The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure, Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.
There is currently an attempt going on by several governments to crack down harder against the people. While before it was "only", say, California and their age-sniffing laws infiltrating and tainting Linux - thus declaring war against the people, as revealed by Meta acting as primary lobbyist here - today I read that now that age-sniffing was also approved in some european countries (in one EU country the parents are required to install a sniffing app and thus verify the age of the kids; I think it was in Greece. I'd never help any government act as fascist sniffing proxy trying to control and monitor by kids, that is an act of betrayal of such a government), their next line of attack is against VPN. Suddenly the picture shifts, because if VPNs are targeted, how does finding an excuse such as "but but but think about the kids", make any sense? That is very clearly governments becoming increasingly fascist. Add a few lobbyists here and there who benefit financially from this and now we suddenly understand how democracies are undermined. See also:
The recent spate of state-level age verification laws, while stupid, are primarily designed to insulate Facebook from lawsuits and not actually crack down on people. You can comply with them by just having a date field and an API to get bucketed age ranges out of them. The reason why they seem like a concerted crackdown is that Facebook can pay people to go to literally every legislature and bug them up and down[0] until they pass a law to make OS vendors provide age buckets.
The real shit is happening parallel to the actual legislation. Companies that need to comply with, say, the extremely onerous UK Online Services Act, are forcing everyone to use data-heavy verification paths like facial recognition age estimation or ID scanning. Newgrounds just used your account age or a credit card.
A core property of fascism is that, unlike other forms of tyranny, it is specifically a public-private joint venture. The government uses corporations to bypass its own constitutional restrictions, and those corporations then agree to follow rules that don't actually exist, specifically so that those corporations can shut down all their competition and form para-governments that supercede the democratically responsive bits. This has actually been going on for a while, but it's only now that the people are actually noticing it.
[0] Inspired by Louis Rossmann's efforts to get R2R bills passed, I've started doing amateur lobbying for the Rio Grande Plan. It's surprisingly easy, but you will almost certainly have to take off from work or sacrifice many a lunch hour to be able to actually get to talk to people.
For memorizing stuff, I use pen and lighting markers. This works quite well, and they are easy; I can quickly memorize things that way.
However had, for anything else I use the computer, and I style everything the way I need via HTML+CSS for the most part. I don't use HTML directly but a simpler and easier to use template, which is programmable (via ruby). There I also make use of javascript and have a multitude of effects to use. I can use the browser to research past content I stored and it is visually pleasing. And it takes not as long as handwriting either. So while I do use pen and paper still and probably will for the rest of my life, I am mostly in the digital era myself. I don't understand why I'd want to use pen and paper. Granted, I have to archive a lot of things, but I use various USB sticks and USB-connectable harddiscs; these don't take that much space away, compared to pen and paper written stuff or other hardcopy books. I don't think I will go back to the only-pen and only-paper, ever. I am not saying digital-only has only benefits, but if I compare all advantages and disadvantages then the digital lifestyle has more benefits. For instance, I don't need to store hardcopy books anymore (I still have them, I still use them, I still like them, but whenever I am about to purchase anything anew, I ask myself whether I want to have physical space be occupied by a book. Often the answer is no, if I can just use a .pdf instead.)
Like media reporting about Trump. Trump is a (mostly) fake-news generator. The problem is that the traditional media is largely structued to suit different goals, often the owner (make more money), in part to send out a certain narrative (propaganda). Or both.
I don't have a good work-around for this either. I try to gather news from different sources and use my brain, but even then my brain is influenced a lot by what information is given. Youtube is kind of great and awful here; great because you may have critical content (e. g. I like Vlad Vexler's thinking and reasoning, even if I may not always agree with the rationale, analysis, premise or outcome), but there is also soooo much propaganda on youtube. Tons of parrots repeating a certain narrative. Peter Zeihan is my personal disfavourite right now (the recent "How to Break Iran" is pure propaganda IMO) but there are so many more examples, influencers too. One day I'll need to disconnect myself from youtube (and, in the process, Google); right now I admit I am too addicted to some of it (the content, not the platform; the platform pisses me off. It is not even usable anymore without ublock origin).
All the main build tools (cmake, meson/ninja and GNU configure) have different benefits. For instance, I expect "--help" to work, but only really GNU configure supports it as-is. I could list more advantages and disadvantages in general here, but by and large I prefer meson/ninja. To me it feels by far the fastest and I also have the fewest issues usually (excluding python breaking its pip stack but that's not the fault of meson as such). ninja can be used via cmake too but most uses I see are from meson.
> ninja can be used via cmake too but most uses I see are from meson
How do you know though when the choice of cmake-generator is entirely up to the user? E.g. you can't look at a cmake file and know what generator the user will select to build the project.
FWIW I usually prefer the Ninja generator over the Makefile generator since ninja better 'auto-parallelises' - e.g. with the Makefile generator the two 'simple' options are either to run the build single-threaded or completely grind the machine to a halt because the default setting for 'parallel build' seems to heavily overcommit hardware resources. Ninja just generally does the right thing (run parallel build, but not enough parallelism to make the computer unusable).
ninja supports separate build groups and different max number of parallel jobs for each. CMake's ninja generator puts compilation and linking steps in their own respective groups. End result is by default `nproc` parallel jobs for compilation but 1 job for linking. This helps because linking can be way more memory intensive or sometimes the linker itself has support for parallelism. Most projects have only a handful of linking steps to run anyway.
I find Meson's --help fairly useful, at least compared to the disaster that is CMake's. (Try to find out, as a user not experienced with either, how you'd make a debug build.) I agree that configure --help is more useful for surfacing project-specific options, though.
It is basically an unfair advantage, even if inadmissible in court. The state can find more facts even in illegal ways; and this assuming the government is fair rather than criminal. I have a hard time trusting governments who mistrust the public.
> Pixel artist Lazur's 256 colour rendition (left) of a photo by Krzysztof Kaczorowski (right). A masterful copy showcasing the sharpness, details and vibrancy achievable with pixel techniques.
Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
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