It’s seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it’ll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it’s not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.

And the Lamy ballpoints can finally have a decent ink, now that they’re making them with the Jetstream ink. Pretty sure it’s a Japan exclusive for the moment, though.

Fountain pens? One may want to consider the excellent German brand Lamy which offers both cheap and expensive models of fountain pens (and ballpoint pens too, but not as cheap as Bic). Their cheap ‘Lamy Safari’ pictured here was designed in the 80s/90s to help kids proper handwriting and is still, imho, one of the best cheap/beginner-friendly fountain pen one could buy here in Europe. Its also real sturdy while still being easy to fix if anythign was to happen to it ;)

Depending on where you draw the line, Lamy might no longer count as a European brand, since they were recently bought out by Mitsubishi Pencils.

That aside, you’ve still got Pelikan, who do make some entry level fountain pens.

It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.

In fairness, that’s not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I’ve had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.

It could also just be peoples’ biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.

And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet “communities” really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I’m closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.

Gonic works pretty well with my library, and Tempo is fine for a client. I mostly just put stuff on an SD card in my Fiio these days, though.

I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I’m kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn’t getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I’m also pretty happy with it for now.

they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty.

In fairness, this is also down to companies having no loyalty to their employees. I would be more than happy to never have to go job hunting again, if career jobs, with appropriate incentives, were still a thing that actually exists. I am substantially less enthusiastic about the prospect of spending my entire working life dedicated to a single company that will not give me annual raises that beat inflation or any sort of pension as a reward for my loyalty, while my working conditions and benefits will likely deteriorate over time at the whims of a rotating group of petty tyrants in management, and the prospect of getting laid off because some dipshit in the C-suite implemented a terrible idea that anyone with the least amount of experience doing the actual work could have told them was doomed from the start and saved everyone suffering the consequences of their dumbass vanity project to pad their resume for when they pull the cord on their golden parachute and jump ship to sink another business.

I suspect a lot of people would be quite content at having the stability of such a position, if only the trade-offs weren’t so terrible for them in pretty much every other way. The vague possibility of a farewell party at the end of 40+ years of work doesn’t cut it.

At lot of this strikes me as non-issues, or even bordering on entitlement.

Well, for instance, if you’re contributing your own code, there is a high bar to clear. It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is. Just to get accepted, you have to offer something better than some existing product that may have been around for decades.

Well, no kidding, that’s how it works in most things. Why would a project accept a contribution that doesn’t add a previously missing feature or improve on the implementation of a current one? I would be pretty suspect of using a program that accepts a random commit so that a college kid can check the “Timmy’s first accepted pull request” box and let them pad their resume.

Some would-be contributors are very familiar with programming, reading, and writing code, but they may never have opened an issue or sent a pull request. This is a scary first step. Others may have the necessary tech skills, but not the creativity. Where should they you begin? Also, if someone is scared, that can result in impostor syndrome. The fear that people all over the world will see your bad code is a powerful factor reducing the urge to share it.

These are all things that the greybeards being maligned had to figure out at some point, I don’t really see the harm in new contributors being expected to do the same, especially when there is an abundance of documentation and tutorials available now, which simply didn’t exist in the past.

For instance, there are a lot of folks doing mods for video games. This can be a very creative activity, there is lots of room for innovation, as well as outlets such as streaming to reach an audience. It applies to all sorts of games, such as Pokémon, Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft. Game modding is a great way in. It could even be a way to set up a company, or to make a living. But it’s not considered as FOSS. For novices getting interested, it could even be attracting people away from getting into FOSS development.

Again, nothing new here. No, game mods weren’t nearly as prevalent in the past, but new devs have had the choice between contributing to FOSS software and contributing to/creating proprietary programs for as long as FOSS has been a thing.

I don’t think the old guard should be dismissive or rude to newcomers when their contributions aren’t up to the standard expected to be accepted, but they also aren’t getting paid to be these peoples’ mentors. It kind of reminds me of posts I see in language learning communities, where people would get all upset, “I completed the Duolingo Spanish tree, but the cashiers at my local Mexican restaurant speak too fast for me to understand and they switch to English when I try to talk to them in Spanish.” Cool that you want to try and use the language, my friend, but these people aren’t being paid to be your tutor, and you may well be making their job more difficult and/or holding up other paying customers by trying to force random people to listen to your extremely basic, and likely incorrect, Spanish. They don’t have an obligation to put everything else in their work or life on hold to try and stroke your ego.

