In my tired daze I mistakenly read ONLYOFFICE as OpenOffice and was about to yell No!

The article does well and links to their other article on the OO 9.0 release, which explains why it’s probably a smarter choice for this office situation when compared to LibreOffice:

ONLYOFFICE is one of two options that comes to mind when I think of a solid Microsoft Office alternative on Linux, the other being LibreOffice. Both offer a range of useful features and support a wide range of document formats. What sets ONLYOFFICE apart, though, is its focus on collaboration and generally reliable compatibility with Microsoft Office files.

A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

If anyone does, make sure to check out guides like https://specificsuggestions.com/ (use filters)

I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

As for games, I admit I haven’t tried many of them but the Explorable Explanations I have tried are great, particularly the ones by Nicky Case (Parable of the Polygons , the Evolution of Trust , the Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds). I’d call these short games even though they lean strongly towards elements of education and simulation.

Rat

and the only thing that can stop them is violence at this point

There are a range of effective violent and non-violent resistance tactics. The important part is understanding that violent tactics will inevitably be necessary to complement the non-violent tactics. Violence alone doesn’t work - look at the anarchists around the 1900s who assassinated a range of kings and police chiefs.

And there’s no winning against a military force like the US.

There are plenty of countries which have resisted US military invasion. They’ve faced atrocities and been left with horrific scars, but nonetheless this view of the mighty US military as unbeatable is repeatedly contradicted by its history. And a civil war would provide a different dynamic, so it’s a bit of a mystery in my opinion. Obviously not advocating for that, and believe it or not the (whole) military is not an inevitable opponent.

Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

• People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
• I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
• Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

xcancel is just one Nitter instance (just like lemmy.ml is one Lemmy instance). I recommend sharing the load around to other working instances, or better yet, as Avatar of Vengeance mentioned, use the LibRedirect browser extension which automates this for a huge range of other websites.

The simplistic ‘left-right’ spectrum isn’t particularly useful when it comes to something as complex and location-specific as politics, left-right is really just vibes in the end. You’re on the right path by comparing policies, and it helps to understand the different contexts they’re in (e.g. US red scare culture), along with the similarities you mentioned.

I think this exercise could be fun and deepen you/our understanding of politics, but at the end of the day, different cities have different material conditions (circumstances) which means the same policy may make sense in one environment but not the other. I think an insightful exercise would be to compare the DSA to your country’s main demsoc parties (PvdA/GL?) and figure out the main differences and why they’re different.

I don’t see the point in trivializing a serious, potentially life-threatening allergy just because another tick-borne disease (also prevalent in the same country) is worse. Plenty of excellent reasons to complain about the US and its citizens, but this post is pointless and petty.

I wonder if it was a romance scam.

There was a person last year going around to websites posting a whole bunch of hastily-made .onion single-page scam websites that essentially just say “Pay $10 to this bitcoin address for the service”. They’d post a series of links, like:

Facebook hacking:

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14h3kjfu4.onion/

Love potion spell

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14hfspopd.onion/

Mystery box

http://fakew3b5173b14hb14hb14fine9ffewh.onion/

[…]

Not only are many of these scam services played out and pretty obvious, like pretending they will hack facebook accounts for $25, and not only were many others ridiculous like a love potion spell, satanic spells, a “mystery box” that you pay $10 to find out what’s in it, but their shotgun approach of listing them all in a single post makes it obvious how fake and desperate it is. I’d be amazed if anyone fell for it, but they kept hand-posting these for months until site owners manually blocked them.

So, an ML Leftist?

That position isn’t specific to ML tendencies. I personally see more anti-electoralism rhetoric from anarchists, for obvious ideological reasons.

A good thing about tech is that if you have a spare device (even a cheap single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi or similar cheaper one, or a partly-broken laptop) or a working virtual machine, you can break things. That’s a core characteristic of the old-school hacker mindset, to try stuff and break stuff until you understand stuff. Usually, the worst case, you just reinstall the operating system and have a fresh clean environment (or, better yet, you restore a backup you made! Learning how to fail gracefully is a great skill)

I bricked a certain wacky laptop setup twice and had to start over (luckily with backups) just trying to get a custom startup loading screen. But once I realized why it was breaking and how to avoid it, I had a cooler looking computer!

I know it’s been said, but Brave is a hard no. Replace it with Ungoogled Chromium. I haven’t seen the video so I don’t understand why it’s in the “not ideal for a normal human” list, and I am biased since I use plenty of “not for normal” tools.

I haven’t been around these communities in a while, so I can’t really speak for /c/privacy as much as /r/privacy and other communities, but I’ve noticed far far far far too many posts which are blindly perfectionist, with no consideration of threat capabilities or their motivations. Privacy is futile without a realistic threat model, that’s how you get burned out solving non-problems and neglecting actual problems.

My threat model is largely just minimizing surveillance capitalism and avoiding basement-dweller neo-nazi stalkers from connecting any dots between my online personas and real life identity. Even for that, my measures are a bit excessive, but not to the point where I’m wasting much time or effort.

Daily reminder: “more private” and “more secure” are red flags. If you see or say these, without a very specific context, it’s the wrong attitude towards privacy and security. They’re not linear scales, they’re complex concepts. That’s why Tor Browser is excellent for my anonymity situation but atrociously insecure to anyone who is being personally targeted by malware (tl;dr monoculture ESR Firefox^[1]). That’s why Graphene is not automatically anti-privacy simply because it runs on a Google Pixel and Android-based OS. (Google is one of my main adversaries.) And I think this simplistic ‘broscience’ style of “[x] is better than [y], [z] is bad” discourse is harmful and leads people into ineffective approaches.

Tor Browser (daily driver) because I really hate surveillance capitalism. I have fallbacks but rarely need them. Can recc LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium.

Great feature! One of my concerns when I dipped my toes into ComfyUI was that I struggled to find ways of avoiding spaghetti layouts. Tools like this to neaten and abstract the workflow can do wonders (although I hope it’s done in a smart, clear way that doesn’t confuse newcomers by hiding the important parts from them)

At least one US fash has already, Chadwick Seagraves. The rest might need a little encouragement.