requires terminal skills to deal with most things

Have you actually used linux? Terminal is optional. Most linux users use it because it’s rad, not because it’s necessary.

Digging through the registry or searching ad laden websites to find where a new setting or old menu is buried is more time consuming than typing man <command> or tldr <command>. The latter is to improve my system and the former to prevent a private company from making it worse.

I would say there’s been a mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon and from Reddit to Lemmy. The current numbers are still a small fraction of the original services, but the federated services have reached a critical mass where they now offer comparable value. YouTube hasn’t been ubiquitous for that long and it’s already pretty enshittified. I see a lot of people who are fed up with it and looking for an alternative. The peertube platform is there, I think with more people and content and it’ll join the ranks.

Me if that happens:

jk, i barely use YT as it is. I’m waiting for the YT ToS update that causes a mass migration to peertube

I’m convinced Mark Zuckerberg had a wet dream about pupil tracking when he bought Oculus.

Came here to say this. Also

OpenDyslexic as an alternative font

Respect. Congrats to OP on launching. Will take a peak when I get the chance.

People who are proud of getting a good deal via an app break my heart. Most folks I know like that are not strapped for cash. They just like the feeling of getting a bargain. They don’t consider that the prices are artificially inflated. They don’t need the sale item. And in the long run they’ll probably end up paying more when the stores know their purchasing habits and have A/B tested them enough to know how to provide as little as possible while charging as much as a customer can stomach.

If a coupon requires an app, I don’t by that item. Especially when it comes to groceries. When it comes to store cards, most let you use a phone number instead of scanning the card. So plug in a random number at checkout. You can often get a hit on the first try. Then pay in cash. Dirty up someone else’s data and give these stores nothing on you. Seriously, if people keep giving in, it’s guaranteed to get worse. First the store card, then the app, what’s next?

I’m with you 100% up to the “little recourse,” I think there’s more options now than there have ever been. Open source (including linux and self hosting) are about the only tech-future things I’m genuinely excited about.

There’s still a learning curve and progress to be made, for sure. However, anecdotally, I’ve seen programming and hosting become vastly more accessible in the last 15 years. Also, not everyone needs to self host, people just need to know someone who is willing and able to set them up.

Not saying it’s a guarantee, but it’s a possible way out, at least. And being here on lemmy, reading and writing about these issues is a good sign there’s movement in the right direction.

Offline playback / downloads

Dope. Aside from the usual, outside of wifi situations, if your networking skills are (like mine) not to the point of confidently, and securely opening ports, this is a great stopgap. It’s a nice-to-have feature that’s missing from the official app, last I checked.

I wouldn’t say that we disagree. I’m not against regulation. I apologize if I was not clearer about that.

I do think it’s a blunt tool, but I also think blunt tools are necessary. I didn’t mean to undermine that, I wanted to communicate that a cultural and behavioral shift is an additional tool we need.

Besides the “assholes and idiots,” there’s also well-meaning but ignorant folks out there. Understandably, too- we’re dealing with complex supply chains. It’s easy to think switching to paper is better- and it is, on the waste front- but it isn’t on the carbon front, not without reusing them a few times. I regret not being clearer and to the point in my original reply.

Growing up, I was focused on the waste problem but it wasn’t until I heard an estimate about how many people would die globally in the next few decades if temps rose 2° C instead of 1.5. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the source again, but I remember it was orders of magnitude more than the holocaust. And those are going to be people in vulnerable parts of the world, not the biggest polluters. It really woke me up to the stakes of greenhouse gases. Of course micro plastics are a concern, as well, but I’d have felt much better about the posted news if it were targeting the plastic around food which is so abundant now and harder to reduce, reuse, or recycle.

Anyways, thank you for your pushback. It’s helped me realize that I need to be clearer and distinguish my stance from sounding too much like Plastic PR talking points.

infuencers are just rebranded shills

Why do people only ever talk about the carbon footprint when plastic bans are discussed?

This is not the case. Ai, crypto, airplanes, cars, meat production, fertilizers, etc are more are on my radar than bag bans. Suggesting otherwise feels combative. I agree that we should reduce both greenhouse gases and plastic waste. I didn’t say or even suggest we shouldn’t reduce plastic waste. My last sentence (“… we need to foster a culture that consumes less and reuses more.”) is inclusive of reducing plastic use and waste.

many people do not recycle or reuse their plastic bags. I would assume this measure is aimed more at them then at you.

And that’s why my response was about the behavioral and cultural change. The unintuitive fact about plastic vs paper bag carbon emissions was something I heard about a decade ago and it helped push my understanding of environment impact beyond simply “plastic bad, paper good,” and focusing only on waste and not manufacturing and distribution, as well. Regulation is just one tool, and a blunt one at that, but individual choices matter and can operate with more nuance for better results. To be clear, that’s not an argument against regulation, it’s an argument for acting beyond the baseline that regulation sets.

