Luna's recent activity
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Comment on Is OneDrive for Linux Mature Enough Yet? in ~comp
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Comment on How does one engage in criticism of Israel without stooping to anti-semitic tropes? in ~talk
Luna (edited )Link ParentTrump already did major damage to our reputation as a reliable international partner with all his talk about pulling out of NATO. Though Israel is not in NATO, they are a major strategic ally, and...Additionally, we cannot have a narrative that we abandon military allies when the going gets tough spreading to further undermine trust in our role as the ultimate military might on the planet.
Trump already did major damage to our reputation as a reliable international partner with all his talk about pulling out of NATO. Though Israel is not in NATO, they are a major strategic ally, and abandoning them would be a clear sign that alliances mean nothing (edit: regardless of administration, to put the icing on the shit cake) and do irreparable damage to the security of all our allies, NATO or not.
This is also why Xi Jinping talked about how Israel needs to stop with its "collective punishment" of the Palestinians a few months ago - regardless of whether you view what Israel is doing as genocide, it doesn't matter, because China clearly has no qualms about genocide considering their treatment of the Uyghurs. They just want to try and undermine US support for its strategic allies, because if we're willing to abandon Israel, what are the chances we're willing to stand up for Taiwan? If they can create some bad PR for Taiwan (and with over a billion people, millions of whom speak English, they could easily muster up a PR warfare department to flood the internet with deepfake footage that will get quickly gobbled up and poison the well against Taiwan) and bribe some politicians like Russia did, it'll be over for them, too.
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Comment on How does one engage in criticism of Israel without stooping to anti-semitic tropes? in ~talk
Luna Link ParentAgreed. As I have said before, I genuinely believe Joe Biden is doing his best, as foreign policy is truly a balancing act, and sanctions don't really work if a country is committed to bypassing...I think it can be solved, but it's not going to be done by people arguing online or on college campuses.
Agreed. As I have said before, I genuinely believe Joe Biden is doing his best, as foreign policy is truly a balancing act, and sanctions don't really work if a country is committed to bypassing them and resisting change.
Ten years ago, I would have been fully in favor of the US invading I/P and attempting to setup a one-state secular democracy a la Turkey. But at this point, after learning about US meddling and our attempts at state-building (and how Turkey has been actively backsliding due to Erdogan's right-wing government), I'm completely burnt out on the idea of regime change. Best case, you get a secular dictatorship that can stand up to Iranian and Saudi meddling with equal oppression for everyone.
As much as I hate to see the death toll continue to rise, I'm legitimately not sure what good we can really do beyond continuing to supply aid to Gaza and hoping the Israeli people elect Labor or another party which genuinely wants peace. But there's not much we can do to further that end. Certainly, internet debates between non-Israelis aren't going to do much to move their political needle.
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Comment on How does one engage in criticism of Israel without stooping to anti-semitic tropes? in ~talk
Luna LinkI've stopped engaging with online critiques of Israel/Palestine because there's just too many bad-faith, reductive techniques, like the "AIPAC controls the US govt" talking point espoused in this...I've stopped engaging with online critiques of Israel/Palestine because there's just too many bad-faith, reductive techniques, like the "AIPAC controls the US govt" talking point espoused in this thread and which I frequently see parroted in slightly more cloaked language in left-leaning spaces, and the inevitable "Hamas did nothing wrong" takes that seem to follow.
Honestly, this whole conflict has been a bit of a wake-up call in terms of seeing how easily people fall for rather blatant propaganda that falls apart upon the slightest inspection. I've even seen rehashed crap from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion getting heavily upvoted and treated as fact. At this point, I'm convinced that a large portion of leftists are just as intellectually lazy as conservatives and not willing to learn about the broader context of issues outside those which immediately affect them, like NIMBYism driving up rents and ruining the very spaces they claim to want to protect.
There are valid criticisms of Israel's right-wing government (of which I have many), and there are broader contexts that explain why these things happen to begin with when you look at the shifting alliances that fuel these conflicts (namely Iran v. Saudi Arabia), the original 1947 Resolution 181 borders being indefensible and a perfect example of design by committee hubris, and the reality of Hamas being so inept at civil governance that they could not hold on to power if they were to pursue peace in good faith and hold new elections, thus guaranteeing a forever war (which is pretty depressing to think about).
And all of this just gets tossed out the window when online debate-bros catch wind of a fresh conversation about the conflict and feel the need to shit up any legitimate, good-faith discussion with the latest bad thing Israel did meaning the gloves are off and the US should declare war on them.
