Well, if vinyl could come back, I suppose MiniDiscs can too.

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Gate

Well, @[email protected] reports claiming it with his tongue, so if enough people follow his example, I’d hope occasionally.

EDIT: Apparently a possibility that’s already been considered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Gate

Since the sculpture was expected to be outdoors, concerns arose that it might retain and conduct heat in a way that would make it too hot to touch during the summer and so cold that one’s tongue might stick to it during the winter.

“What this tomato needs is some tomato sauce.”

Dice 'em both, cook 'em together and eat them both.

Tomato and potato work together, so I figure that totato and pomato should too.

I have never used Arch. And it may not be worthwhile for OP. But I am pretty confident that I could get that thing working again.

Booting into a rescue live-boot distro on USB, mount the Arch root somewhere, bind-mounting /sys, /proc, and /dev from the host onto the Arch root, and then chrooting to a bash on the Arch root and you’re basically in the child Arch environment and should be able to do package management, have DKMS work, etc.

Boot into a live boot install of some distro on a USB drive.

I think another major factor for Linux gaming beyond Valve was a large shift by game developers to using widely-used game engines. A lot of the platform portability work happened at that level, so was spread across many games. Writing games that could run on both personal computers and personal-computer-like consoles with less porting work became a goal. And today, some games also have releases on mobile platforms.

When I started using Linux in the late 1990s, the situation was wildly different on that front.

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC

An ultra-mobile PC,[1] or ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC), is a miniature version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in Spring 2006. Sony had already made a first attempt in this direction in 2004 with its Vaio U series, which was only sold in Asia. UMPCs are generally smaller than subnotebooks, have a TFT display measuring (diagonally) about 12.7 to 17.8 centimetres (5.0 to 7.0 in), are operated like tablet PCs using a touchscreen or a stylus, and can also have a physical keyboard.

considers

I’ve been in a couple conversation threads about this topic before on here. I’m more optimistic.

I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways. I mean, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to a huge amount of information. Your voice has an enormous potential reach. A lot of stuff where one would have had to buy expensive reference works or spend a lot of time digging information up are now readily available to anyone with Internet access.

I think that the big issue wasn’t that people became less critical, but that one stopped having experts filter what one saw. In, say, 1996, most of what I read had passed through the hands of some sort of professional or professionals specialized in writing. For newspapers or magazines, maybe it was a journalist and their editor. For books, an author and their editor and maybe a typesetter.

Like, in 1996, I mostly didn’t get to actually see the writing of Average Joe. In 2026, I do, and Average Joe plays a larger role in directly setting the conversation. That is democratization. Average Joe of 2026 didn’t, maybe, become a better journalist than the professional journalist of 1996. But…I think that it’s very plausible that he’s a better journalist than Average Joe of 1996.

Would it have been reasonable to expect Average Joe of 2026 to, in addition to all the other things he does, also be better at journalism than a journalist of 1996? That seems like a high bar to set.

And we’re also living in a very immature environment as our current media goes. I am not sold that this is the end game.

There’s a quote from Future Shock — written in 1970, but I think that we can steal the general idea for today:

It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.

Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

That’s just to drive home how extremely rapidly the environment in which we all live has shifted compared to how it had in the past. In that quote, Alvin Toffler was talking about how incredibly quickly things had changed in that it had only been six lifetimes since the public as a whole had seen printed text, how much things had changed. But in 2026, we live in a world where it has only been a quarter of a lifetime, less for most, since much of the global population of humanity has been intimately linked by near-instant, inexpensive, mass communication.

I think that it would be awfully unexpected and surprising if we would have immediately figured out conventions and social structures and technical solutions to every deficiency for such a new environment. Social media is a very new thing in the human experience at this scale. I think that it is very probable that humanity will — partly by trial-and-error, getting some scrapes and bruises along the way — develop practices to smooth over rough spots and address problems.

