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Cake day: April 1st, 2025

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  • And when the Cathars, or the Templars were eradicated, or when Protestants and Catholics went to war, do you really think it’s because of sincerely held beliefs regarding their God, or because one group threatened the hegemony and material wealth of the other? In the case of the Protestants, the single most critical doctrine they went after was the Catholic belief that doctrinal authority came in part from the Bible, and in part from the Church; whereas Protestants argued for Sola Scriptura - the belief that doctrinal authority came from the Bible alone. And even the 95 theses clearly had the goal of ending a system of exploitation and financial parasitism by the Catholic church. Welcome to real politics.

    None of this does anything to change that cases of church authority are still functionally the same as those of state atheism and anti-theism. In the case of Christian churches, you have the view that only Christianity is the truth and everything else is both the result of the devil, and leads to evil, and therefore all other beliefs are invalid and ultimately must be eradicated.

    In the case of these varying state atheist groups you have governments expressing that atheism is the only valid belief system, and again, all others must cease. And anti-theists are explicit about their view of all other religious beliefs being invalid and needing to be eradicated.

    If persecutions and executions against religious people by governments that are saying everyone has to be atheist isn’t killing in the name of atheism, then what the fuck is?


  • “The Soviet Union (1922–1991) had a long history of state atheism, whereby those who were seeking social success generally had to profess atheism and stay away from places of worship; this trend became especially militant during the middle of the Stalinist era, which lasted from 1929 to 1953.”

    “The Communist Party engaged in diverse activities such as destroying places of worship, executing religious leaders, flooding schools and media with anti-religious propaganda, and propagated “scientific atheism”.[55][56] It sought to make religion disappear by various means.[57][58] Thus, the USSR became the first state to have as one objective of its official ideology the elimination of the existing religion, and the prevention of the future implanting of religious belief, with the goal of establishing state atheism (gosateizm).”

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism




  • I remember around 15 years ago I was excited to get my first computer with a dedicated graphics card, a laptop with Nvidia Optimus. It was also around the time I was just beginning to get into Linux. I found an Ubuntu forum post with detailed instructions on installing Ubuntu and setting it up properly on that exact laptop, so I tried to follow that.

    It didn’t help that I was unfamiliar with using the terminal at the time. But even so, this was before tools like Bumblebee were in a usable state (is Bumblebee still the preferred way to use Optimus?). I remember getting to the part about graphics switching and seeing some messy confusing hack for it. I don’t remember the specifics, but I think it involved importing a script and using diff to patch something. And I think all it did was just disable the very gpu I was looking forward to trying out.

    I jumped back and forth between distros and Windows 7 a lot at that time. But it was such a shitty experience all because of Nvidia that I have never purchased any of their products since then. I’ve owned a lot of computers in that time, and I’m just one customer lost. I hope Nvidia looks at AMD sales and wonders how many of them are users that Nvidia lost because things like that.





  • Because you’re presupposing that copyright is right in the first place. Distribution of information has been made free - because of the internet it’s the one thing so far where the Star Trek future has been made reality. But intellectual property laws are designed to create artificial scarcity so that one publisher can monopolize a creative work, to the detriment of everyone else.

    Fans of various game franchises are not just consumers, but creators in their own right. You have to remember that this delegitimized practice of “piracy” also results in the entire romhacking community.

    The bottom line is that free sharing of information benefits us all and produces a rich commons, but intellectual property plunders that commons and produces centralization of media ownership while stripping away our right to be co-creators.