I grew up in Russia. We don't use imperial units in any way, shape or form: we're fully metric. Every single person who taught me at school and whatnot was born and raised in Soviet Union that was also fully metric, and science was worshiped. We used to laugh at imperial units.

Given all that, I... don't hate imperial system. Inches, feet, miles, Fahrenheit degrees, gallons, all units based on human proportion. Just think where the word for "feet" came from.

Zero C is meh, nothing in particular. A hunge boils your blood kills you instantly. It's useless: it's a "shit ton of heat" in human scale.

Zero F is chilly, a hunge F is toasty. It's based around human perception. To me, there is no difference between 100 and 90 C, but the difference between 100 and 90 F is more perceptible, and thus more useful to a human being.

Same with every other unit. What's a gallon? A gallon is enough for an average Joe to get drunk, that's what a gallon is.

Where it all falls apart is when you're trying to create something. When you're trying to get some calculation going. When you're making — not consuming — you need your units to add up, e.g. to have the SYSTEM in place. Imperial system is not a system.

Imperial units are perfect for _consuming_ stuff: a gallon of milk, a pint of beer, a (real) footlong sandwich, a pound of meat. Six foot high dude with seven inch dick.

Metric units are indispensable when you're _making_ stuff, at any scale. That's the difference. Imperial units are the tool of consumption, metric system is the tool of creation.

Only the time units seem to be the same for everyone on earth right now. Time itself in its mercilessness gives the same treatment to all entities, doesn't matter if you're a human or a grain of sand.

using macOS is an exercise in obedience.

Ubuntu made me believe in Linux animations again.

Somebody got the entire sex offender registry on his speed dial 😉

I switched to ubuntu!

— What is this malleable metal that is awfully convenient to make all sorts of things from?
— It’s lead. It is considered harmful by some.
— Nah, I don’t think so.
*proceeds to make pipes, solder in plumbing, glazed pottery, crystal glassware, cooking pots, utensils, paint on kitchen walls or utensils, foil used to wrap food, seals on wine bottles, weights in fishing or curtain weights stored near food, storage containers for food or drink, gasoline additives, water fountains in schools, candy wrappers, ink on food labels, bottle caps with liners, food can solder, ceramic dishware, spice containers, children’s lunchboxes, toys, baking molds, measuring spoons and kettles out of lead*

Isn’t it funny how people can be pretty mean to each other, yet half of them don’t realize that all they really wish for is for all of it to go away forever?

lmao he looks like he carefully studies the insides of any round fruit

The typeface in this picture that still looks modern is 127 years old.

memory is punishment
no memory is hell on earth

In 2025, only at Apple can you spend $3,268 on a smartphone + laptop combo and get a laptop with 16 GB of ram and a phone with USB 2.0.

using Thunderbird after apple mail feels like being manhandled in bed by a big beautiful 6'4" MILF. I mean it's fine, and she's hot, but damn she's huge and, dare I say,... monumental? I feel like a tiny male ant making love to huge female ant that is like 40 times bigger than I am

Yes, pdf a’s code of some kind is indeed ends with a space, and that space is mandatory. Who let uncle bob specify anything, anything at all?

Software RAID 1 is better than hardware RAID 1! Here's why:
1. Hardware RAID controllers do fail, and when they do, they kill all hard drives connected to them.
2. If your controller didn't fry your hard drives when it failed, you'll have to find the exact replacement, or you can kiss your data goodbye. You installed a hardware RAID array using second hand Broadcom controller three years ago, and now it failed? You better get on looking for the same controller of same revision running the same firmware version (of course you can't update firmware yourself) if you want your data back. Oh, Broadcom discontinued this model? Tough cookies. With software RAID, everything is easily recoverable.
3. You save a lot of money you can invest in other parts of your system. Good hardware controllers, even second hand ones, don't cost less than $200.

Performance loss is negligible.
RAID built into your motherboard is the worst of both worlds: it's just the software RAID you can't reallly control. Don't do that.

Hardware RAID is only worth it if you have a contract with your hardware supplier that says they're responsible for managing your RAID array. They have the resources to replace failed controllers properly. You know how IBM installs full rack worth of servers just to disable 70% of them because of your plan limitations? It's easier for them to do that than to physically go there and take servers away, just to reinstall them when you grow. Yeah, that kind of contract at that kind of level. If you're there, you don't need me telling you all that.

TL;DR: if you want to buy a two 8TB hard drives for $150 each on newegg and a used RAID controller to make RAID 1 array, you can make both 16TB _and_ make your system more reliable. Reliability is what you're after if you want RAID 1, isn't it?

What are you do... wha... no! stop! are you gonna buy a raid box from Aliexpress? are you fucking crazy?!

I feel like switching from macOS to Debian started some kind of transformation within me
the brain appl-itis is a house of cards, all but gone with the first swing at it

Apple be like:
I RECEIVE: $700
YOU RECEIVE: a phone with USB 2.0 in 2025

Should someone try to verify what they trust, they will find themselves on the shore of infinite, immesurable void. This void is aggressively anti-memetic: it exists, we know it exists, but it's practically unknowable.

Have you ever tried so much as compile your entire OS and all its programs from scratch? I know it's possible, I know there are people somewhere who do it, but have YOU personally tried that? Did you compile every part with multiple compilers to verify that your compiler isn't compromised? You can talk the talk, but have you walked the walk?

