I like the Wombats version too.

It’s also the scale of the donation for me. He didn’t just make a donation the way you or I probably would - his donation accounted for 72% of the party’s entire income for 2025. So the money that Mullvad makes is now tied to the continued existence of the party, albeit indirectly.

I have about 50 days left on my Mullvad subscription, so I figured I’d wait it out and see how they handled it. Going by this latest Mullvad response, I think I’ll probably have an IVPN account soon too.

I luckily stocked up on storage before the prices got crazy so I’m good there (although my RAID is gonna have to sit unfinished for a while), but I didn’t upgrade my RAM when I should have.

I’ve been saying for a while, IMO the thing with AI is that it is actually pretty useful in certain circumstances. The problem I think is, we’ve taken something that’s a handy tool and blown it up to world-altering proportions. This has also made everyone very polarized - there’s the camp of “It’s going to take over the world and do everything” vs. the camp of “I can’t wait for AI to go away” and I don’t think either of those will fully happen. I think when the dust settles it’ll just be more of a correction back to where it should have been in the first place, which as I say is more of just a handy tool in the toolbox.

I think some of it is how you apply it personally too. Like I’m an arts person, but I don’t let AI do any actual art stuff, because that’s what I want to do. What I think it can be useful for is all the paperwork like grant applications, form letters etc. AKA the sort of mindless paperwork clutter that doesn’t need a lot of brain power but still needs to be done and eats up time. I’m fine to let AI do that stuff, so I can spend more time doing the actual art myself.

high horse

I see what you did there

Oh and Heart’s cover of Stairway to Heaven (not 80s or 90s but still a banger)

I like Denzel Curry’s cover of Bulls on Parade.

They do a good Sheryl Crow one too!

Favourite/Current Distro/Distro I’ve used the most: Arch btw.

Distro liked the least: Ubuntu

First Distro Used: Corel Linux (I am old lol)

Honourable Mention: Pop!OS with the COSMIC desktop is pretty nice considering how new it is IMO.

Future Distro: I’ve messed around with NixOS a bit and I kind of want to try it. I like to tinker a lot though so sometimes immutable OS-es kind of interfere with that.

Ubuntu in general I find tends to fixate on one particular thing that not many people are asking for (Unity, Mir, that “convergent phone” thing they were doing for a while, now Snaps) and let everything else stagnate until they get the thing to be almost decent, then they dump it and go chasing after the next shiny object.

I can see why it would be a bit troublesome to base a distro around. I assume that’s why Mint keeps that LMDE version running as well.

I hate to say it, but Linux in general is not great for art stuff in my experience. There’s some good stuff like Krita and Blender, but I’ve found that Linux is generally very twitchy about graphics tablets, and some stuff like Toon Boom/Moho for animation just has no real equivalent in Linux (and I haven’t had any luck getting those to work in Wine so far either.)

One of the strangest phenomena that I’ve encountered when occasionally using Windows is that sometimes there’s a problem that’s so stupid you can’t smart your way out of it. As an example: when trying out Windows 11, I made a restore point after a fresh install so that if I fucked something up I could roll back to a clean install. I then fucked something up and thought “no worries, just roll it back.” I then discovered that Windows only keeps one restore point, and manages it automatically by itself, meaning that when I fucked up, it decided to take the state of the machine immediately after I broke it and overwrite the clean restore point with the broken one and at no point asked or informed me that that’s what it was doing.

Like how do you even begin to deal with an issue like that? The only solution I know of is to pre-assume that everything actually made by Microsoft will behave in an idiotic way sooner or later, and to replace as much of it as you can with third-party solutions as quickly as possible immediately after a fresh install, but anyone new to Windows/not a tech person has absolutely no way of knowing this.

I’m up to Wyrd Sisters!

I happens as a Brit too. Recently I casually used the phrase “use your loaf” around some North Americans. I then had to explain that loaf = loaf of bread = head. They were like “why” and then I had to try to explain the concept of Cockney Rhyming Slang, and then there was a barrage of questions about the origin of Cockney Rhyming Slang and all the other examples. I don’t know, I’m not even Cockney!

One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word ‘jam’ can mean:

• a fruit preserve
• to play music
• heavy traffic
• a door that won’t open
• to cram something into something else
• a difficult situation

Or ‘saw’, which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word ‘run’ apparently has over 600 different meanings!

We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example ‘dust’, which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or ‘left’, which can mean remaining (“I only have three left”) or departing (“They left.”)

Chinese has something a bit like this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

Oh sorry! In Linux there are different ways of formatting your drives, kind of like FAT32 and NTFS in Windows, if you’re familiar with those? Anyway, ext4 is like the old reliable in Linux, and btrfs is the newer one which I think is the default on some distros now.

Anyway, if you open up Konsole and type lsblk -f it should tell you which one you have. I don’t think you can change it without reformatting and starting over though.

I also tried to learn German and I remember this about gendered nouns:

The man = der mann (masculine)

The woman = die frau (feminine)

The boy = der junge (masculine)

The girl = das mädchen (neutral)

Not even genders themselves have the genders you’d expect lol

Also in French once you get past about 60 the numbers turn insane. E.g. 97 = Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or literally Four-twenty-ten-seven.

While this is obviously bad, I don’t think there’s ever really a total win or loss when it comes to this stuff. It’s a constant fight. They’ll bring shit like this in and it’ll seem hopeless, then someone will bypass it and it’ll go back and forth. Same as ad blocking or DRM or countless other things.

It’d be nice to not have to deal with it in the first place, but we’ll deal with it sooner or later I’m sure.