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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Thanks for that correction then. I wasn’t conscious of that detail.

    In any case, the issue remains that, if the vendor’s default repositories push for a type of package I don’t want, I either have to manually find and vet third party repositories I trust or find someone else to rely on for defaults I’m fine with.

    The difference between “I want a different source for a single package, so I’ll manually select a different source for that one” and “I don’t trust Canonical to select sources I agree with anymore” is one of scale. I’m fine with manually pinning the transitional package, uninstalling it and the snap (hopefully remembering to back up my profile before realising that it also deletes user data) adding a ppa, reinstalling it and reimporting my profiles just for firefox.

    But if I feel like I have to fight my distro vendor over not using their preferred package distribution system, it’s probably better to jump ship - other vendors have beautiful distros too.

    (Also, “you can just use a different source” is part of the reason people prefer not to use snap, where you can’t do that)


  • Correct me there, but wasn’t the “select source” thing intended to be about different deb sources?

    The issue is that what you expect to be a deb package manager ends up redirecting to snap anyway. It’s not a different source, it’s a different system. If I have to manually take steps to avoid using the distro vendor’s default sources because they just redirect to a system I don’t want to use, I might as well look for a different vendor.

    And so I did


  • IIRC, the issue was that - unless you take steps to explicitly prevent it - Ubuntu would occasionally reinstall the snap version. I don’t remember the details, been a while since I had to dance that dance, but I recall it being one of the things that put me off snap in particular, Ubuntu in general and sparked my search for a different distro.

    I’m now on Nobara, a Fedora-based gaming-oriented distro maintained by GloriousEgroll (who also maintains the popular Proton-GE)




  • Are you trying to argue that laws and treaties are worthless unless enough people abide by them and are willing to enforce them?

    Because, yes, that is the fundamental principle of society: We need to work together to survive and thrive, so we agree on rules by which we work, and enforce them on those that break them. If you disagree with something but take no steps to oppose it, your disagreement is just as worthless as a law nobody cares to enforce.

    So what point are you trying to make here? “If China enforced their claim and nobody stopped them, their claim would be effectively valid”? How is that relevant to the situation if all they’re doing is protesting, but nobody else cares to back them up and they don’t actually take measures to prevent the passage?

    “If I put pineapple on my Pizza and nobody stops or punishes me, it’s legal”? Yes. Congrats. You understood the very basics. Want a sticker?







  • A specialist in one field isn’t necessarily adept in another, and particularly coming from STEM to humanities seems a particularly treacherous transition because so much about humans is based on premises that cold, logical STEM principles just aren’t aware of. That doesn’t mean we STEMs are stupid, we just don’t know just how much there is that we don’t know and would need to know before we can understand, let alone predict human behaviour.

    I know I’ve found myself grossly misjudging human reactions in some case because humans are complex and there are so mamy premises and factors affecting individual behaviour and so many more for collective behaviour that they’re effectively non-deterministic and even predicting the probabilities requires such familiarity with the people or demographics, respectively.

    All that is to say: Yes, I think so too. She’s well-educated, but not above tripping over the same, common stone that many smart people have stumbled on.






  • On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

    Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

    On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

    So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

    The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

    (I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)