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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Stack Overflow, like Reddit, derives its value entirely from its users—it’s just a host. Now that users (and their knowledge) are moving elsewhere, the platform’s importance is fading.

    It’s odd when people worry about Stack Overflow’s decline. Online communities have always shifted: from BBSs and newsgroups to forums, chat, Yahoo Groups, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. Each had its time.

    The next gathering spot for tech-savvy users might be the fediverse, but who knows at this point. AI isn’t solely to blame for the shift—people moved to Stack Overflow because it was better than what came before. Now, as it declines in quality thanks to general enshittification of services as companies try to monetise uaers, they’re moving on again.


  • Maybe I’m cynical but I feel like this is suspicious timing to release this information a day after videos of his memory issues in 2023 surfaced. Feels like a cynical attempt by his PR team to change the narrative.

    In all honesty, an 82 year old man having prostate cancer is not very surprising. It is a personal issue and I have sympathy but it’s frankly not important to the world. A US president with memory issues concealed from voters and his own party in 2023 when it could have seriously changed decisions about the Democratic party nominations is surprising. That is an issue for everyone and very important to the world.


  • It doesn’t need any organisation; there are plenty of right wing apologists and zealots who are motivated enough to vote. People can’t really vote “against” Israel so it’d be very easy to distort the vote if even a minority of people are focused enough to vote for one country. Israel’s song wasn’t terrible but it was pretty bland ballad and the televote result was patently ludicrous. But also none of the other songs were that great this year which would make it even easier for a concerted effort to win the televote.

    Extreme example in the other direction is when Ukraine won in 2022. The song wasn’t particularly good but Europe coalesced around voting for Ukraine. Even the Jury voting that year was distorted in Ukraine’s favour. It didn’t need any organisation.






  • Most people expect a GUI interface to get into their desktop. But you dont have to use one if you dont want. SDDM can log into any desktops you have - KDE but also Gnome or XFCE etc. It can also help select X11 vs Wayland sessions.

    There are alternatives like LightDM if you dont like SDDM. Or TTY is fine too. But generally they’re not large pieces of software and while they are undoubtedly bloated from what they could be, they are still small and lightweight in the era of Tbs of storage and Gb of memory. The savings you’d get in not using them would be small on the scale of the rest of the OS. Obviously they’re useless for none GUI machines / servers.

    They’re called display managers because historically the concept was added to X11 system where you’d have a stand alone X terminal running locally for the end user with an X server which would then connect to an X display manager on a central machine. This was in the Unix days and shared spaces like governments, universities or corporations and the set up was potentially less hardware intensive allowing cheaper X terminals and an expensive central server.

    The concept has gone now - PCs are vastly more poweful and can easily run the entire OS locally, and thin clients are the modern set up if you do want terminals/clients and central servers. The most common scenario is now the display manager running on your local PC, alongside everything else and essentially replicates the TTY login in a GUI form. So yes its basically a session manager but the name is historical and probably won’t be going anywhere fast.