Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 13 Posts
  • 769 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • There is no “original Bible.” Different sects of Christianity have different canons that they consider “scripture.”

    Most Protestants adhere to 66 books divided into the “old” & “new” testaments. Roman catholics include several more books commonly called the “apocrypha” or “deuterocanonical” books.

    Various traditions in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox sects such as the Syriac Orthodox church or the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church include even more books and depending on the specific tradition, don’t even have a closed canon of official scripture. They don’t really think of scripture in terms of being officially canonized, it’s more of a spectrum from “more authoritative” to “less authoritative.”

    There was no defined canon for any of the early Christians for several centuries. Early Christians circulated many different epistles, religious poems, stories, legends, sermons, and parables, often just by oral tradition.

    Some, like the gospel of Mark, are considered fairly historical by many scholars, others are more fantastical or don’t have as solid historical attestation.

    There is active debate amongst scholars about authorship of the now canonized Biblical corpus and the level of historicity.

    Take the Bible for what it is; an impressive and important historical work, really a small library of ancient literature. It’s not a magical text though, it was written by people in very specific sociological and historical contexts and should be studied and examined with those in mind.

    If you find it enlightening and inspiring to your life and it helps you be a better person to others, that’s great. And if you attach special spiritual or religious meaning to it, that’s your call. But that doesn’t change the nature of what the Bible is and where it came from.


  • It’s not about being “obvious.” It’s about understanding the most basic concepts involved with using a piece of equipment that is central to their job and has been that way for decades.

    I wouldn’t want ride in a car with somebody that couldn’t remember what the difference between red, yellow, and green traffic lights are, or couldn’t remember how to activate their turn signals or windshield wipers. And I certainly wouldn’t want them operating a vehicle as a core part of their everyday job.

    Now I’ll grant that in general, a car is far more dangerous than a computer. But the principle still holds, these are not tough concepts to understand, takes literally 5 minutes to explain at most. Plus, they haven’t changed in at least 30 years, so it’s not some new fangled techno-babble.


  • I’m already more sick of hearing about AI than NFTs and Crypto. At least those largely stayed within their own separate spaces where they could be ignored.

    “AI” is infecting everything. Even Duck Duck Go has it now. The web has become so enshitified. Search engines are just ad-link spam and the results are largely poisoned by AI generated sludge so even when you think you’ve found a useful article, you realized partway through it’s LLM garbage.

    What a depressing dystopia, it’s not even sexy like the movies, it’s just a bland, sludge-filled wasteland.

    Trying to avoid it has becoming so tough. For months now, I’ve been painstakingly building my own content feeds from trusted sites, forums, and content sources. It’s like the old internet, I’ve literally started buying books for tech topics because finding reliable help and documentation is getting harder every day.








  • As much as I can get it, and more every year.

    All my computers run Linux exclusively. Gaming desktop, personal laptop, Steam Deck, work laptop, and all my servers in my home lab.

    Hypervisor is XCP-ng, VMs are a mix of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and some random other Linux distros for testing and experimenting.

    My NAS is a TrueNAS Core box.

    I’m in the process of switching my router to PFSense.

    Phone is a Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS.

    Email, VPN, and cloud storage is Proton.

    Password manager is Bit Warden.

    Office docs are all Libre Office & Only Office.

    The only non-FOSS software I use constantly is Discord and Steam, and of course, most of the games I play. On my phone I have majority FOSS apps for everyday stuff, but some things are still proprietary.


  • I’ve seen the same thing. IT departments are less and less interested in building and maintaining in-house solutions.

    I get why, it requires more time, effort, money, and experienced staff to pay.

    But you gain more robust systems when it’s done well. Companies want to cut costs everywhere they can, and it’s cheaper to just pay an outside company to do XY&Z for you and just hire an MSP to manage your web portals for it, or maybe a 2-3 internal sys admins that are expected to do all that plus level 1 help desk support.

    Same thing has happened with end users. We spent so much time trying to make computers “friendly” to people, that we actually just made people computer illiterate.

    I find myself in a strange place where I am having to help Boomers, older Gen-X, and Gen-Z with incredibly basic computer functions.

    Things like:

    • Changing their passwords when the policy requires it.
    • Showing people where the Start menu is and how to search for programs there.
    • How to pin a shortcut to their task bar.
    • How to snap windows to half the screen.
    • How to un-mute their volume.
    • How to change their audio device in Teams or Zoom from their speakers to their headphones.
    • How to log out of their account and log back in.
    • How to move files between folders.
    • How to download attachments from emails.
    • How to attach files in an email.
    • How to create and organize Browser shortcuts.
    • How to open a hyperlink in a document.
    • How to play an audio or video file in an email.
    • How to expand a basic folder structure in a file tree.
    • How to press buttons on their desk phone to hear voicemails.

    It’s like only older Millennials and younger gen-X seem to have a general understanding of basic computer usage.

    Much of this stuff has been the same for literally 30+ years. The Start menu, folders, voicemail, email, hyperlinks, browser bookmarks, etc. The coat of paint changes every 5-7 years, but almost all the same principles are identical.

    Can you imagine people not knowing how to put a car in drive, turn on the windshield wipers, or fill it with petrol, just because every 5-7 years the body style changes a little?