I’m usually not into social media drama but I did watch the video. It’s set up in a way so you don’t have to know any of the people mentioned and don’t really have to care about the people mentioned afterwards either. It does take a really close look into modern plagiarism, specifically through YouTube and video essays. I thought the way all the information was really well presented.

Hbomberguy starts off with an example of a plagiarist who responded poorly to his accusations. This was a set up for the following examples and call outs of plagiarists which further explored the various reactions and attempts at damage control to preserve a creators reputation. That was the main focus for the first half of the video. The second half then focuses on James Somerset which others have already explained in this thread. What I found interesting was how James Somerset was very much a culmination of all the prior examples. Yet he was able to navigate his way around the accusations while continuing to profit off other peoples honest work. The fact that James Somerset is removing himself from the internet shows how thorough Hbomberguy was in documenting the plagiarism.

The video also touches on a things like Content Mills and AI Generative Art which still falls under the topic of plagiarism.

I’m not an artist or creator in any capacity, I just found the video interesting. Especially how the examples or accused reacted to the discoveries of plagiarism. However, I think artists and creators could probably benefit from watching this video to understand the possibilities of what happens to your work once you release it to the internet. Plagiarism seems to cause a lot more grief and frustration once you start to look further past the act of a person simply taking someone else’s work.

The indigenous people of Australia used fire is a part of their land management. It helped clear the land and managed land between crops, regrowth and wild animal populations. Also, some seed pods require fire in order to open thier pods. Otherwise the seeds won’t be released. I had the opportunity to live in Australia for two years and got to learn about some of this.

This video nicely illustrates what has been learned about pre-colonial land management by the indigenous people.

To me, it appears they had a deep understanding of the land. Something that had been developed through careful observation and passed down through traditional knowledge. Knowledge that had been disrupted and destroyed. Leaving behind so many broken people.

It deeply saddens me to know that such intimate knowledge of the land had been destroyed. It makes me wonder just how much local knowledge has really been destroyed through colonialism or other expansive and destructive forces.

Even with all that said, we today can still learn from these people. We can still learn from the land around us. We can draw inspiration from all this in order to build a sustainable future. We can start building our own knowledge again to pass down to our future. It doesn’t have to involve raking our leaves and shipping it somewhere else that’s out or sight and out of mind.

My hate for mowing and raking runs pretty deep.

I don’t believe I was advocating for everyone to grow a forest on their property.

Personally, I’d love nothing more to have a forest garden in my backyard since it’s been brought up.

I’ve never seen anyone rake s forest floor and the forest seems to be just fine. Nature has been doing it’s own thing for a couple years and seemed to have figured out what works.

Us humans could learn so much about the world if we spent more time observing it in action. Instead we spent our time bending it to our will. Disrupting beautiful complexity while blissfully unaware of future consequences. Replacing nature with unadaptable machines that are high in maintenance. Machines which are prone to wearing out and breaking down. Replacing nature with our own complexity that doesn’t break down as nicely as a leaf or branch.

Nature in action is beautiful in it’s own right. No one should be judged for spending their precious time on this world observing nature. It’s a wonderfully complex and adaptive machine with many moving parts and doesn’t require any synthetic lube to run.

I had been involved with the labour board over a wrongful termination dispute. I made complaints about about an abusive workplace and was shitcanned as a result.

During the final settlement where the lawyers were fighting over what my settlement payment would be, my lawyer and I had a bit of a discussion revolving around mental health.

She suggested I should consider a move into mental health services as I was essentially writing off continuing my trade apprenticeship by this point. She noted that I am a good listener and have a very clear understanding of mental health. She even offered to get me in contact with those in the mental health field.

It’s been heavily on my mind to go down that path but a part of me is intimidated. I’ve been able to help a few close friends who all experienced some heavy mental issues over the past couple years but these are people who I’ve become close to and am able to help them through a deep understanding of them.

I tend to get attached to people easily and I’m not sure how I’ll be able to separate work thoughts from my own thoughts meant for my own time. What heavy burdens will make it home with me?

Would I be good at working in such a field? According to my lawyer and those closest to me, I’d be great. But what am I going to do about my own mental health if I follow that path path? I can barely handle children and I’m the biggest kid in my own life. It’s already a monumental effort to keep myself fed and not spontaneously running into traffic.

