Regarding earplugs, hi-fi manufacturers like Sennheiser and AKG (can’t remember exactly which of them) make earplugs for musicians and concert-goers, so the person hears all the instruments, but quieter.

Idk how Vaio are built these days, but Macbooks have been famously made from an aluminium slab by cutting out the inside space, for a long time now. This ensures solid structural integrity. Plus the display hinge is very robust too, doesn’t swing easily.

I’ve had a Vaio back in the late 00s, it was slapped together from separate plastic parts and creaked with any movement.

Check out the netlabel plainly named ‘Russian Post-punk’ for some of that genre from various post-Soviet countries.

Some more from Eastern Europe:

Russia:

• NOM, e.g. ‘Entertainers choir of the conductors reserve’ — 90s ironic punkish rock, often mocking popular kitsch and consumerism. Now doing some metal-y songs with commentary on current events.

• Nol — 80s-90s bayan folk-punk. Later Fyodor Chistyakov recorded some moody interpretations of classical music on bayan, and currently lives in the US and has released English versions of his old songs (but they suck, because he’s old now and because the songs don’t translate well).

• Mango-Mango — 90s comedy-rock with splendid ska-ish instrumentation

• Nogu Svelo — 90s absurdist rock

• Boney Nem: e.g. ‘Heavy Nagila’ and ‘Chito-grito-margalito’ — mostly parodying cheesy Russian pop music in thrash and death metal. The 2003 album ‘День Победы’ (‘Day of Victory’) is full of bangers.

• Lemonday — acoustic-ish low-fi somewhat absurdist anti-folk. Their best stuff is these old videos on YouTube.

• Inturist — jazz/post-punk fusion

• toska po domu — electronic post-punk (Russian, based in Tel-Aviv)

• My friend tape recorder — very danceable post-punk, oddly lyrical

• margenrot — post-punk/post-industrial with some Arabic motifs

• Beskultura - noise-rock

• Megapolis — retro rock (the linked song is actually a cover of a 1958 song, but with different lyrics)

• Egor Letov / Grazhdanskaya Oborona — 90s psychedelic punk (fun fact: Egor’s brother Sergei Letov is a jazz saxophonist, famously having played in Sergei Kuryokhin’s band)

• Straw Raccoons — 90s absurdist noise-rock/punk

• Zemfira — 2000s inscrutable Russian alt-rock with pretty good instrumentation, afaik all written by the titular lead singer and leader of her band

• Anatoly Nikulin’s ‘Russian Music’ is a bunch of prog-rock/electronic covers of early-20th-century classical music that was influenced by the folk tradition back then

5’nizza — 90s Ukrainian reggae-rock

Воплі Відоплясова — Ukrainian folk-rock

The Hypnotunez — Ukrainian, playing some kinda Balkan-ska/swing

Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra — a rather obvious recommendation for Serbian/Balkan folk-rock

Zdob și Zdub — Moldovan, playing Balkan folk-rock

Đorđe Marjanović was a popular Serbian/Yugoslav singer of the 1960s with rock’n’roll songs among other stuff

Demolition Group — Slovenian post-punkish rock, known for inclusion on the ‘Trans Slovenia Express’ tribute compilation by Laibach

the VAPE (Petr Válek) — hilarious Czech noise

A Hawk & A Hacksaw — USian, but mixing Balkan, Jewish and Turkish music

Elsewhere:

Die Toten Hosen — German bar-punk

Sexy Sushi — French electroclash / synth-punk (picks up with the forth track in particular)

Hedningarna and Värttinä — Nordic folk-rock

Garmarna — Swedish folk-rock

Ulver’s ‘Kveldssanger’ is an acoustic album of sorta Norwegian folk-rock, made between two raw-black-metal albums

Tappi Tíkarrass and Kukl — Icelandic, punk/post-punk bands in which Björk was before The Sugarcubes

(Perhaps check out the 1982 concert/documentary film ‘Rokk í Reykjavík’, from which the Tappi Tíkarrass footage is taken, for more Icelandic post-punk/new-wave bands.)

‘Saigon Rock & Soul: Vietnamese Classic Tracks 1968–1974’ and ‘Cambodian Rocks’ — brilliant compilations of garage-ish rock of Vietnam and Cambodia from back in the day

Pungo — Japanese jazzy post-punk/folk (see ‘Waltz’ in particular)

Garage Chanson Show — Japanese dark-cabaret

Melt-Banana — Japanese noise-rock

Ruins — Japanese prog/noise-rock

Faye Wong — Hong-Kong pop, check out the cover of ‘Dreams’ from the film ‘Chungking Express’

Mammals — Chinese noise/math-rock

Mimilocos — most probably Argentinian, coldwave

Molotov — Mexican rap/alt-rock

Odd that ‘Splean’ is spelled like that in English, when the original word directly corresponds to ‘spleen’ as in bad mood or melancholy. Wikipedia notes that it’s ‘a pun on the spelling of the Beatles’, but it doesn’t quite work imo.

Operators of pirate sites don’t tend to publicize their identities.

Reddit has at least one sub where the posts and the comments are generated by Markov-chain bots. More than a few times I’ve gotten a post from there in my feed, and read through it confusedly for several minutes before realizing. Iirc it’s called subreddit_simulator.

Yeah, the US got a lot of hubris talking about how other countries are dangerous, and then I see posts like this every month.

I’ve understood things about Macbooks back in the early 2010s when I saw a manager at my job holding his Air, open, by the corner while gesticulating. A contemporary Vaio would’ve snapped in half from such treatment.

Kinda like Daft Punk’s nu-disco stuff, but with synths straight from Modern Talking.

Second Life never took off

“In 2013, it had approximately one million regular users.”

‘Second Life’ has been chugging along for twenty-two years, with an actual in-game economy and a GDP of 500 million bucks. But clutchtwopointzero here thinks it ‘never took off’.

& runs the program in the background right away.

Another comment in the thread says that “isn’t pro-choice” is exactly about the rejection of the axiom.

Stop threats to democracy

Isn’t Korea getting these insurrection attempts with each new administration?

I keep wondering which one of the two countries will first implement cyberpunk: the Sovereign Chaebol of Samsung or the United State of FAANG.

Back in the day I’ve listened to him at some panel gathering, about AI. And heard nothing that wasn’t already said by sci-fi writers and tech thinkers. So his ‘genius’ anyways eluded me, while him being the moneybag raised suspicions.

Hearing that he was in PayPal immediately put everything in place, because that company was known for decades for freezing people’s accounts on random pretext and keeping the money.

Regrettably catbox doesn’t work for some people on Lemmy, neither directly nor via Tor. Idk why, just doesn’t connect.

Remarkable how a carefully chosen username never fails to bring out people with nothing but farts in their heads, who think their focus on the name gives any weight to their twaddle in the absence of actual thought.

Did you forget that you wanted to block me, coward? Something keeps you coming back, apparently.

xdg-open seems to do the same in Linux, since ‘xdg-utils’ oversee file associations.

I bet the GUI environments also have their own mechanisms to indicate that the app needs to close, before whipping out the signals.

More like, the app complains about not being able to find the window manager due to some environment variables missing in the shell env, and refuses to launch.