underemployed, not unemployed. I got REALLY lucky when I was younger and enjoyed a short but glorious period of time where life was actually working out. Turns out jobs that pay a living wage are really hard to get and hard to keep. There’s always shitty retail or fast food jobs.

I’m still coasting off the success from when I was gainfully employed up until 2018. I sure am glad I did nothing but stockpile savings into a bank account during this time. I can’t believe I’ve made it this far just living on a “at least im losing money slower” basis. Don’t know what I’ll do next. I should have used my savings to buy a plot of land and a camper to homestead on since that seems to be the only way to circumvent unfair apartment rent and unfair housing prices. I think I could have lasted even longer doing it that way, live and learn I guess.

I kind of wonder this sometimes too. Maybe not from an organ harvesting standpoint but enslavement. If I were captured/kidnapped and became a sex slave or a scam call center slave or something, my #1 goal would be to escape and if that’s not possible, go on a violent rampage and murder as many of my abusers as possible before they kill me (they’d just kill me when I outlive my usefulness regardless) and if that’s not possible, the s-word, as a last resort. Does this type of thing happen more often than they make it sound? Perhaps they are really efficient at going after the families of victims that don’t fully submit which keeps victims in check? Maybe victims are kept in holocaust-like conditions so they aren’t physically capable of anything in the first place, but then they wouldn’t be capable of work, so idk.

Human trafficking disturbs me enough that I try not to think about it.

be careful with this one because the types of people this applies to will just twist its meaning into “people need to own less/nothing. Minimum wage is too high. The Bible says having enough money to survive is bad”

Computer engineer here (well I have a computer engineering degree and have worked on several computer engineering projects at least). The only point of fucking with an i486 in 2025 for reasons besides “vintage computing” or playing MS-DOS games is that it’s probably the most powerful cpu that can still run on a cheap 4 layer circuit board. This cpu is also simple enough that a i486 chipset can be DIY’ed without ball grid array components. Electronic devices with 4 layer circuit boards are less susceptible to getting ruined by tariffs because they can be manufactured for a reasonable price in places besides just China. Ball grid array components require specialized equipment in order to put them on circuit boards. The easier surface mount (quad flat package) chips required to build a viable and performant i486 motherboard are simple enough that all you need is a cheap soldering iron and a steady hand to solder them onto a circuit board.

What I’m getting at is that prior to them dropping i486 support in Linux, it was possible to use cheapo microchips from Mouser, connect them to i486 cpu and singlehandedly DIY a modern-Linux capable computer, in theory at least.

With Linux dropping support for i486, the bar is now much higher. It’s still possible to completely DIY an ever more powerful, non-i486 based Linux-capable computer yourself if you REALLY know what you’re doing (and people HAVE done it).

I wanted to build one just for fun and maybe to use it like super high performance arduino but now there’s a lot less of a point so meh.

I don’t know, but I know of one thing citizens SHOULDN’T do to prevent their country enabling genocide. That is forfeiting their future by electing a dictator that might genocide poor people on the other side of the world a little less in exchange for giving up freedoms. I get it. Voluntarily making our lives worse/harder because it might help poor people in another country sounds like a grand and noble thing to do. But now they’re sending American citizens to concentration camps. If you think this was a fair trade, just block me right now. Don’t be like gen Z and swing voters in the 2024 US election. Sometimes you just have to choose to save yourself first.

LXDE sucks ass because no one has ever figured out how to mod a search bar into the start menu.

please for the love of fuck can someone please mod a search bar into LXDE.

technically, the command line on modern computers runs in graphics mode and not text mode anyway. It ends up being more efficient to do this because of fonts and font sizes and multiple colors and whatnot. It’s been like this for at least the past 20 years. So the ctrl+alt+f1 screen is still a gui.

I would say yes. Personally it is kind of against everything I stand for to pay a corporation for ai. With that being said: the only reason I personally have not yet set up a completely ai-driven self-hosted lan forum or lemmy instance meant to simulate the Old Skool ™ days of the internet is because a) none of the forum software has an api that’s worth a damn (phpbb for example. gnusocial is also lame and stupid and impossible to work with) and b) lemmy instances are actually pretty difficult to both set up and get ai bots to operate with.

I could definitely hack up some diy python-bottles or django thingy in less effort than it would take to actually pull off any of those other approaches but I currently have marginally better things to do with my free time so it will have to wait.