Consider, say, the early motorcar, which had no seatbelts, windscreen, roof, suspension, was driven on a road infrastructure designed for horse-drawn carts to travel maybe ten miles an hour, didn’t have a muffler, didn’t have an electric starter, lacked electric headlights and other lighting, an instrument panel, and all that. It probably had a lot of very glaring problems as a form of transportation to people who saw it. An awful lot of those problems have been solved over time. I think that it would be very surprising if electronic mass communication available to everyone doesn’t do something similar.

I don’t know if I can count this as mine, but I certainly didn’t disagree with predictions of others around 1990 or so that the smart home would be the future. The idea was that you’d have a central home computer and it would interface with all sorts of other systems and basically control the house.

While there are various systems for home automation, things like Home Assistant or OpenHAB, and some people use them, and I’ve used some technology that were expected to be part of this myself, like X10 for device control over power circuits, the vision of a heavily-automated, centrally-controlled home never made it to become the normal. I think that the most-widely-deployed piece of home automation that has shown up since then is maybe the smart thermostat, which isn’t generally hooked into some central home computer.

I mean, the Newton hadn’t done well. The Pippin hadn’t done well. The eMate hadn’t done well. What were the odds of Apple doing a really successful new consumer electronics product?

I wouldn’t.

Depressions aren’t a zombie invasion or a nuclear war. They’re a reduction in economic activity. Some percentage of people get laid off, are out of work for a time.

If you get laid off, you’re probably going to want a financial buffer, and buying stuff ahead of time is most likely not a great idea. Better to have the buffer.

If you don’t get laid off, not likely a lot you can do to prepare.

I’d also add that while depressions affect a large area, it’s entirely possible for particular areas to see economic decline even if the country as a whole is seeing rising growth. Like, say a major employer in a small town goes out of business.

If you think that the post shouldn’t be up, contact the moderators or admins — they are the ones to make a call on that. It’s not the role of individual users to play moderator.

No, it’s not illegal. However, an assault rifle — which will have a select-fire toggle that permits more than one round to be fired per trigger pull — is not, under current case law, protected by the Second Amendment, and you are required to get a federal firearms license; the government is permitted to restrict your purchasing of them by requiring you to qualify for this license. They are also not inexpensive.

You can get semiautomatic rifles that do not have such a select-fire toggle that are otherwise identical to assault rifles. These are protected by the Second Amendment.

You can also, in most states, legally own rifles with bump stocks. These are functionally somewhat-similar to automatic weapons in that they can fire multiple times after a trigger pull, albeit via a different mechanism. These do not require a federal firearms license.

EDIT: You’re also probably going to get better answers on firearms in [email protected] than [email protected], as the people there will be people more-interested in the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 BC to 1450 BC. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It evolved into Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered.

I asked a simple question

Heh. So, there’s this Saturday Night Live skit from 1997:

https://youtu.be/OMNaTApbo8E?t=130

Harry Caray: “Hey, if you were a hotdog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”

Host: “What?”

Harry Caray: “I know I would. First I’d smother myself in brown mustard and relish. I’d be so delicious. So would you?”

Host: “I don’t know.”

Harry Caray: “Don’t jerk me around, Norm. It’s a simple question. A baby could answer it. If you were a hotdog and you were starving, would you eat yourself?”

All frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, again are you saying that this is what most people want to see?

I mean, I don’t know how I can be clearer than I was in the above comment:

The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).

It will have everything that people are posting on any communities that any single user on your home instance subscribes to. This means that the proportion of traffic on All will generally reflect what people want to post.

There are some social media websites that try to profile you based on your viewing or commenting habits or other such things and then do recommendations of content. Some of these, like Twitter, have caught flak for recommending content that someone is likely to engage with, which causes them to tend to recommend ragebait material.

But regardless of the merits of one recommendation system or another, mander.xyz is running Lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t, in 2026, have some sort of system to profile you, try to predict what posts you want to see, and then show you only that. Maybe it should and someone should write that, but today, it gives you three choices:

• You can view All, which is all of the posts in any community that anyone on your home instance has subscribed to.

