Yeah, the effect of subscribing seems to be very subtle. So far, the experiment hasn’t lasted more than a few days, but I think I’m beginning to see a pattern.

The channels I subscribed to do show up a bit more often, even in the search results. I also see plenty of other channels in the main feed. Interestingly, there are a few channels I watch every now and then, but they never asked me to subscribe, so I didn’t. Somehow, those channels still show up in my feed as if I had subscribed, which makes me wonder what the role of subscribing even is these days.

However, this experiment needs to continue much longer. I wonder if it continues like this for several weeks. I’m really curious to see what happens to the channels I subscribed to. Will they all show up in the feed consistently, or will some of them disappear completely. Time will tell.

That could work too. Superstitions and religions were in at the time, so I think there’s plenty to exploit.

You could call coal the Devil’s rock, and spread rumors about it being cursed and haunted. You cal talk about the smoke causing vice, moral decay and sin. Oil could be seen as the blood of the Earth, tears from ancient curses, bad omens etc. Only rebellious sorcerers and heretics would dare to tamper with the natural order of things by burning oil. As the un-godly un-natural smoke poisons the air, it poisons the soul etc. God gave you the sun and wind, so using them is the only righteous choice… You get the idea. The 1800s was a magical period of time.

I have a plan B too, but it’s not so gentle.

The goal is to become the number one energy producer and stomp out all opposition and competition before it has a chance to grow. There are no laws against cartels and monopolies, so you exploit the hell out of it. You file extremely broad patents to prevent fossil fuels and combustion based motors from ever becoming a thing. You play super dirty, no mercy, no remorse. It’s going to be basically like the East-India Company, but with renewable energy.

You lobby governments to adopt renewable energy and electrical devices you provide. You influence the public opinion on fossil fuels by spreading information about climate change, pollution and negative health effects. If the global energy company becomes big enough, you should make your own private army and conquer all the places where large oil deposits exist, and establish massive natural reserve parks in those areas. Lobby the governments to make other similar areas legally protected from all industrial development for the next 1000 years.

You would become the supervillain billionaire of the 1800s, but you put the whole world on a renewable trajectory.

I would go to the year 1800, and bring with me a bunch of books on science and engineering. Basically all the building blocks you need to build wind farms and solar power. I would visit all the universities I can and drop these books in library shelves. Some climate change literature could be nice too.

So, a name and shame kind of site?

Back in the X11 days, I actively avoided GNOME, because Cinnamon, KDE and XFCE were so much better. I had so many issues with the design philosophy, that using GNOME felt impossible.

However, when Wayland started having some support in GNOME, I got very curious and gave it a try. Then, I also bought my first touch screen laptop, and simply had to try GNOME with it. Turns out, GNOME wasn’t that bad, as long as you’re not trying to tweak every little thing about it. If you’re a tweaker, KDE is definitely the way to go. If not, GNOME might be tolerable or even good.

I’ve done so much tweaking already, that I don’t really have that itch any more. Sure, some things like custom keyboard shortcuts have to be just right, but that’s why you have GNOME Tweaks and the dconf Editor.

I used to have a Sony phone. It was so big and thin, that I was constantly worried about bending it accidentally.It had like some super cinematic 21:9 ratio or whatever. Looks good in a movie theater, but feels really awkward in your pocket. Actually, my jacket had pockets big enough for that phone, but It was really difficult to keep it anywhere else. In the bad old days, people used to keep the phone in dedicated belt mounted phone pouch/holster/thingy. I wish I had one of those leather pouches, because that phone really needed one.

Reading, browsing and gaming on it was great though. Having a bigger screen is something I really did appreciate when sitting in the metro every day.

If you need more screen realestate, consider getting a phablet (aka plus sized phone these days). If you can carry a tablet with you, that would probably be even better.

Yeah, that sounds like you’re worried about paradoxes. You might want to check out the Many-Worlds Interpretation to fix that. In the MWI, every decision and event branches into its own timeline. Instead of running into your past self, you would be visiting an alternate you.

If you don’t remember being visited by a time traveler, then your timeline didn’t have that event. That’s ok though, because there are infinitely many timelines. However, you can’t visit all of them. You’ll only have access to the ones where a future you visited an alternate past you. Instead of changing your own past, you’re creating a new timeline where an alternate you got visited by a time traveler.

Who needs a fence when you have land mines.

See also: Finland and the Ottawa Convention

The “unless you know what you’re doing” part tells me it’s totally worth it in some highly exceptional situations. You just need to be able to justify spending a few hours to figure out exactly how to do it safely.

Best thing about Linux is that you can do literally anything you want. If it works, it’s awesome. If you break your system, you get to keep the pieces and learn something new along the way.

I’m utilizing this liberty by being a lazy admin who updates things like eventually™ or soon™. Haven’t learned any hard lessons yet, so I guess it’s ok. Or maybe I just know what I’m doing…

True, but I still think there are some significant ethical questions here.

I can’t be bothered to update every day, or even every week. LOL. More like once a month or so, which means that it’s usually 100 MB or more and there’s at least one package that is more or less critical. When I start updating, and before hitting Y, I pause for a second and realise I should totally check the news first. Usually, it’s fine, but over the years, there have been a few times when intervention was necessary.

Remember this one from 2022?

Yeah, that one ended up being a learning experience… After recovering from that dumb misadventure, I finally learned to take those announcements more seriously.

In Debian, that’s opt-in, whereas in Ubuntu it’s opt-out. Tells you something about the core values, doesn’t it?

In my experience, Debian has been very low maintenance. Occasionally, you may run into an issue that would be solved by having newer packages. If that happens, consider switching to Fedora.

My Fedora installations have been pretty smooth. The only thing that always breaks randomly is the software update GUI. I just got fed up with that and ended up using the terminal for installing all updates. Apparently this distro requires a bit more maintenance.

I think this is one of the big steps that make Linux gaming more accessible to the general public. Proton was clearly the first major step and Bazzite might be the second one.

Gardening, hiking, camping and hunting (if you believe the whole society is about to collapse)
Sewing and mending clothes (if you believe you won’t be able to buy new clothes very often)

They call it theft and hijacking, I call it old fashioned piracy.

Exactly!
With that clever coupling trick you made sure that if one thing happens, another thing happens as well. I don’t have that sort of connection to my lunch box, and I’ve paid for it many times. Probably should develop some sort of routine for that as well. So far, I just hope that I remember to do everything in the morning.

As long as the sequence of actions isn’t altered, it works pretty well. When something unexpected happens and I have to deviate from my routine, that’s when everything goes off the rails.