gru:Bz
Average millennial living life on the edge (of the Midwest)
Notes
So about those MrBeast allegations...
I'm obsessed with this terminal emulator
Never thought I’d feel so strongly about a terminal app but I’ve been obsessed with Warp Terminal for the last week. It has built in AI so you can use natural language when you don’t know where to go next. I wish they had this kind of thing circa 2009 when I installed Ubuntu on my old HP Pavilion.
I’ve spent so many nights trying to install some obscure program, screwing something up and ultimately installing dependencies for dependencies for dependencies and breaking stuff to the point where I throw in the towel. Just used it a little bit ago to help me figure out how to get VS Code running on Wayland.
On the free account you get 100 queries per month, which isn’t a heck of a lot but if you go easy on them they can really bail you out when you need it. Lots of extra features on top of that, especially for coding and collaboration. I’m just lazy and like having the option to let AI do the work when I’m in over my head with everyday Linux stuff. Worth checking out if you spend a lot of time on the command line. I don’t think I need yet another subscription just for a terminal emulator but it’s so shiny and new and fancy 🤩
I like my cozy little echo chamber
I try to live in an echo chamber. I’m not into debates. I’m not a fan of confrontation at all, really. Some people thrive on it, I shut down and retreat into a sweaty shell.
When I’m reading an article or watching the news, while I do follow a lot of centrist sources, I try to stick with the farthest left publications I can find. I’m open to change; like if someone comes in and blows me away with mountains of evidence or a better take on something we disagreed on, I have no problem admitting I was wrong. I can change my perspective if it makes sense.
The Onion, InfoWars shenanigans
One [bid] was from the Jones-affiliated First United American Companies, which offered $3.5 million, the trustee revealed in court Thursday. The other, from The Onion, was lower but contained an incentive by some of the Sandy Hook families to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds and give it to other Jones’ creditors, the trustee, Christopher Murray, said.
[Judge Lopez’s] 20-page order on the sale procedures in September…gave broad authority to Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the best interests” of Jones, his company and their creditors.
Maybe I’m just an idiot but isn’t the point of this to liquidate his assets and pay the Sandy Hook families for damages? I get the part about the creditors but who gives a shit about Alex Jones or his company’s best interests? He’s showed absolutely no remorse for any of the misinformation he spread that got him here. He literally talks shit about the entire situation any chance he gets, as if he’s the victim and the families are just obsessed with him for no reason.
Murray had Infowars' website and studio shut down Thursday as he began the process of securing assets, a lawyer for the trustee said in court Thursday. But on Friday, Infowars and its websites were back up and running…Jones told listeners that Murray had told him it was wrong to shut down Infowars before the sale was finalized.
Why do I feel like he’ll somehow weasel his way out of this? The worst people get away with this kinda shit all the time. The judge says there are issues with transparency and the legality of The Onion being picked as the winning bid since it was for less money, and because there was no round of bidding after the initial bids were unsealed. Which the same judge said was optional according to his order.
I guess we’ll see how it goes next week at the hearing 🤞
Source: What happens next in The Onion’s effort to buy Alex Jones' Infowars
Re: Massive New Information on Aliens Just Came Out (penguinz0, YouTube)
I like Charlie’s take on this. Yes; I believe all of the people at the congressional hearing on UAPs were telling the truth, I just don’t think it means aliens. Whether they think so or not. There’s proof of strange craft flying around the skies and we don’t know who they belong to or how they’re able to do these seemingly impossible maneuvers, but that doesn’t mean aliens.
“Has there been to your knowledge any communication with a non-human life form?” Republican Eric Burlison asked. “The term communication is a bit of a trick word because there’s verbal communication, the problem is you also have non-verbal communication, and so I would say definitely yes,” Elizondo said. “When a Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US air space we scramble two F-22s, we are certainly communicating intent and capability. I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US air space and…they’re making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear readiness.”
In Charlie’s video, he makes the point that we believed the “Wow!” signal from the 70’s was smoking gun evidence of life on other planets but it’s since been debunked.
I, too, believe the universe is far too vast for us to be the only intelligent life out here but that’s just it; it’s so vast there’s little to no chance we’re anywhere near any other life. We have satellites like Voyager and JWST venturing deep into space, snapping a bunch of photos and soaking in all the data they can and yet we’ve still not seen any signs of civilization anywhere but Earth.
I would absolutely love for a society of benevolent aliens to come save us from ourselves and welcome us into The Galactic Federation but that’s just wishful thinking.
