• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • The collection of texts today known as the Bible were not written at once. There’s actually a lot of interesting history about how it came to be, but the short of it is that there were a multitude of maybe-canon Christian texts floating around during the early period of Christianity. These texts were written decades or even centuries apart, and often falsely attributed to authors who did not write them. There was also the Septuagint, a Greek text which was a translation of various Jewish scriptures, many of which now form the Old Testament.

    The early Christian church decided which of these were deemed to be canon and which were non-canon. The canon texts were compiled together to form what is now the Bible. Everything else that was deemed not canon is called the Apocrypha. Many of these texts were also deemed heretical or blasphemous to read, publish, or teach by the various ecumenical councils.

    Each Christian denomination has a slightly different version of the Bible depending on which decisions and ecumenical councils they accept.

    The most interesting difference would be the Bible of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), which has an additional text called the Book of Mormon. That was written in the 19th century by a guy named Joseph Smith, an American religious leader who founded Mormonism. According to Mormon theology, it contains the revalations he received from God about various other unknown saints who lived in America and other holy happenings which took place, making the US a second holy land of sorts. His group travelled to the western United States to find their own promised land and establish a Mormon theocracy (they were successful; it’s now the US state of Utah).

    There’s no historical evidence that any of these texts were intended to be read as anything other than religious scripture, but keep in mind that in Biblical times, people seemed to have had a really difficult time differentiating texts written by people having fever dreams versus actual genuine accounts of observed events or legitimate attempts to write scripture. If you want a fun time, you can read some of the Apocrypha, which are often similar in style to the canonical gospels but are slightly… weirder. The line between religion and insanity was not so easily found back then. Regardless of their authors’ original intent, the Apocrypha certainly can be read for entertainment in the 21st century.


  • I think there is a line to be drawn between what is theoretically better and what is meaningfully useful.

    It is realistically not useful information for an attacker to know what country you are from by observing your UTC offset. It’s simply much easier to guess this information by observing your other behaviours. For example, the text and time of your post is already leading me to guess UTC+5:30 as the time zone in question. But again, knowing what country you’re from is not really useful information most of the time, as even if my guess is correct, that narrows it down to a whopping one-eighth of the human population.



  • Like the others have said, all major distros are fine. Ubuntu is or used to be Valve’s “favourite distro” and the package that you can get from Valve’s website is for Ubuntu. That being said, software on Linux should be installed using the package manager (the Software Centre) and not downloaded from the Web.

    You may wish to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS later. This is fairly easy (you can use the Software Updater application) but the newer versions have better drivers and newer GNOME versions which may bring better performance.




  • Look no further than the dissent to United States v. Wong Kim Ark (when the Supreme Court ruled that the passage you cited grants citizenship by birthright), written by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, the mastermind behind such legal opinions as:

    • Racial segregation is completely legal (Plessy v. Ferguson)
    • States can’t regulate workplace conditions or enact maximum working hours laws (Lochner v. New York)
    • Income tax is unconstitutional (Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust)

    Anyway, he wrote:

    the children of Chinese born in this country do not, ipso facto, become citizens of the United States unless the fourteenth amendment overrides both treaty and statute

    and

    [Birthright citizenship means] the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not.

    So in other words, he was willing to rule that the constitution is optional as long as you are using it against undesirable races in order to get his way.









  • SystemD will consume the entirety of Linux, bit by bit.

    • In 2032, SystemD announces they’re going to be introducing a new way to manage software on Linux
    • In 2035, SystemD will announce they’re making a display system to replace the ageing Wayland
    • In 2038, the SystemD team announces they’re making their own desktop environment
    • In 2039 SystemD’s codebase has grown to sixteen times its size in the 2020s. SystemD’s announces they’re going to release replacements for most other packages and ship their own vanilla distro.
    • In 2045 SystemD’s distro has become the standard Linux distribution. Most other distros have quietly faded away.
    • In 2047, SystemD announces they’re going to incorporate most of GNU into SystemD. Outrage ensues from the Free Software Foundation, which vehemently opposes this move.
    • In 2048, Richard Stallman dies of a heart attack after attempting to clone SystemD’s git repo. SystemD engages in a hostile takeover and all resistance within the FSF crumbles
    • In 2050, SystemD buys the struggling RedHat from IBM for $61 million.
    • In 2053, most world governments have been pressured into using SystemD.
    • In 2054, Linus Torvalds, fearing for his life, begins negotiations to merge kernel development into SystemD
    • In 2056, the final message on the Linux kernel development mailing list is sent.
    • In 2058, Torvalds dies under suspicious circumstances after his brand-new laptop battery explodes.
    • In 2060, SystemD agents assassinate the CEO of Microsoft.
    • In 2063, after immense pressure from SystemD-controlled human rights organisations, Arch developers discontinue development.
    • In 2064, the remaining living Debian developers release the next stable version of their clandestine and highly illegal distro.