The annoying thing is that fixing the double click is stupidly easy. Years ago, I got frustrated with that exact problem (after a string of 3 mice that each lasted only a few months); so I opened one up and soldered on a random capacitor I had lieing around.
Capacitors like that cost literally less than a penny, and are no more complicated to install at production time than any other component already on the circuit board.
1 line of code?
Amateur, I changed 1 byte of code in the Linux kernel!
It was random driver with something along the lines of “if (hardware_version > 3) fail()”.
One day we got a new shipment of hardware that wasn’t working for some reason until I upped that 3 to a 4.
“Organization founded on gender discrimination adopts discriminatory gender policy”
The definition being adopted is:
any male defined as a human being naturally born male, who remains and continually identifies as a male,
https://glaad.org/glaad-exclusive-alpha-phi-alpha-fraternity-considers-transgender-ban/
In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comes with a:
I’ve been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.
Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)
[0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).
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Miniaturization is amazing. The limiting factor to how powerful we can make phones is not space to put in computational units (processors,ram,etc). It is the ability to deal with the heat they generate (and the related issue of rationing a limited amount of battery power)
At a $188 price point. An additional 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system …
And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.
4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.
Because the thing people refer to when they say “linux” is not actually an operating system. It is a family of operating systems built by different groups that are built mostly the same way from mostly the same components (which, themselves are built by separate groups).
Every movement has a canon: the core principles behind it, a mythology about its history, and the textbook statement of its objectives.
Every movement also has a reality. Thousands or millions of people with their own ideosynchratic beliefs forming a complex social web. Within this web, a vibrant biosphere of memes [0] develop, spread and evolve on this social web. A movement is simply a name we give to a cluster of memes within this complex web. It is not any of the myths we tell about it; those are merely particular memes holding the cluster together.
The author of this article is a self described liberal feminist. She identifies a change that occurred within her bubble of feminism, where it became increasingly anti-man.
To be clear, that is not all the author says. Once she gets to the “Let’s talk about how the patriarchy harms men and boys” section, she stops the meta conversation about the movement itself, and spends the rest of the article discussing mens issues directly.
However, to your comment, and the first part of the article, maybe we need to stop hiding behind the mythology we tell ourselves about feminist; and start recognizing that the “feminist” portions of the social web are still susceptible to anti-feminist memes.
[0] in its original sense; as a direct analog to the genes of biology.
This post is in two parts. The first is my attempt at an objective analysis of what lessons we should take from this.
The second part is my subjective introspection of why I feel the way I do about it. I’m still not sure if sharing that part is a good idea; but I wrote it to gather my own thoughts and feelings, and maybe it can help someone else. Or maybe it is just a giant wall of text that no one wants to look at.
First, the analysis:
The story with the bear hypothetical has almost nothing to do with gender dynamics. Sure, there is a gender politics point to be seen. A lot of women fear men. However, that is not a new insight. That observations has been a major part of the gender discourse for as long as I have. Almost no one is being introduced to that concept through the bear hypothetical.
Having said that, if you, dear reader, are part of todays lucky 10,000, then congratulations! If you are interested in learning more, then I would suggest avoiding anything that mentions “bear”, and instead start with metoo. That was another time this type of gender dynamics conversation went viral, and produced a much healthier discourse.
In an ideal world, the bear hypothetical would have been made, and quickly forgotten about; either because someone was venting, or just struck out on a rhetorical point. These things happen. People who hear them see the context in which they happen and everyone moves on.
However, this hypothetical was posted on TikTok. TikTok is an amazing app. An unironic triumph of artificial intelligence. It is capable of turning humans into engagement with an efficiency that we thought was impossible just a decade ago. And this bear hypothetical is great for engagement. Toxic engagement, but engagement none the less. It then spread to other social media, which have similar (although less advanced) algorithms designed to create engagement. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the lemmyverse was late to the bear party. Or that when the bear party reached us, such a disproportionate amount of the content has been at the meta level. We do not have the same toxic algorithms here. The meme only made it here as spillover after the big social media sites made it such a huge thing.