• You can view Local, which is all of the posts in communities on your home instance alone. Unless you are only interested in using the Threadiverse for highly-specialized content and on a home instance dedicated to that content, this probably isn’t what you want.

• You can view Subscribed, which is all of the posts in any community that you personally have subscribed to.

What I’m saying is that it is very likely that the third option is going to very probably provide you with a higher proportion of content that you want to see. “All” will probably never reflect what you in particular are most-interested in. It’s maybe a way to help expose new users to a sampling of what’s out there, reduce the barrier to start them using the Threadiverse, but you’re probably going to want a Subscribed list tailored to your interests.

But what I can say with utter certainty is that people who are posting memes will not stop posting memes because you don’t want to see as many memes in your feed, and All is going to reflect what people post. Getting upset about what people are posting and then complaining about that won’t solve your problem. Writing a recommendation system to profile users and provide recommended feeds for Threadiverse servers might, if you can code, but I’m guessing that the most-practical solution is going to be just doing a set of communities tailored to your interests, and then browsing Subscribed.

It’s easier to create a meme than writing a title?

It’s easier to create a meme than it is many other sorts of content.

I’m asking why is it filled with this content, are you saying that this is what most people want to see here?

The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).

That’s why I’m saying that you’re probably going to be happier whitelisting the content that you are interested in, rather than complaining that people on the Threadiverse as a whole aren’t posting what you want. There are many different takes on what people want to see, so no one person is going to be happy with traffic as an aggregate. There are a bunch of furries here, who are happy with furry content. One of the first threads I ran into when I first joined — Kbin sent people to random posts to try to help them discover new communities — was a post talking about technology issues. Another user there, who also appeared to be a new user sent there randomly by Kbin, was upset that there was so many furries there and complaining about the fact. It was in a community on pawb.social, which is a furry instance. There’s no reasonable way to make the guy who didn’t want to see furry content and the people who do want to see furry content simultaneously happy with any one single collection of content. Gotta produce user-specific feeds for that.

EDIT: There are also some people who prefer to blacklist rather than whitelist. Like, browse All, but then just keep blocking every community that they don’t want to see. I think that this doesn’t scale well — I mean, there are tens of thousands of communities out there. Some people can create shit-tons of communities, and I suspect that sooner or later someone is very probably going to set up an instance that has auto-generated communities for one reason or another. Maybe to mirror RSS feeds somewhere or something, who knows. There’s already one that mirrors Reddit subreddits, lemmit.online. Then it’s going to flood the feeds of the blacklisters. But, well, that’s another way to curate content.

Probably because they’re easy to make, so there’s a lot of traffic there.

I think the real question is “why does the content I see not reflect what I want to see”, and I’d guess that that’s most-likely because you’re browsing “All”, which combines all traffic from all communities on any instances that anyone on your home instance, mander.xyz, subscribes to. This is, for any given person, unlikely to be specifically what they are interested in.

I’d generally suggest finding a list of communities that you are interested in, subscribing to them, and then having your webpage/client/whatever set to show “Subscribed” rather than “All”.

If you want a convenient way to browse a list of communities on all instances (even ones that nobody on your home instance has subscribed to yet — you can be the first one!), I recommend https://lemmyverse.net/ and clicking on “Communities”. If you see one you like, say, [email protected], then just search for it on your home instance (like, the text !strategy_games@piefed.world), and if your home instance doesn’t know about it yet, it’ll tell your home instance about it. Then subscribe to it, and traffic there will show up when you browse “Subscribed”.

EDIT: Note that Mbin and PieFed communities are, somewhat-unintuitively, shown in their own lists, probably because the three software packages don’t provide the same pieces of information about communities and lemmyverse.net wants to let you be able to search using all available search criteria, rather than just the least-common-denominator stuff. If you want to search for communities on Mbin or PieFed, select those from the menu in the upper left.