Man pages, help files, and commented configuration files galore

Technical documentation != Tutorials. Not even remotely.

Linux support forums might be hostile to entitled noobs looking for a handout and a quick fix

“Oh so you use Linux? Name every distro (to prove you ‘put in the effort’ to my standards)”

Sarcasm aside, Lime Buzz is completely correct; FOSS as an ecosystem has cultivated an air of ahem techno-elitism, and that severely undermines its actual usefulness as a tool of individual freedom or certainly resistance. If a tool requires a bunch of X (time, money, base knowledge, etc) in order to utilize, it’s not going to be useful to people who do not have that resource to spend on it. Which is going to be the majority of any given group. And that has really made it as an ecosystem much less important than many other concerns. Individual projects can still be important, but Linux is certainly not going to save us from Authoritarianism.

Corporations pay for support services. The code is free (as in speech). No one ever claimed that the support was also (or even should be) free.

Corporations may unfortunately be people, but people are certainly not corporations, and shouldn’t be expected to pay for everything corporations do.

If you believe that Linux actually helps people- that it materially improves their lives over being trapped in a predatory tech world built by for-profit entities who are happy to sell their customers out to a fascist government- then you are conceptualizing the relationship between Linux evangelists and new users incorrectly. We’re not providing sales and tech support in that case, we’re providing them aid. And aid workers don’t ask people to show how much they’ve tried to help themselves before offering them help.

And if you don’t think Linux actually aids peoples’ lives, then you just agree with Lime Buzz that

There are far more important things to worry about and to do.

Relative to people in their country, sure. But China can’t and isn’t interested in flying over to the US to arrest you if you talk to their AI models about Taiwan being its own country, whereas no one should have any doubt that OpenAI or any other US AI company is happy to tell Trump’s administration who’s been asking it about LGBT+ issues or other topics the US government is now against.

It’s not whataboutism anymore, it’s literally that both are evil authoritarian governments, but one (US) has physical access to US users, and the other doesn’t.

Knowing more about AI makes people less open to having it in their lives

Is it just me? Doesn’t this feel like the more natural way to frame this? There’s something about the title that feels like people are being encouraged to know less about it.

I’d be interested if anyone has insight into the mental/ linguistic mechanics of this.

Go away Europol. We already have enough problems to deal with around Big Tech right now without also having to worry about European police states demanding them to do away with any semblance of user privacy.

“When we have a search warrant and we are in front of a house and the door is locked, and you know that the criminal is inside of the house, the population will not accept that you cannot enter.”

If you already know they’re a criminal (i.e. they’re already convicted), why do you need their messages? Or are you referring to suspects as criminals? Also, likening digital communications to actual, physical, living individuals is some “You Wouldn’t Download a Car”-level fear-mongering.

So what are you referring to, then? Inflation-adjusted wage growth?

Purchasing power, which was not shit in the 90s compared to today. That’s what really matters; what can you get with the money you have.

You’re ascribing way too much rationality to the average voter here.

I think you’re ascribing too little. The average voter is not a political philosopher, but they’re also not comatose. They understand simple economic principles like tax cuts being given to others and not to them, or subsidies for certain industries and not others, or the lack of government action to curb rising prices, etc. They may not have all the proper labels to describe what they’re seeing vs what they want to see (and indeed, the US has spent so long demonizing Socialism and propagandizing Capitalism that most can’t describe either properly), but polling proves that most Americans (hilariously, even most Republicans) don’t want cutthroat neoliberal everyone-for-themselves economic policies.

Bold of you to assume there’s more to come, in light of recent events.

I think that Trump would love to install himself as a dictator, and maybe he will, but even dictators keep controlled elections going for the appearance of legitimacy. He’s already 78, and no other Republicans have managed to replicate his popularity among GOP voters. One way or another (unless the US government literally dissolves, which is my preference tbh) we’ll be dealing with a post-Trump US government sooner or later.