For those who are interested, here is a 20 minute mini-documentary about this individual that goes by the name of Mr. Swirl.

That makes sense. I guess for my case it’s fine since I have more storage than I can use. Additionally, I keep my most important data on multiple offline storages and even that is quite minimal.

Thank you, that makes sense.

What reasons would people not like doing that?

I personally feel like separation of user data and OS data is easier for me to manage.

I’m not experienced enough with linux to understand if this is a question or a statement on what I can do. In either case, I don’t know how to interpret what this means.

My system still freezes outside of Steam and gaming. My best guess based on searching around for issues related to my system is that Linux doesn’t handle switching from integrated to discrete graphics that well with amd+amd systems. Other users who have Dell G5 SE systems have had the same issue for at least 3 years now.

It’s tolerable because it doesn’t freeze while gaming and that’s the most intensive thing I do on my system. If I was writing or editing and it froze and I lost work constantly, I’d be more upset and annoyed.

Occasionally it will freeze just from opening discord or steam but the load up time is significantly shorter than a windows hard reset. It’s tolerable for me, for now.

I should also add, I can’t start steam normally. It still freezes constantly unless I start directly opening to steam Settings from the start menu.

Adding the command seems to work quite well. All of my games are launching just fine now with all the system updates applied. Which is great because the graphics and fps have improved considerably too.

I did some searching around and it seems the Dell G5 SE line seems to have issues in general with Linux. I tried installing Pop!_OS and the live USB would lock up constantly.

I’ll have to be patient and hope things get sorted out down the line. For now it’s tolerable with Mint, maybe I’ll try some other non-ubuntu distributions later when I’m in the mood and see how stable they are.

A few years ago I got adopted a gecko and had been learning how to make a bioactive terrarium. Using insects such as mealworms/darkling beetles, isopods and springtails to clean up waste, decaying matter and mold.

From that I learned how valuable it was to have a complex eco system in order to make it function. This year I built a garden bed and took all the knowledge and observations from my terrariums and applied it to my garden. I didn’t focus on my crops as much as I focused on created a healthy soil bed for my crops.

I planted clover for ground cover. It provides shade and cover for all the little insects above ground. It retains moisture for anything below ground. It pulls nitrogen into the ground. It also looks pretty.

I placed stones for stepping on but also a place for the crawly things to hide. They love the underside of stones. I don’t have to trample and compact the soil whenever I step inside the garden.

When pruning back my tomato plants, I’d cut the cuttings into small bits and throw it back into the garden bed. It was broken down quite quickly.

I let a few wild plants grow a bit. Eventually I’d pull them, cut them up and toss it back in to be broken down like my tomato plant cuttings.

My garden eventually got to the point where I’d water it every 2-3 days because the soil was still very moist. Always easy to find isopods crawling about. If I dug a bit, I can find worms. The variety of plants brought around lots of different pollinators. My cherry tomato plant is outlasting my neighbours plant although the cooler weather is finally catching up to it and the leaves are just starting to wither. My kale is still growing strong and is almost as tall as me now. The swiss chard is still going as well to my surprise. The rest of my crops have rather died off or producing their last bits of seeds.

I’m considering gathering some fallen leaves this autumn to throw on top of the garden. Add a bit of variety to what gets broken down in the garden.

It’s been a really interesting experience so far and I hope to learn and observe more next year.

I bought a Raspberry Pi a few months ago and I feel strangely prepared. I wanted to use Home Assistant to have greater control over my devices since Philips Hue’s app seemed limited.

I feel like a sucker for falling for Philip’s marketing but at least I can use zigbee. I have now decoupled myself from their Hue Hub and app. Unfortunately I now have a wasteful hub sitting around. I have it posted for free on the classifieds in hopes it will disappear.

I have a meeting tomorrow morning with a mediator and representatives from my old company with my lawyer tomorrow.

I’m trying to get my job back since they fired me in response to bringing up issues of abusive behaviour in the workplace. They are trying to get me to back down and disappear.

I have mixed feelings. A part of me wants my job back. The act itself would spit in the face of the general manager who is rotten to his very core.

The other part of me thinks I’ve done enough damage and can safely call it quits by taking a money offer. I exposed to corporate just how awful management at my company was and in response to my firing, corporate has forced several costly updates to work flow practices at the company, cracked down hard on all the unsafe work practices, refused to represent them in my labour board reprisal claim and forced the HR manager to retire ahead of her scheduled retirement plant (I assume, it’s convenient she retired a month after my claim was officially filed and not in 2024 as scheduled).

