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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • Almost literally, the moment Trump was sworn in as president, the same exact folks who spent the prior 8 months of their lives blaming Biden for the high cost of eggs suddenly had an epiphany that the president does not directly control the price of eggs. And then when the president DID specifically and directly affect the price of groceries as a result of tariffs, those same people suddenly insist that grocery prices are based on complex and rapidly changing global socioeconomic phenomenon that cannot be predicted nor controlled and besides this is still Biden’s economy because it was so broken that Trump hasn’t been able to fix it yet (even though he promised to have it all sorted out in a timeline of days).

    They live in a separate reality, void of fact and logic, and I honestly have not figured out a way to reason with that. As wiser folks have said much more eloquently than I could, you cannot reason people out of something they did not reason themselves into.



  • How do you know if someone owns a Steam Deck? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

    So anyway, a couple years ago I bought a Steam Deck. And since I bought it, virtually all of my gaming is on the Deck. Prior to that, virtually all of my game time was on a Windows PC. So, for me personally, there’s been a big shift towards Linux for gaming.

    The other big change that’s coming for a lot of people I know: end of Windows 10 support. Honestly, the majority of people I know who still have a traditional Windows PC are using machines that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. These computers are perfectly functional and do everything the users need them to do, and they have no inclination to go out and buy a new computer just because. Especially in this economy. Additionally, there are quite a few people with computers that are capable of running Windows 11, but they have no desire to upgrade to a worse experience and an experience that is randomly different in a myriad different ways for no good reason. Both groups are ripe for the picking in terms of a switch to Linux. No, the year of the Linux desktop is not here, but the conditions for such a change are building. And this Steam data may present a picture of the larger trend. Who knows?


  • Same here, I’m in the Southeastern USA. Monarchs are one of those species I pay attention to, and this spring we had a bumper crop around here. I’ve never seen so many of the caterpillars and adults in the past 10 years or so I’ve made an effort to look.

    Granted, that’s also true for the handful of other butterfly and moth species I keep tabs on, they’re all having a really good year this year it seems. Luna moths, several different swallowtail species, Gulf fritillary, regal moths, hummingbird butterflies. About the only thing that I’ve seen less of this year are the giant hummingbird hawk moths.

    But these things do tend to ebb and flow. One year certain “bugs” are everywhere, the next year they’re hardly seen. And with the monarch lifecycle being what it is, one good year like this one, even if it’s good in more than one region, isn’t a guarantee of long term success.



  • Really depends on the situation.

    If I’m just feeding myself, I have no issue with going outside and foraging for food. I don’t hunt, but I’m not the type that needs an animal based protein main entree in my meals, so it works/worked for me to collect wild vegetables, fruits, and fungi.

    And from there, I eat whatever is cheapest. Grocery store mark-downs and deep-discount sales would guide my decisions. If an acquaintance was giving away food, I’d take it. When the food bank is doing a giveaway and it was close enough for me to visit, I’d go there and take what they had to offer.

    At my poorest, when I had no access to a kitchen, peanut butter sandwiches were a mainstay. Tuna sandwiches were next best, but more expensive. At the time, powdered milk was a bit of a luxury, but it definitely helped wash down the peanut butter and was way cheaper by volume than fresh milk.

    A lot of stores and restaurants, at least where I live, will have condiment packages out in the open. Don’t go hog wild, but my experience is nobody cares/notices if you grab a few packs of whatever items are out: ketchup, mustard, mayo, honey, hot sauce, soy sauce, salt, and pepper – in moderation – so those can be free to you to use for meal prep.

    When I’ve just been broke and/or saving money, my main protein was usually chicken. I’d just buy whatever was cheapest on sale, and try to stock up a bit or get rain checks. Then I could cook that in a crock pot and literally have meals for days. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas, turkey usually goes on deep discount and there are almost always a myriad of programs that just give them away. If you have room in your freezer and a crock pot, then you can be set just from that.

    Add in some rice and/or beans/legumes to soak up the flavor when cooking meats.

    Eggs were also always a solid choice, pretty versatile because they could be hard boiled, scrambled, fried, mixed into other things like noodles, or used to cook/bake other dishes.

    Potatoes were another cheap source of carbohydrates, something that goes on sale often enough that I could usually find a deal, and if properly stored (cool, dark, dry) they can last a long time. Plus, they can go into the slow cooker with some chicken thighs and both ingredients benefit flavor-wise.

    So, meals would be whatever combination of those things you can physically obtain. Your meal items don’t have to have a name. If you have potatoes and mix those with scrambled eggs and mix in some wild dandelions, that’s still a meal even if that’s not going to show up in a recipe book. If you boil some noodles and add in some mayo and a pinch of rosemary from a bush you saw down the road, that’s still a meal. Basically, just get creative with what you’ve got.







  • With few exceptions, everyone I know has mentioned that their workplace has either downsized, is in the process of downsizing, and/or is on a hiring freeze at a minimum. Where do the people who have become unemployed directly and indirectly because of the federal government’s decisions find a job? I know they think suddenly everybody’s going to be rushing out to those seasonal agricultural jobs that barely pay above minimum wage (if that) and have no benefits, but do they really think data scientists and education coordinators are going to be well suited to picking okra and processing tomatoes even if they were willing to do it?

    Simultaneously, the prices of necessities seem to be on a steep incline again.

    The government is coming at working people directly and from both ends.

    One problem is, at least conceptually, that last time this shit happened, we could blame it on the ramifications of covid and at least the better informed among us knew it was a worldwide phenomenon. This time around, for the USA at least, it’s self inflicted. Much of this, if not virtually all of it, was avoidable.

    The other problem, in my opinion, is that people are literally living in completely different and seemingly mutually exclusive realities. To my conservative acquaintances, the cost of eggs are down which is fantastic and even though last year the price on that was all Biden’s fault, now that the prices on so many other things have gone up due to Trump’s tariffs or threat thereof, suddenly the story is that the president doesn’t control the prices of groceries. How do you even find common ground with those types of “facts”? You can’t.


  • What about people who wear solid color t-shirts that have long-ass slogans on them which are super specific and seemingly only apply to a single person on the entire face of the Earth often written in a variety of fonts and font-sizes and including bizarre details about their lives like the t-shirt that was given to me by my same-sex lover on the second Saturday in June of 2021 to celebrate the fact that I managed to clear an entire thornless blackberry bush of berries that we used to make the most delicious blackberry cobbler from that very same evening?


  • According to some (but mostly only online), I’m not even allowed to enjoy July. Sometimes Lemmy is like the Debby Downer from the 90’s Saturday Night Live tv show in the USA America. Oh, you like fireworks? You know that every explosion releases 5 million tons of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere which is enough to raise global temperatures by 0.00008 per cent? Yes Debbie and fuck you in your unfortunate face.





  • Kind of depends and changes depending on a lot of factors, to be honest.

    When I worked in an office, I discovered that headphones + music was the key to productivity for me. When I transitioned to work at home and had a more or less quiet home office to work in, I found that having music going was a bit irritating at times and totally not helpful at the best.

    So I guess the deciding factor is whether I have to deal with the ridiculous noises other people make or not?



  • I’m a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that’s currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.

    But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I’m not even here to say they aren’t smarter than the rest of us and I’m sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn’t need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.