OldFartPhil

Twitter still has devs?

I wouldn’t say I love it, but Panda Express is my go-to when I’m hungry and there’s one nearby.

That correction is going to be a mess. My company headquarters are in a medium-sized US city. We own (and used to occupy) two downtown office building, a mid-rise and a high-rise. Right now both buildings are mostly empty, with little prospect of them being occupied in the near future.

Still full time remote. I do miss the face-to-face contact with my co-workers, but do not miss my 2 hours a day bus commute.

Prior to the pandemic, I had a couple of co-workers who were already full time remote and everyone was allowed to work from home a couple of days per week. But during the pandemic we recruited nationally, so there’s no way my company can put the WFH genie back in the bottle. They’re currently talking about right-sizing our office needs and building collaborative spaces; another sign we’re not going back.

The New Yorker article said Cuban was approached to be a donor, but it doesn’t say whether he is actually a supporter. Apparently, the group is very close-lipped about where their money is coming from (what a surprise).

I don’t want to turn the thread into too much of a political discussion, but when one political party believes in democracy and one party is an existential threat to democracy, there’s no room for spoiler candidates.

I’m actually pretty bummed about the change. It’s a luxury (and one of the things that makes Oregon special) to be able to wait in a heated or air conditioned car while someone else pump my gas. I also don’t understand why some people are so gung ho to pump their own.

I agree. I was a big fan of hers during Congressional testimony. But she is definitely awkward in unscripted environments and would be a poor presidential candidate in a nation where a significant portion of the electorate wants a president they can have a beer with. Additionally, her history as a prosecutor makes Democrats suspicious of her.

Republicans hate her because she’s a Black woman. They’ll make up other excuses, but none of them hold water.

Light From Uncommon Stars is the most memorable book I’ve read in years. It’s a beautifully-written, extremely ambitious novel about demons, found family, donuts, Asian cuisine, interstellar war, gender identity, the violin, loyalty, good and evil, beauty, fear and love. Plus, it takes place in the San Gabriel Valley, which is my old stomping ground. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but I absolutely loved it.

Based on the posts in this thread, I see a lot of overlap between urban fantasy fans and science fiction fans. With the exception of Lord of the Rings, I’ve never cared much for high fantasy, but I’ve really enjoyed the urban fantasy series I’ve read. If anyone is interested, I’ve enjoyed…

1. The Laundry Files by Charles Stross
2. The City We Became and The World We Make by MK Jemisin
3. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
4. The Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey
5. The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch
6. The Stranger Times series by C.K. McDonnell

N.K. Jemisen is one of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy writers. If you like her style and world building I’d highly recommend the Broken Earth trilogy.

The murderbot stories get so much praise but I was never able to get into them. I binge read (well, actually binge listened) to the Rivers of London books a few months ago and thought they were first-rate.

I just finished the new Ann Leckie book, Translation State, which I liked very much. If you couldn’t get enough of the the Imperial Radch universe it’s a must read.

This seems like a golden opportunity for distros like Suse and Ubuntu, who offer enterprise support for their free product, to poach some RHEL customers.

Boosting this advice. When I started using Linux as my daily driver (14 years ago), I got into the habit of taking notes on everything: troubleshooting solutions, bug fixes, how-tos, configurations, useful software, etc. It’s not the Arch Wiki, which is a treasure, but I can solve a lot of my own issues just by looking up what I’ve done before.

Does it help to encourage users to host their own media rather than upload it to a lemmy/kbin instance. Or is that a minor component of the cost?

As someone who’s old enough to remember seeing 2001 on a huge screen when it was first released, it’s hard to express how monumentally spectacular the effects were. It brought the moon and space alive in a way that no movie had done before. The closest comparison I can make is with the first Jurassic Park movie, which was the first time movie audiences experienced living, breathing dinosaurs.

The whole psychedelic transit thing, hotel room/zoo and star baby was pretty obtuse for most audiences. You really needed to read the book to suss out what happened.

I wasn’t a big fan, either. I think for me it was cultural; I had trouble understanding the main character’s motivations and why she made the decisions she did.

I didn’t love The Martian. It wasn’t a bad book, but I got bored in places. I was more engaged by Project Hail Mary (which is probably another unpopular opinion).

EDIT: Guess I should mention I’m referring to the books. Never saw The Martian movie.

Define cheap. The least expensive laptop on Dell Refurbished currently is $180 and would easily run any desktop environment, including the heavyweights. Specs are here:
CPU
1x Intel Core i5-6300U (2-Core, 2.40 GHz)
Memory
8 GB (1x 8GB)
HDD
256 GB (1x 256 GB SSD)
Display
14" HD (1366 x 768)

If you’re thinking cheaper yet, you’ll want at least a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM. Just about any business laptop from the last 10 years or so would work, as long as you stay away from bottom of the barrel Celerons or AMD processors and <4GB of RAM. You can run Linux on a very low spec machine, but you’d want to use a lightweight DE and web browsing wouldn’t be a fun experience.

Great. Another “genius” CEO who thinks he’s smarter than the experts and that his product is so innovative that regulations would just be a burden.

If I understand how the fediverse works (an open question :-)), the amount of activity on the home page/“all” feed/federated feed of an instance is dependent on how many magazines/communities the members are subscribed to. I’ve noticed that the “All” feed of the most established Lemmy instances have more posts than here at kbin.social. I would anticipate that situation improving over time as the community here grows and people increase the number of subscriptions they have. I would expect more (and more active) local magazines over time here, as well.