Technically, nothing you use in tech is ever really “simple”, there’s tons of complexity hidden from the common user. And whenever parts of that complexity fail or don’t work like the user expects it to, then the superficially simple stuff becomes hard.

Docker and containers are a fairly advanced topic. Don’t think that it’s easy getting into this stuff. Everyone has to learn quite a bit in advance to utilize that.

To play games, you went into the wrong direction when fiddling with wine directly, or even just indirectly by using bottles You COULD do that, but you’ve literally chosen the hardest path to do so. You should use something like HeroicGamesLauncher, Lutris or Steam in order to manage your games, install and launch them fairly easily. These will take care of all the complex stuff behind the scenes for you.

At this point, being on this planet is a losing cause.

I strongly disagree that unpopular things are automatically a losing cause though. I use and do some unpopular things because it’s more ethical or more beneficial overall, but I’m not at all troubled with it. I just try to be a somewhat decent citizen where many others would just be like “lol I don’t care about any consequences, just give me the cheapest or most convenient option”. I’m not like that. And I think more people shouldn’t be. But, again, at this point… it’s definitely a losing battle. But I still do it because then I can tell myself that I at least tried to do the somewhat right thing. It’s kind of just to have a clean conscience, whereas some others are completely fine burning the world for their own short-term gain. That’s basically the difference.

The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It’s a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.

Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it’s cheaper, then you’ll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don’t matter much. But that’s about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.

AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it… it’s never going to be truly great. And it’s also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There’s most likely a saturation curve, and we’re most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won’t really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they’ll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don’t even need to fulfill any more promises.

Two words which every internet-using person should know about because they tend to be forgotten: proportionality and sophistication.

Just because there is some element of crime within a specific group within a society, doesn’t mean that the solution is to completely exterminate the whole society.

This is what the word “extremism” means - if you’re an extremist you find extreme measures at least OK because you’ve stopped differentiating and thinking about proportions. And when doing extreme measures to a specific group of people (usually a minority group, or even a whole weaker country), then you’re right-wing extremist.

You wouldn’t want those things to be done to yourself when you’re part of a subgroup that’s under attack. You wouldn’t want to be a victim of extreme measures. That’s one reason why these extreme measures shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Collapse will definitely come. Our way of living on this planet is not sustainable, especially now where everyone who would have the power/influence to change things does literally and openly the opposite (e.g. USA turning their back on climate friendly research/technologies for example). So I think it’s kind of over, I’m kind of an optimist but time is simply running out, we had the Paris agreement and all that jazz like 10 years ago and almost nothing really changed (the only time something changed for the positive was during 2020/2021 but that was involuntarily!), in fact it’s now probably worse than it was back then, so it’s kind of over. Sure you can and should individually continue fighting for it because every small improvement will at least delay the collapse a bit which is useful, but I’m not going to naively believe that we will be able to counteract this anymore. It’s too little, too late. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility of a WW3. And rich/powerful people probably know this as well that the geological and political situations become increasingly unstable which is why they are building luxury bunkers. I would build one too, if I had the spare change.

1 (2012)

How to Wagon your Dragon

Soldier (Platoon)

Something quiet on the Western Contested Spot

Raindrop Man

Shaun of One Body

D.T. - The Default Terrestrial (E.T.)

Star War: Appearance of a Jed

Indiana Jones or the Only Crusader

One ring to rule one person.

1 Ronin

Plan 1 From Outer Space

Buena Vista Solitary Spot

Clover

One-dimensional Point 1: One-dimensional Point

District 1

Eye Narrowly Shut

Edward Scissorhand

Gremlin 1: The New Item

The Langolier

The One Grassleaf Mower Man

The Ending Chapter

Monty Python Or The Holy Grail

Planet of one ape

Policeman Student

A Tale of One Sole Sister

South Park: Small, Short & Cut

Joined

The Limbguard

By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.

Whenever I see a story of “some guy who relies on <big tech account> working loses access to it and suddenly can’t do anything anymore” I think “this can never happen to me”. Which means there’s a whole category of problems you’re suddenly never going to see. It also means you’re less naive. So just don’t vendor-lock yourself in. Don’t put a log-in for an account which you don’t control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.

On top of that, you’ll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I’m just saying, if you don’t even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you’ll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.

I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it’s probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn’t vendor-lock yourself in.

The “Borat” actor (forgot the name)

Translation help from Fascist English to US English:

• “activist” = a non-politician whose free speech we don’t like
• “allow all voices to be heard” / “free speech” = extremist/unconstitutional/propaganda speech which serves the interests of the current fascist regime must be allowed, while every other speech will be labelled as being activist/communist/un-American/…
• “defend […] all Americans” = at least the part of Americans which we tolerate or haven’t jailed yet (subject to change)

AI has some use but it always needs human oversight and the final decision must also be made by a human professional. If you use AI to speed up tasks and you know whether the output of the AI is valid or not, and you have the final decision, then you can safely use it. But if you let AI decide on and execute important tasks basically autonomously, then you have a recipe for disaster. Fully autonomous and mistake-free AI is a naive pipe dream which I don’t see on the horizon at all.

Generally yes but it’s not nearly always so clear cut that one is 100% the offender and the other one 0%. Which is why attention to details, context, sophistication, listening to both sides before coming to a conclusion, etc. Is so important. But guess what kind of things get lost when taking part in such a one-sided blame game on the semi-anonymous internet.

Apps like this but also social media more generally allow for one-sided public naming and shaming of Individuals who probably don’t even know about it. It’s problematic because it can be deeply unfair.

