Welcome to the internet.

Have a look around.

This has never been forbidden.

No apology needed. No offense taken.

I know that text replies, especially terse ones can be interpreted in many ways. Often I tend to be rather verbose to get my point across accurately. Some then complain about the verbosity of my replies.

It’s a struggle to find the right amount of terse while being verbose enough to not be misunderstood.

I usually want whatever is best for the majority. I’m done college, and I paid my student loans, I’ll vote for student loan forgiveness and a restructuring of that system so others don’t have to go through what I did.

I’m pretty healthy and rarely need hospitals but universal healthcare is something that everyone should have.

I would also vote for UBI, though I would get no benefit from it, as I’ve been employed pretty much non-stop since I left college.

I would also vote to raise the minimum wage, though my salary is significantly amount the minimums.

My principles are in line with what most people would consider to be the greater good for all people. I believe in true equality, and I don’t feel like that’s what we have, some people just aren’t given the same basic rights, especially in America with roe v. Wade being overturned. Bodily autonomy and the right to love, and marry whomever you want. I don’t believe in lowering the bar to give the illusion of things being “fair”, eg, allowing people who are otherwise mentally or physically incapable of doing a job, to do the job just because they’re a particular race, gender, or something else (making it more about who they are than whether they’re the best fit for a job).

I don’t think I need any convincing to vote for what’s good for someone else.

Why? How does knowing how politics worked before I could vote, help me as a voter today?

I understand enough about politics to cast my vote and beyond the act of voting, I generally don’t follow politics. I vote based on party platforms (what they intend to do) and the likelihood of those things happening. Eg, if a party was to say that they’ll make everyone rich, I would consider that statement to be delusional, unrealistic and not something that could be fulfilled even if that party was voted in. This is an extreme example, but I think you get my meaning.

Beyond doing my due diligence in figuring out who I want to vote for, and then voting for that party… What else do I realistically need?

My district always elects the same party anyways, whether I vote for them or not. I’ve landed in a gerrymandered location and that party basically always wins, but I still vote regardless.

IMO, I shouldn’t need to take a political history course to be considered to be a responsible voter.

You think politics are in my control in any way, shape, or form? They’ve gerrymandered my vote to irrelevance.

I still vote, I look at the platforms and vote for whomever I feel serves my interests the most, not that the party’s platform means jack or shit. They’re all just pandering to whatever they know you want to hear, and once they get into power, they do whatever the hell they want.

My district leans a particular way, and whether I vote with them, or against them, the same party is elected to govern. I’d say my vote is pretty useless in that context.

I was too young to vote, pre-9/11, and had even less interest in politics than I do now. I’ve vaguely followed along since I got registered to vote when I got old enough to do so, but it’s not like learning about what happened before I was registered to vote will help me in any way. I make the best choice based on the information that is available, and in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

Alright, just stay off my lawn and we’re cool.

Yeah, what’s this fucker on about? I’m an adult that doesn’t even get carded at the liquor store anymore, I fucking swear whenever I damn well please and as often as I give a shit to. Nothing wrong with some cursing, especially at those young fucks that won’t stay off my goddamned lawn. Shit, they’re at it again.

Brb, gotta yell at some asshole kids.

I was alive for 9/11 and I don’t know the difference.

I don’t care for politics.

That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.

It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.

So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).

Awesome.

IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.

That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.

I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.

I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.

My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.

GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.

Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.

The banks are borderline criminally negligent because they exclusively use SMS for 2FA.

Simply, it is insufficient.

I get that they want the SMS information on file, and that’s understandable, but give people another option at least, Holy hell. It gives my inner IT secops brain an aneurysm.

It’s improvement.

But you can also polish a turd, and that’s also improvement. It’s still a turd. Taking 1990’s tech and overlaying rich text services onto it, is just polish for the same 90’s tech that should have been left behind.

IMO, it’s still worlds away from what you can get with a purely digital instant messaging system.

Also, it seems idiotic to me that nearly all of your communications can go up in smoke by accidentally dropping your phone into a wood chipper, and you’ll be SOL until you replace it because everything is hairpinned through your cellphones SMS capability. Battery dead? Out of your providers service area? Ha ha, get fucked.

Just dumb.

All I’m going to say to this is…

You people still use SMS?

I’ve explicitly told people not to send me text messages. The protocols are old and shit compared to other instant messengers. I’m on Google chat, telegram, signal, discord, slack, teams… Find another app to talk to me with. I generally don’t care which one, but I actively refuse to sign up for or into any Facebook/meta/Zuckerberg properties. If you use something I don’t that isn’t owned by the zuck, I’ll probably sign up so we can keep touch, but for the love of God, not SMS.

Look, SMS was great when phones didn’t have internet on them. It was a quick and easy way to send updates and chat while away from your cable/DSL/dialup (whatever you had at the time). Now that data is the primary use for a mobile phone plan, just use a more robust IM app.

I also have about six or seven phone numbers, which I give out to different groups of people for different reasons, plus a phone number on my mobile which nearly nobody knows. All my other lines (all VoIP lines) ring my cellphone number. Texting from my VoIP line is not fun, but it does work. Multimedia messages generally get lost and RCS is just encouraging the use of something that should have been killed off.

I’m partial to Telegram and signal since they mainly operate by phone numbers, but I can make “voice” and video calls over data rather than having to use my cellphone directly; which allows me to call from my computer, laptop, phone, tablet… Literally any device that can run the program. So if my phone is lost/damaged/stolen/whatever (unavailable for any reason), I can still send messages to you and call if needed.

If everything is tied to your cellphone number, and that number becomes unavailable for any reason, well… Get fucked I guess. Your SIM stops working, your phone dies/breaks/gets stolen, your provider decides to fuck your account up or charge you a fortune for no good reason and cuts you off, your provider has a major malfunction and stops servicing clients in your area… Literally anything goes wrong with the one system you use and all your SMS bullshit goes away. Stop. Using. SMS.

I’ll just leave this here:

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

This is the main reason why I quit Facebook and other services. Anytime you access them from mobile via a web browser it corners you into a “download our app” page. Facebook started doing it with messenger and I knew I had to get out.

I’m not giving Zuckerberg that level of access to my data.

Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. People hit the most minor roadblock and just stop working until someone else fixes their shit.

It’s an attitude of “we’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas!”

I don’t like those people either.