We’ll see how long it takes for the government to put a stop to US companies actively data-mining, profiling, and discriminating against our citizenry. I’d say we need a Chinese company to come in and do it, but clearly they’d just ban that one company instead of the actual problematic actions, and allow US companies to continue exploiting us.

bull market

The stock market is not the economy. The economy on the ground has not been bullish. The US stock market doing well benefits the wealth-holders, not workers.

people primarily care about their own life, and just aren’t motivated by big abstract concepts

I agree, which is why the DNC’s attempt to allow a leftward shift only in its social policies has fallen largely flat with connecting with voters. It’s a sort of Rainbow-Politics, if you will. Voters see that they’re not actually moving Leftwards on economic policies that would help their own lives.

Sadly, it seems the DNC is taking this as a message that the Leftward shift on social issues was the problem, rather than the lack of economic change. Sanders has been talking about exactly this ever since election day, but the DNC leadership is already signaling they don’t believe that or care. I am worried we’re in for several Presidential election losses before they all die out or get the message.

Passion isn’t felt towards everything equally, it’s specific, and Democrats can’t figure out how to make people passionate about their candidates without compromising on their leaders’ neoliberal economic policies and their so-called “rules based order” of American hegemony, so they keep losing. Obama ran as a populist candidate, and he blew away previous numbers even though he turned out to be a staunch neoliberal. Biden barely managed to eke out a win in 2020 (“Despite his relatively comfortable 74 vote margin in the Electoral College, Biden only won the decisive states of Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona by a combined 43,000 votes.”), and it was only because he was coming straight out of Trump’s term. Harris had 2 months to try to turn around Biden’s dumpster fire of a campaign, and she made too many missteps.

Ultimately, candidates have to earn votes, and the DNC’s anti-populism and pro-neoliberalism clearly aren’t doing it for people. Maybe in the '90s when people’s salaries were booming, Clinton was able to win on it, but we’re not in that economy, and most Millennials and younger have only seen recessions and stagnation. Even after Trump, we’re in for more losses if Democrats only allow for Progressive social policies, and not economic or political ones.

The fact that Congress could come together so rapidly and so unanimously to do something so stupid, at a time when our country is falling apart, says so much about their priorities. They work for the Capitalist class, not us.

I hate to link to Reddit (and I’m too old to know how to get to the original video), but this also seems pretty relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1i302rf/if_tiktok_being_banned_doesnt_radicalize_you_as/

In the beginning, sure. But all the TikTok users actively choosing Chinese alternatives would seem to disagree with that, now.

You’re argument is basically that you should have the right to to ruin yourself.

Look, I agree with you that TikTok is bad, but… YES, freedom means the ability to choose, good or bad.

If you want someone to blame for this, blame the US government for allowing US tech companies to become so predatory and gross that young people literally prefer a foreign product that may be profiling them. It’s not like data collection and censorship isn’t rife on Xitter or FB, and the reality for most Americans is that the US government has more ability to use their data to directly harm them than the CCP does. No one is worried that the Chinese government is going to show up in Alabama with CPS in tow because a teen revealed they’re trans online.

That’s a feature, but sadly many don’t realize that

Zuckerberg is just cynically following the political winds to avoid Trump going after Meta at Elmo’s behest. He doesn’t care any way about anything other than getting and keeping (not) his money. The second Democrats control all 3 branches, if that ever happens again, he’ll make another 180. Don’t give him the credit of saying these are his true, “mask off” morals or beliefs; he has no morals or beliefs.

Starting into the article, I got the impression that it was heading for a “centralization ultimately better” argument, so I’m glad it concludes on decentralization and federation’s advantages.

There are no issues that exist on federated and distributed channels as individual nodes that don’t also exist on centralized ones, differences only emerge when you try to treat or exercise control over distributed systems as a group. Facebook is completely centralized, but they still have to deal with third party content making its way onto their platform via bots, API posts, integrations, ads, etc. The big difference is that with a centralized platform, you have a Single Point of Failure, and that’s bad all-around.

There is literally no advantage to a centralized platform that I can think of (though I’m sure that people less opposed to authority/ hierarchy would disagree).