Regardless of how this meme came to be so large, is it useful? I would argue not. Look at all the discourse it has generated. How much of it has been productive? How many problematic men do you think listened to the discourse and took away the lesson you want them to take away? How many problematic men do you think listened to the discourse and took away that the entire movement you are trying to advance is stupid? Sure, plenty of men understood what you are trying to say; but those are not the ones that you need to reach. The ones we need to reach took away the other meaning. Beyond simply missing the point, many of them are now inoculated against the point.
Now comes the introspective part of the post. This is about how the meme and surrounding discourse made me feel and why. I don’t claim to know how it made most people feel or why. This is just one person’s feelings, motivated by their specific perspective and lifetime of experience. And that is the first point: there is a huge landscape of possible thoughts someone can have to the meme, of which I had a few. The meme, however, forces me to project all of those thoughts into a single decision: man or bear.
This is not a criticism of the discourse around the meme. The meme itself pushes me to pick a side before I read any of the discourse, before I even think about responding to it, before I even start engaging with it on a conscious level. The first thing I need to do is pick a side, and all of my subsequent thoughts are colored by that initial binary.
I picked man. And that hurts; because my tribe picked bear. And so, I find myself being “part of the problem”, and being in the camp that is identified by an ideology that I do not like and is against my values. And that hurts.
I recognized that engaging with the meme was not healthy, but the algorithms are too powerful, so I kept reengaging and disengaging as it kept getting shoved back into my face. And the meme picked at a lot of other scars I have.
Many commentators have described the dichotomy as man=literal thinking and bear=metaphorical thinking. I have nothing novel to contribute to that analysis, but it is a good framing for this point. Growing up, I was very much “literal thinking” kind of kid. I still am a “literal thinking” kind of person, but it is my childhood experience that matters here. It was clear to me from a young age that my kind of thinking was not welcome, and so I learned to keep my thoughts to myself. When I did share them, they were beated down, and I never quite understood why. The discourse around this meme pokes at those old scar, and that hurts.
Growing up, I never really understood this whole boy vs girl thing. Sure, I understood that there were some clear physical differences, and could easily classify people into boys and girls. And I understood that I got classified with boys. What I didn’t understand was such a big deal. Why did the girls get one room, and the boys another. Why the girls have their set of cliques and the boys have theirs. Why the girls got to wear nice clothing while I was stuck in a stupid suit and tie. For a long time, I thought everyone was simply acting. That no one wanted to be the one to say that the emperor has no clothes. And so, I acted. The few times I tried talking about, the adults would just say that I am trying to “be difficult”; that I do not actually believe what I was saying. In high school, I learned about transgender people. That was enough for me to logically convince myself that gender must be a real thing. After all, if everyone was just acting anyway, why would so many people insist on acting as the wrong one. I never really internalized that lesson, but the logical knowledge was enough to let me compartmentalize it and just go along to get along. Most of the time. This kind of gender essentialism discourse forces those boxes back to being the center of conversation, which pokes at those old scars, and that hurts.
Several months ago, there was a very moving article posted in one of the trans communities. Musings of a trans man wrestling with many of the same issues I talked about. How he had to spend his childhood acting a gender he didn’t feel. How the exact same aspects of his self would have been received so differently if he was born a different gender. How he had to deal with the cognitive dissonance that comes from believing in, belonging to, and benefiting a movement that is in many ways between oblivious to and hostile of anyone who is not cisgendered [0]. In reading that article, for the first time I can recall, I felt heard. Someone put so many of my own thoughts and experiences down on paper. Someone else read that and thought it was so good that they had to share it with their community. And that community was unanimous in accepting it.
And so, I opened up. I shared my own thoughts. Not all my thoughts. But there was one thread running through all of the original article that really spoke to me that I wanted to crystallize and explore. Overall, I was agreeing with the same piece that everyone else was agreeing with, just doing so through my own lense.