Tomorrow I’ll have to pick my battle carefully. As much as I’d love to drag this company to the human rights tribunal, I’m also pretty tired and should consider taking the wins I already achieved.

Bureaucracy is fucking lame.

I haven’t listened to this artist (yet) but the article did resonate with me about feelings that have been brought to the forefront of my attention in the past few years. Particularly after the death of Queen Elizabeth. As people spoke out about what the Queen truly represented to them and their people, all the internalized and disconnected feelings I had been struggling to understand suddenly snapped together.

I am a Guyanese-Canadian. Both my parents came from Guyana and my sister and I were born in Canada. My father passed away before I could form any memories of him. My mom eventually met and married a Canadian with a Scottish background when I was about 8 years old. My first 8 years of school were in schools that were very mixed in a multicultural sense.

That shifted dramatically after I entered highschool where it was half white, half Indian/Pakistani. Where I once felt safe diluted in multiculturalism, I now was unconsciously forced to deal with what it meant to be a brown person in Canada.

My mom was quite young when she and the majority of her family moved to Canada and the United States. My mom had adopted the Canadian way of living more readily compared to her other family as a result. Which meant that I also grew up as a Canadian. She also did not want to return to Guyana after my sister and I were born due to the corruption taking place there. I do not have a sense of what it is to be Guyanese. By blood, I am Guyanese. By culture, I am Canadian and North American. By the end of highschool, I was more confused than ever before. And I only got more confused as time moved forward and I grew older.

The Queen’s death brought a lot of discussion. For many people it was a sad time that saw a notable person with a long history come to an end. For others, it was the death of a person and history that represented colonialism. For me, it was that discussion of colonialism that became the final puzzle piece of understanding why I felt so isolated. Why a brown person who couldn’t truly feel accepted by either white people or brown people.

If you are unaware of the country of Guyana, it is a small, English speaking country in the corner of South America. It is cornered by Venezuela and Brazil. Also in it’s little corner is French Guyana and Suriname (or Dutch Guyana as I like to call it). The history of the Guyana colonies had a lot of back and forth between the British, the French and the Dutch before things settled. A lot of people who came to Guyana came as indentured servitude from India and other parts of the world. You can find black, brown and white Guyanese people.

Today, I don’t really know where my true roots are but my best guess is that originally I am from India. Along the way, some relatives immigrated to Guyana to produce sugar. At some point in time, Canada offered immigration to Canada for Carribean Commonwealth countries and that is when my mom and her family made the move up north.

I had unknowingly been assimilated into whiteness. My histories and cultures slowly stripped away at each generation and I was oblivious to the effects of colonization on my personal life because of this.

Around the time of highschool and getting my first job, the question of who was and where I came from seemed to matter to a lot to people who weren’t me. The question I hated more than anything was “Where are you from?”

Where am I from? That’s easy. Canada. Afterall, I was born here right?

“No, where are you from?”

Canada.

“No, where are you really from?”

Canada. My sister and I were born here.

“Where are your parents from?”

Guyana…

“Oh, so you’re Guyanese!”

But I was born in Canada…?

“But your background is Guyanese, so you’re Guyanese!”

At this point, my mind is attempting to crawl into a hole. Winter snow, block me in, I’m done. But that’s just my interaction with other Canadians.

Indian people would often come up to me and start speaking to me in another language. After a few confused looks and attempts to explain that I only speak English, they would simply turn and walk away. No attempts to speak to me in English. No care or bother for me after finding out I’m not one of them.

And then there are the Guyanese people. They love me when they hear that my background is Guyanese. They then start talking to me as if I had all the knowledge of Guyanese culture. Then they get mad at me for knowing nothing about Guyanese culture. Then they get really upset at me for never visiting Guyana. Then they feel it’s their duty to force feed me Guyanese culture. Then they think something is wrong with me after I reject their culture they are forcing onto me.

These interactions are a pattern. Rarely do they deviate. It does absolutely no good for a person who just wants to feel like they belong somewhere and wants a sense of self. They would not simply accept what I said. In their eyes I am just too young and naive to know that I am actually Guyanese.

Today if you were to ask where I am from, my answer will be “I was born in Canada.”