Wasn’t part of the point that the mindset necessary to create Iron Man would inevitably lead to Ultron?

Automation to increase power (productivity) beyond what humans alone could do -> Iron Man -> Cutting out humans once they are the chokepoint/ limiter in power (productivity) -> Ultron

Companies want automation because they don’t want human limits on productivity to restrict their profits. That mindset is the problem. If we accept that mindset as a valid business operating model, it will never not lead to wanting to remove humans as much as possible.

Turns out the Luddites were right, and the company-owned factory automation was a scheme to dilute worker pay and value. That we’re now fighting not to have workers cut out of the equation entirely kind of proves that it was in fact a slope we’ve slipped down.

9 hours a day, 9 days a week, 6 years a year

The person quoted in the OP who said

I’m probably being too hopeful

I’m probably being too hopeful

They are. Trump likes to make statements that he thinks sound “strong”, and that’s all that “and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone” was. He didn’t actually have any intention or meaning behind it, he’s just pandering to his faux-masculine base who like hearing threats made because threatening people is “manly” in their minds.

I didn’t really want to have to watch any more of this dude, but I wanted to make sure I gave him a fair shake… and hoo boy.

Just look at it for what it is, and realize it’s going to fail. And then plan accordingly.

This is just victim blaming, bruh. Even if a developer sees a project is going badly, it’s not like there are infinite jobs out there that need filling. Changing jobs is not fast and easy, some of the workers are likely on work visas that don’t allow them to just change employers, game companies aren’t all in the same small area such that it won’t require moving homes which is a huge expense, and there’s no guarantee that the project you’re moving to will be any better.

This is a failure of worker protection laws. Framing it as workers just needing to hustle smarter, while executives run companies and families into the ground, is peak corporate apologism.

He’s literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being “too woke” and tries to counter that.

If you don’t think that alt-right-lite is a huge problem in gaming circles, I don’t know what to tell you. Go play literally any multiplayer game and you will find plenty of gamers spouting anti-DEI/ anti-woke/ right-wing talking points in no time flat. And yes, they absolutely do avoid games based on it. And the problem with just ignoring this is that you’re ceding the narrative to them. Young white men have seen a shift rightwards precisely because alt-right-lite chuds like JonTron capture them via gaming-focused content, and then shift them over to politics-focused guys like Tate/ Shapiro/ etc. It’s a pipeline, that often starts in gaming spaces.

Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games “journalists” push on a daily basis.

He wasn’t talking about ideological soapboxes in reference to journalists, he was talking about developers. And he is using that as a direct euphemism for “DEI”/ “woke” content.

And yes, the comments are agreeing with him, that’s the point of a dogwhistle. There are a bunch of comments being anti-diversity/ anti-woke, referencing another video of his about game companies hiring people who supposedly despise gamers.

Here is a video of his called “The Real Impact of DEI in Gaming”. He uses rainbow/pink/diversity-washing being bad to then ultimately conclude that DEI is a net negative that he (no joke) BLAMES ON OVERREGULATION by the government. He then goes on to suggest that DEI actually is about dividing people in order to (also not a joke) feed a DEI-consulting industry.

“They’re hiring in people that don’t have the merit, that don’t have the skill” (8:40) Classic. He then goes onto blame “DEI hire” developers for games being buggy or releasing too early, as though that is their choice (once again, he clearly doesn’t understand what developers do or do not control).

It’s frustrating seeing these chuds get wiser about the number of levels they couch their ultimate anti-diversity rhetoric in, because clearly it’s working on some people. Instead of saying, “diversity in gaming companies bad”, he says, “regulations force execs to hire diverse devs who lack merit (which is bigoted bs on its own), who then over time lower the quality of games, ** and also** evil DEI consultants intentionally push devs to make diverse games without being sincere about the portrayals and stories… so in the end we should stop pushing devs to be diverse and make diverse games, and just let each group of people make games for themselves (which is back to square one where big companies just hire white guys).”

He’s literally just taking all the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric and applying to to gaming.