Yeah, people forget that form follows function.

The parameters for making a USEFUL plastic that ALSO degrades gives a narrow band. Too degradable, and the function of fulfilling all the areas plastic is currently used for can’t happen. Not degradable, and we have the current situation.

Plastic being is in use not simply to fuck the planet over or something, but because compared to other materials it has physical qualities that things like glass, wood, fabric, etc. don’t have, that’s why it’s ended up in so many things. It’s lightweight, strong, and “plastic” (that is to say, more easily shaped and molded than other materials, and I suspect there’s a labor component too where maybe it needs less labor to shape and form).

I’m eventually going to write a story about a sci-fi world that’s under quarantine because they successfully made a plastic-eating bacteria that never stops eating and breaking down plastic. Go there and most of your technology/clothes/etc. are eaten away. I might throw in wood, too…a world with no wood or plastic because the local bacteria is like, “Yum, yum, food!” and gets into every nook and cranny. I anticipate I’ll have to do a lot of thinking to figure out how drastically technology would change under these parameters…I imagine a lot of it would be very “brutalist” because you’d have to rely on heavy-as-balls metals and cement and stone and such. Unless there’s an Aluminum Future or something, where everything that can be made out of aluminum, can. Of course, there’s also the byproducts of intense metals mining to think about on a fictional world like that. Anyway, lots of details to pick apart for worldbuilding.

Just so anyone reading knows…some games with Linux binaries sometimes run better using proton and the windows binaries.

Crusader Kings 3 is buggy with Linux binaries but fine using proton, while Stellaris is the reverse for me. Ymmv.

I’ve been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.

I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it’s true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn’t get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.

Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.

I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.

Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

Yeah, I’ve had such an easy time of it that I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t work in Linux now too. Which is a reverse of how it used to be.

I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.

There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.

It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.

I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .

Like in a file?

Bitwarden already syncs between PC and phone.

Well, when a mommy and daddy hat bobble love each other very much…

Actors have unions. Actors also get royalties or a percent of sales.

Afaik video game workers have neither unions nor do they get a % of the profits.

The reason dog food is a no for cats isn’t because it’s harmful if they eat a kibble or two, but because dog food isn’t fortified with an amino acid cats need, taurine, so feeding a cat exclusively on dog food will result in a type of malnutrition in the cat.

https://www.petmd.com/blogs/nutritionnuggets/cat/dr-coates/2014/december/what-taurine-32287

This article is worth reading just for the perfect quotes from the couple. I’m American and can still hear the accent they’re said in.

I’m skeptical too.

Lots of software is designed so the delete button just flags an entry so it doesn’t show to low privilege users on the front end, while the data persists in the database where database admins and the like can still access it.

Online it’s wise to assume every website acts like this if you don’t actually run the site yourself with full admin access to the underlying web server and database . Once what you write gets on a site it is permanently out of your control in most cases.

It legitimately surprised me back when Russia first attacked Ukraine how parts of the internet suddenly reverted in tone to how the early 2000s internet used to be. The posts pushing subtle division in random message forums just stopped for a few days.

Really made me realize how pervasive the social engineering of English speakers by outside agencies has become online. I think about it much more, using that brief cessation as a touchstone. Like, my memories of forums being saner weren’t false, heh.

That’s a really good point. There were individual trolls and general cruel maladjusted scum, but they hadn’t yet been courted or manipulated by political orgs and fed collective marching orders to sow discord.

As far as I’m given to understand from folks who are Russian (but got out of Russia) or Ukrainian, this fellow would more be a change from one strongman to another if he replaced Putin. Apparently his Livejournal has him saying some nasty stuff he hasn’t repudiated. (Unfortunately, I don’t speak or read Russian so I can’t examine the sources myself very well, and machine translation doesn’t bring cultural nuance or context.) (Also, as funny as it sounds to people who remember Livejournal as the first English-speaking major social media for fandom, Livejournal has been the place for years for Russian intellectuals and politicians to say their bit, so it has a different cultural context in Russia than it does elsewhere where it was mainly used for fandom drama.)

It’s been strangely fascinating watching as western media tries to hold him up as some hope, when as far as I can tell when I stop to listen to actual Ukranians or Russians with better cultural knowledge on how Russia works than most western commentators, there’s basically minimal hope he’ll be anything close to a (good) Western-style leader and if he gets into power. (it gets swept under the rug in the west that Russian culture is NOT western european culture and things that are a “given” in European and other western cultures actually are not necessarily established culturally in Russia.)

As far as I understand it, it’ll just be exchanging one dude who’s done obviously terrible things (Putin) for another who probably’s not going to be all that different, and will just do his own brand of bad things. I think perhaps people just hope he’ll be a stable asshole, as opposed to an unstable one as Putin’s become.

