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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Consider me enlightened! The recontextualization of the statement makes it make a lot more sense. As with many things, being swept into the tech sphere robbed it of meaning. I also think that the sentiment of “the tools used to build something are not the same tools which can effectively dismantle it” is true in many senses, not just in the context of social/politiical/institutional change.

    I was confused by the section “How Taking the ‘Master’s Tools’ Seriously Can Serve Enshittification”. It transitions from an argument that

    The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled

    (which is true), then links this group directly to Facebook. While these descriptors apply to both the founders of the internet and the founders of the tech giants, facebook is at least 15 years younger than the foundation of the public internet, and these two groups are both mutually exclusive and ideologically at odds. The author then goes on to use the social harms of big tech to push back against Doctorow’s first stage of enshittification, when the companies are “good”.

    I think this is a fundamental misreading of Doctorow. He has spent his career as a free software advocate, and claiming that the first stage of corporate capture of the internet is the ideal would be anathemic to his more general arguments. What he means by “good” here – and he says this frequently in public discussions on enshittification – is that the product does what it says on the box, with no BS. That people are tempted to use it because it allows people to access the internet without coming up against the sharp edges of the technology itself, and that is a reasonable compromise for many people at first, because it allows more people to access the internet.

    The article argues that in order to fully represent the experience of all stakeholders, the internet “getting worse” is an incomplete view, and to understand the impacts outside the white, male, etc. perspective, we should use the tools of decolonialism, which would be true if Doctorows project was a thorough sociological analysis of the impacts of technology. But it isn’t, it’s a rallying cry. The goal of his book is to make a coherent narative of the change in experience for consumers of technology over the era of Big Tech, and it does that. This is far from the only case where it leaves out strong tie-ins to other philosophical or sociological concepts, but there is a strength in a focused argument as well.

    It’s unsurprising that Doctorow misappropriated Audre Lorde’s words in their meme form, becuase that’s what the book is – an abbreviated, digestible approach to the topic. However, I’m glad that someone made those connections.




  • You can’t run steam with no compositor whatsoever, but you can use the steam deck’s solution of using their gamescope micro compositor for everything. You should be able to install gamescope and just run gamescope -e {other CLI options} steam (assuming you’re using the native Arch package and not the flatpak).

    My experience using gamescope for steam has been very mixed, but I’ve seen a tutorial somewhere on doing exactly this.

    Gamescope isn’t necessarily the best option for every game, and having a normal compositor (which, for now, must support XWayland) is just a much more flexible solution.

    This may also be possible with something more general like xwayland-satellite, but frankly steam and all its games still run on the X11 protocol, so if you really don’t need a GUI you might be able to install a vanilla X11 instance and hook to that directly. I can’t speak to either of those options directly.

    But is this worth it, in a practical sense? No. You have a reasonably powerful system, and the only performance you’d be saving is a few percent of a single core on the CPU, which in your config is absolutely not worth it.







  • I would also add that the more you modify the system (PPAs, packages not installed via the package manager, nonstandard partition layouts) decreases the stability of your system and makes it harder to get back to your current system state if something goes wrong. I like to think about it like balancing a tower of blocks as a kid. Mint is the first block, and is very stable, but each additional block makes the system less and less stable. Mint itself is really stable, but if you do weird stuff the Mint devs can’t do anything about it, which puts you in a bad position until you really know what you’re doing.

    The Snap store is intentionally left out by Mint, because they don’t like how Ubuntu manages it. This means that even though the Ubuntu version Mint is based on supports Snap, there’s no guarantee that snaps will work with the same stability which .deb/apt and flatpak packages will, because it hasn’t been tested in Mint. I would advise against using it.




  • I do love my bangle.js 2. i was feeling some nostalgia for my Pebble Time 2, so I pulled it out to try it with the new app, but then I remembered that I hadn’t updated anything on my Bangle in ages (dont generally have chrome enabled ony phone) and the updates made everything so much smoother. No reason to switch back to pebble, especially in its current state.

    My only complaint is that there is no way for the watch to tell if it’s on your wrist, and the heart rate monitor and screen can’t be woken up separately. So it can be annoying at night, when unless it’s fully shut off the HRM and screen will light up the room every 10min.