I’m not proud to be Canadian. Or Guyanese. Or Indian. I was simply born here on this land labeled as Canada.

It’s taken me a long time to understand that I am who I am because of the experiences I’ve experienced. A country does not define me and holds very little value to me these days.

If I should be proud of anything, it’s that I am who I am, and not what others say who I am.

Unfortunately, that’s a road less traveled. I guess that’s why I prefer to travel on that road with like minded people.

I may just switch to another distribution in the future when I have the time. I think I’m also traumatized by windows.

Usually I have to schedule an entire day reformatting and updating windows. Compared to setting up Mint the first time which took maybe a couple hours. A lot of that time was going through the settings just to set things to my preferences.

Still can’t shake the feeling of dread about installing a new OS when deep down inside I know it’s not so bad hahaha

In Mint, from the start menu you can right click on the app you want to run and from the drop down menu you can select to launch with dedicated GPU. Otherwise left clicking will launch with the integrated GPU as normal.

From the other comments, it looks like it may be an ubuntu issue so I’ll consider another distribution and maybe things will run a bit smoother in general.

You indirectly answered another question that got lost in my head. I’ll add those commands to my cheat sheet so I can attempt to diagnose problems myself in the future.

I won’t have a chance to try it out soon but that sounds like the solution I am looking for. I’ll give it a try when I can.

If it’s an ubuntu issue, I may switch over to a different distribution when I have the time to set it up properly.

Thanks for the info.

I was always aware of the subtle misogyny on Reddit, however, it wasn’t until the end did I understand how truly bad it was. All it took was one post and 24 hours for me to see how awful some men can be.

I made a post to a collapse support subreddit detailing how I, a man, had been treated by other men in the workplace. I also explained how the men I have been surrounded by were sexist, racist, homophobic and intolerant to anything “unmanly.” I also went on to explain how the everyday treatment of women was not much different than how leaders and businessmen of the world acted. The only difference being the scale of which their actions affect other people. I also provided a few personal examples of how men manipulate women in every subtle way possible. My main motivation for making the post was finding out a former co-worker of mine was attempting to sext with a legal but considerably younger person we both knew. He is married and has two young girls with his wife.

The comments section was… interesting. I received many comments from women who had agreed with me, acknowledged what I said or expressed gratitude for simply being acknowledged from what I posted. Some men and wives of men also commented saying they experienced similar treatment in a bunch of different fields of work. Those comments made me satisfied with the post.

The other half of the comments all claimed I was promoting hate and that my post was hate speech. There was no middle ground or attempt at discussion. Worse, once they caught on that the subreddit moderator was a woman, they descended into her dm’s with hate filled messages, threats and declaring that she was supporting hate speech against men.

The harrasment was so much that my post was removed by the moderator but she did reach out to me beforehand. It was quite clear to me that my post had unintentionally affected her mental health. We had an understandable back and forth and I don’t blame her for taking an unfortunate step in trying to protect her community she worked so hard to build. A community she needed for herself as well.

The last thing she did say was going forward, she would be more heavy handed with the bans and to be less tolerant of intolerance.

Unfortunately, I quit reddit following the API changes so I don’t know how that subreddit or moderator has progressed over the past months.

I think stronger moderation for such vulnerable communities is a necessity. I also think being a moderator is also a nightmarish position to be in as well. I imagine seeing countless negative or awful comments would have a lingering effect on a moderators mental health. Even worse when it’s a passion project.

I have been trying to be more vocal on Lemmy when I see men attacking feminism and feminist groups. I also try to come from an empathetic and understanding place because matching hostility seems to end the comment thread in flames from my observations.

Unfortunately it seems my comments get ignored while women commenting under the same post will have their comments picked a part letter by letter from hostile men. It seems their goal is simply bullying women.

I wish there was a simpler way to filter out the hate and intolerance but when dealing with so many people, how do you even know where to start? Fighting complexity is a nightmare and people are fucking complex.

I don’t think I’ve heard one good user view on snaps, which is what I’m assuming you are refering to when talking about containers. I don’t have much experience with it but the view on them is overwhelmingly negative.

I do like the concept of cutting out the middle man in this case. However, I’ll probably stick with cinnamon for a while as I’m still learning about the linux environment and distribution hopping will add lots of unnecessary frustration for me.

Thanks for the write up.