OldFartPhil

Twitter still has devs?

I wouldn’t say I love it, but Panda Express is my go-to when I’m hungry and there’s one nearby.

That correction is going to be a mess. My company headquarters are in a medium-sized US city. We own (and used to occupy) two downtown office building, a mid-rise and a high-rise. Right now both buildings are mostly empty, with little prospect of them being occupied in the near future.

Still full time remote. I do miss the face-to-face contact with my co-workers, but do not miss my 2 hours a day bus commute.

Prior to the pandemic, I had a couple of co-workers who were already full time remote and everyone was allowed to work from home a couple of days per week. But during the pandemic we recruited nationally, so there’s no way my company can put the WFH genie back in the bottle. They’re currently talking about right-sizing our office needs and building collaborative spaces; another sign we’re not going back.

The New Yorker article said Cuban was approached to be a donor, but it doesn’t say whether he is actually a supporter. Apparently, the group is very close-lipped about where their money is coming from (what a surprise).

I don’t want to turn the thread into too much of a political discussion, but when one political party believes in democracy and one party is an existential threat to democracy, there’s no room for spoiler candidates.

I’m actually pretty bummed about the change. It’s a luxury (and one of the things that makes Oregon special) to be able to wait in a heated or air conditioned car while someone else pump my gas. I also don’t understand why some people are so gung ho to pump their own.

I agree. I was a big fan of hers during Congressional testimony. But she is definitely awkward in unscripted environments and would be a poor presidential candidate in a nation where a significant portion of the electorate wants a president they can have a beer with. Additionally, her history as a prosecutor makes Democrats suspicious of her.

Republicans hate her because she’s a Black woman. They’ll make up other excuses, but none of them hold water.

Based on the posts in this thread, I see a lot of overlap between urban fantasy fans and science fiction fans. With the exception of Lord of the Rings, I’ve never cared much for high fantasy, but I’ve really enjoyed the urban fantasy series I’ve read. If anyone is interested, I’ve enjoyed…

1. The Laundry Files by Charles Stross
2. The City We Became and The World We Make by MK Jemisin
3. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
4. The Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey
5. The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch
6. The Stranger Times series by C.K. McDonnell

N.K. Jemisen is one of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy writers. If you like her style and world building I’d highly recommend the Broken Earth trilogy.

The murderbot stories get so much praise but I was never able to get into them. I binge read (well, actually binge listened) to the Rivers of London books a few months ago and thought they were first-rate.

I just finished the new Ann Leckie book, Translation State, which I liked very much. If you couldn’t get enough of the the Imperial Radch universe it’s a must read.

This seems like a golden opportunity for distros like Suse and Ubuntu, who offer enterprise support for their free product, to poach some RHEL customers.

Does it help to encourage users to host their own media rather than upload it to a lemmy/kbin instance. Or is that a minor component of the cost?

Define cheap. The least expensive laptop on Dell Refurbished currently is $180 and would easily run any desktop environment, including the heavyweights. Specs are here:
CPU
1x Intel Core i5-6300U (2-Core, 2.40 GHz)
Memory
8 GB (1x 8GB)
HDD
256 GB (1x 256 GB SSD)
Display
14" HD (1366 x 768)

If you’re thinking cheaper yet, you’ll want at least a dual core processor and 4GB of RAM. Just about any business laptop from the last 10 years or so would work, as long as you stay away from bottom of the barrel Celerons or AMD processors and <4GB of RAM. You can run Linux on a very low spec machine, but you’d want to use a lightweight DE and web browsing wouldn’t be a fun experience.

If I understand how the fediverse works (an open question :-)), the amount of activity on the home page/“all” feed/federated feed of an instance is dependent on how many magazines/communities the members are subscribed to. I’ve noticed that the “All” feed of the most established Lemmy instances have more posts than here at kbin.social. I would anticipate that situation improving over time as the community here grows and people increase the number of subscriptions they have. I would expect more (and more active) local magazines over time here, as well.

The kbin mobile website works fine in Safari on the iPhone, too. Looks just like the website adapted for a smaller screen and has all the same functionality. With the exception of notifications, it’s fine. And it’s early days, people will develop apps for the platform.

Same here. I like the look, usability and layout of Kbin better. I do wish there were more users here at kbin.social, though, as the federated feed is more lively on the large Lemmy instances.

For being an early beta, kbin is usable and remarkably polished. I think the downsides for most people are deciding what server to join and content discovery.

Steven King, at his best, is the greatest American novelist of his generation. His character building is unsurpassed and he can definitely turn a phrase. On the other hand, a lot of his books would have benefited from more aggressive editing and he doesn’t always stick his landings. That being said, he’s been a fixture in my library for decades.

I’m glad to see others recommend 11/22/63, which IMHO is the best “modern” King novel (and maybe his best ever). For less well known books, I read Duma Key recently and liked it a lot. I know it’s been mentioned before, The Talsiman is one of my all-time favorite books.