Only if you ignore the context.

If I said “Mexico isn’t even trying to end this war” and you said “they are literally shooting every American that steps across the border!” it would not sound odd at all.

And it certainly wouldn’t sound bigoted against an ethnicity.

Context clues, my friend.

That post is clearly referring to shooting Russian soldiers that have invaded.

And just to help you further, the adjective “Russian” in that sentence refers to the state for which the soldiers fight. So a “Russian soldier” could be some poor dude from North Korea who got shipped over.

To further aid understanding, look at the military of a diverse place like the United States. You will have “American soldiers” working side by side who have different ethnic backgrounds and were even born on other continents.

The shitty thing is, the checks and balances kind of still exist but the people in charge of them approve everything Trump is doing.

And then the constituents who are in charge of voting those people out ALSO approve of what they are doing and/or are too ignorant to notice. (Any illegal tampering with voter rolls and ballots notwithstanding)

How does one fix the culture of an entire nation? Ugh.

In my limited exposure to the ramblings of conservative acquaintances, they now consider Zelensky to be a “little dictator” who was rude to their favorite douches.

Regarding Israel, I think it’s something along the lines of “judeo-christian values” good, brown savages bad, and OH LOOK SOMETHING SHINY!! Sorry, you were saying?

“Narrative” has been an american conservative dog whistle for a while now, as far as I can tell.

It translates roughly to “the reported facts which should not be believed because they don’t work for MY narrative.” So basically just the usual projection. And it’s even a smart-sounding word which really helps it carry weight with dummies.

Absolutely. I have found that going hard into my non-tech hobbies is really good for me. Subjects that I veered away from in school (e.g., chemistry) can become big hyper-focus-worthy aspects of my hobbies (e.g., the nitrogen cycle and all the organic chemistry that goes into oxidation of the organics in my koi pond).

And some other interests of mine, like having a part time photography business for the past decade, allow me to learn more STEM shit (optics) as well as have an artistic and creative outlet. And even today that has morphed into video editing as an activity with my son.

It’s even true when I limit the context to my career. I am a software engineer and have loved programming since the “manually number every line” days of BASIC on Apple II school computers in the '90s. But my education and career have run the gamut from semiconductor design and physics (and the quantum quantum quantum!) to computer engineering and logic/assembly, to general electronics, to manufacturing & testing & quality assurance of electronics, to straight-up business administration, to UNIX/Linux, and now to writing software for embedded Linux systems that use in-house electronics.

At work the cross disciplinary skills help not just for being on a cross-functional design team, but for figuring out a complicated system that was half completed several years ago by people who no longer work there.

They say that variety is the spice of life, but it’s even better if you are neurospicy yourself.

The differences in sheer speed and responsiveness is something FOSS alternatives need much more publicity about. When the requirements for one product are “help the user do what they want” and the requirements for another product are “synergize the KPIs of these 53 stakeholders in our trillion dollar conglomerate, monetize our market position in every way possible, and check the minimum viable checkboxes to keep end users engaged with the brand” it shows!

Windows to Linux is of course the most significant and worthwhile. As I like to describe it, even using the most full-featured distros out there (Linux Mint Cinnamon gang represent!) any flavor of Linux is like greased lightning compared with windows. And I mean Windows 10, not even 11.

A few weeks ago I turned on an old secondary desktop PC that had been powered off for a month. It had numerous updates, everything except installing a new named version. Even the kernel. I decided to time it. From the time I opened the software update GUI – including typing in my password, letting it download, letting it install, getting the “yo, reboot when you’re ready,” etc – it was done in 5 minutes. And those were 5 minutes where the computer was totally usable. Running the current version of the full featured Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 on a PC from 2011!

My favorite recent example is the switch from Plex to Jellyfin. Now granted, fully self-hosting means more IT admin type stuff for me so that family members and I can securely connect remotely. But god damn if every single app I have tried doesn’t feel like warp speed compared with the Plex versions. Did you know that watching my media using the WebOS app on my LG TV does not have to be dog shit slow? And don’t even get me started on phone apps like Finamp. (it really whips the jelly’s ass?)

I do mostly c/c++ for an embedded product, but one of the modules in the system uses an FPGA programmed w/ VHDL. So I’ve gotten to do a few deep dives into that code in the past couple years.

