https://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

instead of Gentoo.

I agree with your limited-set:

TheRegister & Ars Technica are the 2 that give the highest quality overview,

and yeah, Phoronix is kinda required for Linux news,

and … how the hell could churning more be somehow increasing one’s productivity??

Stephen R. Covey’s truth about…

• the bigger one’s Circle of Concern…
• the smaller one’s Circle of Influence…

one must Focus, or one is just mindlessly dissipating one’s finite strength.

Limit one’s inputs, to quality overview points, and know which other-sites to hit, for specific digging-down into some specialty,

( Leonard Susskind’s lectures, on yt, e.g. for mental exercise: his “Time As A Fractal Flow” one is awesome, when the lightbulb goes on, at the end )

and then you win most.

Never let sand into your gears, in other words, eh?

Keeping all the “misc sand” out from one’s “gears” makes one more productive.

Oh, also www.SemiAccurate.com for the semiconductor foundry industry news, if Demerjian’s still updating that ( he’s scooped the industry toooo many times to let that one escape being important! )

_ /\ _

You, and everybody interested in this who wants real integrity in their leverage to argue this stuff, need to get Hofstadter’s remapping of gender-terms from Mr vs Miss & Mrs to …

… IF you are white, THEN there is 1 pronoun for you, …

… ELSIF you are black, THEN your pronoun is dependent on whether you’re employed or not

written by Douglas Hofstadter ( author of “Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”, the keystone to competent philosophy ), for Scientific American magazine, decades ago.

It may be in the “Metamagical Themas” book.

It was mentioned in the 1990’s in the Feminism FAQ as being trailblazing, because it caused what we were unconscious-of to GET in our faces, violating our habits, so we could actually perceive just how prejudiced it is.

searching … This may be it…

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

I only glanced at it, it’s too jarring for me ( I’d rather that I could just live in solitary isolation for the entire rest of my life: humanity’s abuse ), but it may help crystalize the ability to articulate just how stilted this all is.

I completely agree that “Mr.” and “Miss”, “Mrs.”, “Mz” all are gender-identifying, and as-such ought be considered illegal under their law.

But exactly as the convict/felon/inmate Yehoshua “Jesus” benJoseph identiied, a couple of millenia ago, legalists insist on the letter-of-the-law, while ignoring whatever law’s inconvenient to their artifice.

Legalists haven’t changed since benJoseph called them “Hypocrites!”.

_ /\ _

If it’s changing, you might want to get a brain-scan, immediately.

No, it isn’t normal ( not for me, anyhow ), to the guy who said it is normal.

It’s not an ear thing, it is an auditory-processing thing, so it’s your brain that’s doing it.

The question is why it is doing it.

Perhaps it’s just fuzzy wiring, as most such cases likely are.

( synaesthesia is a case of weird wiring, and I’ve got that, but not in the normal way, not senses blurring into each-other, but rather my non-visual cognition being a kind of “blur” to those senses, so they mesh oddly )

But if it begins changing in either intensity or character, get a scan.

( I’m a braindamage survivor, and it takes decades to adapt to braindamage: prevention/avoidance is better than hating one’s life for decades, while being bullied by all who reject that it could still validly be a problem, and hold that one ought either force oneself into being an “acceptable” drugged psychiatric-zombie, and not “pretend” to be getting better, or one ought be able to be acceptable-pretence, just like Valid People™ are. )

_ /\ _

Spend a half-month considering, deeply, which path you would most-value having taken at the end of your life.

Due to an unconscious psychological-limitation, imagine your funeral at 1.5x your current age ( we apparently have a kind of “horizon” in our ability to understand our meaning beyond that ),

and imagine each significant variant, or compromise, and see how each makes you, in that future-condition/context feel.

Your answer is within you, same as for everyone.

_ /\ _

SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

and not just privilege’s gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered “level” playing-field.

The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_ /\ _

Fish, arthropods, etc, had eggs millions of years before chickens.

_ /\ _

A couple of decades ago, iirc, SANS.org ( IF I’m remembering who it was who did it ) put a fresh-install of MS-Windows on a machine, & connected it to the internet.

It took SEVERAL MINUTES for it to be broken-into, & corrupted, botnetted.

The auto-attacks by botnets are continuous: hitting different ports, trying to break-in, automatically.

I’ve had linux desktops pwned from me.

the internet should be considered something like a mix of toxic & corrosive chemicals: “maybe” your hand will be fine, if you dip it in for a moment & immediately rinse it off ( for 3 hours ), but if you leave you limbs dwelling in the virulent slop, Bad Things™ are going to happen, sooner-or-later.

I used to de-infest Windows machines for my neighbours…

haven’t done it in years: they’ll not pay-for good anti-virus, they’ll not resist installing malware: therefore there is no point.

Let 'em rot.

I’ve got a life to work-on uncrippling, & too-little strength/time left.

