… Oh.

the use of language as a means of control […] well may have been his most prescient point.

While I think Orwell’s “newspeak” was contrived, it did illustrate the point in strong relief as something unfamiliar… at least at first. But I don’t think he was predicting the future. Instead, I think he was warning the reader of what dangers are already with us.

Honestly, I think this has always been a thing. The spoken word is often inexact as a form of communication efficiency; if the other party has the same ideas in their head as you, pronouns, idioms, recalling past events, are all powerful ways to compress dialogue. However, that same inexactness leaves the door open for doublespeak, dogwhistles, and suggestion in place of fact. Language as a means of control is just in how you use it; the underlying mechanisms were always there.

Yeah. I’m starting to think the misspelling is not deliberate, but ironic - it’s one thing to have guns and a written warning saying you will use them. It’s another to loudly convey that you’re this dumb and also have guns.

Oof. Thanks. I hate it.

For those that may need it:

1. Right click and select “inspect”
2. A new panel will open, and the text <img ... will be highlighted. Right click that.
3. Select “Delete Node.”
4. Impress your friends with your new hacker skills.

Put any distro in front of me and provided I don’t need to master it, I’m good. Ubuntu is fine. Debian is fine. RedHat is fine. Fedora is fine. I even have a tiny low-end system that is using Bohdi. Whatever. We’re all using mostly the same kernel anyway.

90% of what I do is in a container anyway so it almost doesn’t matter; half the time that means Alpine, but not really. That includes both consuming products from upstream as well as software development. I also practically live in the terminal, so I couldn’t care less what GUI subsystem is in play, even while I’m using it.

The only time I’ve encountered people that care a little too much about what distro is being used, is right after having transitioned to Linux; the sheer liberating potential of the thing can make you lose your head.

I’ve come across a lot of professional bias about Linux distros, but that’s usually due to real-world experience with tough or bad projects. Some times, decisions are made that make a given distro the villain or even the hero of the story. In the end, you’ll hear a lot of praise and hate, but context absolutely matters.

There’s also the very natural tendency to seek external validation for your actions/decisions. But some people just can’t self-actualize in a way that’s healthy. Sprinkle a little personal insecurity into the mix and presto: “someone is getting on great with that other Linux I don’t use, so Imma get big mad.”

It’s worse than that. They think that toeing the line and refusing to deviate is the strong position to take here. Always has been.

The current Republican platform is largely based on stupid easily disproven lies.

It’s worth mentioning that this strategy is straight out of the trolling playbook. The overall idea is to get everyone to waste their time arguing nonsense, making it impossible to discuss anything of merit. While the following article applies to internet forums, it’s not hard to see how any social media, TV, or radio, can spill over into our day-to-day discourse and have the same effect: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7573649/

In this case, the topic at hand meets multiple criteria for deliberate trolling. IMO, there’s little room for doubt that we’re being led by the nose and baited to waste valuable pre-election time:

• Digression - Luring others into off-topic discussions by spamming, partaking in cascades or introducing tangential topics (e.g., as in [16]).
• (Hypo)criticism - Excessive criticism of others, e.g. on their punctuation while possibly committing the same errors oneself.
• Antipathy - Creation of a sensitive or antagonistic context through purposeful provocation, in order to manipulate others to produce emotional responses.
• Endangering - Giving out poor advice under an innocent guise, and others are compelled to respond in order to protect others.
• Shocking - Posting about taboos or sensitive subjects, such as religion, death or human rights.
• Aggression - Deliberate and open aggressing of others into retaliating (e.g., by name-calling or foul language).

It’s also worth noting that the launch PS3 also had a whole PS2 inside of it, which partially explains the inflated price point. I say partially since I’m prrety sure that a PS2 slim cost a lot less than $330 in 2006 dollars; they could have just bundled both consoles or offered a rebate on a PS2 purchase and called it a day.

Well, we are talking about a pop star with absolutely staggering amount of influence and reach, specifically with a young demographic. If she were able to motivate her fan-base to vote, that would be a huge deal.

Edit: Holy shit.

Thank you!

people customers always just cut it off 5 words in for some reason…

Fixed that for ya. ;)

I firmly believe this is how we wound up with tabs as a feature in the first place.

Great jebus. It looks like something Ginger Billy would build. There’s no way that’s street legal, nevermind the lack of license plate.

Mom, I want a cybertruck.

Honey, we have a cybertruck home.

Cybertruck at home:

Thank you! I want to ::sniff:: thank my coach, the whole team ::sniff::, and especially my mom for helping make this happen! ::sniff:: Love you mom!

Here’s a version for my fellow gluten-free peeps:

I just want to echo your sentiment with something I’ve been saying here for a while now:

Do not confuse information technology use for computer literacy.

Honestly, this is why I tell developers that work with/for me to build in logging, day one. Not only will you always have clarity in every environment, but you won’t run into cases where adding logging later makes races/deadlocks “go away mysteriously.” A lot of the time, attaching a debugger to stuff in production isn’t going to fly, so “printf debugging” like this is truly your best bet.

To do this right, look into logging modules/libraries that support filtering, lazy evaluation, contexts, and JSON output for perfect SEIM compatibility (enterprise stuff like Splunk or ELK).