They diverted the funding for AI? AI is already a way for rich crooks to steal and make money off public information, if not an outright hype that grifters employ to attract funding for their devious pursuits. None of this is AI’s fault. But politicians should understand the type of people they are funding, instead of ignorantly falling for buzzwords.

I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.

Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.

I don’t know what’s happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary ‘features’.

The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.

I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

I agree with this part.

GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.

Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.

Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.

The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.

Github is more than just git. We need decentralized solutions for associated services and persistently online repos.

They used to advertise Linux.

You don’t need to mention them by name.

Though you may be right, I have a feeling that he is facing formidable opposition. That may include anything from social engineering to full on psyops.

Can you imagine the amount of corruptive influences and persuasions he is resisting?

That’s a very low effort way of underplaying the effect of these communities on the broader FOSS communities. There is a good reason why most FOSS developers/maintainers prefer to keep their personal and unrelated politics away from their project communities. For one, unchecked bigotry in isolated communities can turn bad for the general public - for example, 4chan, kiwifarms, etc. I have heard from more than one source that community engages in hate speech and brigading against people outside the communtiy - one example is visible in this video itself. This is why laws specifying limitation to free speech exists.

Now, even if you neglect the brigading, there is still the problem of support and contribution. Hyprland is a widely used project. Many end users and developers are going to stumble into the discord server either seeking support or with intent to contribute. If they belong to any minority group, they might inadvertently expose themselves to bigotry, bullying and harassment. Now you may be compelled to label this as hyperbole and fearmongering. But this is well known, highly underplayed problem in FOSS communities with numerous examples. There are so many cases where women stopped FOSS contributions because they felt insulted and harassed. This problem is why CoCs exist in the first place.

Nobody can force others to follow CoCs. But as Brodie says, it has become very important for end users to evaluate the projects they use - to see if it is a community they want to ever interact with. Similarly, distros need to decide if they want to expose their users to such a community.

Printers are the text book examples of why device manufacturing shouldn’t be left to big companies. You have tracking dots, spyware infestation, subscription for ink/toners, reporting of the cartridge as empty when you still have much left in it, refusal to print when unused color cartridges are empty, intentional bricking if 3rd party cartridges or ink is used, and utterly crappy firmware in general.

Inkjets require precision manufacturing. But assembling it or other types from components should be possible - like how desktops, mechanical keyboards, etc can be. We really need to ditch filthy mass market printers because DIY printers will be much better than anything they offer.

If you want to flex your experience, I have twice as much as you do, just with Arch. You are just speaking your perspective and extrapolating it to others. Neither the official Arch sources, nor the regular users’ experience match what you say. The argument you made is in complete disregard of the ability, patience or intent of the vast majority of users.

It’s a common trope that I see that newbie Linux users complaining about how Arch users talk down to them. I can see where that comes from.

Arch requires significantly more tinkering to keep it working, compared to Debian. That’s not because of FUD. Arch has a more hands-on philosophy. It even says so on their wiki.

I have seen savvy users jump directly from Windows to Arch without trying easier distros like Mint. But if given a choice, I wouldn’t introduce anyone to Arch as their first distro. Most people are simply not that patient and are likely to give it up as being too hard. They are likely to give in to the actual FUD that Linux is not user-friendly.

It’s not unusual for people who have tasted the freedom that Arch gives you, to think that it’s the easiest distro around. But the Arch way of doing things is alien to most people around. It’s very important to set the expectations straight and not get carried away.

That really isn’t true. Debian packages are often heavily patched and tested to make sure it fits into the rest of the ecosystem. While Arch does it too, they prefer to keep the packages as vanilla as possible - often requiring effort of the user’s side to make it work with the rest of the system. It’s a different philosophy. While Debian tries to be simple by being opinionated, Arch relies heavily on the effort of the users.

Let me start with my unbiased opinion. There’s something for everybody in the Linux land. You have to try different distros out and settle with the one you like most. I usually advocate for the path of least resistance - ie, to start with the easiest distro. Mint is a good first distro. Fedora and Debian are also reasonable choices. But I have also seen a rare few cases where people start directly with a high effort distro like Arch - so it’s not impossible.

For a lot of people, Mint may satisfy their needs - a user friendly distro that needs no tinkering and meets all of their needs. Some people though, like to tune everything. Such people can eventually grow into something like Arch.

I personally like Gentoo. Not because it’s compiled from source, but because it’s easy to work with its Portage package management system. Another one worth trying out is QubesOS, if you’re into security.

Have you noticed how the modern AI models absolutely tow the line of its creators? Just like this example, there’s another one where an image generator refuses to generate the image of Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie, even though its copyright expired recently. The same model has no problem violating the copyrights of independent artists.

And while these models can strictly refuse to avoid what its creators don’t want it to do, they fail at basic prompts like ‘show a black doctor’. These models are pathologically rife with biases from its creators.

How does GDPR mandate a public audit of the code base? Is there such a provision in it? (Not a confrontational question)

If customizability is your concern, then Arch might be a better fit. Arch is almost as customizable, without the build step. The recent Gentoo binary repo is also equivalent.

I use Gentoo too. But it’s for another reason.

Honey, the REAL answer is such tech ALREADY EXISTS! Your cynical snark doesn’t make you smart or right. It just makes you one ignorant fellow. I’m not even going to bother answering you, because you aren’t here for answers. You are here to insult, annoy and pick a fight with strangers. Go look for it elsewhere.