“but I don’t need antivirus: i never get infected!!”

then how come I needed to de-infest it for you??

“but I don’t need an immune-system: pathogens are a hoax!!”

get AIDS, then, & don’t use anti-AIDS drugs, & see how “healthy” you are, 2 years in.

Same argument, different context-mapping.

Tarpit was a wonderful-looking invention, for Linux’s netfilter/iptables, years ago: don’t help botnets scan quickly & efficiently to help them find a way to break-in…

Anyways, just random thoughts from an old geek…

EDIT: “when do I need to wear a seatbelt?”

is essentially the same category of question.

_ /\ _

IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn’t possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn’t a niche distro, either, iirc.

Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you’re rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn’t sane to continue doing it. )

Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don’t even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

_ /\ _

If it works for you, stick with it.

Works is a feature, not a bug.

_ /\ _

I’m a braindamage survivor.

You need to communicate your values, and why they are your values.

You need to communicate who you are, via the most-significant-moments/events you experienced: the most-significant-for-you meanings, see?

As for you disappearing, the Soul/CellOfGod/ChildOfGod/Continuum ( whatever you want to call it ) that causes the molecules in your body to continue-living ( yes, there is a physics-level cause for the anti-entropy behaviour expressed as living-organisms, and it isn’t there, when those same molecules are doing the disintegrating-corpse thing, obviously )

That cause is unkillable.

It keeps getting caught in conceptions/lives, through endless-stream-of-Universes’s perpetual recycling/churning of ALL energies ( including meaning! ) contained within it.

It isn’t the-individual-life that is the center,

it is the Soul/CellOfGod/ParticleOfBrahman that is.

IT experienced some of ITs growing-up, in/through your-life.

With you, your Soul got a gift, fersure.

My life’s been hell, & I’m glad:

nothing like aversion-therapy to force a Soul/CellOfGod to grow-up, eh?

The Soul that had “me”-personality won’t ever make that mistake, again.

: )

If you’ve still got any ability to read, or to have someone read to you, please have someone get Elisabeth Haich’s “Initiation” into you:

it is likely that only part of the book will be important for you, but that part will likely be IMPORTANT.

The world her Soul 1st inhabited was something like 10,000y ago ( it hasn’t rained much there, since then ).

My Soul’s spent most of its time inhabiting insect-lives, or particularly-stupid-fish-with-bad-eyesight.

It’s been centuries since it had been in a human-category life ( the Catholicism I was pressed into, by mom, got nuked when I discovered those strange-memories were memories of my Soul’s having lived in other kinds of lives.

Not only did it nuke all the Abrahamic religions, but it forced me to accept that ALL lives are lives because they have a Soul underlying them, and there isn’t anything “special” about the life of a human, except for our Potential & our Opportunity, which most take for granted, including me, in my younger days ).

Anyways, you can’t unexist, from Eternity.

You’ll always have-been, see?

The Soul/CellOfGod who had you has YOU in it, indestructibly.

I’m earning removal of me-personality now ( should be days ), so the nervous-system currently having “me” can get that “me” ripped-out & can replace it with a better personality ( it’s a Buddhist technique, apparently nobody remembers it, in the modern version of Buddhism, for some reason ), so you can stack multiple personalities/someones into a single incarnation, to get-through multiple-lives of lessons/growing-up crammed into a single incarnation/life.

It works, but it takes work to force one’s own identity-death, or removal of the instance-of-ego underlying one’s personality…

There are 3 kinds of mind that death-itself has difficulty “gripping” on:

• Wisdom-realizing-that-all-phenomena-are-empty-of-self-inherent-existence

• immeasurable-compassion for all sentiences ( but tempered by wisdom )

• Faithing, which is the simultaneous surrendering-to higher-power, relying-on higher-power, and gratitude-to higher-power.

Faithing on one’s own CellOfGod/Soul is perfectly find/workable.

It has BuddhaNature/GodNature, so all you have to do is orient to that aspect of its nature, and then faithing is powerful/valid, see?

Guru-yoga, is faithing.

“a faith”, ie noun, … isn’t what the original texts said, btw.

Anyways, I hope something in this helps, gives you leverage.

Either way, our Souls will meet again, after “us”, sooner-or-later…

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, Hoomin!

( :

_ /\ _

Read Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture”, and consider that a person in a high-collectivity culture, which also is a high-power-distance culture, may well answer the survey with what “face” requires them to say, instead of answering with what they, themselves, feel.

If you aren’t correcting for that, you’re doing propaganda, not science.

Different cultures REQUIRE different subjectivities be taken-into-account.

I think it would be more valid to dig into specific dimensions of happiness, & make some of those objective ( cortisol-blood-levels, for measuring stress, e.g. )

WHEN you ask people in individualistic cultures a question, and THEN you ask people in collectivist cultures the SAME question, they are not answering the same question, they are answering the social-pressure question, instead.

It makes complete mincemeat of cross-cultural measuring of “objective” things.

