Lettuceeatlettuce

7

A lot of people get fed up with slow or no progress, so they fall for supporting approaches that "get things done." Even though they go very wrong, and by that point, some are too lost in the sauce to admit it's wrong or severely off-base.

Being involved in anarchist and decentralized leftist orgs, it's very discouraging how few people care and how little power we have.

Often times it takes weeks of planning and everybody's collective effort and spare resources to provide meals to a few dozen people, or to host a single information booth or class at a larger leftist meet up.

After years of that, the temptations of centralized power to just dictate to the masses what will happen is very strong. The justification goes something like, "yeah there are a ton of problems with XYZ, but at least they are accomplishing ABC!"

I feel it too when I look around my country of the USA. Sure China is State-capitalist, authoritarian, pseudo-dystopian police state, and super politically repressive. But god damn it, they have some of the best public transport in the world, a kickass tech and manufacturing sector, solid public healthcare, and the actually imprison and even execute billionaire scumbags...

When I have to encounter the level of American idiocy on a weekly basis, listen to the most asinine politicians and talking heads, and endure capitalist bootlicking propaganda everywhere, I start to get really tempted to advocate for the China way...

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 4w ago

Brotato...so much Brotato...

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 4w ago

I use a bunch of different ones depending on the use case. But the one I've been coming back to for all my general purpose applications is Mint.

It just works, and the Cinnamon DE is the most stable one in my experience, I've almost never experienced any crashes in years on a bunch of different devices.

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

Waterfox might have just got a new convert here.

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

Yeah, it's a neat little tool. I used it recently at my work. We had a big list of endpoints that we needed to make sure were powered down each night for a week during a patching window.

A sysadmin on my team wrote a script that pinged all of the endpoints in the list and returned only the ones that still were getting a response, that way we could see how many were still powered on after a certain time. But he was just manually running the script every few minutes in his terminal.

I suggested using the watch command to execute the script, and then piping the output into the sort command so the endpoints were nicely alphabetical. Worked like a charm!

2

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

The watch command is very useful, for those who don't know, it starts an automated loop with a default of two seconds and executes whatever commands you place after it.

It allows you to actively monitor systems without having to manually re-run your command.

So for instance, if you wanted to see all storage block devices and monitor what a new storage device shows up as when you plug it in, you could do:

    
watch lsblk

And see in real time the drive mount. Technically not "real time" because the default refresh is 2 seconds, but you can specify shorter or longer intervals.

Obviously my example is kind of silly, but you can combine this with other commands or even whole bash scripts to do some cool stuff.

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

I've been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.

Sadly you're right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you're working specifically at a Linux company, you're almost certainly using Windows.

My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It's running on bare metal. 😞

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

Finally got my crap together. Career taking off, got rid of my toxic relationships, adopted several cats, getting into really good shape.

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

I work in IT, many of the managers are pushing it. Nothing draconian, there are a few true believers, but the general vibe is like everybody is trying to push it because they feel like they'll be judged if they don't push it.

Two of my coworkers are true believers in the slop, one of them is constantly saying he's been, "consulting with ChatGPT" like it's an oracle or something. Ironically, he's the least productive member of the team. It takes him days to do stuff that takes us a few hours.

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

That's rough, I'm sorry too, it never gets easier. 💔 stay strong, the important thing is that they feel safe and loved 💙

2

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

Let me share my personal story. Trigger warning for anybody reading this, there's a lot of details.

My spouse and I had a beloved cat who was amazing. Rescued her as a kitten, the runt of her litter. She was born sickly and got worse for a while, we thought she wouldn't make it for several weeks.

But we nursed her back to health and she started to thrive. She never got big, even fully grown, she was 6.5 lbs. Most people thought she was still a kitten, but she had 60 lbs of attitude lol.

She was a wonderful cat, full of life, playful, fierce, super smart, my spouse and I were totally in love with her.

Then one day, she stopped eating and started acting really lethargic. We went through all the typical potential causes. Tooth pain, upset stomach, constipation, UTI, etc.

Took her to the vet several times. After almost 2 weeks of us barely able to get her to eat more than a few bites of her usual favorite treats per day, we had them scan her for potential blockages or other stomach issues.

Vet came back with the results, it was cancer, her entire abdomen was filled with large tumors. 100% terminal, the vet said that there was no way to remove it all without killing her from the internal trauma because the cancer had spread so far and was completely surrounding many of her organs.

We were absolutely devastated. She was only about 3 and a half years old. The vet said it was just bad luck, it was rare to see this kind of cancer in a young otherwise healthy cat, but it did sometimes happen.