I've unsubbed from a lot of reddit communities because of this bad-faith one-sided mess, and been outright banned from subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism for attempting to introduce nuance to the conversation. It's clear that people who take a holistic view on the conflict are not wanted by most leftist communities, so I've opted to reserve discussion for people who I know want an actual conversation IRL.
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Comment on US senior homes refuse to pick up fallen residents, dial 911. ‘Why are they calling us?’ in ~health
Luna Link ParentPrivate equity firms have been buying up US healthcare companies, especially assisted care and nursing homes, for decades, and they don't have any pride, ethics, honor, or morals - profit is the...Private equity firms have been buying up US healthcare companies, especially assisted care and nursing homes, for decades, and they don't have any pride, ethics, honor, or morals - profit is the only thing that matters to them. If they can pawn off liability for free, they will absolutely do it.
Private equity firms operate this way by design - they explicitly cater to people who are living socialist caricatures of capitalists, the ultra-rich who have zero qualms about grinding the country into dust and dooming the entire planet just to enhance their bottom lines. It is fundamentally unsustainable, but they do not care. If they wanted modest returns, they would just park their money in the S&P 500, maybe do some angel investing on the side, and be happy with that; PE firms are the exact opposite - the are for those who have wealth and want to expand it as fast as possible. There is no such thing as a good private equity firm, and there is no low they will not stoop to.
It makes them more money to punish employees who care enough to help than it does to risk helpful employees causing a lawsuit due to the nature of subrogation in the US healthcare system. And until we tackle the real cause of the problem (the rich and privatized healthcare), things will only continue to get worse.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001
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Comment on US government reportedly ponders crimping China's use of RISC-V in ~society
Luna LinkThe double-think is both impressive and terrifying. Congress will destroy open source in the name of spiting China."While the benefits of open source collaboration on RISC-V promise to be significant, it can only be realized when contributors are working with the sole aim of improving the technology, and not aiding the geopolitical interests of the PRC," the representatives wrote in a November 2023 letter that called for creation of a "robust ecosystem for open source collaboration among the US and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work."
That's code for "Banning sales of chips to China won't work if Beijing can build its own using RISC-V." The Committee members therefore called on US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo to consider what might be done about RISC-V.
The double-think is both impressive and terrifying. Congress will destroy open source in the name of spiting China.
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US government reportedly ponders crimping China's use of RISC-V
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Comment on Are Free Software developers at risk? A potential threat to Free Software developers looms in the form of an ongoing lawsuit in the UK involving Bitcoin and its core developers. in ~tech
Luna LinkFaketoshi again? JFC this dude cannot stop shitting up everything he touches. The world would be a better place without him. He's not even a real "Dr" - he claims to have multiple PhDs, but has...Faketoshi again? JFC this dude cannot stop shitting up everything he touches. The world would be a better place without him. He's not even a real "Dr" - he claims to have multiple PhDs, but has never submitted any evidence for any of them. (As in, he hasn't even submitted a diploma mill certificate.)
For the (blessedly) uninitiated, ALAB did a great episode on him a few years ago showing just how insane he is, though it's a obviously bit out of date at this point: https://www.alabseries.com/episodes/episode-3-faketoshi-the-perfect-client
TL;DR - This dude is a con-artist in every sense of the word who has committed some of the most brazen fraud imaginable, been called out numerous times for it (including in court, where he was spinning lies wilder than you get from Alex Jones), should be taken seriously by nobody (except a psychiatrist, because he's either faking mental illness really well for his grift or needs to be involuntarily committed), and might just destroy free software in the UK.
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Comment on Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI in ~tech
Luna Link ParentYeah, it feels a lot like the older generation seeing a bad thing that they (and those around them) aren't super into and seeing it as a good target for punching down. Truth Social, Fox News,...Yeah, it feels a lot like the older generation seeing a bad thing that they (and those around them) aren't super into and seeing it as a good target for punching down.
Truth Social, Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax are also super manipulative (and have done demonstrable harm to society), yet you don't see many serious calls to ban them. I totally support banning TikTok, provided we also go after their equivalents for the older generations.