I just bought the domain name worksucks.me. I think I’m going to start working on a silly little thing like Fesshole only instead of random confessions you can anonymously submit a post bitching about your job. No idea if it’ll ever come to fruition but I need something to tinker with. And before you say there’s already Glassdoor - that’s a professional website where you can actually find a job. Mine does nothing and brings absolutely nothing to the table aside from a stream of posts from strangers who hate their job.
Indie web escapism
Back in 2016 I didn’t have this community. I had Twitter and I think Tumblr? And definitely Facebook.
Facebook is already a shitshow. People fighting and ending lifetime friendships, a few Trump supporters being schooled on what tariffs actually are even though it’s a little too late now.
I’m glad I have a nice place to go and escape the noise and general insanity of the impending fascist regime, even if I am coming here to bitch about it.
I don’t know most of you very well but I’m glad we’re all here.
USPol: Election woes
Take two: giving Kagi another shot
We need each other
People, I mean.
I’ve always considered myself a bit of a loner. Definitely an introvert; I love hanging out with friends but I love coming home and decompressing while watching some TV or spinning a few records even more. My nights of staying at the bar until 2am and passing out at a buddy’s house are long behind me.
Recurring Strangers
Mini rant about Meta, staying in touch
It’s annoying that Facebook is the only way for anyone to get in touch with extended family or old friends. Idk of any other platform where literally everyone has an account.
I log into the mobile web version every few weeks and it notifies me of new messages but then it makes me install Messenger to even see who it was. Then I catch up, uninstall it and reinstall it in another month or so.
I wish there was a less shitty platform for staying in touch. Or at least some kind of open protocol that can talk to stuff like Messenger but isn’t tied to any single huge mega corporation.
Warm take on federated social media
The stuff you’ve already heard a million times
Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning anyone can download it and run their own instance. Each instance can federate with each other, so it still feels like one massive social network. The benefit is that there’s no single point of failure, but that’s only relative to the entire Fediverse. People recommend joining the smallest instances or running your own because it’s better for decentralization - and it is. If you’re on a server with 15 other people and it gets wiped off the face of the internet for whatever reason, only you and 14 other people are affected. If Twitter goes down, everyone with an account is affected.
Putting yourself out there: on self doubt, persistence
What makes WP Engine different from Bluehost?
This might sound dumb but I don’t get the difference between something like WP Engine and other hosts that specialize in Wordpress, like Bluehost which literally refers to itself as a Wordpress Hosting Platform and Dreamhost, both of which are recommended by Automattic?
I get that they have “WP” in their name; that makes sense for being easily mistakable for an official part of Wordpress, but the revision history thing just doesn’t seem like it’s as big a deal as Mullenweg is making it out to be. I know he criticized them for not contributing enough to Wordpress.org development but isn’t that kind of arbitrary? Like what is enough?
I do think being owned by a private equity firm is a little greasy for a company that offers hosting for open source software but Bluehost is owned by one too.
Is it just a matter of how big they are? Is it just a personal thing between two rich guys? I feel like it’s probably that.
What's valuable to you?
I was just reading this Reddit thread about a blogging platform that launched a few years ago. It's grown into a successful space with a thriving community by now, but the comments were kind of cracking me up.
The #1 thing people were focused on back then was how to monetize it.
There's no built-in advertising options and it's really not even set up to run something like Google ads. SEO, maximizing engagement and clicks are not baked in. It's simply a place where indie bloggers can go to share their stories and hang out with other bloggers.
Why even come out if you're bi or pan?
Seasonal euphoria
Progress in the middle of nowhere, Ohio
I just re-watched this old video of someone driving around filming my hometown with a camcorder in the 80's. It's unbelievable how much it's changed even since the first time I watched it a decade ago.
I want to record my own.
Intel and a few other big tech companies are setting up shop about 15 miles down the road and they project 1,000,000+ people moving to central Ohio in the next few years. We're one of those towns just outside of the city and they're already expanding highways and announcing plans to build a big downtown area. Things are about to drastically change.
Imagine recording a tape of this little town no one's ever heard of, saving it for 30 years and finally pulling it out of an old broken down box in the basement so you can upload it to YouTube. Time goes by so fast, next thing you know we'll blink and it'll be 2050. I'll scroll through miles of photos and videos in my iCloud drive, find the one I recorded 2024 and marvel at how different things were back then.