If I ever finish the mountain of “more important” personal projects I have then I probably would eventually get a completely fake self-hosted self-made ai social media hackfuck.

You’d have to be a fucking idiot to support Trump while being PUBLICLY known as someone that uses marijuana. Once The Party has all the transgenders either killed or in concentration camps, marijuana users will likely be next. This isn’t just stupid this is advanced stupid.

I think it only works if you’re either an absolute KDE config file genius hacker or your distro’s repository has actually good default configs and setup. Installing KDE on arch always works well for me but every time I’ve tried it on Ubuntu I just get an unusable mess. One time I had it such that I had to retype my password all the fucking time to “unlock the keychain” and then the stupid update window would ALWAYS show up during the worst possible time with impeccable timing.

A long time ago I needed to install a program. It needed snap I think. Well I googled and googled and googled and I couldn’t just type “sudo apt install snap” for some reason. But there was a way to get snap if you had flatpak. I didn’t have flatpak So I googled and googled and googled some more and I couldn’t find a way to install flatpak that didn’t involve already having snap first.

So then I never fucked with flatpak or snap ever again except for that one time I installed gzdoom in flatpak and it actually worked for some reason, the end.

idk about 2025 but as of a few years ago, Slackware used to not have a dependency resolver in whatever it uses to download packages. You had to resolve dependencies manually.

Luckily I switched to Gentoo and 3 years later after my system was done compiling, it was already out of date so when I used emerge to update my system, it borked itself because it was so out of date.

ACKTUALLY they’re on the verge of dropping i486 support. Fucking bullshit if you ask me. Now they expect us to upgrade our computers more often than once every 40 years? Homebrewers ARE JUST NOW figuring out how to diy i486 motherboard chipsets.

Next thing you know we’ll need a 3090ti just to boot into Grub.

obligatory LXDE is actually also really good but you know what would make it 10000000000000000000000000000 times better? If there was a Windows 7-esque search bar on the start menu so you could search instead of painstakingly browse through all the stupid icons like its Windows 95.

I always post a comment like this in discussions about desktop environments in the off chance someone found a way to mod a search into LXDE’s start menu.

I hate Gnome because it doesn’t give you taskbar boxes to show all the open windows. There is a extension for this but it’s almost always out of date. How the fuck is anyone expected to get any work done like that? Pressing the “windows” key to show that tile view is a thing but I want to see what all is open without pressing a button first. It’s fine for watching youtube or playing games. And the ui looks really cool if you’re high off your ass, but that’s it.

Dolphin is the worst file manager, mostly because of how it doesn’t give you a file copy window but also because it’s just a shittier version of Nemo. Nemo is superior except that most of the time you can’t drag and drop files from a zip folder window into Nemo but only if you’re using KDE. Cinnamon is pretty much the only other DE I can stand and Nemo lets you drag and from from zip files all the time on Cinnamon but it’s otherwise worse than KDE.

Gnome is better than KDE wow what a typo. KDE is better than Gnome. With that being said, the dolphin file manager sucks ASS. The Nemo file manager is superior, except depending on which way the wind was blowing while you installed your distro, you have a 50/50 chance of being able to drag and drop the contents of zip folders into Nemo when running KDE. Dolphin always works when you do this on KDE but that’s Dolphin’s only positive aspect. The ui and button placement is worse, there’s no file copy progress bar window and the file transfer notification it does have is awful.

Cinnamon works with Nemo and zip file drag-dropping works all the time, but then you’re using a 10% shittier DE just to be able to drag and drop. Cinnamon doesn’t fully support wayland yet and its beta wayland support is terrible and slow so it’s a pretty bad one to be using right now.

I wish there was a fix. I would suck dick for fix to the “you can’t drag and drop the contents of zip files into Nemo on KDE except for if you got randomly lucky when installing the distro in the beginning” bug.

At least we (not me, I voted for Harris) all did the right thing by forfeiting our chance at maintaining good living standards by voting to help the poor people in Gaza. I hope it was worth it.

Eventually you graduate to making the conscious decision to not instead of just being to lazy. Last time I had a job that paid a living wage was 2018. I’ll never look at society and the world as a whole the same way again. If I was considered romantically undesirable back then, I would be entirely in the wrong for thinking there’s a chance now. It was time to get over it a long time ago. I’m over it. Now I read books and study science so I have a better chance of surviving the impending collapse of western society.