Sarcastic bitch with a wine problem

  • 16 Posts
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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2024

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  • Oh it’s not quite as “from scratch” as some people make it out to be. It definitely can be more work than most distros, but mostly it’s pretty straightforward and you generally just follow some wiki guide or another when picking “components” to install and I think nowadays you can use prebuilt binaries too (I haven’t used Arch in a good while.) There’s really not all that many moving parts, most of them are sort of a package deal – if you want to use X, you have to install Y and Z. It really is more like building a PC from parts.

    Now, if you actually want to build a Linux system from scratch, there’s the very surprisingly named Linux From Scratch project





  • The Usenet post I linked to claims it’s originally from the 1st quarter of 1990, but who knows if that’s accurate or not. I actually can’t find a good source for whether Stumpf is the original author or just the one who posted it to rec.humor.funny.reruns, but it’s usually attributed to him at any rate.

    But yeah, fairly ancient by internet standards. I remember first running into it in the 90’s







  • Because ADHD I usually have at least 4 books underway at the same time.

    • I’m just about to finish Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.

    • I just started Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

    • I’m also reading A City on Mars, a nonfiction book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

    • I started re-reading the Area X trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, I think I’m still in Annihilation.

    • I also started re-reading Dune by Frank Herbert, but honestly it’s such a slog that I think I got halfway through before getting frustrated. The worldbuilding may be interesting but holy shit is Herbert’s writing turgid.






  • I think it’s interesting is that so many autocracies keep up the pretense of democratic and rules-based governance; even North Korea has elections. Same with political trials like you see in so many authoritarian regimes, from modern Russia or China to Nazi Germany – it’s like autocrats need to be able to pretend to themselves that the system they run is fair and just, and that they’re not just tyrants who govern with impunity and enforce rules arbitrarily.

    What I don’t get is why? Why bother when it’s immediately obvious to everyone that it’s all a sham? Why not drop the pretense, which everybody knows is just a pretense?