Recovering skooma addict.
Typical call to the AI safety hotline:
Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…
It’s interesting to see that Linux has gotten popular enough that a few of the most user-hostile devs are going out of their way specifically to stop people using it. Other than ignorance it’s unclear what their motivations could be. I for one will remember the names of the studios that do it and try my best never to buy or talk about their games.
You’ve got to keep the airlines running, though. How could we burn such enormous amounts of fossil fuels for ever and ever without them?
It does not require compromising your free software ideals
By which of course I mean what I think of as free software ideals, which I’ve come to understand in large part through the teachings of Richard Stallman even though I’m not personally such an idealist as he is. He Sometimes he even goes so far as to recommend people to services with non-free software on the server side, so long as it requires only free software on systems that the user controls. Your standards may differ. But anyway, if you had to quit fedi because someone set up a fediverse/telegram bridge I think it would not be a practical way to live. Where you draw the line is of course up to you, but I wouldn’t expect many people to follow you that far from the usual FOSS positions.
You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client
ohhhh so that’s how normal people do it. I sort of felt stupid for not figuring out the easy way when I wrote an overly-complicated shell script for it.
I don’t think even RMS himself would refuse to participate in something on the grounds that Telegram users are also able to do so. It does not require compromising your free software ideals. By all means point out to them that you believe them to be doing something wrong, but the method you’ve chosen to try and get them to change their ways seems very likely to be ineffective and also counterproductive. It does further divide the community, even if others have already done even worse.
It looks like you are more of an xmpp advocate than a free software advocate. If you want to join a matrix room and it’s too burdensome to do so through your xmpp client, then use a matrix client for that. Without some much better reasons for doing so, setting up a competing xmpp room is not a reasonable alternative.
… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.
I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.
I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don’t want it using up any of my attention or the computer’s resources the rest of the time.
I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.
Government isn’t about industrial policy any more, the leaders are all too busy with the latest all-purpose political strategy: Flood the zone with useless bullshit, hope something good happens that you can take credit for.
There’s way more than enough wealth in this country to go around, if it were evenly distributed.
Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.
I checked the local classified ads and their prices don’t seem too far out of line with what people are asking. I guess there’s still demand even though 2020 seems like a long time ago in computer years. Not from me though, I think the PS3 will be my last. There’s no need for a newer console now that games can run on linux.
I don’t know much about Doug Ford, but this sounds a lot like one of those “every accusation is a confession” situations.
The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria
Depends on the argument I guess. Don’t bring a sweet roll to the kind where you need a war axe.
I’ve used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I’m probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I’d say they’re both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They’re quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.
One way to stop the alt-right Russian propaganda campaigns from undermining trust in our institutions would be to improve those institutions in order to avoid giving those who aim to disrupt our society so much authentic discontent to work with. But that would take competent government and difficult choices, grappling with under-acknowledged problems, and making radical changes to our economy to make it more financially, democratically, and ecologically sustainable. Why bother, when you can instead simply hire anti-Kremlin influencers like me?
Give me a call and I’m sure we can work something out.
I took notes for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t like their info in video form. My attempt to summarize what Linus says:
He enjoys the arguments, it’s nice that Rust has livened up the discussion. It shows that people care.
It’s more contentious than it should be sometimes with religious overtones reminiscent of vi versus emacs. Some like it, some don’t, and that’s okay.
Too early to see if Rust in the kernel ultimately fails or succeeds, that will take time, but he’s optimistic about it.
The kernel is not normal C. They use tools that enforce rules that are not part of the language, including memory safety infrastructure. This has been incrementally added over a long time, which is what allowed people to do it without the kind of outcry that the Rust efforts produce by trying to change things more quickly.
There aren’t many languages that can deal with system issues, so unless you want to use assembler it’s going to be C, C-like, or Rust. So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust.
If you make your own he’s looking forward to seeing it.