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Comment on Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI in ~tech
Luna Link ParentI find it wild the sheer amount of hate Gen Alpha is getting, and also the amount of media attention about their supposed political opinions and affiliations. Depending on what starting year you...I find it wild the sheer amount of hate Gen Alpha is getting, and also the amount of media attention about their supposed political opinions and affiliations. Depending on what starting year you use (the earliest I've seen is 2010), the oldest of them are just entering high school or just entering middle school, and the youngest have yet to be born, which means they don't have any real power and their opinions will change as they continue to mature, such that we cannot form any real generalizations about them yet.
And yet, there is no end of articles talking about how they're screwed or that they're going to ruin the world, that they're all going to grow up ultra-conservative or that they're all going to become Maoists...it's absolutely ridiculous. The only thing that can be said for sure is that, given our inaction on climate change, they are going to bear a much bigger brunt of the consequences than we will, which is an indictment of us, the older generations, who have failed to be good stewards of the Earth.
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Comment on Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny, will cost $5.25/month standalone in ~tech
Luna LinkOfficial Microsoft post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-teams-wwOfficial Microsoft post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-teams-ww
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Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny, will cost $5.25/month standalone
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Comment on If you came into a lot of money, what would be the indulgent thing you would buy? in ~talk
Luna (edited )Link ParentI've thought about this a lot (what I'd do if I magically became a billionaire) and this is the conclusion I've come to as well: start a housing non-profit that runs buildings at-cost + 10-20%...where the tenants own the coop itself (and so can broadly set their own rents based on maintenance costs) and pay some proportion of those maintenance costs back into a centralised bank, which is then charged with continually buying/building more housing.
I've thought about this a lot (what I'd do if I magically became a billionaire) and this is the conclusion I've come to as well: start a housing non-profit that runs buildings at-cost + 10-20% (20% if the amenities make it a "luxury" building) to fund expansion, through both building and buying.
Even better would be if the parent organization did more than just housing, so that profits from the other lines of business could be fed into furthering the goal of decommodifying housing. With enough capital, you could reduce operational expenses through self-insuring, self-financing, etc. and exert downward pressure on rent prices.
Basically, a conglomerate whose sole goal is building more affordable housing rather than paying out dividends.
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Comment on How millennials learned to dread motherhood in ~life.women
Luna Link ParentIt's not just about retirement, a 529 (college savings fund) is also caught up in the stock market. Depending on market conditions when your children go off to college, you may have your kids'...It's not just about retirement, a 529 (college savings fund) is also caught up in the stock market. Depending on market conditions when your children go off to college, you may have your kids' educations entirely covered, or you might as well have not even bothered.
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Comment on LGBTQ couple in Nepal becomes the first to receive official same-sex marriage status in ~lgbt
Luna LinkThis reads like an Onion article. "Heartwarming: This trans woman married a cis man and we still get to call them fags." Apparently Nepal allows people to change their gender to "other" but won't...According to Human Rights Watch, [Maya] Gurung is a transgender woman who is legally recognized as male in the country, and [Surendra] Pandey is a cisgender man.
“After 23 years of struggle we got this historic achievement, and finally Maya and Surendra got their marriage registered at the local administration office,” said Sunil Babu Pant, an openly gay former parliamentarian and leading LGBTQ rights activist.
[They] became the first in the nation to receive official same-sex marriage status.
This reads like an Onion article. "Heartwarming: This trans woman married a cis man and we still get to call them fags."
Apparently Nepal allows people to change their gender to "other" but won't allow for anything else (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Nepal#Binary_transgender_recognition), which is...puzzling.
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Comment on Poll: US President Joe Biden’s standing hits new lows amid Israel-Hamas war in ~news
Luna (edited )Link ParentThis is the unfortunate truth. It's also why I've come to dislike the BDS movement: its supporters have good intentions, but it's an incredibly naive, Trumpist line of thought, that sanctioning...This is the unfortunate truth. It's also why I've come to dislike the BDS movement: its supporters have good intentions, but it's an incredibly naive, Trumpist line of thought, that sanctioning Israel would magically cause them to bend the knee. Sanctions don't really work (source), despite what some officials would lead you to believe, and if the US embraced the BDS movement as punishment, what would Israel do? Well, they already export quite a bit to Russia and China, so I'm sure at least one of them would be more than happy to take our place as Israel's #1 ally. Russia may be Iran's ally, of which Hamas is a proxy, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time they've played both sides of a middle east conflict.
If foreign policy was as simple as "sanction a country and it will magically fall in line with western demands," this wouldn't be an issue, Putin would have never occupied the Crimea (much less launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine), the Uyghurs wouldn't be in concentration camps, and Yemen wouldn't be torn apart by a brutal civil war.
