racemaniac

joined 2 years ago
[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 1 points 10 months ago

Someone else already replied, but about living within your means, lenders can look up other debts you have, and missed payments you have. And they all request access to your pay slips so they get a basic view of your income. In the end it's close to the credit score system, with the difference that someone who doesn't have any loans or credit cards willl also have a good score since they don't have any missing payments, and haven't gathered too much debt already, which makes sense.

Regarding your point of rent vs ownership. In the end you can still boil it down to needing a certain amount of money/month. Only part of it is your mortgage of course, you need to save up for bigger things, but it's not that different. And i don't even see this being relevant in this discussion, i don't see how the credit score system would predict you being up to being a house owner and setting money aside for bigger repairs.

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

For non political content, not bad, of course a lot smaller than reddit, but it's a good start.

But the left wing populism echochamber is a bit annoying. It's ok to have an opinion, but all the silly so easy to refute things that get repeated here over & over again because it sounds nice & fits the agenda is just annoying... "Why do billionaires need more money?" because they're addicted to ego & power, it's not about the money. "The right wing are so violent, we are the good guys", every other thread: eat the rich, prepare the guillotines. -insert a not so common incident that supports an agenda- 'see, this happens all the time, we should do -insert short sighted measure that will just cause different problems-. etc...

I'd love all those topics to be actually seriously discussed here, but so far it feels like it's just edgy teens shouting whatever fits the popular narratatives...

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

No it isn't. It's to force you to use credit under the guise of checking how good you would be at paying back.

I'm from europe, you know how much credit i had before i got a loan for my condo? absolutely zero. All they needed to know was that i had no debts, lived well within my means, knew what i was doing, not "how many credit cards and car loans have you got running". The best possible person to loan money to is someone with 0 credit history who can prove they've got a solid source of income, and are living well within their means. Because you know, once i bought my condo, paying my loan is the exact same thing as paying my rent.

And if you wonder if i got a decent loan with such a "terrible credit history". It was a loan with variable interest rate, after the first change, my interest dropped to 0 due to the financial crisis, and it remained at 0 until i paid it of.

Anyone actually believing the american credit score system is anything else than just a way to force you to use credit while you really shouldn't, is just indoctrinated. I'm sorry, but someone perfectly paying rent, and saving up for purchasing a house without ever using any credit is the perfect person to give a good mortgage too, and the exact kind of person this system sets out to punish because they're not taking part in the American banking system the way the banks want you to.

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 4 points 10 months ago

Yeah, the policy causes more cars to be sold, which is also an important thing to take into account.

But you initially said "If most people replace their cars every three years they’re not getting to 80,000 km before they buy a new one.", and that is plain wrong, the car is not scrapped after those 3 years, so when it changes owner for the first time is irrelevant. And that 80k km is worst case scenario, that assuming all electricity is generated in the least environmental way possible, in practice it's often <40k km that there is already a break even because not all electricity is generated by coal.

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 1 points 10 months ago

It for sure applies to voters, but not to the politicians present at climate conventions as this cartoon portrays. And in the end it's them that have to broker a solution, not individual voters.

They'll of course use such language to their voters since whatever gains votes is fair game, but i very much doubt they themselves are this stupid. Behind the scenes it's just finding ways to screw with the others.

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 2 points 10 months ago

Yup, i wish talking about issues like this would be more common here rather than "what if we accidentally create a better world", and other really populistic views of what's happening.

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (8 children)

I kind of get these kind of comics, but isn't the reality that all of humanity is still in a competition with eachother, and doing all the wrong things gives you more power than doing all the right things, so that's what continues happening.

In these climate debates the reality is that it's a global chicken on the road, we all go toward self annihilation at a steady pace, and the first who flinches and tries to take action will get taken advantage of and ruined. So it's slooooooow talks about doing tiny things and kind of maybe a bit cooperating while noone really wants to, because any advantage they can get over another country will be taken advantage of...

Maybe i'm a bit too pessimistic, but it's my assumption that things work like that, and then all this bullshit suddenly makes sense >_<...

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 1 points 11 months ago

It was already fixed in their nightly builds, and it's an extremely mature video & audio player, i get most open source projects can't pounce on any tiny issue. But like the most mature open source player should be able to resolve a serious playback issue in their stable build in less than a month. Either by applying the fix that fixed it in their nightly builds, or by reverting to a previous version of whatever is causing it that had it working well in earlier versions. I get the open source mantra of "you're not the client", but VLC is good & big enough to manage this kind of stuff a lot better.

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 2 points 11 months ago

It would be if those weren't flac files i had for a long time and i knew didn't have any issues.

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 5 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Sadly i recently learned VLC doesn't just always work.

About a year ago i had an issue with playing FLAC files on VLC, where there would be short periods of no audio. I had recently made some upgrades to my audio hardware, so i was looking at my new hardware/cables/config.... but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely:

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/27696

Nice quote from this issue: VLC is broken since months Use their nightly version, it has a nice new interface too, and no bugs. I don't get how they can keep a huge breaking bug like this in vlc from MONTHS.

And neither can i... until a year ago VLC was for me the pinnacle of "it just works". Now after them leaving a bug causing audio playback issues into their stable version for months, they broke my trust in them... they're probably still the best option out there, but now i'll just say probably, not for sure, and there is room for improvement...

And if it were some obscure format, sure, but FLAC? ....

[–] racemaniac@startrek.website 1 points 11 months ago

your docker issue with a downloaded deb package from the net … wtf - first of all why not use something from the repositories … getting out of just downloading something from someone and installing it should be prio 1 when changing to linux … but how hard could it be to do a sudo apt install ./filename.deb

Oh man, i love all the comments saying this, and now seeing this pop up: [https://startrek.website/post/5789855](https://startrek.website/post/5789855)

Steam saying "if you want to install steam on ubuntu, just download our .deb package".

Yeah, obviously people moving to Linux will figure out they don't need to download .deb packages if THE MAIN THING THAT USED TO KEEP THEM ON WINDOWS, NOW FINALLY AVAILABLE ON LINUX, AND MADE BY A HUGE TECH COMPANY USES A .DEB PACKAGE.

And yeah, i can find command line ways of installing a package. But that pretty much defeats the entire point of a linux desktop you know, the entire thing i'm complaining here about. If your answer to me complaining that the linux desktop being a dud is "yeah, most things don't work, just use the command line", you're completely confirming me in the message of my post.

 

Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.

I've got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i've got multiple raspberry pi's running, and a synology diskstation, and i'm no stranger to ssh'ing into them to manage some stuff)

Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it's still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.

First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i'd rather leave it disabled (although i assume that's mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought "it's probably some setting somewhere to change this", but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares.... Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i'd need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly... (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)

Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it's not switching to the refreshrate of the video i'm playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn't use a window manager that should solve it but doesn't, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I'd give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you'll find so little yet contradictory things...

Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought "i've got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let's see if i can find something nice on ubuntu", and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and ... "no app installed for this file"... google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error

Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn't replace it yet. Wouldn't want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?

For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I'm missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or... right?

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