Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 1st, 2023

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  • I can think of a couple of uses. Well, basically just one use. You could hide posts that cause distress for whatever reason. For example, I hate snakes and if someone posted a neat picture of a snake I’d probably hide it, just so I don’t have to keep seeing the same post and jump scaring myself with a picture of a snake while scrolling. Another example might be a thread in which people are arguing and you don’t want to get dragged into the argument. I actually literally did this earlier today with a thread where people were yet again arguing about the upcoming US election and whether voting Biden is a reasonable choice. I’ve read this argument so many times and it’s so tempting to jump in and be an asshole to someone who is wrong and I just don’t want to do that today, so better to hide the post so I don’t keep seeing it while scrolling.

    So yeah, you can hide posts you don’t want to keep running across while scrolling for whatever reason. Seems like a pretty useful feature to me, I’m glad we have it now.




  • But what if we grow? What if more people pirate?

    Good. Unlimited piracy on media and software corporations.

    I’m a communist first and foremost. Private property is wrong in all its forms, this wrongness is just most obvious when talking about intellectual property, because intellectual property can be easily copied and isn’t something physical like the tools in a factory. Of course corporations will always try to clamp down on piracy, they’ve been trying to do so my entire adult life. It doesn’t really matter how many pirates there are, because corporations don’t just want money, they want all the money. If even one person pirates, corporations will try to make piracy difficult.

    I guess I fundamentally disagree with your statement that “The world can handle a stable population of pirates.” I don’t think that’s a meaningful statement. It’s not like there’s some “carrying capacity” for piracy after which point the intellectual property ecosystem will tip out of equilibrium and cause pirates to become an endangered species.



  • I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They’re a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It’s weird to say the least.

    My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they’re humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.

    It seems to me you want magic. You don’t want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that’s completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?




  • what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask

    I don’t think having my real life phone number tied to a website or game account is a trivial ask. I’d like my data to be private, especially something as real-life and tangible as a fucking phone number. Sure, there are ways around these things, you can get a fake phone number for cheap (or possibly even free), but that’s rather more effort than I’m willing to put in for most things. If I need to enter a phone number to sign up for an account for something, chances are very extremely good I’ll just decide I don’t need the account that badly. I don’t think I’m alone in this.


  • For years I used vanilla vim before finally switching to spacemacs like 4 years ago. I’ve never used neovim, because it just didn’t seem stable and mature enough before I switched to spacemacs and at this point I’m happy with spacemacs and will probably stick with it for the foreseeable future.

    My issue with vim, and the reason I switched, is that vimscript was an absolute nightmare. I was doing easy stuff, writing LaTeX, but getting vim to compile LaTeX and talk to my pdf reader (as you need if you’re going to be working with LaTeX in any kind of serious way) took way too much configuration and my setup would break fairly often as well. Spacemacs is significantly easier. I was shocked when I went from “I’ve never used spacemacs before” to “I’m comfortably writing LaTeX here” in about half an hour. My setup still breaks occasionally and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to figure out why and how to fix it, but it’s much easier than vim was, that’s for sure.

    I also just like the emacs workflow. I like helm, I like being able to change how the editor works on the fly just by writing some elisp anywhere, I like how easy it is to access the documentation on functions, variables, keybindings, whatever else you might need. I like org-mode. I like that emacs has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.

    I’d never heard of doomemacs. I’m pretty happy with spacemacs so I probably won’t switch, but I’ll at least read about it some more.



  • Sounds like you’ve gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check https://www.protondb.com/ for your game if it doesn’t work immediately.

    Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I’ve never used Mint myself (I don’t like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I’ve heard good things), but that’s part of the beauty of linux, there’s so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.


  • Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you’re defining democracy as “a system in which people vote”, then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don’t think that’s a great definition and I don’t think China is a “liberal democracy” like the US is, but at this point, we’re getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don’t think now is exactly the time for that.)

    Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the “all” feed aren’t going to be the ones where we’re talking theory, they’re going to be the ones where we’re dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That’s true. It doesn’t mean that theory posts don’t exist, just that they aren’t as contentious as dunking posts. That’s an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.

    Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It’s probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say “libs suck”, we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it’s not that we ignore republicans, it’s just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think “liberal” means “democrat”. It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think “liberals” and “democrats” are synonyms.

    And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn’t mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It’s to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It’s fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make “communism” a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?


  • even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.

    What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?

    There isn’t any discussion on political theory

    There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there’s a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I’ve learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you’re reading, you’ll get engagement and answers. It’s pretty cool.

    the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.

    Yes, we’re communists. We aren’t going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you’re an actual leftist and not some “just vooooote” liberal, you’ll probably enjoy hexbear.



  • Yup! It’s what finally made me stop watching twitch (embarrassing, I know, I’m more of a gamer than I like to admit). Minutes of unskippable ads, way too often, and no adblocker could get rid of them. The best I could find was a twitch redirect that would block the ad, but it couldn’t give you the content back, so when the ads happened the stream would just go dark until they were over. I decided enough was enough and I haven’t gone on twitch since. I’m mentally preparing to do the same with youtube if and when they succeed in breaking adblockers. Which is going to absolutely suck, I watch a lot of youtube, but maybe it’ll actually be a good thing and I’ll be on the internet less.


  • Wait, you think hexbear “gives little regard to class consciousness or worker solidarity”? You think we’re only claiming to be socialist? You think we have a “pathological obsession with identity politics”? I would disagree about all of the above, honestly. I will grant you that I’m not a big fan of patriotism, because I live in the imperial core, and there is nothing good about america. Also, could you give me an example of what “lumpen behavior” you think we’re defending?

    I just realized, I have no desire to get in Yet Another Internet Argument. Please do not answer the above questions unless you really, really want to for some reason. Thanks for explaining your thinking, I very much disagree with you, but that’s ok! This is a 2 day old thread at this point and I’m trying to be less of an argumentative butthole online, so I’ll just say, I hope you have a great day!