Foreign diplomacy is a balancing act, pulling on various levers of power to try and achieve the best possible outcomes, but being very mindful of how easy it can be to pull too hard and break them. The more I've learned about geopolitics, the more I've come to realize that it's a shit sandwich no matter how you slice it, but if you're careful, you can at least scrape most of the shit off before eating it.
Edit: added source for the dubious efficacy of the US sanctions regime.
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Comment on Half-Life: 25th anniversary update in ~games
Luna Link ParentBlack Mesa is definitely the way to go if you're new to the series, in my opinion. It's a remake, not a remaster, and I think it truly rises above its source material as a result. There's a lot of...Black Mesa is definitely the way to go if you're new to the series, in my opinion. It's a remake, not a remaster, and I think it truly rises above its source material as a result. There's a lot of quality-of-life improvements, like more intuitive level design, better pacing, being more immersive (HL1 feels like a ghost town today with its barren environments), and that's before you get to Xen, where the levels actually feel well-connected, logically building to something great, and taking place in a living ecosystem, rather than a series of disconnected, barren wastelands that you fight and puzzle about before teleporting to the next one.
Black Mesa truly nails the art of placemaking, and its world actually feels lived in, which is something I can't say about HL. That's not to say HL was bad at that (at its release, HL's placemaking was revolutionary), but it was very much limited by the hardware of its era, and it doesn't hold up today without some seriously rose-tinted glasses.
I know there are a lot of die-hard HL fans out there who have a bone to pick with anyone who recommends BM over HL, so to any die-hard fans reading this: I have played both, and I played HL (plus Op4 and BS) before playing the sequels, and that was well before BM was available to the public, so my perspective is not purely retrospective.
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Comment on Will the switch to USB-C be good for repair? in ~tech
Luna LinkThis feels overly optimistic. I haven't done phone repairs before, but from what I've seen in teardown videos, there seems to be quite the variety in breakout boards and ribbon connectors for type...We’ve largely stayed out of the USB-C mandate fight, because it’s not directly related to repair. But still, repair should be positively impacted by this legislation—USB-C ports are typically cheaper to replace than proprietary connectors like Apple’s Lightning port, due to broader availability. On top of this, the shift means we should be able to expect a certain degree of interoperability of spare parts. One wouldn’t need to purchase a port specific to their device’s make (assuming that parts pairing isn’t implemented to prevent the use of non-original assemblies).
This feels overly optimistic. I haven't done phone repairs before, but from what I've seen in teardown videos, there seems to be quite the variety in breakout boards and ribbon connectors for type C ports in the smartphone space, plus phone firmware tends to be quite brittle, expecting very specific hardware configurations with little wiggle room for changing things out.
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Comment on Why HOAs are everywhere now in ~life
Luna Link ParentYou would think, but I distinctly remember one of my accounting professors talking about his work for his condo's HOA. Every time he double-checked to ensure an invoice was for authorized work (as...$300 per month isn't the kind of cost people will just ignore. Members of an HOA will dig into a charge that large and ask where the money's going.
You would think, but I distinctly remember one of my accounting professors talking about his work for his condo's HOA. Every time he double-checked to ensure an invoice was for authorized work (as opposed to the classic fake invoice scam), people acted like he was a burden, because who would bother scamming such a small HOA? (With an attitude like that, it's only a matter of time...)
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Comment on YouTube is now rolling out disabling videos after detecting adblockers in ~tech
Luna Link ParentI didn't say embed the ads in the video stream and allow full client control. If they changed YouTube to be more akin to a live stream where the client can request the server play/pause/seek, the...I didn't say embed the ads in the video stream and allow full client control. If they changed YouTube to be more akin to a live stream where the client can request the server play/pause/seek, the server could just blanket deny those requests during the ads it's inserting.
Of course, SponsorBlock could still work under this scenario, assuming YouTube didn't start allowing Partners to mark specific timestamps as sponsored (and thus unskippable), but I seriously doubt they would consider such an integration without requiring a revenue split from the Partners, which would be a very difficult sell.
I was also unaware there was an official Linux client. If there is, I wish it was available when I was in uni and lived in OneNote (which I had to run in a VM since I used my university OneDrive to sync it between devices automatically but OneDrive doesn't work under Wine, a known issue).
Edit: In the thread I linked, it seems someone has found a workaround using onedriver. I'm not sure if it would work with OneNote, but at least for syncing files, it should suffice.