Of course, I don’t think we’re actually in danger of bacteria suddenly eating through plastic like it’s a moldy apple or anything… Obviously wood is still hard to break down, and plastics aren’t too dissimilar. It’s just kind of cool that we can build something super cheaply out of plastic and it will hold up well in the elements without much care at all.

At the risk of sounding super ignorant the desire for plastic to biodegrade always seems really short-sighted to me? I understand that there are problems with plastic pollution for the ecosystem and that there may be health concerns with microplastics and whatnot… And that we probably shouldn’t make so many disposable items that we do want to degrade out of plastic (and that we should probably not have as many disposable items in the first place)… But plastics are also kind of miracle materials and ideally you want them to not break down in many use cases. Like, wouldn’t it be bad if all of a sudden we have bacteria that will eat through blood bags and plastic structures?

It seems like this article is mostly talking about studying microbes to design plastic eating enzymes that will help efficiently recycle plastic in the future, and that sounds super cool and very useful. But the whole “we should have bacteria that can quickly break down plastic in the environment” angle that I hear about a lot seems kind of risky to me because one of the reasons plastics are so awesome is that they’re very resistant to degradation… Maybe I’m just ignorant, though.

For some reason I find it really unlikely that Google would support a product for 10 years. They don’t exactly have a great track record…

Yeah monitors are my primary problem too. Can’t get them to work properly at all through the thunderbolt dock.

Hell, I’d settle for thunderbolt peripherals working reliably. Maybe it’s just a Linux problem (or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing), but I’ve never had a thunderbolt dock “just work” as advertised.

You’ll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it’s great.

On Nvidia, in my experience, it’s occasionally a hassle if you’re using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won’t be if you’re on a “normal” distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver… And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won’t work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn’t let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you’ll probably upgrade before it’s an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there’s a good chance you won’t really notice any issues.

This is my experience as well. It’s a little disappointing. Still, if anybody has suggestions for xmpp communities I’d be happy to hear it!

I’m surprised how many fellow xmpp people I see on here, because I feel like matrix has a lot more of the public consciousness. It’s nice! I’m pretty happy with xmpp, though I wish I could find some larger communities.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes RAM getting “wiped” is a “feature”, e.g., you don’t want somebody to be able to pull information from RAM after you shut off your computer… but that’s not really what it’s designed for (and you can recover data from powered off RAM in some lucky cases). It’d be sweet if we could have fast non-volatile memory. Having a computer use 0 power when suspended and not having to worry about hibernating to disk would be sweet! I do kind of wonder about the security RAMifications of that, but I guess it’s not much worse than having a laptop suspended currently.

I’m a Canadian living in the US and the fact that you haven’t burned the health insurance companies to the ground is still astounding to me. Like the situation in the states is so fucking dire and depressing, but I guess there just isn’t “one unifying event” for people to rally against… Like I think if you took away public healthcare in other countries you could organize some push back, but when it’s the status quo it seems a lot harder to rally everybody at the same time… especially when people literally can’t afford to strike and the culture is so individualistic. Also I feel like in America there’s a very low tolerance for inconvenience? There’s a lot of “well I agree with what these people want, but they should protest in a way that I can completely ignore”, which, I mean, I understand… it sucks when unrest happens and ruins things for you… but also seems really short sighted and counterproductive.

I dunno, I’m probably just ignorant, but it just seems so hopeless? Like nobody ever does anything… I don’t do anything either (I especially don’t want to protest while living abroad when I can get deported lol). Getting a critical mass of people to protest seems super hard… especially when protesting is kind of scary and hard, and you have to work all the time.