Ephera

These days, you also likely get faster loading times when you self-host the font, because it can be sent through the same HTTPS connection and because caching doesn’t work anymore like it used to many years ago (cached files aren’t shared anymore between websites).

Ah, I meant that as in the individual hair have less circumference and therefore are easier to cut through.

Personally, I find it much easier down under, because the hair is a lot thinner…

“As always.” is an old favorite of mine. They’ll assume things are neither particularly good nor bad, when what you mean is that you always feel bad.

I don’t remember the details, but the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities from a few years ago also felt like they were cutting corners. Those were enabled by some fundamental architectural decisions, which really just didn’t sound like a good idea to me, when I read up on them.

Instant messengers.

Oh man, I use a shopping list app, which lets you sort the products into aisles, so that you can just walk through the store and complete the checklist top-to-bottom as you visit each aisle.

This would be excellent for that.

I think, you could replicate it by creating an invite-only instance that federates with no other instances.

…Which makes this whole concept sound exactly as weird as I assume it is. Like, was there a point to these communities? It just sounds like a smaller audience, with no real reason to post there…

I just want to throw in that if you do want to give Linux a shot, you can do so without installing it.

You can prepare a USB stick from which you could later install Linux, but before you’ll actually install it, you will boot from this USB stick and then you’re able to click around, browse the web etc…

It won’t be entirely representative of the actual performance in the end, because it will run off of the USB stick rather than the hard drive, but yeah, you can at least get an impression whether it might work for your usage.

This kind of bootable USB stick is also called a “Live-USB”, just to give you another term to search for. And well, you will need to enter your BIOS (or at least the boot order menu) of your laptop to tell it to actually boot off of the USB stick.

It isn’t trivial, particularly since I don’t know how techy you are, but yeah, before you go through with the installation, it is rather unlikely that you break things by doing this.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to create a backup beforehand anyways. 🙂

And yes, I do also think that Linux really deserves consideration here, unless you know upfront that you strictly need applications that do not support Linux. Linux has been known to give old hardware a second life, and your hardware sounds old enough for that to apply here.

Oh, and perhaps also worth throwing in that browsers do work the same on Linux. I moved both of my parents from Windows 7 to Linux and since they practically only use the browser, it took just a few minutes for them to adapt…

Yeah, I always found it really valuable to know a person on the other side. Obviously, they’re not immune to propaganda either, but even just seeing the differences in propaganda can teach you a lot, both about which parts may be untrue, but also how propaganda works.

For example, I once saw a guy on Mastodon, who posted a populist Indian news article and expressed his agreement. The article was about some policy the EU was discussing, following Putins attack on the Ukraine, which would’ve affected India.
That policy was controversial here in the EU. I don’t remember what policy it was, but I didn’t feel good about it, my country (Germany) didn’t support it, but the EU as a whole did agree to it.

Meanwhile, that article framed it as “Europe is doing a bad thing” and “the West is blah”.
Like, man, I doubt, I would agree with my neighbor about this policy, but somehow I’m being generalized into an amorphous blob, the size of half the fucking planet.
It dehumanizes. It makes it seem like we’re not open for discussion, despite us internally leading extremely heated discussions.

But of course, we do the exact fucking same. We talk about India collectively all the time, even though it is much larger than the EU, with 1.4 billion different opinions. You don’t hear “the East” as often these days, but you do hear “Asia”, which is effectively just as meaningless of a word.

And yeah, just seeing the inverse happen to me, made it instantly clear why this is shit, which I would not have even thought about, if I only ever read our news outlets.

Oh man, seeing folks suggest it as a Discord alternative always had me uninterested, because I don’t even use Discord and it just seemed like yet-another-standard.
Now I’m reading this really technical title for a talk which mentions XMPP and I’m instantly sold.

Well, to be honest, “Movim” also sounded like a VC-funded startup. Looks like it’s a bus-factor-of-1 open-source project instead, which I have significantly more trust in.

I would try to avoid driving over them when safely possible, because they make an annoying noise, which I wanted to spare folks living nearby from. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Kind of wild how rambly of a video this is, while also being shorter than your average YouTube video.

Where’s the cold open, the intro animation, the needlessly long introduction into the topic, the cliffhanger, the sponsor segment, the second(???) introduction into the topic, the summarizing of a news article without adding even so much as your own opinion, the bland statement with zero nuance and the telling people to like, comment, share, subscribe, ring the bell and blow the foghorn…?

Ah, no worries! Taste is hard to describe. 🫠

I’m not saying, that the taste isn’t strong enough for me. I’m saying that it actively adds a taste, which I can best describe as “hollow”. Falafel or hummus with cumin tastes worse to me than without…

I can’t imagine the kids of today finding pogs particularly interesting, when they’ve got smartphones in their pockets. Maybe if you equip the pogs with an NFC chip that ties into some online game to give you monsters or items or such. But yeah, even that’s going to be a hard sell, unless the game happens to be Roblox or Fortnite.

I mean, we’re not talking about a clean or fresh or citrussy taste of perfumed soap. We’re talking someone did the dishes with dish soap and didn’t properly rinse afterwards. That’s genuinely what I thought had happened when I learned of cilantro.

I mean, there can be multiple different gene variations. I have the soap thing and I can’t remember tasting anything other than soap, although admittedly I haven’t tried cilantro in isolation or in enough dishes to be able to tell for sure.

That would be a great scam. Just offer unparfumed soap and some of your customers will never know.

I mean, those customers would also be entirely unlikely to want anything with cilantro in it, but you know, I’m sure there’s someone you could fool.

Hmm, is that olive thing not a universal experience? I always figure the cooks are just too lazy to cut up the olives, which would help a lot.

Well, and what also helps is to combine the olives with lots of different veggies. Don’t just serve an olive-tomato salad, but rather throw in cucumber, bell pepper and garlic as well, along with maybe some beans, a bit of rosemary and thyme.

I guess, the cooks have a hearty salad like that in mind, but then start bargaining whether they could leave out one or two veggies.
And then they never figure out that, no, they cannot. You need a rich base flavour to compete with the olives, but then you want it to be light to balance out how heavy the olives are. Well, and a surefire way to get rich+light is just lots of different veggies.