Or maybe they just like a scapegoat narrative–it has been fascinating to me that he voluntarily returned to Russia, and it really reminds me that people who aren’t necessarily good can still show courage, and shape narratives that way in their favor. I suspect his actions have motivations underneath that I don’t understand because I don’t understand Russian strongman culture. And I suspect other people interpret his actions through a western lens, without understanding there’s cultural nuance going on that doesn’t align with how a western viewpoint might interpret something, and that’s why western media keeps talking about him so breathlessly.

Someone I read pointed out that in the real world, people are actually largely ok with monarchies and authoritarian rulers so long as the ruler at the top keeps things stable enough for business to be conducted. Ideals like democracy fall by the wayside in light of pragmatism when a nation state is unstable–people crave stability over all, over democracy even, regardless of what method of governance brings it. They will flock to authoritarianism if it promises stability.

And in Russia, the early 90s in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR brought a great deal of instability and hardship along with its “democracy”, so there’s not necessarily a positive feeling towards it as there is in more-functional western nations where it’s been working more or less for decades, as people who lived through the 90s in Russia associate the concept with hardship, not stability. Basically, a good concept implemented like crap can poison the concept in people’s minds for the rest of their life.

So I suspect if Putin is ever ousted, whoever replaces him (whether this guy or another) will be there because people think he can bring stability, not because the successor will actually be a good leader (from a western perspective).

But it’s all operating on a lower level of the “hierarchy of needs” than most people in western countries understand–more concern with base survival, less with being able to flower and thrive. So things might stabilize, but it might still be very bad for people, especially minorities, in Russia, and bad for smaller states if this guy gets into power but also turns his eye to conquering or dominating them in order to garner support.

Anyway. I find it interesting this guy hasn’t yet been executed. Instead they (supposedly) shuffle him off elsewhere. If you were Putin, why not kill him? Must be things going on behind the scenes that we don’t see, or understand, things concerning enough that Putin thinks executing him will be more trouble than it solves.

If Navalny ever comes to power, I don’t have any particular hope he’ll be a “good” leader.

But he has an interesting story, to be sure, and you can’t say he hasn’t been through quite a bit of hardship.

The one big benefit I enjoyed with Twitter was following artists and scientists I would never have had such casual access to learn from in any other way. Being able to watch pros in their fields talk about their topics was something I never would have had access to. And because it’s short form folks were more likely to post than on a blog or something.

Without social media the shop talk goes entirely behind closed doors, which is a loss for my ability to casually learn.

I’ve nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn’t have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.

I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I’ve mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam’s own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.

The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield–it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn’t have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III…but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it’s supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it’s been rock solid.

I’ve played No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don’t feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)

Thumbs up for the World Tree.

Your account has 4 posts over a few months and one comment. Maybe you have actually been using Lemmy for longer on another account, but we can’t see that.

I’m an Elder Millennial, used to admin/mod a fandom forum around 1999-2002ish. A small percentage of active users essentially carrying the content of small niche communities on their back until ignition happens has ALWAYS been how communities work. It’s like that in real life, and it’s like that online. It was like that when niche message boards and forums reigned in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was like that on usenet, in IRC, on email groups. It was like that on World of Warcraft, when you tried to get a guild off the ground for raiding or something. It’s like that here on Lemmy, because Lemmy is a social platform too.

The only real solution to grow a community is to jump in and create content yourself, to help communities along until one or two ignite and take off. You have to participate yourself to change the culture, not just bitch in a post that it’s “changed” and that you’re going to stomp off if it doesn’t “change back”. (Although, that type of post is, admittedly, also a tradition as old as time.)

Anyway. Communities starting small and needing people to grow is just…a thing. This is how volunteer organizations work in real life–why do you think they’re constantly pleading for other people to get involved? Because you need people who actually pull on their adult pants and get in and do the work of organizing things, doing things, instead of sitting about like a lump consuming it.

You can move back to reddit of course, if you want. That’s similar to moving from a small town to a big city for the night life, which people do. Maybe you don’t have the time or energy to essentially “volunteer” your time on a small community to help it grow.

But the thing you’re complaining about is…just part of how communities work. Communities have always revolved around a few people contributing most of the content until the community takes off (or doesn’t).

So, rationally, what’s the next step? Stepping up your own contributions, or going off somewhere else?

Only you can decide because only you know your IRL time commitments. But one action is going to be more useful to helping niche subs get off the ground than the other.

(Here’s something interesting: The Frugal sub has a shit-load of people subscribed who eagerly jump in feet-first if you start a relevant topic. Why doesn’t someone here with an interest in that sub go over there and start a post?)