Then, this happened (direct quote from the 1 response I got. Spoilered because even copying it was lightly triggering for me):
Oh come the fuck on. Just shupt up, dude. “Not all men” is just a generally shitty response that shifts conversations about toxic masculinity, SA etc. away from those affected. It centers men in a conversation about issues that disproportionately harm women and nonbinary people. It is the telltale sign of men refusing to take responsibility for their own participation in coercive patriarchal structures, a horribly dumb behavior as patriarchy is provably harmful to men. Yet you folks can’t stop defending it and downplaying your complicity in it.
Notably, this is a thread about transmasculinity and the difficulties of having masculinity as a transition goal in a culture that has deeply contaminated masculinity to create oppressive structures and you dipshit barge in here to NOT ALL MEN this. You walk into a trans space and turn it into a platform for liberal antifeminism. Fuck you, you disgusting debate pervert, crawl back to reddit you stupid shit.
Also fuck yourself doubly for being a cis shit that tries to have an opinion about trans issues AND COMPLETELY IGNORES ANYTHING TRANS REALTED ABOUT THEM, i’ll file another report of your shitty post. We never should have federated with your shitty instance full of wehrmacht apologists, fuck you.
I reported that poster. Some time later, I discovered that I was now banned from the server. I had finally found my tribe. The most my tribe of any my tribe I had seen yet. I came out of my shell, spoke a little bit of my thoughts. And I was pushed back down, exiled from the tribe, and told to go back to the others. And that hurt. Also, getting called “cis” as a slur really pokes at the non-binary scar I talked about earlier, and that hurts.
And so, in comes the bear meme. Almost surgically designed to poke at all of those scars. And it hurts
What am I supposed to do when somethings hurts? Do I go to my tribe and vent? I can see a few brace (or stupid) posters in the various comments section expressing some thoughts similar to my own; but overall my tribe was united in saying that those posters were “the problem”. And that hurts.
[0] I really do not want to go into the merits of those criticisms, as I do not think it is actually relevant to this post. Also, the original article does it better than I can.
Sudo is a setuid binary, which means it executes with root permissions as a child of of the calling process. This technically works, but gives the untrusted process a lot of ways to mess with sudo and potentially exploit it for unauthorized access.
Run0 works by having a system service always running in the background as root. Running a command just sends a message to the already running seevice. This leaves a lot less room for exploits.
This: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JebyNOvJmCM&pp=ygUfYmFsdGltb3JlIGJyaWdhZGUgY29sbGFwc2UgbGl2ZQ%3D%3D
Police audio from the incident: https://youtu.be/xzOvImnlHFc?si=INIeTXr7ThY5dAlw
The whole bridge just collapsed
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
I just checked my State’s rules. [0] The maximum benefit is given by the “thrifty” food plan, which is cheaper than the USDA’s “low cost” food plan.
For a 20 year old woman, that is $242.30 a month. From there, you compute 30% of your net monthly income, and subtract it from your SNAP allotment.
If the result is too low, this provision kicks in:
Except during an initial month, all eligible one and two-person households will receive a minimum monthly allotment of $16, and all eligible households with three or more members which are entitled to $1, $3, or $5 allotments will receive allotments of $2, $4, or $6, respectively.
Truly a golden ticket. /s
[0] https://dhs.maryland.gov/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program/food-supplement-program-manual/ (section 409)
https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-monthly-reports
You joke, but after cosmonaut Alexi Leonov complained about the possibility of a bear attack, the TP-82 shotgun was standard issue on Russian spacecraft for decades.
The actual difference between a working new mouse and a failing double click mouse is in the button itself (mechanical parts are almost always the problem).
However, it is not some exotic failure mode. All mechanical switches have a “bounce”, where the contact makes and breaks a few times before settling into the connected position. Switches are typically designed to make the actual contact spring loaded (which is the origin of the click sound you here). As they age, this mechanism degrades, making the bouncing problem worse.
However, this is a well understood problem that any electrical engineer should be familiar with. One solution is to install a filter capacitor. Now it takes longer to switch between the on and off state, so the inherent bounce in the switch is smoothed out to the point where you cannot detect it.
They probably did testing with a new switch, and decided that they didn’t need to include any explicit debounce component, ignoring the fact that the switch would degrade over its lifetime.