Edit: formatting, brevity, clarity, typo

That’s on the whole probably good news, though I’m having trouble finding immediate satisfaction. Banning plastic bags doesn’t necessarily mean less of an impact on the environment. Not without a behavior change, as well.

Plastic bags have the lowest carbon footprint to produce and distribute compared to paper, polypropylene, or cotton. In many places plastic bags (including small produce bags) can be recycled at the grocery store (two near me do but it’s easy to miss). I also found plastic very easy to reuse. It’s a bit annoying to have to buy trashbags when my reused grocery bags worked fine and were made of less material.

Reusable totes are only as eco friendly as they are reused (about 130 times to equal plastic). Forgetting them and amassing a huge collection is not progress nor is using paper bags once and then recycling them. source

Happy to see attention on the issue but as I haven’t always appreciated the nuances or been wary of the green washing in the past, I thought this was worth sharing. Progress is rarely as simple as a new regulation or new product, as strong capitalist forces would want us to believe. If we want meaningful progress we need to foster a culture that consumes less and reuses more.

Yeah. My partner later said it was almost a deal breaker when I first told her.

I’m a fan of most of the movies listed, but didn’t notice anyone mention one of my favorites, Moneyball. Don’t let the baseball fool you. I don’t even like baseball. To me it’s not about baseball, it’s about trying to succeed in a flawed system.

Never have I ever read a single book or watched a single movie of the Harry Potter series.

I have used inkscape for this purpose and it can be effective. The display units can be changed in the preferences (inch, cm, etc) and basic shape dimensions input directly. You can input absolute position for shapes and nodes, but I didn’t notice an easy way for relative position. They also have a path effect called “Measure Segments” for that functionality. FWIW, I later preferred blender, but I might try a dedicated tool like LibreCAD mentioned in another comment. They seem to have decent documentation and a wiki.

Yup! Migrated from VSCodium; wanted to learn a modal editor but didn’t have the time or confidence to configure vim or neovim. It’s been my go-to editor for 2+ years now.

I went a little overboard and wrote a one-liner to accurately answer this question

history|cut -d " " -f 5|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|head -5

Note: history displays like this for me 20622 2023-02-18 16:41:23 ls I don’t know if that’s because I set HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T ' in .bashrc, or if it’s like that for everyone. If it’s different for you change -f 5 to target the command. Use -f 5-7 to include flags and arguments.

My top 5 (since last install)

   2002 ls
   1296 cd
    455 hx
    427 g
    316 find

g is an alias for gitui. When I include flags and arguments most of the top commands are aliases, often shortcuts to a project directory.

Not to ramble, but after doing this I figured I should alias the longest, most-used commands (even aliasing ls to l could have saved 2002 keystrokes :P) So I wrote another one-liner to check for available single characters to alias with:

for c in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z; do [[ ! $(command -v $c) ]] && echo $c; done

In .bash_aliases I’ve added alias b='hx ${HOME}/.bash_aliases' to quickly edit aliases and alias r='source ${HOME}/.bashrc' to reload them.

And all that data probably takes up less room than a few pictures, could easily be stored locally, and encrypted locally before backing up on a server. But why give individuals control and privacy over their own behavior and history when you can sell it to anyone and keep the profits for yourself? /s

scruffy-seconded.gif

I’ve been surprised by how effective it’s been to say, respectfully, “this is important to me,” maybe adding “here’s why.” Got all my siblings, mom, SO, and best friend on Signal, that’s a vast majority of my online conversations.

reddit is orders of magnitude bigger then lemmy, but I find lemmy high quality and has more people with similar values- more than i could ever keep up with.

Back when Adobe went subscription-only, I stopped using it on my personal work and devices even though a lot of my previous work depended on it. Had to switch to different tools, but now there are better options. Not only has Adobe stagnated, but they caused an even bigger exodus when they messed with the ToS to train ai on user data.

I switch to linux a few years ago and now when I have jobs that use windows I realize how clunky it actually is, and it’s only getting worse while linux has been getting better.

I’m fully degoogled (also a graphineOS user). It took me years to eliminate each service, but I was sick of these giant companies that could never give me the things I wanted because in interferes with what they want (ad revenue). The only thing you can do is take it all back. Participate as little as possible. These companies will not stop getting worse while people continue to use them.

It can be inconvenient, time-consuming, and hard, but there are options, and it is a lot easier now than it was a decade ago. I see no reason why it wont continue to get easier and more accessible. That’s why it’s important for tech savvy folks to do what they can, now, and make it easier for those who come after them. Personally, I’ve done a lot for myself, but need to learn more about hosting securely so I can offer close friends and family better alternatives that they can easily access.