It’s been decades since I’ve had to write new VHDL or Verilog though.

What is even worse than how embarrassing this is, is that it’s impossible for me to tell if this was Putin’s idea or just a fortunate side effect of his stooge’s lead-addled and dying brain.

I get that it specifies tech workers, but still my first reaction was that 12% is pretty low. You can find a much higher percentage of people who are confidently wrong about way more important things.

If Trump’s incompetence in executing Vlad’s grand vision saves Ukraine, and his chaotic bumbling at home collapses our government in such spectacular fashion that we look more like modern Europe in a decade, I will obviously be happy about it but I will also be so annoyed.

He would not be the Trump we deserve, he would be the Forrest Magoo that we need.

I heard our respect is way up with both the KKK AND the Illinois Nazis.

I could tell you why I would choose to stay where I am even if I had the resources to leave. It is actually possible for some of us to put together a decent life for our families and try to brighten the lives of those around us.

…Even though our government is somewhere between evil and self-destruct, and our culture is somewhere between “fuck you got mine” and “die woman/jew/brown/LGBT+/other!”

And yeah I’m a straight white dude, how did you guess? :/

But anyway, I’ve lived in the same house for 17 years. It is a 10 minute walk to the elementary/middle school my son will attend for the next 5 years. It is a 6 minute drive to the office for the best job I’ve ever had. We are active in our community and school district, and have some wonderful friends. All my son’s grandparents are within a reasonable drive (but not too close). All my nieces and nephews are similarly close by.

It’s a small modest house that we’ve made our own. In the past 5 years we’ve done some major renovations, repairs, and remodeling. We fenced in the back yard which is great for our kid and our multiple dogs. And our tortoise. Oh yeah, we’re animal lovers. And that includes a koi pond that I built in the back yard that’s literally part of my mental health self-care.

Moving to some place that seems less insane right now would materially change my entire life, not just which government I have to live under.

Jfc. Unbelievable. Well, very believable. Scumbags.

The most amazing(ly vile) one is using the tendency of our minds to skip over “the the” as if it’s an IQ test.

Well that and the whole idea of using this stupid collection of badly worded instructions to “determine” a human’s worthiness.

“Determine” with the assistance of that family guy “OKAY / NOT OKAY” card.

What I am most curious about is how long ago Trump and Putin first had a discussion about this arrangement, and what the quid pro quo details are. Because of course there is one.

For what it’s worth, I have switched three machines of mine from Win10 to Mint in the last year, and in each case it was much easier and faster to install than Windows. And of course, daily use is much faster and smoother than Windows, but that is true of all distros. It’s just worth mentioning because mint is made to be the full featured user friendly experience (some might even call it bloated) out of the box, yet it’s still a rocket in comparison.

One was a typical work-issued Dell laptop w/ port replicator + M365, one was an old PC at home I built several years ago, and the last was an even older PC I built like 14 years ago.

Just yesterday at work I installed Win10 in VirtualBox so I could test a Windows app that gets built alongside our main embedded Linux software (used the VM since a certain popup window secondary to the main app wasn’t immediately working in Wine). Holy crap was it painful after being used to the Mint installer.

Then when I got home I decided to turn on that 14 year old system that’s been off for a month (when I installed the latest point release 22.1) to let it update. Even using the GUI updater, and even though it had to update the updater itself before updating however many dozen packages AND the kernel, I timed the entire process at five minutes flat. On the computer from 2011, with a pretty old & small SATA SSD system drive. And you can use the PC like normal until it’s done, when it shows a banner suggesting you reboot when you can because of the kernel update.

Again, nothing special in the Linux world where software is actually created with users put first. But still noteworthy for being the “easy” distro that looks a lot like Windows when you first boot it up.

I’m not posting this to say anything negative about Arch, either. That kind of distro is very important to begin with, and Arch in particular seems it’s good enough that it might be the new Debian. Especially with SteamOS switching to it.

Not sure what you mean. If my post reads like “understanding the written word helps” then yeah it does but that isn’t remotely what my point was.

I think you’re going downvoted because you start off being disingenuous (“they” clearly refers to Russian invaders) and follow that up with some whataboutism.

I can assure you that the Lemmy population is quite aware of bad things being done, it having been done, by other governments. Even ones that live under those governments.