Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 9 Posts
  • 698 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • The problem with replacing Discord isn’t the tech or features. Discord doesn’t do anything special that hasn’t existed in other software for 15-20 years.

    The key difficulty is overcoming the network effect. All the big streamers use Discord, which means their millions of viewers are going to use Discord also, which means that most of their friends will too, and thus, you have a default app that almost everybody uses.

    It took a massive amount of effort for me to just get three of my friends to sign up with Matrix and join a group server for gaming, and two of them stopped using it after just a month or two. I only have a single friend who is still using it, and they only use it when the two of us are gaming.















  • The earth can easily sustain our current population at a 1st world standard of living, but only if we are orders of magnitude more efficient. That means things like no mass car usage, eco-urbanisn, no more single family homes with quarter acre empty lawns, widespread plant-based foods as the norm, and repairable technology that actually lasts decades instead of planned obsolescence and cheap plastic junk that fills up landfills.

    You don’t need to be some anarcho-primitivist/Ted Kaczynski wannabe living in a wooden shack with one set of clothes.

    Now is that viable in the current societal climate? No, people, especially Americans generally hate much of those eco-urbanist ideas. As long as Capitalism is the default economic system and neo-liberal politics is the default political approach to democracy, we will continue marching towards a consumerist doom.




  • Linux mobile phones are the fusion power of the FOSS world, always “right around the corner.”

    All the pieces are there, but none of them work together smoothly enough to be functional for anybody except the most hardcore FOSS enthusiasts.

    When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

    So it’s certainly possible for things to completely change, but we need a big player or consortium of players to unite with a shared goal of getting a Linux Phone to the state where it’s genuinely able to replace a traditional Android or Apple phone.

    I’m very cautiously optimistic, I think it would come together much faster than Proton did for Linux gaming, but again, there needs to be a really heavy push into a singular device to start off. Like how the Steam Deck was, it allowed devs to have a singular platform to target for compatibility. Then, as the platform matures, competitors & innovators can enter the market and expand options, like how now there are multiple distros with builds for handhelds, like Bazzite, Nobara, and CachyOS.



  • Depends on your meta-ethical framework. If you’re a consequentialist, then you should always choose the option that leads to less evil being done. Same if you’re a utilitarian.

    If you hold to a Kantian value-based framework, like the action itself holds the primary moral goodness or evil in its own nature, then choose the action that itself is less evil.

    There are many other frameworks. It also depends on what you think happens in the case of something like voting. Some people see participation in any sense as a sort of tacit agreement or endorsement of the system as a whole. So by casting any vote, even one of protest, you are legitimizing the system as a whole.

    Others see voting as a mere means to an end, and thus, is justified if the outcome is better than not voting would be. Some see it as purely neutral, like a tool that can be used for good or bad.

    Still, others see it as an inherently good thing, and view abstaining from the act of voting as a moral wrong, because it is a willing act of self-sabotage of the moral interests of the greater good, or sometimes as a violation of the social contract.

    There are many other positions and considerations. Basically…it’s complicated.