Also Ubuntu for me. It had a golden age, I want to say 2006-2015ish.

I had a substitute teacher who saw the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ads against John Kerry and repeated it to the class like it was 100% fact.

Yeah, you start seeing the full multiverse. It’s crazy.

But ultimately I have come to the conclusion that twice is too often to be a coincidence

Wait, who said anything about twice? I think you’re dead on about the second term, I think it was intentional. Just the first term was the dog that caught the car.

I think that credits them with a little bit too much conscious attention. I think they were surprised to even win and kind of bumbled through and were able to retrospect with the look back at that experience and think about what to do once they had a second chance. So I did set up a second term, but I don’t regard that as having been part of a singular intentional plan. Like another commenter in this thread said the dog caught the car in the first term.

Love Rhythmbox! I used it way way back when I first installed Ubuntu (back when it was good) and it was part of a special nostalgic feeling of having been ushered into this new linux world, and I think it lets you rate your songs 1-5 stars (if you want) and I had a lot of fun doing that.

Indeed, the way to combat bad media is to dispute it with good media, not hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I would call this a marketplace of ideas fallacy. Rumor and misinformation rise to the top ever bit as much as good argument, and poisoning those conversations with bad faith is now part of an explicit ideological strategy to weaponize those spaces. That phenomenon is as real as thoughtful deliberation, I would say more so.

So if you believe "combat bad with good’ works as a matter of practice, I think that argument is obviously unsustainable. If it’s “bad things will happen but we should keep it that way as a matter of principle” it’s at least a more coherent argument. I wouldn’t agree with it but I can understand why someone would find it at least a respectable idea.

that refused to play certain songs

Nazism songs.

The existence of Mien Kamph in a library’s collection doesn’t make the librarian a Nazi,

No but 100 copies of back issues of “Being A Nazi In 2025 The Magazine” probably would, and the present case is more like the latter.

tell me what content is or isn’t permissable

Nazism being the content

based on their political beliefs

Nazism being the political belief.

And how are they defining alt right?

It’s music tags that literally have phrases like nazi or white power in the phrase.

Yeah I like being able to opt-in to a specific block list, or having it enabled by default but individual instances can disable it (more to neutralize bad faith arguments from trolls who want to normalize nazism), even though I want it effectively banned.

It’s like 6 or 7 tags that all have the word “nazi” or “white power” in the tag. As long as Sam Hunt tracks are not being encoded that way he should be good.

Nextcloud on a paid plan from some company (e.g. Hetzner) or, if you’ve got the stones for it, Nextcloud self-hosted.

The reddit account has a username with the number 88 in binary, which led some to speculate its a nazi (88 = HH = Heil H*tler) dogwhistle, to which Andy Yen says its his year of birth 1988. Kinda weird, but he could just be that clueless, who knows

I mean this part I give him a pass on. It was right for people reading him to raise an eyebrow, because political signalling like that does happen, especially in a context where he’s making comments like he made. But in this case it was just a nothingburger.

It doesn’t make his “wasn’t intended to be a political comment” excuse any less gibberish though.

I have been defending Andy Yen’s idiotic comments because he’s not American and doesn’t understand the hyper-reactive nature between US Americans and US politics

And I could see the point, kind of, even though it strained credulity on substance. He seemed more confused to me than die-hard partisan. But it’s really hard to square what was effectively a blanket statement endorsing R’s with his subsequent comment that it “was not intended to be a political statement” (paraphrase).

You said not a high budget, and yet everyone here is saying Framework even though the they are $900 to $1,000 at the low end. To me that is not budget.

Pine64 is affordable but maybe too slow to be a daily driver, unless you feel confident finding your way through ultralightweight software and the command line and can do most of your problem solving that way.

For other pre-built options, there’s Starlabs and System76 but those are similarly priced to Librem and Framework.

Beyond that I might just research Windows laptops that are agreeable to being formatted.

If by dozens you mean 50,000?

I remember in the early days people saying that Lemmy wasn’t succeeding. Very frustrating to hear because it was like the very early days. And look at it now!

A great way of re-framing it. A lot of how we tease out whatever intelligence an animal has is with some incentive. And sometimes we’re comparing apples and oranges if we’re making a comparison where one side has more of an incentive.

If the anomalous outliers of human intelligence are inventing calculus or formulating germ theory, what are the equivalently anomalous crows?