This is the thing. People like to blame Berniebros and whatnot for Clinton’s loss in '16, but the reality is that the centrist Democrats that vote for the party’s corporate-backed candidate wouldn’t vote for a progressive one, so even if Bernie had won the nomination, he probably still would have lost because he would have lost the support of these DNC hardliners. I heard people literally say in '16 that if Bernie had somehow won the nomination over Hillary that they would have just stayed home. It’s wild to think how ideologically balkanized the Democratic party is, with so many people fervently belonging to the leftist minority that holds their nose every election to vote for another mediocre person whose best attributes are being “not an outright fascist” versus the people who will never vote for a truly left wing candidate because they’re fiscally conservative but socially liberal and just allergic to compromising in the same way that they’ve forced the leftists in their party to do since forever.

What are they, 1-2% of the potential Dem voter base?

Add a .000 in front of those numbers and you might be right. If those numbers were accurate you would expect somewhere between, what…1 and 2 million tankies in the US alone?

Not the person you originally asked, but the main reason is probably that referring to it as gnu/Linux is 1) already deeply associated with the Richard Stallman meme, to the point that referring to it in that way automatically comes across as either a joke or just a person being intentionally contrarian, and 2) just really weird sounding. In the minds of most people, there is no real reason to refer to it as GNU/Linux, because the actual operating system that does the things the operating system is expected to do - as in provide an API for syscalls, memory management, etc - is just “Linux.” That it’s routinely built alongside a set of core utilities designed and maintained by GNU is largely pointless. It’d be like referring to a hamburger as Buns/Hamburger or Buns+Hamburger. It’s just…weird.

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

surprised to find indignation at sexual scenes in novels

To quote Ryan Letourneau, “Gen Z is Puritanpilled.” Seriously, I’ve found post-millennial generations to be extremely prudish. I think part of it has to do with the fact that as the internet evolved and became mainstream (and more profitable by catering to general audiences), the edgy or adult content became more ghetoized and quarantined over time. Used to be you’d go to reddit and there’d be porn on the front page. There’s like a 0% change of finding something NSFW on the front page there now. As such, younger people who grew up with the modern incarnation of the internet have a very different perspective on sexual content than those of us who grew up with a more “wild west” style internet where porn was just something that lived alongside the more mundane content. The side-effect of this is also that content like the John Irving novels you’re talking about are treated as if they’re grotesque for presenting sex as just another part of people’s lives - something that you’re not supposed to be shy about or ashamed of. Which is, uh…concerning, for a number of reasons. Other theories are that the world in which we live has eroded platonic relationships among young people and that they want to only see platonic friendships among characters, as that’s the vicarious experience they most desire.

It’s episode 2. “Fifteen Million Merits.”

How much easier is it for Google to implement the same?

The correct question is actually “when will Google implement the same?” Because this is a “when will it happen” question, not a “will it happen” question.

If he wants to name it after something he loves, he could name it ApartheidOS, EmeraldMineOS, ApartheidEmeraldMineOS, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Realistically, he would call it ElonOS, hire a bunch of shitty systems programmers to cobble together a bullshit operating system mostly comprised of code stolen from other open source projects, insist that it be written in python because “python is critical to AI,” talk about how the OS integrates with AI seamlessly while having no actual AI in it at all, sell it with a tiered subscription that locked basic functionality, like being able to use the file system, behind a paywall, and then quickly abandon the project and fire everyone involved, having made no real money from the venture but still referring to it as a “triumph of engineering.”

A lot of people forget how overwhelmingly, insanely popular Musk was with way too online nerds. He was reddit’s golden child for years. Part of this is that whenever Disney started releasing the Marvel movies, beginning with Iron Man, Musk was front and center as the core inspiration for Tony Stark (yes, I’m serious, the director and Robert Downey Jr. basically went on record as saying as much) and he fucking milked that shit. It’s also important to understand that for a time he was seen as a forward looking entrepreneur whose business was “going to help save the planet by making electric cars so popular that every car manufacturer would switch to electric vehicle production to keep up.” If Musk was a genius at one thing, it was manipulating public perception of himself and his enterprises. It took years of him being a thin-skinned weirdo and massive corporate tool to undo the amount of positive sentiment he’d built for himself and Tesla.

It’s also how we got snap packages and apartheid, and I’m not even sure which of those is worse. (yes, I’m joking)

Edging is not a new thing, really. You’ve probably just never encountered the concept. Edging is the practice of bringing yourself to the edge of orgasm before backing away. The idea is that when you do finally orgasm it’s been “built up to” by the earlier edging so you get a better climax.

I find the movies conceptually interesting because there aren’t many movies in which humans are just explicitly the bad guys, or in terms of the most recent one just a supporting entity that exists on the periphery of the story. Avatar kinda does that, too, but the Avatar movies are also puddle deep genre fiction and the “of the Apes” movies are at least structurally and narratively competent.

things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.

We have a word for these. It’s called “parasites.”

My favorite was the Chapo Traphouse subreddit because the image in this post describes the hosts and their relationship with their fans. Whenever the subreddit got banned and the hosts heard about it their response was “good, that was the right choice. We fully support the admins here and their banning of that subreddit.” The reddit fans were so salty.

Under the Dome has always been super interesting to me because Brian K. Vaughn is one of the best comic book writers of all time and a consistent criticism of UTD is how bad the writing is. I know he didn’t write many of the episodes, though, but I also wonder how his episodes rank in comparison with the others.

Anything related to a DND live play I’m going to assume will be immediately toxic by virtue of what I understand about DND’s fanbase. I love Dimension20 and I like Critical Role but I’m going to assume every other fan of the show is an insufferable idiot.

I read that as “should be trivial,” not “shouldn’t.” In my defense, I don’t have my glasses on right now. 🤓

In Linux you have to do sudo systemctl disable snapd, which produces a warning about snapd.socket. New users sometimes get a little freaked out about disabling stuff in systemd, especially after they find out what systemd is and does and how important it is. They’re afraid of bricking their installation and you have to be like “no, that won’t happen. Yes, I’m sure it won’t happen. No, you don’t need to reboot. Just replace disable with stop in those commands again and it won’t run anymore. Yes, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” So the commands are trivial, but the psychological toll of doing stuff via the command line that you perceive as dangerous, for truly novice Linux users, isn’t to be underestimated.

Linux is really just the kernel the OS runs on. What people dislike are some of the stupid choices a distribution’s maintainers make. Like, Ubuntu used to be a great entry-level operating system for people who wanted to get into Linux but didn’t want to ditch all the things they understood from Windows or MacOS. It provided a level of comfort and ease of use. Which is great, and something the Linux community needs. But then Canonical started injecting snap package bloatware with everything and it’s just a mess. You have as little control over snap updates as you do Windows updates unless you completely disable the service, which is hardly trivial for a new user.