“If you see ducks, ducklings or wildlife attempting to cross a freeway or road, stay in your car and call for assistance.”

Huh. At least it’s minor injuries.

Where I live a woman was sent to jail for 90 days for stopping her car for ducks on an expressway and killing a motorcyclist and its passenger when they slammed into the back of her car.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/emma-czornobaj-loses-appeal-1.4152387

Sure. It’s always “better” to burn stuff to generate more pollution in the air that you breathe, and also continue to depend on fossil fuel.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/gas-stoves-air-pollution-1.6394514

And “better” depends on your sources of energy and what your goals are. Like most people here, I grew up with an electric stove and we are just used to cook this way. It’s just an adaptation. I use gas stoves in camping and in my cabin, and I’m so used to an electric one, that I hate using gas.

Electricity here is cheap and clean so if you want to eat hot and warm food and minimize the impact on the environment, and your bank account, you should probably get used to cooking with electricity. There’s also different technologies. My mother prefers a glass-ceramic stove but induction stoves are also getting pretty popular. Or you can pay more, pollute more, continue to breathe the results of combustion and keep buying fossil fuel to cook “better”. I consider less pollution for millions of people, and less reliance on the oil & gas industry to be “better”.

For more facts about this, you can just watch an hour long video on that very topic from Technology Connextras

Have you worked as a Customer Advocate for a hosting company at some point? Because that looks like the training material they showed me when I did this job.

Where I live everything is electric for the vast majority of people. The norm here is to have electric stoves and electric water heaters. Even heating houses is mainly done through electricity.

I was so surprised to learn as a teen that this is not the norm everywhere, and that some people are actually still lighting fires in their houses to cook food.

It’s one of the things that made me prefer using Linux a long long time ago. It’s nice to be able to rename, move, and delete files while they are used.

If you consider god as capitalism then it makes sense.

There’s only four left to clean after this one.

In 2014, there were five areas across all the oceans where the majority of plastic concentrated. Researchers collected a total of 3070 samples across the world to identify hot spots of surface level plastic pollution. The pattern of distribution closely mirrored models of oceanic currents with the North Pacific Gyre, or Great Pacific Garbage Patch, being the highest density of plastic accumulation. The other four garbage patches include the North Atlantic garbage patch between the North America and Africa, the South Atlantic garbage patch located between eastern South America and the tip of Africa, the South Pacific garbage patch located west of South America, and the Indian Ocean garbage patch found east of South Africa.

I am. That’s why I switched to DDG and deactivated it.

It’s so fun to waste energy!

AI drives 48% increase in Google emissions

I love those energy hungry assistants! It’s wasting resources even faster than everything before but it’s so fun and useful!

I grew up with DOS and used Windows 1 (barely, DOS was better), 3.1, 95, 98, etc… But curiosity made me try a bunch of OS in the beginning of the 2000s, like BeOS, QNX, and Linux (Kheops, Mandrake, SuSE). I dual booted for many years, keeping Linux as my main OS but having to boot Windows for games. I preferred Linux but I was pretty much OS agnostic for a while. I even worked as level 1 tech support for many years, helping people with Windows and Office products.

But then came Windows 8, 10, and now 11, + Office 365 + OneDrive. It’s very difficult to stand any of those new versions, with the ads, the constant peddling for Microsoft products, the “forced” login with a Microsoft account, the updates whenever they feel like it if you don’t pay enough for Windows, if the updates are not breaking something. A few years ago I was helping a friend and discovered a version of Windows 7 where you can’t even change the wallpaper.

TBF, I knew it was coming. Anyone in IT knew for years that Microsoft planned of having everything subscription based. To me, every new versions of Windows or Office, or Teams, is now more intolerable than the previous one.

Anyway, at some point I stopped gaming/dual booting and pretty much kept exclusively on Linux. My workplace used Windows, and I use Linux at home. I’ve been using Debian for 15 years now and despite minor issues with sound recently, since pipewire, every time I use Windows, I’m reminded of how much worse it could be.

