V17

Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I’ve heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you’ve had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you’re 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you’re 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it’s easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I’m happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it’s quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic guns with a suppressor (cause I’ve heard a guy recommending one such gun with sub-sonic ammo for potential home-defense, stating “if I really have to use it, there’s no reason why my family should go deaf in the process”, heh).

I mean, ignorant, fine, but propagandist??

Deimos is a dumb piece of shit. Evidence is that Tildes is somehow still invite only after like five fucking years.

Why do you think this is a bad thing? The best discussion board that I’ve been a member of by a wide margin (not mentioning names, it’s all in Czech anyways) has been invite only for 20 years now. It’s a tried and true way to limit eternal september as long as the community is active enough to not die out, which hasn’t happened yet on Tildes.

Well the rules are pretty clear in that you can call other people’s ideas stupid, but not other people stupid. Personally I prefer spaces with hands-off moderation and focus on free speech, but those generally don’t work in a general discussion platform without any implicit gatekeeping to keep idiots away, so I’m giving this style a chance and so far the results have been far better than most places on Reddit on Lemmy.

Did you mean “social democracy”? I don’t think there’s actual socialism anywhere there - that’s still capitalism, only with a strong welfare system, which has downsides, but it’s obviously viable at least in some societies.

I’m mostly staying in an invite-only board in my local language that’s been functional for like 20 years now and is smarter than Reddit has ever been, but I’m also spending some time on Tildes, which is honestly not bad. Like lemmy, it has a pretty strong leftist bias (which is a problem for me because not being from US or western Europe I don’t really fall into their left-right division), but it’s much smarter and less toxic, so disagreement without too much bullshit is possible.

I agree, with one exception:

Reddit’s early days were similar, but internet culture has definitely gotten more intense since the early 2010s.

Has it really been that way? I’ve been on reddit since 2010 and from what I remember it was definitely much more nerdy and full of tech people who live on the internet, but I don’t think it had much in common with what we call “terminally online” today. I associate “terminally online” with people who really care about things like culture wars and trying to push their views on others, spending a lot of time arguing about it. Whereas reddit in 2010 was much more homogenous - the stereotypes about forever alone IT nerds with nerdy hobbies were much more true than now, but that meant there were nowhere near as many cultural things to argue about. People sometimes had really weird or controversial opinions, but there was not a lot of added toxicity about it that’s omnipresent now in the discussions.

Ime the “terminally online” problems with toxicity and culture wars only started around 2014-15 with the rise of “online feminism”, that seemed like the first big division into two hostile groups that spent significant time just attacking each other.

I don’t think you understand what I mean, so I’ll try to rephrase.

Knowing that bad shit is happening and accepting that it’s bad shit is one thing. Wallowing in it and pointlessly arguing about it (not normally discussing it in a measured way) is a separate thing that is not necessary and helps neither the ones participating nor the community in general. It’s possible to do it differently and many are capable of it.

My experience is that firstly Lemmy is not that diverse and secondly that there are platforms that are not that diverse either but are much more open and capable of discussion. Tildes for example is in general too progressive for me (I’m not from the US, so I don’t really fit into its politics/culture wars left-right division, though I’m closer to the left), but it’s nowhere near as toxic as political threads around here and it’s normally possible to have discussion and disagree in a civil way.

The problem is that the people OP complains about generally don’t want to see anything else and pointlessly argue with you if you do it. Personally I’m slowly ending my Lemmy experiment and posting somewhere where the majority cares and is capable of normal discussion.

This is the problem though. It’s fine to mention them and be informed, but there is no need to wallow in how horrible the world is and shut down anybody who disagrees, which is what OP is complaining about (and what IME really is happening in news-like and political threads). Those are two separate things, the second one is a choice and there are places where it doesn’t happen.

RANT: While I know that language changes all the time, I find it very unfortunate that this little fellow o/ and possibly his slightly more formal friend o7 have become synonymous with “nazi salute”. First off, it’s the wrong arm! And second off, what do you have against “man waving” and “man saluting”?

Have they really? Never seen o7 used that way, with o/ it’s more understandable, but since one can easily just use \o (or use an actual unicode swastika) I just don’t see it getting that controversial. Seems even less known than the triple parentheses thing, which is something that most people who don’t spend their lives on the internet never heard about.

I switched from OneNote to Logseq. Its feature set is pretty much completely different, but in the end I realized it’s fine with me and resulted in my notes being more useful.

The main downside that I see now is that it’s kind of slow - much faster than the Electron version of OneNote was last time I used it, but slower than old native OneNote app or Obsidian. Otherwise its main differences from Obsidian are that in Obsidian the basic building unit is a page, whereas in Logseq it’s a paragraph (and, usually, its sub-paragraphs - it’s an outliner), which Obsidian can only do with plug-ins and not as seamlessly, and that with Obsidian you pretty much need to use community plug-ins, whereas with Logseq a lot of the functionality is built-in.

It’s open-source and uses markdown, not completely standard, but close enough for the files to be entirely usable if Logseq ever dies. Its community is smaller than with Obsidian, which is a downside, but it’s not exactly obscure either.

Really probably the most important thing about Obsidian and Logseq is to read an article or watch a video about how automatic backlinking works. It’s especially useful for something like Zettelkasten, but it also works for more “normal” approaches as well as concepts like Getting Things Done.

Both are OK tools and are similar in many ways, but they’re quite different from OneNote. Downside of both is that synchronization between devices sometimes creates issues unless you use their paid service.

Yeah, don’t do that anymore then. Firstly the video doesn’t really find overall 2x speedup, but mainly Cycles X came out since then, where most of the codebase has been rewritten from scratch, and after that numerous significant optimizations happened as well. That video is pretty much irrelevant now.

Afaik Blender since 3.0 does not support OpenCL anymore and AMD rendering uses HIP instead. I have not found any information about dramatic performance differences, though CPU rendering does seem to be somewhat faster on Linux - but more like 10% faster and the amount of computation practically done on the CPU is not that big.

Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

Personally I use NVidia because of CUDA, gaming is an afterthought. I wish CUDA just fucked off and we got some universal compute API instead, because that’s what would reduce the NVidia stranglehold on the market, perhaps OneAPI is going to catch on at some point, but at this moment those options are not practical.

the best example is Blender which works almost twice as fast on Linux

People say this, but what exactly do you mean? I mostly model on windows because it’s my primary system (I use applications that simply don’t work well enough with wine), but mostly finish and render stuff on linux because of windows’ retarded automatic updates etc. that can just cancel rendering without asking. And the only difference I’ve seen is how fast Blender starts - I’d say that’s more than 2x as fast on linux, it’s a huge difference. But rendering is the same (NVidia GTX GPU) and other work inside blender also seems to be about the same.

What is seen as ‘left’ or even what conservatives call ‘the radical left’ in the US would likely be seen as center or center-right globally*.

*in most of the western world and pretty much nowhere else.

The scientists undoubtedly know this, unfortunately I, like you, am too lazy to read what they have to say about this problem. It is conceivable that the bacteria would only flourish in certain environments and plastic would become slightly similar to wood - decomposes quite slowly if you keep it reasonably dry and clean, decomposes very fast when there are water and air and dirt where enough bacteria lives present.