taohansen

and if that hasn’t convinced you, i’ll leave it to a passage from the thing itself, a conversation between a courtesan and the protagonist:

> Aren't you strong enough to master reality, even for a little while?"

> "What do you mean?"

> "Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?"

> "You are not the Chatelaine Thecla," I told her. "But don't you see, neither is she. The Chatelaine Thecla, whom I doubt you've ever laid eyes on-No, I see I'm wrong. Have you been to the House Absolute?"

> Her hands, small and warm, were on my own right hand, pressing. I shook my head. "Sometimes clients say they have. I always find pleasure in hearing them."

> "Have they been? Really?"

> She shrugged. "I was saying that the Chatelaine Thecla is not the Chatelaine Thecla. Not the Chatelaine Thecla of your mind, which is the only Chatelaine Thecla you care about. Neither am I. What, then, is the difference between us?"

> "None, I suppose."

> While I was undressing I said, "Nevertheless, we all seek to discover what is real. Why is it?”

here's another fiction book for you: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. a professional torturer is exiled for showing mercy to a client. what it's really about is love, self, and how self relates to other. if you'd think this covers the whole spectrum of what it means to be human, you wouldn't be far off.

i have read and re-read this book in great lengths of leisure, frequently leaving my paperback copies with friends wherever i travel before finding another in some dusty second-hand store. i have grown up with its main character, Severian, and can no longer tell you how much of me is him. my ethics, my perspectives, how i ruminate and how i love someone can all find some trace of impression in this masterwork.

both parties don't make decisions i consider sane or particularly clever yet those are the only two parties i may vote for with any chance of success. the voting system is broken by outmoded/gamed structures (gerrymandering, an electoral college), and all-or-nothing outcomes (if i vote for one candidate and they don't win, i may make no second or third choice with which then to put my voting power behind).

i simply feel an unrelenting despair when engaging in the realm of politics. it's two devils on a stage lording over minions who condemn and pollute the miracle of human life daily with short-sighted greed and a stunning lack of ethics.

a revolution is out of the question because the very tool that was meant to fight back against such sloven corruption no longer disbands after war but simply persists against an invisible Enemy none of us can touch, see or feel. what is this insane existence we find ourselves in where the only choice i have is to acquiesce or ineffectually protest?

or, y'know, the other operating system not trying to turn a profit on you, Linux.

it's happening right before our eyes. your comment gets downvoted because it openly reveals the shift as a double-edged sword. anything but leftist groupthink consensus is punished. it's the same behavior you see on any subreddit.

binary values of up and down ought to be taken to the slaughterhouse and replaced. society has become a public-shaming gladiator ring. i'm sick of it.

my Thinkpad P50 comes with a dock that slightly raises its elevation. it's a 15 inch screen. i'm 6'1'' and there's no neck strain.

my teachers taught me to tuck my chin slightly when i meditate. my neck (T6 and below of the thoracic vertebrae) stay straight, it's only the the cervical vertebrae which tuck downward giving me a full view of my screen, eyes slightly cast down.

i do! your pelvis should tilt forward on the cushion, which keeps your shoulders at centerline. my desk is a low bench. Ikea used to sell this [1] bench, which was the perfect height for me. any other low bench will do, but you may have to take a saw to the legs. you want your forearms to rest at 90 degrees.

[1] https://www.pinterest.dk/pin/266697609154342319/

why use this over Nix or Guix?

none of these are very good. building on an Ubuntu base has always been a bad idea, be it for servers, desktops or whatever odd use-case you may have.

in the end, any of the Ubuntu flavors function really about as well as the others. see any Phoronix benchmark for proof of this.

if you want light, you follow the path of origination to the source. for graphical user environments this means something like Window Maker or TWM or Openbox. for distros this means Debian, Gentoo, Arch, etc. there are representative flavors available: Window Maker Live, CloverOS, and Crunchbang Plus Plus a few of my present darlings.

common wisdom buy-in has resulted in a state of mass hallucination that “light” is just a thinner coat of paint. get outside your comfort zone and you too can be astonished that light, taken seriously, can make your fifteen year old machine feel like the Chromebook if yesteryear.

that is your opinion. why would i purposely misconstrue your comment?

i wish your answer now had been your original answer. i urge you not to assume malicious intent (that would be malicious) and consider that your original comment might have been saved from scrutiny given expansion.

i disagree. you’re welcome to explain how your statement does not amount to keeping men hooked on porn so they don’t rape (because that’s the alternative).

is this what the conversation has come to? a foregone conclusion that all men ought to be drugged up on porn so we don’t go out raping and pillaging the countryside?

we’re not all like this. i’m not like this. and i don’t like being told that i am.

they are still amazing. see any of the recent articles on Observer or playing a spacefaring race of tortoise in Stellaris.

it may surprise you to read but there are a non-zero percentage of people out there (inclusive me) who believe exactly the statement you just phrased as a question.

these are companies which actively take advantage of the worst in all of us to deliver products that monopolize our time at the cost of calm, concentration, and patience.

i am a film student. after each film is finished, i store the smaller proxy files and get rid of the rest. since this is an archive of my literal life's work, i store everything to my attached USB drive, which gets synced to my NAS, which then should sync to the cloud fulfilling 3 2 1. i am a broke student: CrashPlan was my only lifeline to guaranteed recovery in a total disaster scenario. the smaller proxies still clock in at over your cost threshold for B2 vs Backblaze.

now, because i believe in the ideals of free and open source software and use the operating system that is an instrument of those ideals, i am not worth it, despite knowing that given a passage, the open source community would build you a Hyperloop.

just make a client front-end for Linux, please! there’s literally dozens of us who would pay for the privilege.

or let us pay what the Mac and Windows users do for whatever frontend we want. switching everyone over to the B2 protocol is one thing, but making us pay more for the privilege of doing the same backups your Windows/Mac users do is another.

“Artificial flavoring”? Well if this isn’t loaded... You, most of all, should do as he advises and get out of your conditioned shell and constricted perspective. He was trying to share some of the beauty he had experienced. Since you seem to have a hostile view to anything but the one you are normalized to, I suggest you go out there and experiment before you lay dying and wonder at all the joys you may have missed out on.

Can someone point out the differences between this and CloudReady? First flush this looks like duplication of effort or making a competitor because.

I'm willing to call bullshit on this. Space and time may be constructs but they are "helpful" constructs in that they model specific forces which apply to both us and the mountain. I perceive the waste of this body over time: the mountain is subject to these same wastes and transformations as this body.