Recently I quit my job as a level 1 tech. I can’t help people with Microsoft products anymore. Having calls from people telling me they cannot delete files from their OneDrive when it tells them it’s full, then discover it’s a bug and users with their drives full cannot delete anything, is just disconcerting. Before all that, I could at least see/understand the reason why things were working like they did; I could help and explain it to the users. Now, I’m as frustrated as they are when I use Microsoft products.

I had the same experience as OP when I tried Matrix a few years ago. No hate on it but it was not easy and I gave up because I already had a simple IRC setup that’s working for me and my friends.

Some IRC clients are now web based and it’s been enough to keep a few of my friends there instead of Discord. We use The Lounge. It can keep a history, display images, videos, play mp3s, and show previews of most URLs. Like, we can simply copy/paste images into a channel and they are uploaded on the server and displayed in the chat. There’s also push notifications and it’s mobile friendly.

Convos also does something like this. Apparently it can also do video chat but I’ve never got it to work.

I’ve recently been thinking about giving Matrix another try but I’m pretty sure my friends are going to stay on “modern” IRC anyway.

A decade ago I was whining to my friends that I didn’t like Steam because I was using Linux and Steam was really shitty on that OS at some point. I remember not being able to get the correct keyboard layout in chats, and tons of little annoyances, like not being able to choose where you install games. It was disappointing.

As someone that loves FOSS, I never really liked the model of “not owning my games” but I must admit that it works for most people that don’t care about such things. Valve made huge progress with Steam for Linux over the years, and Proton was indeed a game changer.

I have to tip my hat to them.

I’m Canadian and doesn’t know much about this asshole, but I heard an interview with him recently where he claimed the Democrats were preparing a law to legally kidnap children in California.

He made me want to throw a hammer at his face while pointing out the current ICE raids.

The English speaking world should be isolated. Rupert Murdoch made it sick.

His personal Vietnam.

If Bill Gates is involved we can be sure it’s to help humanity, and not to help capitalists and rich people to get richer.

He has a very good PR team because this man was also backing the former Monsanto company, with proprietary grains, supposed to help solve famine in the world, but causing poor farmers to be sued into bankruptcy and commit suicide. Oh and the grains also commit ‘suicide’ so if you are not sued because the wind flew proprietary grains to your field, you better have enough money to buy new grains from corporations every year.

So I’m sure anything he does can’t be bad. It’s all altruistic and for the good of humanity. Surely nothing proprietary there. All open source. For humanity.

Fuck Bill Gates.

There’s a genocide going on, we have thousands upon thousands of homeless people, the world is heading to a climate catastrophy, but let’s be outraged by someone lightning a cigarette with the flame of a war memorial.

People dying of hunger because of politics, capitalism and violence, it’s none of our business. But that man lighting his cigarette, what a fucking outrage!

There’s a song about this phenomenon in Québecois French called Dégénération, from Mes Aïeux.

It starts with your great great grand father clearing the land, your great grand father plowing the land, your grand father making a profit out of it, your father selling it to be a white collar, and you, living in a one room apartment, owing debts to corporations.

The lyrics are pretty conservative and portray a rosy past, but it goes with the traditional style and the fact the band’s name means “my ancestors”. This being said, the song is still pretty spot on about this phenomenon. Here’s a link to the translated lyrics, and the song.

EDIT: Oh and there’s a parody (no translation, sorry) stating the obvious, like “your great great great grand mother, she took dumps in a bucket, and she only had three teeth left, but it was paradise.”

It would get old fast because I don’t drive a car and would turn crazy in such a neighbourhood.

We’ll just drown you with 🎶 MEMORY, ALL ALONE IN THE MOONLIGHT. I CAN SMILE AT THE OLD DAY, I WAS BEAUTIFUL THEN. 🎶