Curiously, I don’t see any mention of what, in my view, is likely a much more serious issue to getting new generations of contributors involved, as well as having a more diverse set of contributors. Access to technology and relevant education is far from uniform. If little Timmy from Greenwich, CT has had a personal computer he was free to mess around with to his heart’s content from the moment he could read and attended a well-funded school with the possibility of studying computers, programming, and early exposure to things like Linux from grade school onwards, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that he’s more comfortable working with these concepts and more likely to wind up contributing successfully to FOSS projects than my friend Lucas, in Brazil, who only got a second-hand computer when he managed to get accepted to university, and had no real concept of Linux/FOSS until I explained to him why I couldn’t just install a random, Windows-only program he thought would be useful to me.

To draw another language learning comparison, it’s like how in the US, most students will only study a second language for a couple of years in high school and two semesters at university, if they attend higher education, and then you periodically have people going, “How come so many Americans fail to speak a second language compared to students in Europe?” Then, you look at the curriculum in countries like Germany, and realize they begin teaching students English as early as grade-school, often adding another foreign language later on. Is it any surprise that, when they have nearly a decade of foreign language instruction, compared to the mere two years many Americans get, alongside a fair bit more exposure to and encouragement of engaging with foreign language media, that they wind up being more proficient at using said language on average?

It’s hardly a perfect solution that will completely mitigate all of the issues with getting younger and more diverse groups of people to contribute to FOSS projects, but I don’t doubt that having access to computers in the home from a young age and access to more extensive education on computers and related fields from a much younger age would go a long way towards getting more people involved. Of course, even then, having the downtime to be able to dedicate to contributing to/maintaining FOSS projects is a factor that will disproportionately favor historically privileged groups. Even if she has the knowledge and ability to do so, a single mother working three jobs in the Bronx in order to keep a roof over her family’s head, food on the table, and the lights and heating on simply might choose not to spend what little free time she has writing a badass new MPD client in Rust that has plugins to integrate with Lidarr and automatically fix metadata with beets based on matching the hashes of files to releases on various trackers in order to scrape the release data from them, no matter how cool the concept might sound to her. And it’s not really something I could blame her for.

Have they tried pulling out the “Make a vehicle that’s not a massive and shitty death trap,” or “Boot the Nazi from the company” stops? Because, I suspect doing those two might help it out.

a test showing me how little I know, and a time-eater that causes my wife to wonder what happened to her husband.

Worth mentioning, but this gets much better with time. Part of it will go away as you learn new things, and is the same as learning any other new thing, be it using Linux, picking up an instrument, or learning another language. Hand in hand with this, you’ll also just get better at knowing where and what to look for to find answers to your problems, and how to ask for help in a way that includes all the relevant info and is more likely to get you a reply that sorts out your issue sooner.

It can definitely be overwhelming initially, but it’s always helpful to get familiar with the man pages and info pages, which are two forms of documentation that come built-in with your Linux install (along with other systems like the BSDs, if you ever wander over that way. OpenBSD man pages are amazing, fwiw, and may be more helpful at times for finding example commands). You can usually run

man command

to get a man page for most commands in your terminal, though not all. Info pages exist for GNU software, and can often be more thorough in their documentation.

man fstab

for example, will give you a general overview of how fstab works, and also include a list of other man pages at the bottom, under the heading SEE ALSO, that can be helpful in understanding related systems. If one of those entries is followed by a number in parentheses, you type the command slightly differently to access that section of the man page. For example, the fstab page suggests looking at mount(8), which you’d find with the command

man 8 mount

info info

in a terminal will get you a helpful primer on how the info system works, which is good, as it can be somewhat more complex to navigate than man pages and uses a lot of Emacs keybindings.

Both can be a bit daunting when you first start out, but it’s worth at least being familiar with, as you can access them without any internet connection, helping you to do things and troubleshoot issues when you’re unable to go online, for whatever reason.

Finally, don’t overlook the utility of the various wikis out there. For Linux Mint, the Debian Wiki should be pretty decent, and the Arch Wiki is also generally pretty helpful, though may not always work for Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, since it may reference features in newer releases of packages than are available elsewhere. They’ll often include basic setup and configuration guides, as well as a troubleshooting section that outlines how to solve commonly encountered issues.

