manxu

It’s so weird that we have to go through hoops and loops to get rid of this stuff! I was sick of my Android responding to a long press of the power button, meant to shut it down, with a Gemini prompt. Took me an hour to figure out I can’t get rid of the function, but I can switch back (for now) to old style Google Assistant.

If you have to force functionality down your users’ throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost. Gemini is Google’s Clippy, just less iconic and more also-ran.

There must have been a gallery component, since I only looked at generators that had one available.

Honestly, in hindsight the templates were really not a big deal. Just for fun, I tried converting the Hugo template I used to Pelican, and it was easy for me.

Pelican is solid and mature and I would use it, in hindsight. The only major flaws are that it’s much slower (but makes up for it with incremental builds) and that the community is much, much smaller. On the plus side, Jinja2 is much, much, much better than Go templating (Hugo borrows from Go).

I went the same direction, from WordPress to static site generation. I did the same evaluation as you are trying to do and ended up with Hugo, mostly because there is a lot of support available for it. My runner up was Pelican, because I was fluent in Jinja2, but I didn’t want to mess around with the templates and Hugo’s were prettier. Sue me, I am shallow.

The one regret I have about Hugo is that the templating language is challenging. I am trying to be as neutral as possible, but it seemed like even simple things were complicated to achieve. If someone would come up with a Hugo that speaks Jinja2, I’d be really delighted.

Other than that, conversion from WordPress to Hugo was relatively straightforward, despite needing to find a gallery component and converting menus. Hugo is indeed very fast in processing, which become important when your blog has thousands of articles.

I set up the blog as a private git repository. The server pulls from it, then runs Hugo and a full text search engine, and the content is visible and searchable within five minutes on update.

I think it’s the “basically” part in basically right back where we started that makes the difference. Even if 100% of Fediverse users were on a single instance, once that instance starts pulling Musk moves, the users can move somewhere else.

Only if that instance defederates from everyone else do we get the Twitter situation again. Or, since that’s actually what happened, Truth Social, which I think is just a slightly modified Mastodon instance with federation disabled/deactivated.

Never smoked anything in my life, having one side of the family wiped out prematurely by nicotine, all of them.

Lived in Colorado. The pros outweigh the cons a million to one. The biggest positive was the massive reduction in DUIs, since people drink in bars but smoke weed at home. There may be a reduction in harder drugs, too, given how much easier and cheaper it is to get weed. The tax revenue from weed sales is huge (was bigger, though) and because the laws were changed after Colorado turned liberal-ish, the money was mostly allocated to great causes.

Government loves having a law that can be selectively enforced and is broken by a lot of people. Taking it away is a huge plus, especially in times where the government is looking for easy ways to control the population. Even before now, White people caught in possession or smoking marijuana rarely got more than probation, while some Black people were three-striked for the same.

The only downside is that it still smells bad, and I am still not sure that hacking up your lungs is all that sane or safe.

Yes, it appears that young humans can have very negative reactions to weed, and that it can affect their brains negatively. That would absolutely be a problem if legalization increased week use among teenagers, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Technically it’s only regular pentagons that don’t tile the plane.

I know everything about planes because I am shorter than my brothers. When we were young, they called me Tattoo and if I pointed at something with my finger, they screamed in unison, “Da plane! Da plane!”

I’d add to that great list also the problem of the steady enshittification of Google products. Just today, I was driving with Google Maps and suddenly it asked if I wanted to stop at a McDonald’s. I haven’t been to McD’s in twelve years, so you know how terribly useful that suggestion was.

After using Metro and Vanilla for ages, I switched to Gramophone. Looks pretty and I find it intuitive. Also has great support for media change detection and does m3u playlists (that I rely on heavily) very well.

As someone else pointed out years ago (about Eric Trump, not known for his supermodel looks), there is an amount of wealth and influence where you don’t have to look good, because everybody will treat you anyway as if you were the hottest person on the planet. Basically, you want to look ugly because it’s a bizarre proof of wealth.

“Look at me, I am so rich, I can have all the supermodels, porn stars, and Hollywood actresses I want, and I don’t even have to get plastic surgery or a personal trainer like a poor millionaire (ewww) on a budget.”

I think that’s what the Cybertruck is for, to appeal to Conservatives. I live on the edge between blue and red counties, and down in red territory the Cybertrucks are everywhere. (Meaning I saw at least four different ones.)