Try reading Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” book, & understand just HOW different warm-vs-nordic cultures are, in instinct/reactions,

then it should be more obvious how such surveys are disinformation, not information.

Then it ISNT a

“Global Happiness Index”

, rather it is a

“Global URBAN Happiness Index”,

and such profound mislabeling of things is disinformation, not journalism.

Which, itself, is so systematic & profound, nowadays, that there isn’t much hope for integrity to win, in our world, now, anyways.

and if you consider that “economic barrier to entry” can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup’s code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code …

then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one’s code.

“Coopetition” Bill Gates coined, where you “cooperate” with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.

I’ve been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female…

: P

The book “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess” by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women’s-rights simply don’t progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages…

So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…

That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

It’s still true.

Conditioning an entire population’s System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place…

Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas…

… digging …

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

( that isn’t a quick read… may come back to it some day… )

Bingo!

“The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic.”

from

https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people’s System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

What about Hebrew?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

No wonder women can’t get equal-validity in Jewish culture…

( I read a Jewess’s writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ … which explains the damage in the stereotypical “Jewish mother”, a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature… )

So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is … baseless, in some/many cultures…

Interesting, but depressing.

: \

I haven’t read the article, but yes, wars do have time-limits:

Once a war becomes domestically impossible to participate in, Vietnam as 1 proof, then the-course-of-war changes.

Economic-collapse means that Biden’s hosed in 2024, and the Republicans are Russian allies, not NATO allies.

Yes wars have time-limits.

Simply wait & see: by the end of 2025, NATO will be gutted, Trump will have been crowned GEOTUS ( a term they already use for him ), and Trump will ( passively, at least ) back Russia.

Sickening, but it looks like that’s the fact of the unfolding global/geopolitical near-future.

IF by “security” one means bugs have been prevented from living in it, there is one coded in Haskell, it may be named XMonad or something…

( … digging … )

Yep:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad

from there:

“Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]”

Dig: 2000-ish lines of code.

https://xmonad.org/

https://xmonad.org/documentation.html

There was an item in New Scientist, perhaps last century, of an experiment done at a hospital’s ICU ( UK, iirc, the hospital had some kind of religious name, like St (somethingorother) ),

and that experiment tested whether patient-to-patient infections were affected by ionizers ( which charge the air, making particles in the air stick to surfaces, like walls, objects, whatever )…

That experiment had no effect in the control condition, but the ionizer-test condition reduced those infections down to ZERO.

No hospital with any reputation would dare use such “New Age woo”, of course, no matter that evidence, combined with the Hippocratic Oath ( 1st do no harm! ), should oblige its use.

Bah.

I couldn’t find much of anything through DuckDuckGo.com

and Scholar.Google.com had stuff that wasn’t what I was trying to find,

and normal google had this

https://www.google.com/search?q="ionizer" "icu" "hospital" "infection" reduce patient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m#ip=1

Anyways, according to the NO cases of inter-patient infection that was reported in the study I remember, it should have been made globally normal.

Notice that the things are called, by many, “air cleaners”.

I’m disputing that air cleaners have no effect on health ( put a box-fan with a 20"-square furnace-filter on the suction-side of it, and it’ll reduce the amount of dust, without any expensive products, and in some areas, in industrial or desert zones, e.g. it’ll likely reduce the harm done to one’s lungs by that air ), and pointing-out that different definitions of “air cleaner” are valid, though not about the same thing.

Russia, the invader, is the Good Guys, in the Russia vs Ukraine war??

Disinformation-propaganda.

https://bigthink.com/thinking/fascism-definition-stanley/

People need to understand those 10 points that are characteristic of Fascism.

Comically, Fascism was invented by a Black man, an African, named Marcus Garvey, and Mussolini stole it from him, then Hitler from him, to the best of my knowledge…

The problem is the end of civil-rights: WHEN the only internet left is the internet that IS for-profit propaganda, auto-deleting all non-compliant human thought, discussion, intelligence, objectivity, etc,

THEN humanity is just managed “steers” whose lives are being consumed by corporations which graze on us.

Since another dimension of ratchet is the concentration-of-wealth, you can see that working-destitution is being enforced on more & more of humankind, and real wealth being limited to fewer & fewer…

What happens when the working-poor try fighting for a fair share of the economy?

Rigged legislation, rigged “police” ( I used to believe in the police ), anti-education Florida-style for the public, etc…

AI tilts the playing-field, and it does-so for the monied special-interest-groups.

They don’t have humanitarianism at heart.

Neither do the politically motivated.

Neither do for-profit-psychopaths ( corporations are psychopaths ).

Living in a Decorator Prison is all humanity can hope for, now: inmates, … except for the fewer & fewer oligarchs & the financial-class.

'tisn’t looking good.

Without Divine Intervention, which is statistically improbable an event, these are The End Times, but not for the reason that the religious claim.