Wait until you learn about debhelper.

If you use a debian-based system, unless you have actively looked at the DH source, the one thing that built virtually every package on your system, you do not get to say anything about “bloat” or “KISS”.

DH is a monstrous pile of perl scripts, only partially documented, with a core design that revolves around a spaghetti of complex defaults, unique syntax, and enough surprising side effects and crazy heuristics to spook even the most grizzled greybeards. The number of times I’ve had to look at the DH perl source to understand a (badly/un)documented behavior while packaging something is not insignificant.

But when we replaced a bazillion bash scripts with a (admittedly opinionated but also stable and well documented) daemon suddenly the greybeards acted like Debian was going to collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn’t do anything? Do you think it’s because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you’ve circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you’d hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

Then you’re knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner’s dilemma and all that. That’s what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn’t captured by ideology and corporate interests.

I wonder how many terrorist (and “terrorist”) plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone’s group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it’s an open secret.

It’s so easy to tell this map was made by a Brit. Wales gets its own color (despite largely not speaking Welsh) but Belgium and Switzerland are monochrome (despite having multiple federally recognized and geographically partitioned monolinguistic regions and their own flavors of historical-but-rarely-spoken language)?

Only the Bri’ish would be haughty enough to assume their flavour of federal governance is so unique.

(I don’t actually care, it’s just very interesting how even such an innocent map actually shows a strong political/cultural bias)

You underestimate the sheer volume in my hippocampus dedicated to tracking tabs.

… Kidding, mostly. Because generally tabs are grouped together in a way that makes sense so it’s easy to remember. These 10 tabs are me researching a new tool… A couple tags for articles I will surely get to… Then these 15 tabs are documentation for XYZ… Those 5 tabs are YouTube videos I want to watch… These are three Wikipedia searches that popped in my head and oh look a couple songs I want to listen to before adding them to my playlist.

If I want to find a tab and they are fully minimized then I click on the group with the relevant icon then I Ctrl+Tab through them until I find what I want. Perfectly reasonable.

I swear it makes sense and bookmarks are not an adequate replacement.

ls -l /proc/xxx/{fd,syscall}

Camera pans down to resource locks hiding under the floorboards

You’re describing proper incident response but I fail to see what that has to do with the status page. They have core metrics that they could display on that status page without a human being involved.

IMO a customer-friendly status page would automatically display elevated error rates as “suspected outage” or whatever. Then management can add more detail and/or say “confirmed outage”. In fact that’s how the reddit status page works (or at least used to work), it even shows little graphs with error rates and processing backlogs.

There are reasons why these automated systems don’t exist, but none of these reasons align with user interests.

I agree with what you’re saying, but you’re shifting the goalpost.

Everyone is cheering Wayland on, no one believes it’ll succeed

That parent comment (and other comments like it in these threads) are what I take issue with. You can make the exact same argument why people should stick with Windows and not bother with Linux.

This software has been in development for a long time and still doesn’t work for my niche usecase and this therefore UNUSABLE and DOOMED TO FAIL

• Actual Linux users, completely oblivious to the irony of that sentence

It’s already a thing with near-zero delay. MS Teams does it (dunno about the translation) and the QSMP Minecraft server has a bunch of livestreamers from different countries who use it for realtime translation.

[EDIT: Live demo from today. Shit’s impressive.]

What actually happens is that the current sentence gets “corrected” several times as you keep speaking. It’s a bit jittery and if the word order differs significantly then the translated sentence might be a bit wonky for a few seconds, and there are a few misses but overall it works really well; at least well enough that people who don’t speak each others’ language can have a conversation in their native tongues with essentially no more delay than reading speed. I can easily follow a livestream in a foreign language with the live subtitles (which was not the case a mere 6 months ago for any language other than English).

You could argue the same for most games on most Engines. Half Life: Alyx is the same engine as half-life 2 with more shit added over the years (I think they’ve changed it with the upgrade to Source 2, but this really showed as all Valve games would run as hl2.exe, and source 2 is merely an evolution, not a rewrite).

However Bethesda’s Creative Engine was already quite dated by the time Skyrim came out 12 years ago, and hasn’t received any meaningful improvements since. Honestly at this point it’s not a technical issue, any competent software team could have incrementally fixed and upgraded the engine over 12 years, no matter how buggy it was when Skyrim was released and how much spaghetti there was to clean up.
Bethesda just doesn’t care that their game mechanics are stuck in 2009 and the management is probably too set in its ways to figure out another way to write quests or design level without loading screens, too comfortable with the ease of writing dialogue trees without mocap or even some basic “first year of film school” camera placement.

Too bad for them Baldur’s Gate 3 showed the world that these things actually matter. I won’t hold my breath for TES VI, the technical gap on their engine is only growing and they still haven’t indicated even an acknowledgement of its flaws.

I haven’t seen anyone here “support Israel”. Almost everyone agrees that the Israeli State is not free of guilt, far from it.

What people really disagree over is whether that alone makes Palestine right (nuanced) and whether it justifies Hamas’ actions (unhinged but unfortunately semi-common take on here).

And Soviet communism was… better how? Just as (if not more) destructive to the environment, and their “billionaires” were called “party members” instead. What an improvement! Now they can jail/deport political dissenters without even having to pretend to hold a fair trial.

Now of course this is where communists usually go No True Scotsman, but consider for just ONE MOMENT that the concept of wealth inequality is not, in fact, unique to capitalism. Any economic system is vulnerable to greed. And that the countries with arguably the strongest social welfare, highest human development, etc. are… the Nordics. Hardly capitalist, hardly hellholes.

This is why people say communists are angsty teenagers. Capitalism is a deeply flawed system, but all of what you just pointed to is, in fact, not unique to capitalism. That’s just Americana. Pointing to the U.S. as a reason why “capitalism bad” is just as silly as pointing to N.K. as a reason why “communism bad”.
Typical American with a viewpoint so narrow you can’t see further than your nose. I’ve had lots of interesting discussions with French communists, and I agree with some of their viewpoints, but to start with you have to realize that capitalism is not the root of ALL evil, only of some specific systemic issues, which are only a small part of what’s wrong with the US.