation. Guernica is a more meaningful piece with the background of civil war; dadaism only makes sense in opposition to fascism. But both depend on skill and intent to become impressive, not merely the meta context of positioning in art history.

I hate this discussion and I hate that by interacting with it some idiot in a beret will tell me “AHA! So it did provoke you!!”, as if they were making a point or ever had an original thought in their lives.

Opposition to this bullshit is not a problem of the “tech world”, it’s a problem of the art world having obsessed over the same idiotic joke for a hundred years because it’s harder to appreciate something that contains genuine intent and talent than it is to pretend like you understand the genius of stapling a piece of crap to the wall of a gallery.

Yeah, if they need you, but maintaining friendships is hard enough work if one doesn’t actively exclude oneself.

I have a bunch of friends from most corners of Europe, most highly educated, all of them use WhatsApp. I use Signal with those who are on there, but 90% are only on WhatsApp, so I am too.

Worse yet, my friends and family in my home country are almost all only on Facebook Messenger. I stopped using that entirely, and clumsily reach out on SMS whenever necessary. It has absolutely made it harder to stay in touch with people I care about.

I also avoid a lot of other social networks that would have been nice in order to keep in touch with my friends in other parts of the world, which is pretty much all of them as I travel. Pixelfed is nice, but my friends are still on Instagram. Or even Snapchat, even though I’m in my 30s.

Not all my friends are privacy nerds, and I wouldn’t want them to be either. So I just gently push for Signal whenever I can while I hold my nose and continue to run WhatsApp.

That’s part of enshittification I’d say. It’s all about squeezing your users for as much money as you can, and surveillance is part of that.

Oh yeah. This is not an attack on mediocre white men—I’m one of them. We just have to learn to get over ourselves.

Whatever it takes to keep hiring mediocre white men, I guess.

I hate the debate over “what is art”. Honestly I think the best answer I could give to the question is “something that was ruined by a bunch of idiots asking ‘what is art’”.

That said, and not wanting to go into that discussion, calling this guy an “artist” seems like a mockery. He’s not an artist, he’s just some idiot with double sided tape.

They did. Here’s the interior of the Pantheon, rocking since the 2nd century AD.

There was also the practice of giving people a new name upon arrival in Ellis Island, establishing pretty early on what kind of names were considered “American”.

I guess it worked wonders, at least if the stereotype is true that they managed to transform the Irish into a bunch of racist cops.

But yeah, you certainly had a lot of German Americans voluntarily backing away from their cultural heritage in the 30s and 40s.

It’s pretty fascinating considering the history of the US that Americans tend to be worse than the English at pronouncing various European languages. You’d think at least some people would cling on to the correct pronounciation of their own name, as the bare minimum.

I don’t really care how Americans pronounce their own names—if anything I think most Europeans are happy to be easily distinguishable from Americans with shared ancestry at this point—but it is a bit striking.

I’ll give it a shot, thanks!

It seems the running application remains responsive, but not anything else.

I was running RStudio on an external monitor once when it froze, and I could keep using the window. Even when I used touch gestures to “zoom” the window out, I remained in control over it and could execute code in the smaller window. But I could not interact with GNOME at all, including changing to another program on the same screen.

Another time it froze as I wrote a PieFed comment, and I pressed tab and enter a few times. The comment was published so I could continue where I left off.

First time in almost 20 years of Linux usage I’m encountering real problems, and I’m much too primitive to do anything clever about it.

Does it seem to be a Fedora problem?

Well, yeah, they’re run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they’ll turn on their customers. So fair enough.

I think that’s part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that’s not possible.

Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.

I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it’s prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it’s the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.

Their search results were good though. I wouldn’t mind supporting a subscription based model, but I’m sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.

There are some user friendly Android based alternatives out there, since it’s based on open source. Personally I’m running a device with /e/OS, which you can either install yourself or buy a phone with it pre-installed. There are also some other user friendly options out there such as the Volla Phone.

But yeah, iOS is probably a better bet than stock Android, as Apple has a history of being abusive towards their customers in other ways than by selling their data. But crucially both Google and Apple are American companies, so you should avoid depending on their cloud services to whatever degree possible. There’s no such thing as safe data if it is stored by an American company.

If these assholes get bailed out by American tax payers when this shit crashes and burns I’m gonna get real mad.

Well, I’m pretty angry about everything happening in the US already, come to think of it. Oh well. I guess it’ll all just crash and burn.

Based on 404media’s coverage of Girls Do Porn, I feel like PornHub can hardly be described as not being “unregulated and sketchy and extreme”.

Long story short, PornHub was knowingly cooperating with a porn producer operating on the basis of institutionalized rape for years. Lots of women have committed suicide in the wake. The ringleader of the network PornHub cooperated with was recently sentenced to 27 years in prison. I’m of the personal belief that PornHub executives should have been brought in to keep him company—they are as guilty as anyone in this. I really doubt that Girls Do Porn is a unique story in anything else than the fact that it ended up before the courts.

Oh wow, it goes back even further. Incredible.

Historically death camps tend to start out as mere camps, but then suddenly they are full of people who are deemed unwanted anyway and keeping them alive is expensive and difficult so why bother.

On its current trajectory there’s no US camp that shouldn’t be expected to turn into a death camp. And as others have pointed out, thousands “missing” from a huge, poorly managed camp in the middle of a swamp is worrying to say the least.

Americans today are like Germans in the 30s, watching the trains roll by.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this entire fiasco is yet another reminder of the precarious position open source projects with a solo maintainer leave their user base in - especially when that maintainer is a teenager whose priorities are subject to changing rapidly as they get older and discover more about the world than discarded Ubuntu interfaces

What a terrible takeaway. I’d rather say that the takeaway is that all things come to an end, even Unity 7 which it’s honestly incredible didn’t die ages ago.

Those interested in keeping on working on Unity should perhaps focus their efforts instead on Lomiri, the community continuation of Unity 8 and default environment in Ubuntu Touch.

Here’s a demonstration from two months ago, running desktop apps like Librewolf on an external monitor powered by Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 4. It is of course not limited to Ubuntu Touch; Ubuntu Touch is just the only distro where it’s the default interface.