https://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

instead of Gentoo.

I agree with your limited-set:

TheRegister & Ars Technica are the 2 that give the highest quality overview,

and yeah, Phoronix is kinda required for Linux news,

and … how the hell could churning more be somehow increasing one’s productivity??

Stephen R. Covey’s truth about…

• the bigger one’s Circle of Concern…
• the smaller one’s Circle of Influence…

one must Focus, or one is just mindlessly dissipating one’s finite strength.

Limit one’s inputs, to quality overview points, and know which other-sites to hit, for specific digging-down into some specialty,

( Leonard Susskind’s lectures, on yt, e.g. for mental exercise: his “Time As A Fractal Flow” one is awesome, when the lightbulb goes on, at the end )

and then you win most.

Never let sand into your gears, in other words, eh?

Keeping all the “misc sand” out from one’s “gears” makes one more productive.

Oh, also www.SemiAccurate.com for the semiconductor foundry industry news, if Demerjian’s still updating that ( he’s scooped the industry toooo many times to let that one escape being important! )

_ /\ _

You, and everybody interested in this who wants real integrity in their leverage to argue this stuff, need to get Hofstadter’s remapping of gender-terms from Mr vs Miss & Mrs to …

… IF you are white, THEN there is 1 pronoun for you, …

… ELSIF you are black, THEN your pronoun is dependent on whether you’re employed or not

written by Douglas Hofstadter ( author of “Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”, the keystone to competent philosophy ), for Scientific American magazine, decades ago.

It may be in the “Metamagical Themas” book.

It was mentioned in the 1990’s in the Feminism FAQ as being trailblazing, because it caused what we were unconscious-of to GET in our faces, violating our habits, so we could actually perceive just how prejudiced it is.

searching … This may be it…

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

I only glanced at it, it’s too jarring for me ( I’d rather that I could just live in solitary isolation for the entire rest of my life: humanity’s abuse ), but it may help crystalize the ability to articulate just how stilted this all is.

I completely agree that “Mr.” and “Miss”, “Mrs.”, “Mz” all are gender-identifying, and as-such ought be considered illegal under their law.

But exactly as the convict/felon/inmate Yehoshua “Jesus” benJoseph identiied, a couple of millenia ago, legalists insist on the letter-of-the-law, while ignoring whatever law’s inconvenient to their artifice.

Legalists haven’t changed since benJoseph called them “Hypocrites!”.

_ /\ _

If it’s changing, you might want to get a brain-scan, immediately.

No, it isn’t normal ( not for me, anyhow ), to the guy who said it is normal.

It’s not an ear thing, it is an auditory-processing thing, so it’s your brain that’s doing it.

The question is why it is doing it.

Perhaps it’s just fuzzy wiring, as most such cases likely are.

( synaesthesia is a case of weird wiring, and I’ve got that, but not in the normal way, not senses blurring into each-other, but rather my non-visual cognition being a kind of “blur” to those senses, so they mesh oddly )

But if it begins changing in either intensity or character, get a scan.

( I’m a braindamage survivor, and it takes decades to adapt to braindamage: prevention/avoidance is better than hating one’s life for decades, while being bullied by all who reject that it could still validly be a problem, and hold that one ought either force oneself into being an “acceptable” drugged psychiatric-zombie, and not “pretend” to be getting better, or one ought be able to be acceptable-pretence, just like Valid People™ are. )

_ /\ _

Spend a half-month considering, deeply, which path you would most-value having taken at the end of your life.

Due to an unconscious psychological-limitation, imagine your funeral at 1.5x your current age ( we apparently have a kind of “horizon” in our ability to understand our meaning beyond that ),

and imagine each significant variant, or compromise, and see how each makes you, in that future-condition/context feel.

Your answer is within you, same as for everyone.

_ /\ _

SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

and not just privilege’s gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered “level” playing-field.

The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_ /\ _

Fish, arthropods, etc, had eggs millions of years before chickens.

_ /\ _

A couple of decades ago, iirc, SANS.org ( IF I’m remembering who it was who did it ) put a fresh-install of MS-Windows on a machine, & connected it to the internet.

It took SEVERAL MINUTES for it to be broken-into, & corrupted, botnetted.

The auto-attacks by botnets are continuous: hitting different ports, trying to break-in, automatically.

I’ve had linux desktops pwned from me.

the internet should be considered something like a mix of toxic & corrosive chemicals: “maybe” your hand will be fine, if you dip it in for a moment & immediately rinse it off ( for 3 hours ), but if you leave you limbs dwelling in the virulent slop, Bad Things™ are going to happen, sooner-or-later.

I used to de-infest Windows machines for my neighbours…

haven’t done it in years: they’ll not pay-for good anti-virus, they’ll not resist installing malware: therefore there is no point.

Let 'em rot.

I’ve got a life to work-on uncrippling, & too-little strength/time left.

“but I don’t need antivirus: i never get infected!!”

then how come I needed to de-infest it for you??

“but I don’t need an immune-system: pathogens are a hoax!!”

get AIDS, then, & don’t use anti-AIDS drugs, & see how “healthy” you are, 2 years in.

Same argument, different context-mapping.

Tarpit was a wonderful-looking invention, for Linux’s netfilter/iptables, years ago: don’t help botnets scan quickly & efficiently to help them find a way to break-in…

Anyways, just random thoughts from an old geek…

EDIT: “when do I need to wear a seatbelt?”

is essentially the same category of question.

_ /\ _

IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn’t possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn’t a niche distro, either, iirc.

Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you’re rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn’t sane to continue doing it. )

Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don’t even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

_ /\ _

If it works for you, stick with it.

Works is a feature, not a bug.

_ /\ _

I’ve been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female…

: P

The book “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess” by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women’s-rights simply don’t progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages…

So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…

That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

It’s still true.

Conditioning an entire population’s System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place…

Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas…

… digging …

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

( that isn’t a quick read… may come back to it some day… )

Bingo!

“The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic.”

from

https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people’s System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

What about Hebrew?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

No wonder women can’t get equal-validity in Jewish culture…

( I read a Jewess’s writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ … which explains the damage in the stereotypical “Jewish mother”, a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature… )

So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is … baseless, in some/many cultures…

Interesting, but depressing.

: \

Russia, the invader, is the Good Guys, in the Russia vs Ukraine war??

Disinformation-propaganda.

https://bigthink.com/thinking/fascism-definition-stanley/

People need to understand those 10 points that are characteristic of Fascism.

Comically, Fascism was invented by a Black man, an African, named Marcus Garvey, and Mussolini stole it from him, then Hitler from him, to the best of my knowledge…