Even still, we asked about chemotherapy, (yes they do that for pets sometimes). The vet said that at best, it would only give us 1-3 more months if we were lucky, and she would be drugged up so much that she would basically be in a state of dillusion the whole time. Plus it would have cost between $4,000- and $8,000. Which was far beyond anything we could afford.

My spouse and I went home, cried our eyes out for the next 2 days, and talked about end of life care. Our primary vet had given us a pamphlet about in-home euthanasia. They come to your home, you can lay down and cuddle with your pet, play music or talk to them. The vet administers a shot, and after about 10-15 minutes, they fall asleep and then...they're gone.

We chose that option and it was as positive of an experience as it can be, when doing something so sad.

We laid down on both sides of her, placed her on her favorite blanket, and just gently pet her, kissed her, and quietly told her what a brave girl she was and how much we loved her. Our vet was super calm and respectful. After she administered the shot, she let us be with her, and checked her pulse every 5 minutes or so. After the third time, she quietly told us, "Alright, she's passed. Take all the time you need. When you're ready, I'll take her back with me."

The vet handled the cremation and a week or two later my spouse and I got our cat's ashes delivered to us in a little urn, with a clipping of her hair and a little paw print in clay. There was a hand-written note from the vet with her condolences, signed by a bunch of the vet techs, it was very sweet.

It's a brutally hard choice to make, but I think it's the right one. Our cat was in so much pain, she was malnourished, exhausted, dehydrated, she had lost all the joy that a healthy life provided her. Looking into her eyes and seeing her in so much pain, that's what convinced me and my spouse to do it. I think it would have been selfish for us to keep her alive in that state waiting for her to die "naturally" or forcing a massive cocktail of drugs into her just so we could get a few more days or weeks with her.

I don't condemn people for putting it off, I get it, it was one of the hardest decicions I've had to make as an adult. I wept like a baby before and after it for many days. If you haven't seen it before, I can't describe it. But there is a certain "look" an animal gets when it's near the end. They know, they are smart, they have a soul of some kind I think, they can sense it. As somebody who is an animal lover and has had pets all my life, you learn what it looks like. It's a look of pain and pleading, a look that says, "I'm in pain, and I'm tired, it's time for me to go."

Some people say that pets can't tell you if they want to be done, but I think they can, it's that look in their eyes of desperation, and when you're my age and you've had to say goodbye to numerous pets over the years, you learn what it looks like.

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren't mature enough to have their own repo)

1

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

One reason: It's not FOSS, and because of that, it's not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that's always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We've seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don't trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️

1

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 1mo ago

Tailscale, Netbird, or Pangolin. Foss overlay networks have completely eliminated traditional VPN setups for my self-hosting needs.

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 2mo ago

The only thing missing is full fishnet tights with a girdle for Gentoo.

2

Lettuce eat lettuce @lemmy.ml 2mo ago

Left wing (actual OG) Libertarianism is great. Right wing Libertarianism is basically a bunch of antisocial/intellectually lazy people who think the ideal society is one where everybody has a few acres of land with a little shack that they built themselves where they subsist on potatoes, carrots, and chicken eggs and stockpile gold and silver to trade with another libertarian twice a year.

Lettuce eat lettuce

@ Lettuceeatlettuce @lemmy.ml

Posts

11
Comments

851
Joined

3 yr. ago

Always eat your greens!

Moderating

Open Source lemmy.ml

Lettuce eat lettuce

Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”

Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”

Trump says US has "captured" Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife in "large scale strike" - latest

Trump says US has "captured" Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife in "large scale strike" - latest

How do people actually fall into the "Tankie" mindset?

What game recently hooked you on the Deck, more than on PC ?

DistroWatch - The best open source operating systems of 2025

No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog

What are some of your most useful or favorite terminal commands?

What are some of your most useful or favorite terminal commands?

Linux is awesome at home, but aren't y'all forced to use Windows at work?

What's the best part of life after 30?

Permanently Deleted

Thoughts on putting down elderly pets?

Thoughts on putting down elderly pets?

What folders do you make in addition to the default ones ?

4 reasons Plex is turning into the thing it replaced

Solutions for remote access?

is this real?

What is your opinion on Libertarianism?

Being Forced to Say Goodbye

"Intelligent" Car Infrastructure

Brian Thompson Memorial Picture Leaked

Kiosk Mode and Linux

Timeshift On Production Servers?

How Long Should Hardware/Software Support Last?

RegreSSHion Mitigation Debian Stable?

Heliboard 1.2 Released, Fixes Haptic Feedback Bug

Suggestions for Short Rack Mount Case

Switched my Parents to Linux

Sanity Check Setup