My mom died.

My father taught me to hate myself.

You invite my “billionaires shouldn’t exist” TED talk.

Requires a constitutional amendment, which, in case it isn’t obvious, will not happen, as it will require the yea votes of states that currently wield outsized power under the current system.

Yeah, and folks know “scruples” as a noun which some people have and some don’t, but “scruple” as a verb is a nice archaic version that I really like, which you don’t encounter much outside of, say, a Jane Austen novel.

I would say “meaningful”. Billionaires can have a very noticeable effect with their philanthropy, while making essentially no sacrifice on their part. The Gates Foundation does very noticeable good, but Bill Gates isn’t giving of himself very much.

“scruple” as a verb, meaning “hesitate due to conscience”.

It was coined by Cory Doctorow.

Windows has problems, no doubt. But in terms of surfacing functionality in the GUI, it does it a lot more thoroughly than Linux does.

Not to mention having to know things like what my window manager is, am i running “Gnome” or “KDE” before i download an app in a software store. And on and on. Linux is so much less friendly.

Every print dialogue in Windows, they all pretty much have all the same basic options, called the same things, so that inconsistency isn’t that big a deal.

My experience has been filing a bug on a FOSS app, and having it almost immediately closed because it was a dupe of a bug reported ten years prior which remained open and unfixed. I’m not a programmer, so it’s just, “Well, I guess I’m out of luck on this ever being fixed.”

I’ve done a fair bit of UI/UX work in my career, so I have a lot of sympathy for naive users, and FOSS devs mainly do not. If there’s some functionality that is only exposed with a command line parameter, well, that’s good enough. Read the man page.

Linux users are self-selected for increased tech savvy, so they’ll say, “Yes, it’s the best,” but really, the Linux community is still extremely forgiving of terrible user interface, and value things like FOSS over things like apps with robust, accessible feature sets. Linux users are happy to fix functionality holes with writing a shell script, and think nothing of it: it’s not a lack in the OS, it’s a testament to the power and flexibility of the OS!

I’ve used a few flavors of Linux, and their GUIs are almost uniformly terrible, only partially functional without using a terminal. For instance, they have various software and OS update apps located in semi-random menu locations, and none of them work as well as “sudo apt update / sudo apt upgrade / sudo apt full-upgrade / sudo apt autoremove”. And there’s a huge part of the Linux community that thinks this is great and not a problem at all.

Windows hides the ugly sausage-making from typical users, and forces IT folks and other developers to wrangle with it. Linux makes IT/dev lives easier while making typical users somewhat hamstrung if they’re scared of a CLI. So, if that has meaning for you with regards to the question “Is Linux as good as we think it is?” then you may have your answer.

US universities are pro football teams with a sideline in education.

They have ARPU targets (Average Revenue Per User) and UAC targets (User Acquisition Costs). Whales contribute significantly to the game’s bottom line. Non-paying customers are vital, because player population is a game quality, and Whales need a population to notice how awesome they are.

But game companies don’t tend to separate Whales from other players (at least not the ones I’ve worked for), they tend to care about ARPU, which is more stable, and a much easier target to shoot for. And they want to keep UAC down, which lowers the required ARPU for a successful game.

The name holds it back more than you know. No EP or AD wants to put “The GIMP” on their software list for a project. I have to have a conversation with someone ensuring we’re good on all our licenses, and they ask, “What is this GIMP thing?” Answering it makes me sound like an unprofessional jackass. The company would rather just pay Adobe.

I run GrapheneOS. I’m also not a dick about it.

You care too much about this. Let people enjoy things.

You just described letting developers dictate which OS you use…

One, let’s accept that there is a public domain, and cribbing freely from the public domain is A-OK. I can reproduce Michaelangelo all I want, and it’s all good. AI can crib from that all it wants.

AI can’t invent. People can invent: i can have a wholly new idea that no one has ever had. AI does nothing but recombine other existing ideas. It must have seed data, and it won’t create anything for which it has no initial input: feed it photographs only, and it can’t create a pencil drawing image. Feed it only black and white images, and it can’t create color images.

People do not require cribbing from sources. Give a toddler supplies, and they will create. So, we have established that there is a fundamental difference between the creation process. One is dependent on previous work, and one is not.

Now, with influences, you can ask, is your new creation dependent on the previous creation directly? If it is so utterly dependent on the prior work, such that your work could not possibly exist without that specific prior art, you might get sued. It will get debated and society’s best approximation of a collective rational mind will determine if you copied or if you created something new that was merely inspired by prior art.

AI can only create by the direct existence of prior art. It fakes invention. Its work has to come from somewhere else.

People have shown how dependent it is on its sources with prompts that say things like, “portrait of a patriotic soldier superhero” and it comes back with a goddamned portrait of Chris Evans. The prompt did not include his name, or Captain or America, and it comes back with an MCU movie poster. AI does not create. People create.

You don’t get to both ignore intellectual property rights of others, and enforce them for yourself. Fuck these guys.

The Other Shoe: the first recipient was Mitch McConnell, and his episodes lately have been during firmware updates.

Using Facebook on a mobile browser is horrible: the scrolling snaps all over the place. They’re awful, which is why i won’t have any Meta software on my phone.