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 was the opposite, I accepted going bald early on and went full-shave for a few years. When it grew back a bit everyone said it looks way better, and I regret spending most of my 30s with a shaved head.

Yeah I always cringe when I see the “hair transplants are gender affirming care” meme. It’s so embarrassing when someone on your side of the argument says something so dumb. Going bald isn’t feminine?

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.

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

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.

Yeah I hate Musk but this stuff is stupid, including that photo of him “with” Ghislaine Maxwell where he isn’t posing or smiling and has his back fully turned to her. They were obviously having separate photos taken when Maxwell’s photographer shouted his name.

I wouldn’t want a job making more money for hedge fund, but it’s such an interesting technical problem. They’re building custom hardware with FPGAs to parse price changes directly from network packets and respond before a normal CPU even knows what’s happening!

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’ve never doubted the Tiananmen Square massacre before, but there are so many posts lately insisting it happened I’m starting to think maybe it didn’t