Jesus, technical people are some of the worst communicators I’ve ever worked with.

It’s not necessarily their fault though. Y’know who goes into technical jobs? People who often prefer to work with machines, physical stuff, laws of nature, that’s who. And often because it’s MUCH easier than working with people, at least for them.

On top of that, soft skills are HARD. Communication is HARD. It comes easier for some, but it’s a skill like any other. It’s the technical socialites, the diplomatic devs who become the best managers and leaders, due to the rarity of their hybrid skillsets.

I’m in the middle. Just technical enough to mostly understand the devs and understand the implications of plans, and just enough soft skills to turn that into decent documentation, emails, and working with clients.

SUCKS that I’ve gotten a taste of project management and hated the absolute fuck out of it. I probably would’ve been decent at it otherwise.

That’s true, it could be racism, it could be both.

God, if Taylor Swift runs for president I’d be stunned. I mean, given the circumstances I’d vote for her, but geez Louise.

The only outcome that might suck even more is if Biden did step down, Kamala steps up, and she still loses. Cuz then it’s like… oh so we’re just gonna be misogynistic as a voter base now, great, thanks fellow Americans. Like, we were ready to vote for a shambling shell of an old man but not a lady with Hillary Clinton energy, okay. 🤦

Well, in the current economy, the statistical indicators that economists rely on are booming. GDP, etc. What folks on the left like us are saying is that those indicators are easily measurable but do not paint an accurate picture of what most Americans are experiencing. It doesn’t feel like a boom out here because, well, it ain’t.

It’s not like we’re sipping champagne, kicking it at the beach, and complaining that the guy next door has a nicer beach. We work just as hard as other generations and get a lot less to show for it.

Acknowledging that is important, but corporate politicians in either party seem like they just don’t want to anything about it.

Still voting for Biden, but yeah, not enthusiastically.

Yeah it’s not great, but like… coming across as coherent is important no matter the position. Biden kinda failed that basic competency test, probably just due to his age and not like, stupidity or a personal failing of any kind. I’m still voting for Biden, but yeah it’s not exactly an enthusiastic vote.

So, speaking from a purely pragmatic perspective, voting for Biden is better than other US electoral choices for the purpose of trying to help Palestinians.

I understand your reticence and moral indignation, I largely feel the same.

But the biggest reason Trump won in 2016 is because voters were not particularly enthused with their choices, and a great many decided not voting at all (or voting for Trump as a protest against the establishment) was preferable to voting for HRC.

I have to imagine that we both believe that Trump is worse than Biden when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Given that we’re already in election year, it’s down to Biden and Trump. One of them is going to be president come January next year.

Taking all that together, if we want things to get better for Palestine, we should vote for Biden because the alternatives are much worse.

Granted there is a lot you can do outside of elections to help, and I wouldn’t recommend ignoring those. But given that voting for the US president takes a few hours out of one day every four years, it’s not a good idea to ignore that either.

I hope this helps you understand those of us who don’t really like Biden but will vote for him regardless.

people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren’t learning a whole new technology skill.

FTFY.

If I had to guess, he’d try to find a business selling enterprise supported distributions of Linux, buy them, then try to expand/convert them to develop “consumer Linux”. He’d advertise it as getting out from under the thumb of evil corps (ie his competitors), then as soon as it gains even a modicum of traction start implementing privacy violating shit, ads, whatever, to enshittify it as quickly as possible for a quick buck.

Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.

That’s bizarre. I am also on Windows 10 and use Firefox as my primary browser, largely because I can stream DRM’d video sites (Netflix etc) to my friends on discord.

Sounds dumb, but have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling? I might suggest also removing or disabling all extensions to see if that does anything.

Not so much, maybe towards the last month of that period defaulting to Bing. I think it was still being constantly rebranded then. It was still pretty new, so I never really trusted it for anything and just went to the sites in the results.

I used Bing by default for several months just because that’s what my work laptop’s browser had for default.

I never directly compared those results to DDG, but 9/10 times I would get frustrated by the lack of relevant results and go back to Google, where I’d find something useful on the first page of results.

DDG is just Bing. At least as far as the core search algorithm goes.

Unfortunately, my experience is the opposite. I tried to use DDG for about a month and consistently found myself giving up, Googling instead, and finding a relevant stack overflow page or reddit thread or whatever on the first page of results.

It’s unfortunately still far more useful than other search engines, in my experience anyway. I haven’t yet tried the paid search engine someone pointed out to me recently, Kagi, I think.

But given the cost of Kagi’s tiers based on number of searches, it would have to be MUCH more useful to me than Google to really make it feel worth it.

Inkscape is for vector art, yeah. Great for design, not for like, painting.

Krita is pretty great for a free digital art app. But I used it for about a year and could never quite get used to it. I recently went back to Clip Studio Paint (with my perpetual license they do still honor), and my experience just improved so much. It was like… ah, yes, an art program that clearly paid people to specifically make the UI easier to use for non-programmers, what an underrated feature.

Like most FOSS projects… they’re awful at promoting what they actually do on their website front page, instead focusing on FOSS buzzwords. It’s unfortunately a thing.

It’s vector art. You can design all sorts of things. App layouts, website design, logo design, basically anything that is visual and will need to scale up and down without loss of detail.

Because honestly, Office is pretty great for what it does.

I know a lot of folks here can’t get over it being proprietary or all the other anticompetitive stuff Microsoft has done with Office, but once we got M365 at work, a lot of my work life got a lot easier.

Any time I have tried to use LibreOffice or other alternatives, I feel like I’m giving up ten years’ worth of quality of life improvements. That’s generally my experience with 99% of FOSS stuff - fully functional but dogshit to navigate and use.

What does a protest non-vote accomplish? There’s moral satisfaction, of course, but that doesn’t stop the genocide. If the goal of the protest non-vote is to ensure Biden loses to teach the Dems a lesson, and it works, Trump becomes president. That’s almost certainly just a continuation of the genocide PLUS all the harm Project 2025 promises to deliver. MAYBE the Dems put up a more progressive candidate next time, but surely we could try to get that power between election cycles?

I guess I just don’t think protest non-votes will accomplish any of the goals of that protest, but they will allow Trump to live his best fascist dictator life.

I dunno, is there something I’m missing from your strategic calculus here?

“what’s the Judge Rotenburg Center?” looks it up “Jesus”