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True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.

The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.

Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.

Reviewers like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed serve the Windows gamer market first. If you game on Windows you want to know the best price/performance for your purposes. Benchmarking kernel compiles and database transactions on Linux has zero relevance to a Windows gamer, particularly if Microsoft bugs cause the performance not to translate.

If we only looked at raw hardware performance and ignored platform support we might evaluate Nvidia only on Windows and determine they are the best graphics cards for Linux users which would be insane. Platform support matters to an audience.

Not sold on declarative systems in all domains. It often creates unnecessary complexity for little advantage.

Immutable root has huge benefits in large deployments for consumers, enterprise or servers. Really great for Chromebooks and consoles. Probably would benefit the majority of Windows installations, certainly in enterprise. I do not like the idea of critical systems being updated with random shit becoming standard practice as in WIndows/Clownstrike land. Those guys have normalised insanity to the point they think we are the crazy ones.

However I like to mutate my desktop and development systems. I use linux because I like the freedom to tinker and that includes the freedom to mess stuff up. In practice having root writable only by a privileged user, a signed software distribution and knowing what I am doing mostly keeps me out of trouble. On the very rare occasions I find myself without a bootable system (it has happened to me more than once in 30 years) I know how to recover and it doesn’t stress me.

Windows usage isn’t the cause of dysfunction in corporate IT but a symptom of it. All you would get is badly managed Linux systems compromised by bloated insecure commercial security/management software.

I isn’t even a Linux vs Windows thing but a competent at your job vs don’t know what the fuck you are doing thing. Critical systems are immutable and isolated or as close as reasonably possible. They don’t do live updates of third party software and certainly not software that is running privileged and can crash the operating system.

I couldn’t face working in corporate IT with this sort of bullshit going on.

Same here. Ext4 is an excellent general purpose file systems and a sensible default. It lacks features that are useful, even critical, for some use cases which sometimes rules it out but it certainly isn’t obsolete.

Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.

Apple, like Nvidia, are a hostile hardware platform. I have a lot of respect for the ingenuity of the people who invest time and energy to unlock closed hardware. That is the true foundation of the free software movement. I am far less sympathetic to people who support these vendors financially and then complain when things don’t work. Caveat emptor.

Windows 9x was extremely time consuming to install with multiple reboots and before that it was all config files. Out of the box 95 couldn’t play media, connect to the internet (thanks trumpet), even access a cd. Normies bought machines pre-installed and got help when the system shit itself. Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust. You had to reboot numerous times and use third party drivers and apps for everything. I recently installed a disposable Win 10 to do a firmware upgrade and Microsoft have come a long way though having to disconnect the Internet to get a local login is very dark.

A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.

Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.

Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.

I usually roll on desktop/laptop and upgrade on headless. Just seems most practical.

So basically the same as half the school administered laptops full of remote spyware. We had one of those bought home, supplied to teaching staff, the spyware was never disclosed and it used to sit on a desk in the bedroom. The rule now is we buy and control our own devices, even if they have to run shit like Windows for compatibility on some. Enterprise versions of Windows will almost certainly ship without crap like Recall as it might conflict with the enterprises third party spyware. Unfortunately there is still intense institutional resistance to moving away from the Microsoft ecosystems in some organizations.

No it isn’t racist anymore than consensual sex is rape. There is nothing adverse or hateful here. I wish groups like this didn’t exist. I wish women didn’t need to circle the wagons and create safe spaces and we could all participate in open source as peers. I don’t know if people troll with these sorts of comments or lack emotional intelligence. If you don’t want these divisions to exist then don’t be part of the problem.

I have been wanting to watch this since release but it isn’t showing anywhere near me or streaming or available to purchase and ironically I haven’t pirated because I figured everyone was in the same situation so good quality rips would be scarce. This movie is a spectacular example of all that is wrong with geographical distribution rights. I will probably still wait for a legit stream on this one because I want to send a positive signal if any service grabs the rights but I can’t blame people for making other choices. Copyright is supposed to protect the rights holders so they can profit from their work but in cases like this it just stops them connecting with their audience and they get nothing, neither money or exposure. I don’t think piracy is harming anyone in this situation.

Wait until they hear the language used to implement OpenBSD. Imagine being one of the authors of seL4 encountering a member of the rust cult.

Micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) are extremely successful. You have them in your phone and lots of other devices. It turns out semiconductor manufacturing techniques could be leveraged to make some useful devices but that is about it. There is obviously a lot happening at these scales in biology, semiconductors, materials science etc but the grey goop of nanobots turned out to be a fantasy based on extrapolations that don’t seem to hold up well with physical materials thankfully. One less thing to worry about. Now we only have climate change, pathogens, war etc. Hopefully the machine learning bubble will blow over in a similar fashion, genuinely revolutionary in some areas but increasingly difficult/uneconomical to scale into others.

I apologise for the language but I am fed up with this shit.

I don’t think promoting OpenAI/Microsoft services is very compatible with the open source/free software ethos.

OpenAI pretend to be a non-profit but are controlled by billionaires and Microsoft. I am not going to take up a subscription and have my personal data mined by a company so I can have the arch wiki and man pages developed with millions of hours of volunteer labour served back to me.

I used to attend Linux/free software conferences decades ago and there would always be that one person who thought Facebook or Google were brilliant and that adding everyone’s lives and personal data to gmail or facebook was totally fine because the APIs were cool and big companies are totally ethical, “Don’t be Evil” etc. I thought they were foolish then and I think time has shown they are even more foolish now.

Every news site and forum I go to, even very non-technical ones, has people appear out of nowhere exclaiming with enthusiasm how OpenAI/copilot solved all their problems in great detail. Whether they are genuine or are just on the hype train created by bots and paid influencers I am at my breaking point with this shit. It is worse than the crypto bros with their NFT monkeys and get rich schemes. It has nothing directly todo with Linux or open source software. I escaped reddit to avoid all the influencers and people peddling shit but it is here as well and people can’t see it for what it is.

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