Marxism-Fennekinism

(He/him) Marxist-Leninist and amateur writer. I like cats, foxes, sci-fi, science fantasy, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Message me for my roleplay ideas!

Lemmygrad: https://lemmygrad.ml/u/HiddenLayer5

Discord: LinuxFennekin#5514

Reddit: /u/HiddenLayer5

  • 53 Posts
  • 204 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2020

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  • Can someone tell me why this is even necessary? Network printing has existed for almost as long as printers have and doesn’t require the cloud. There are standard protocols for discovering printers on the network and sending prints to them. I’m on Linux, have never installed printer drivers or even manually set up a printer, and I can print just fine over the network, it just knows which device is a printer and I can send prints to it with a single click. It even knows what the printer’s capabilities are, for example whether it can print double sided. Are people so afraid of the system print dialog that they insist on using HP’s app or something?





  • Though, with the caveat that the computer stuff is integrated with the CRT which stores a potentially deadly high voltage for quite a while after being unplugged. Which doesn’t mean it’s not repairable, it certainly is especially by an independent shop with trained technicians, but it was still very clearly not meant to be repaired by the user with no prior experience. IIRC there were older Macs with integrated monitors that had the computer parts more or less separated from the monitor parts, which were comparatively safer.

    Mind you, this carried over to fairly recent iMac models, because up until the M1 iMacs, they had their power supply as just a bare PCB right beside the motherboard with no separate enclosure, and modern switched mode power supplies also have capacitors that store deadly voltages long after being unplugged (as in, higher voltages than from the wall, they step up the voltage before stepping it back down which allows them to use more energy efficient components). While there’s a lot to dislike about discrete power adapters for everything, they are definitively safer especially for people doing repairs because all the dangerous high voltage stuff is self-contained and separate from the actual device itself (and allows you to very easily replace the power supply with zero disassembly).










  • The two biggest charity events he’s had, Team Trees and Team Seas, he did literally nothing but pitch the idea. He was giving away luxury shit and engaging in his usual hedonism during the period he was telling his viewers to donate, and it’s not like he did any of the work either, he just contracted with established environmental nonprofits. So why is he there again? Why didn’t he just tell people to donate to those nonprofits directly?

    Also, he definitely profited from both charity events and they were more marketing events for himself than anything. All the videos have ads and he made no mention of donating the ad revenue so one can only assume he kept it (because if he was going to donate the ad revenue he absolutely would not pass up on making that known to everyone), not to mention the amount of engagement it brought to his other videos and his brand as a whole. That’s also assuming he doesn’t do what most influencer charity campaigns do and directly take a big cut of the donations as a marketing fee or something.




  • I think looking at copyright in a vacuum is unhelpful because it’s only one part of the problem. IMO, the reason people are okay with piracy of name brand media but are not okay with OpenAI using human-created artwork is from the same logic of not liking companies and capitalism in general. People don’t like the fact that AI is extracting value from individual artists to make the rich even richer while not giving anything in return to the individual artists, in the same way we object to massive and extremely profitable media companies paying their artists peanuts. It’s also extremely hypocritical that the government and by extention “copyright” seems to care much more that OpenAI is using name brand media than it cares about OpenAI scraping the internet for independent artists’ work.

    Something else to consider is that AI is also undermining copyleft licenses. We saw this in the GitHub Autopilot AI, a 100% proprietary product, but was trained on all of GitHub’s user-generated code, including GPL and other copyleft licensed code. The art equivalent would be CC-BY-SA licenses where derivatives have to also be creative commons.


  • Not a dumb question! I wouldn’t be surprised if it does though I can’t say for sure it does. With how little development it’s gotten recently, I want to say no it doesn’t spy nearly as much because it likely hasn’t been updated with more spying, though. But I obviously don’t know for sure, they might have went in and added telemetry while changing little else UX or functionality wise.

    LibreOffice has its flaws but it’s functionally superior to Wordpad and (IMO, and this is probably an unpopular opinion) not far behind Microsoft Office, almost on par. It’s also open source and still gets regular updates. So if you’re looking for a privacy friendly alternative to Microsoft Office I’d suggest that and not risk it with Wordpad.

    Though, the Windows OS itself’s spying definitely swamps whatever spying Wordpad does or doesn’t have, so the point is kind of moot, you’re being spied on about the same with or without Wordpad, same applies to LibreOffice as it can’t do anything about Windows’s spying. I encourage everyone to at least try Linux as a dual boot or on a second computer if you already have one of those, even if you can’t fully migrate away from Windows for whatever reason.