christian

christian, 25 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

I don’t read five star reviews ever anymore. If I want to find a believable endorsement of a product, I’ll look for a four-star review that contains a criticism that isn’t that bothersome to me personally, but legitimate enough that I can imagine a customer who would be deterred by it.

We moved a year ago, and I found my favorite pizza guy, Tony, by maybe the most convincing online review I’ve ever read. The most recent review on google maps was a one-star that was basically like “I met Tony and he casually used foul language etc etc there is no need for profanity etc pizza was some of the best I’ve ever had though”

christian, 1 month ago

My favorite thing about this post is that question 2 is asked based on the assumption that you’ve answered question 1 correctly by picking “cat”.

christian, 1 month ago

The soy thing is just a dumb meme right? I’m having trouble imagining a person stupid enough to actually have that concern.

(Just to clarify so no one infers bad intent behind my question, I do think veganism is cool and good.)

christian, 1 month ago

I think what the number 44 specifically would look like was probably way outside the radar of whoever designed that font. Yeah, it looks similar, but even noticing that I still really wouldn’t have assumed that someone wearing intends it as a nazi symbol. Is there really a need to announce a ban and solidify that it will be one? Just change the damn font going forward. Are they going to ban 88 too?

christian, 2 months ago

Here’s Roto-Borola, who has somehow fallen asleep while sitting up like a person.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/3f45b4e5-a72b-423f-857a-97a1b08c5122.jpeg

christian, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.

I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he’d point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn’t feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.

Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He’s giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn’t really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris’ post where he addresses zero of Chris’ points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn’t actually care about free software.

At that point I didn’t really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.

Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I’m pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called “PureOS”) because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren’t taken seriously.

Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word “functional”.

I’ll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.

edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads “PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops.” Sounds like a community of happy customers.

christian, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Yeah, probably a little, but this same change was 1000x more noticeable like half a year ago when reddit banned third-party apps. I think it’s reasonable to lament the change, and I kind of miss the tight-knit community from the first three years I was here, but it’s still worth celebrating the platform taking off. Ultimately all you can do is be the change you wish to see in the world.

That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.

christian, 5 months ago

I know I’m not making a helpful contribution here, but I’ve been wondering about this stuff for a while myself and this thread has some great answers. Thanks for asking this OP.

christian, 6 months ago

I switched like ten years ago because I wanted to learn the details, but in all honesty I still feel like I barely understand anything. Not sure how normal this is, maybe I’m unusually dumb, but I feel like what I’ve really learned is how to troubleshoot and solve issues by reading documentation and tinkering, rather than understanding what I’m actually doing. I’ve had a stable system for years but I kind of feel like if a typical arch forum poster looked my system configuration for five minutes they’d be like wtf are you doing.

christian, 8 months ago

“You seem like the kind of guy who would write poetry on an aircraft carrier” is my new go-to insult.

christian, 8 months ago

I got covid March 2020 and it was basically just a bad cough when I was positive, but like two days after my cough went away I developed some issues with feeling dizzy and weak, but sometimes those feelings were a lot stronger than other times. When it was really bad it would feel like I was about to pass out soon. The fact that my symptoms weren’t visible to others and that the tests showed I should be healthy made it easy for doctors to dismiss, and it was absolutely miserable. On my better days I would feel like a crazy person and ask myself if I’d been imagining the whole thing.

I’ve almost entirely recovered from the long covid, but mentally I’m still messed up from that experience. I feel pretty confident that I was not a hypochondriac in February 2020, but now I freak out over every stupid thing. If I feel some sort of pain and the cause isn’t outwardly visible, I go through an extensive mental dialogue over whether I’m imagining it. At one point I had a reaction to a new medicine and I waited months to tell the doctor because I couldn’t tell if it was in my head, while I was freaking out a little every time I thought about it. I really believe that I didn’t used to be like this.

Being treated like this can add a lot on top of already existing misery. I know doctors are people too, and they don’t have to believe me, but I wish they would have had the respect to pretend that they do.

christian, 9 months ago

I saw one of these in action! I never actually knew her, but she was cc’ed in a lot of the emails I was getting. Our emails were first initial, middle initial, first three letters of last name, then extra digits if needed. J. E. Lloyd had “jello@…”

christian, 11 months ago

It's upsetting to see the shit-talking because I imagine reading that nonsense is emotionally draining, especially when you're already stressed out with a billion things to do. I've seen you guys active in the lemmy community for years and you've always been wonderful. I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates the work you two have put in and are currently putting in. I'm really happy that your project is starting to catch on.