The food you eat every day. Did you make sure that it only contains what the label says it contains? Have you checked it with the lab? Have you then checked the lab itself? Did you check their equipment? The firmware their equipment runs? Purity of test mediums and reagents? The equipment you used to check the purity?

As I type that, I want to smack myself in the face. My brain aggresivelly rejects the idea that it needs to check everything itself. More specifically, the idea that the amount of trust it puts into other people it doesn't even know is INSANE. Here this void is -- known, but unknowable.

Do you remember the shore? It actually was _your_ shore -- you yourself is just an island floating in this void. Other people are islands too. Or bubbles, or, more specifically, entities that live within those bubbles. The bubbles made of beliefs and assumptions that form their hosts' realities.

With natural language, you build bridges to other islands/bubbles. The natural language itself is a thing that you don't really know -- you use it, yet you (and no one else for that matter) can guarantee that other person you talked to understood exactly what you was trying to say.

This black sticky void can consume us all at any moment. Yet, it chooses not to.

This void is god.

oh yes, my hands are shaking again
that weakness, then the tingling
someone's gonna spend the night without her whole body twitching for no reason whatsoever
all hail starvation

My brain vehemently rejects every piece of knowledge related to inductance and inductors. Every time I try to learn something about those things, the knowledge just leaks out as if it was being erased by an external force. Oh how I want to understand how inductors work, but I can't!

mechanical keyboard proponents be talking about longevity... I never ever had a membrane keyboard fail on me. they're indestructible. but I had a mechanical keyboard with kailh red switches fail on me, and I had to constantly spray it with wd-40 to make it work again. ugh.

US is like macOS: a surveillance state (cough cough prism cough cough) that claims to be better than everyone else.

China is like Windows: total surveillance, you have no rights, you control nothing.

EU is like Linux: a lot of vaguely similar things, little to no surveillance, ugly (banking) apps.

I'm yet to get used to the fact that whatever I'm seeing on my screen is private and for my eyes only

bye apple, I said bye, get out of my mind, eat shit and die!

1. surveillance doesn't exist
2. surveillance exists but general public actively fights it
3. surveillance exists, activists fight it, general public doesn't care/doesn't want to think about it
4. surveillance exists, fighting it is seen as radicalism/is socially unacceptable
5. surveillance exists, people actively and voluntarily help it/take part in it
6. people believe surveillance doesn't exist

where on the scale are you?

it's so comforting to live with Debian knowing that Debian is a journey, not destination. Slowly, step by step, you hone this system to be _exactly_ as you want it. it's computing on your terms.

I'm yet to wrap my head around the fact that what's on my screen is for my eyes only, and no one else anywhere in the world sees it, human or AI.

JoyRant beta has expired! Need new TestFlight link

I'm slowly but surely make my KDE Debian's UX better than what I was familiar with on macOS. It's already _way_ faster.
When I'll get UX done, I'll get to UI -- all kinds of beautification
pro tip: AI is VERY good at configuring linux for you

Thought experiment (and I promise there are no plot twists and no metaphors -- it won't turn out that I was talking about tiktok/apple/censorship):

Imagine there is a cosmic horror entity that can annihilate us in an instant. It lives at the bottom of a pit. We as a species are being constantly sucked into that pit -- in this fictional universe, it's the natural order of life. The pit devoured many before us, and we're next. The pit is not conscious -- it's just a force that exists, and like a black hole, it can do nothing but attract things around it just to devour them. It has no choice -- it destroys things passively. It never changes the way it destroys things.

We know we should've been already done for long ago, yet we are still alive. We know that at this scale, it wasn't because of something WE did or didn't do.

It can only mean one thing: a very powerful entity consciously keeps us alive.

Can this entity be called "god"? If yes, why? If no, why?

Choosing either way tells nothing about you and your religious beliefs -- the universe is pure fiction, and known gods/religions don't work there. All I need from you is raw thought process.

KDE Plasma can't into animations. I mean they can be beautiful, but they are immediately preceded, as well as followed, by ~200ms of all sorts of flashing visual fuckery that completely ruins everything.

So I just went and disabled every animation I could. Now it's time to disable animations in my browser as well.

Now KDE feels scary fast. If macOS felt like a fast but comfortable SUV, KDE without animations feels like a 1000hp all-manual EXO-car.

Knowing that a modern SUV can be remotely hacked and steered into ongoing traffic at 100mph, I would argue that an all-manual car is safer, at least for a certain kind of people.

Do you know what a head on a stick is called? Onlyjayus

I dig Debian so far. Here’s why I chose it:
- When something corpo doesn’t work on Arch, no one cares. But when it doesn’t work on Debian, it’s a big deal, and corpo people will be fixing it in no time. Good example is VSCod[e|ium] constantly crashing on Fedora: “it was fixed in kernel, all we have to do now is just wait for Fedora to catch up”.
- Complete and utter boringness/stability. When something breaks in Debian, it definitely broke for DenverCoder9 back in 2014 as well, and is easily fixable. You’re never the trailblazer, and with OS stuff that’s a good thing
- Complete and utter compatibility with everything. If you want to install/do X on Debian, someone else already did it and fixed everything for you
- Noble pedigree. “I use arch btw” is a running joke, but “oh, I use Debian” makes people respect your distro choice. Nobody hates Debian

One thing that transitioning people should know about GNU/Linux in general is that you shouldn’t try to replicate your previous experience with Windows/macOS in GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is a go kart, or a hot rod. You have to be involved. You have to be ready to tinker/fix things.
But one good thing about hot rods is that if you drive one, CIA can’t kill you with a remote car hack.