Or, just maybe, they could adequately staff their stores instead of constantly running skeleton crews. If they were actually sincere with their cries of high theft, more employees on the floor could deter would-be thieves, while also giving them time to help customers when needed and pack out product so the place doesn’t always look like an obstacle course left in the wake of a hurricane, with piles of stuff on the floor blocking half the aisles.

Any place that requires an app for me to shop at is a hard no for me, much less all the other nonsense they want to include.

Japan also has a problem much like exists elsewhere, that older voters are the ones who vote most, so their interests and views get disproportionately represented in election results. I’m sure that’s only exaggerated in a country that’s so lopsided in its age distribution as Japan is. I also wouldn’t be surprised at all if it were to turn out that elderly voters tended to be more xenophobic and resistant to changes in immigration policy.

Japan really needs to get it sorted out soon, though, as they are desperately in need of work in all sorts of fields, but moving there is such a massive pain that it really doesn’t seem worth it unless you live in a developing country where you can go to Japan, do a few years of work and go back with enough money to buy yourself a home. Like, I looked into it for a laugh a month or two ago, and I actually have work experience that would qualify me for a visa as a skilled worker, but there’s no way I would consider going. You could only use it for a maximum of 5 years, it cannot be renewed, as far as I could tell, it also cannot be reapplied for, and it’s ineligible to serve in any capacity for establishing residency. You also cannot bring your family with you. That’s a pretty hard sell for all but the most desperate of people to uproot their lives for, even before you get into Japan’s famously terrible work culture.

I do understand a certain reluctance towards migration that doesn’t result in cultural assimilation to a fair extent, especially considering how big of an export Japan’s cultural products are, but xenophobic reactions to any possibility of change are going to back Japan into a corner where they have to pick between collapsing as a society, or just opening the floodgates to immigration in a way that will leave them way more susceptible to the sort of massive cultural shift that so many Japanese voters seem to fear. In my layman’s opinion, they would do far better to go about massive work culture reform and allow much more immigration with an immense amount of support for people learning the language and culture, and assistance in integrating into the community. It’ll probably be painful for all involved, but the result of kicking this can down the road perpetually will be far more painful, and they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves.

On android, GrapheneOS, AntennaPod and Tempo are probably my top ones. On my desktop, Firefox, tmux, mpd, ncmpcpp, gonic, neomutt, qbittorrent, weechat, mc, btop, Lagrange and emacs probably round things out for me outside of base OS stuff. OS side, my desktop has Arch Linux and my laptop runs OpenBSD. Bitwarden across platforms.

They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.

I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.

It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.

X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.

There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.

If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.

For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.

Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.

Sure, but many people seem to suffer when it comes to distinguishing facts from opinion and interpretation.

For example, it’s a fact that Biden had a very poor performance in the debate. No one is really disputing that, though there have been various justifications offered for it. All good up to this point, but it falls apart when it comes to interpreting what that means for the Democratic campaign. Some are of the view that it’s too late to change the candidate and have Biden stand down, and that to do so would tank our chances of beating Trump. Others, myself included, feel like the hit he has taken is likely terminal, and that our best chance is to have him bow out and spin up a new campaign as soon as possible, in order to have the best shot at viability. Personally, I think the longer the delay on doing so, the more it becomes a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Either way, absent someone with a functional crystal ball or some time travelers that can give us a definitive answer, both stances are subjective and fallible interpretations of what the best course of action would be, based on facts. Yet, in the couple of hours I browsed Lemmy after my post-work nap today, I easily saw a dozen people accusing posters who stated Biden should step down of being trolls, Russian agents, useful idiots, and/or arguing in bad faith for merely stating an opinion. I’ve seen people who think Biden is the best shot get called stupid for holding that view, but it rarely seems to have the same power to kill a conversation dead in its tracks as, “You disagree with me, ergo you must be a Russian shill.”

To deny these disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, are real is to be deluded, yet so is dismissing any and all criticism of the party or views that don’t hew to the party orthodoxy as being pure propaganda. Heck, even for people who have fallen wholeheartedly for such propaganda, you ignore them and dismiss them at your peril. If you don’t successfully reengage with them and manage to bring those individuals back into the fold, they could quite easily make up the margin that ultimately could swing the election. According to this NPR article, the last two elections were essentially decided by less than 80,000 votes each in a few swing states. Unless Democratic strategists have a surefire method that’s guaranteed to juice their votes by millions in those states, they really can’t afford to be leaving anything on the table if they want to win.