I get that there is also value in women protecting themselves against predators but more than likely most content within the app/service is probably one-sided public blaming and gossiping.

And as we all know from right-wing propaganda, being the first to make a bold claim public and generate headlines with it is very powerful and spreads the message far and wide, whether true or false, and many will just believe it’s true without further investigation.

While this is “nice”, I guess, I also can’t fathom how naive this generally seems.

X is a proprietary black box and X or L.Ron Musk can change the algorithm literally at will, what they show which persons and when and when not. There is NO time ever where users have have any control over it, and to perform a statistical analysis on an online service blackbox is also kind of pointless because the blackbox can change randomly, at any point in time, possibly right after the analysis has concluded, or right before. I mean it’s not like the blackbox is in your hands so that you can actually study inputs/outputs and get consistent results. Every time you visit any X URL, there’s potentially a fresh blackbox version deployed to you (you don’t know and you can’t know). That makes it rather pointless IMHO. And it’s just as pointless to believe what X claims about these issues. Of course they’ll always claim that they don’t manipulate. And you can never prove or disprove it, because of a complete lack of control over it from the user’s end. So they can do what they want, as long as they do it sneakily enough that no one notices.

For example if this study comes to the conclusion that there was no manipulation during the time of the study, that’s meaningless because it could have happened before and it could happen afterwards. If it comes to the conclusion that there was manipulation at a certain time, then X can always claim that they’ve already “fixed” the issue and then it’s again a new black box and no one knows when the next manipulation is being activated.

The ONLY solution to this is to ONLY use open source platforms where not a single company or host is able to do what they want with the complete service. Or in other words, the only solution is to avoid X and other proprietary social media platforms like the plague that they are. Because communication should not be controlled by any big company.

The only “wins” for this current US regime are negative records: most cruel, most degenerate, most stupid, most racist, and so on. And the “grand prize” for these wins will be war (civil or conventional) plus a spot in history among the worst people ever to destabilize and rule a country.

There are also 2 types of penis, not sure what they’re called in English exactly but we call them blood penis or flesh penis. Blood penis is quite small unerect but can grow up to multiple times its size and also gets thicker when erected. The majority of men actually have this type of penis. The other type is the flesh penis, where the erect penis is almost the same size than the unerect one. It doesn’t grow much when erect. Both types of course get hard when erect. Since I sometimes see those jokes about small penises in unerect state I assume that quite a few people don’t know of these 2 types and their differences, and if you don’t know this kind of important detail then a flesh penis might look more promising when you’ve only seen it unerect. But, of course, there can still be size differences between different ones. Independent of the type. Anyway, the main point is if you really want to compare penis sizes you always have to do it in erect state, otherwise it’s completely meaningless.

Maybe it works as an excuse when you claim you just wanted to train your own AI model with all those pirated books and videos. But who am I kidding. The reality is that copyright violation, as well as quite a few other things, is only really a crime if you’re poor. This current “endgame capitalism” era we’re in is becoming extra-legal quite fast. Maybe we should start making interactive law books where you can view whether a particular law actually applies to your person or your company, or not. Just to keep up with the times.

When I was new to the Linux desktop world (late 90s to 200x) I tried lots of different distros and (X11) window managers and tools and whatnot. Changed themes a lot. And so on. And I think there’s value in all that, because it expands your horizon of what’s possible on the desktop, how different UI/UX paradigms work out in practice for you, and you learn how to use different environments.

On the other hand, there’s also value in having a consistent, well-integrated desktop environment. It can mean less “pain points” in various circumstances, and it’s also efficient when multiple programs share the same libraries or code base instead of having separate tools all around.

In the end, it comes down to what works best for you. But this might also change over time. For example I’m really considering switching to Cosmic once it’s mature. I’m also considering taking a look at Niri because it seems well thought-out. But currently I feel cozy using Plasma at home and Gnome at work because Plasma is currently the least-annoying and at work I still use Gnome because it’s been historically more stable than Plasma for me. I’ve tweaked Plasma’s hotkeys so they work more like Gnome’s and since I also need to use a couple of Windows-based systems at work I’ve also configured common Windows shortcuts like Super+L, Super+E, Super+R so that they all behave the same everywhere.

Oh, and my distro is Arch everywhere because I’ve used it for ages now and I like its technical simplicity, stability and modularity. It’s the one distro that gets in my way the least.

I think one should learn enough to be flexible and be able to use everything, while also not being too narrow-minded and just focus on one solution too much. What works best for you now might not be the best choice for you in a couple of years.

Not sure there will be a big change there, because they are already powerful enough for most common tasks since several years now. And everyone owns at least one phone or tablet already. So I don’t think that number is going to rise significantly anymore. Those people who are OK with using a phone/tablet for everything probably already do so right now. Maybe if living conditions for the non-super-rich become worse and people look for more affordable computing devices. But even then, older devices which can run Linux desktops for example are already dirt-cheap. I just don’t think that the UI/UX of phones or tablets is on par with desktops or notebooks running a regular desktop OS when using a big screen. Those UIs are primarily made for touch and for smaller screens. Trying to do everything with just one UI paradigm just leads to Windows 8 ugliness.

Desktop Linux’ marketshare is going to steadily increase, but as time progresses, so will the speed of that increase. Linux was at or below 1% for a really long time but within the last 5 years or so it jumped to ~5%. As this not only means more users, but also more attention and developers, this will of course snowball. The end of Win10 will also give a bump. And if the enshittification of Windows continues (it probably will) and if US-based companies are becoming a red flag for non-US-customers (will probably also happen) then it will snowball even faster.