The year of the Linux desktop I’m thinking of was like 2008. That was then it became perfectly usable on the desktop and I haven’t had to switch back since.

I don’t understand why anyone care’s what Linux’s “market share” is. It’s open source, no one makes money when someone installs Linux.

Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.

I dunno, I hate Trump as much as the next guy but it seems to me he meant “I’m going to fix all the country’s problems in one term so you won’t need to vote for me again”, not “I’m going to abolish voting”.

Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like “tech bros ruined the internet”. No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn’t care about the downsides. There’s an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren’t cool enough.

£100k per year is not middle class, it’s the top 3% of the country.

I grew up middle class, my family are lawyers, high level civil servants, software engineers. I don’t know anyone who earns £100k.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren’t art, but that doesn’t mean someone working in photography as a medium can’t be an artist.

In my experience it’s only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they’re comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don’t physically make the marks yourself and it’s the concept and composition that’s important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like “oh, that’s interesting”. They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn’t art depends on the intention not the process.

This is why I can’t do online left wing spaces any more. They talk the talk about ableism, but then its “why can’t you boycott the only food you can eat, just eat something else”, “you could talk to service workers if you wanted to, you just think you’re better than them”.

Then sharing a video of people with their fingers in their ears at a black music festival with a caption calling them racists, when they’re clearly autistic people enjoying the festival but having sensory problems.

I blame the popular understanding/misunderstanding of neurodiversity. People think autism is just a personality type.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

Does anyone else not really like talking about their special interests?

I can see how bored people are the second I start, like their eye contact suddenly breaks and they look around the room, and only say “mmhmm” instead of replying. So I shut up after one sentence.

But if the other person also likes the subject, I don’t like talking to them either, because there’s nothing to say. If we disagree I don’t want to be rude and argue so I awkwardly pretend to agree. If we agree then all you can do is tell each other things you both already know and agree that they’re good.

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it’s all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn’t actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.

Looks like they commited a change to Piped bot two hours ago which accidentally removed the functionality to actually change the link. Whoops!

Absolutely. I tried getting back into Usenet a few years ago and it was like Yahoo Answers.

But he specifically said that not everyone has to like it.

He said not everyone can handle it, implying there’s something with people that don’t like it.

There’s this irritating Emperor’s New Clothes thing with movies and TV lately where creators can make the most boring stuff imaginable, and then when people say it’s boring you simply imply they aren’t smart enough to understand it.

Weird how it’s literally impossible to ever live without something no one had 100 years ago

VR porn needs to be at least 4k for immersion and you can only get that quality with a paid account. But that’s a waste of money so you pay for one month and fill a hard drive before you cancel.

This is the only reason why anyone wears any particular type of clothing. There is no style of clothing that it objectively makes sense to wear.

It’s a shame the strategy is now failing because software as a service is so popular. Nothing in the GPL forces you to distribute your changes if you don’t distribute the program. So just put the program on a webserver and let users interact through an API and hey presto, steal as much GPL code as you like.

Everyone crucified MongoDB when they tried to create a licence that prevents this, and FSF have declared that the problem can’t be solved with licences and everyone just has to boycott non-free software (good luck!).

End of free software as we know it, IMHO.

I suspect a lot of “breakages” were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.

I wash my hands because I use my hands to manipulate objects, touch my face and prepare food. Perhaps you perform these tasks with your anus?

If I had a sphincter on my hand with shit inside it, which occasionally farted or shit came out, and washing it would never actually make it hygienic because it’s not a hermetic seal and bacteria from the shit inside would always be on it anyway, then yeah I’d just wipe it with paper. And use the other hand

Or you never used paper properly.