To the people that don’t get it. Censorship is when the government oppresses or modifies speech.

What the user above is talking about is when social media companies like Twitter banned Donald Trump and neo-nazi accounts.

Social media companies are private entities that you have a contract with where they provide you with service and you agree to abide by specific terms of that service. Hate speech and promotion of violence are things that you have agreed to not do on their services. If you do those things, then you agreed that your account could be terminated. That is what happened to Trump and the neo-nazi accounts (but I repeat myself).

I can agree that social media companies have too much power over public interaction and media consumption but I also agree that a person or organization should not be forced to host and broadcast messages that they disagree with.

Ironically, this standing legal interpretation is due to a right-wing lawsuit widely celebrated on the religious right about a cake baker who didn’t want to make wedding cakes for a gay wedding. The ruling is what affirmed the ability of private entities to regulate speech on their platforms.

Complaining about being banned from a public platform and also celebrating the victory of the cake baker is a situation where their side wants to have their cake and eat it too.

This brand of argument is basically ‘If you can’t do everything perfectly, then it is pointless to do anything especially the thing that you’re suggesting.’

You see this person in every thread on every topic where people discuss things that they can contribute their expertise to. Their message is ‘it is hopeless, your plan won’t work, give up what you’re doing, you don’t stand a chance’.

Honestly, and forgive the langue, but fuck those people. You know what your strengths are and what you’re capable of, not some faceless bot pushing violent political rhetoric who is, by its own admissions, not in the US.

If you don’t want to participate in the tech landscape as it exists today, there is absolutely nothing wrong about avoiding it entirely and building something else. Companies will not be so complacent about their position in the market if they know there’s a completely Free alternative that does everything that they charge a subscription for.

The people who are doing self-hosting today are exactly like the early adopters of the smartphone or any other technology. There’s always people trying new things and sometimes they succeed.

People who are using privacy focused approaches to personal technology, like self-hosting, are beta testing the ability to use cheap, mass produced hardware and open source software to build a product ecosystem that meets their needs. That progress is enjoyed by anybody in the future who decides they also want to leave the walled gardens of Tech Giantopia.

Once Wine made about 50% of my games playable I was dual booting because I liked the environment and customization.

Once Valve started contributing to the WINE project and released Proton most of my games were working and I was only swapping back to Windows to play a few games.

Now, I don’t have a game that doesn’t work on Proton(-GE-10) and exclusively use Linux. HDR was really the last item that I was missing and with the newest KDE/Wayland/Wine changes, it works with little fuss.

I cannot think of a single reason to recommend Windows if you’re even moderately technical. The problems you’ll have with Linux are different than the ones you’ll have with Windows but the big difference is that they are not happening in a black box and so you can troubleshoot some issues A LOT easier.

A crash happens in DirectX? You don’t have the symbols, nothing you can realistically do.

If you have a crash in Wine, not only do you have access to the full source code and the ability to write the patch and compile it yourself. You also have access to developers that are not bound by NDAs, a public issue tracker and the ability to use fixes made by other users without their risking prison time for copyright law violations.

There is no privacy destroying ‘telemetry’, no advertisements disguised as system messages, your data isn’t automatically uploaded to the cloud where you have to rent access to it, your encryption keys are not stored in on someone else’s computer, there are not mystery closed-source modules running in kernel space, the developers cannot force your system to update or deny you the ability to, and they do not force you to buy a new computer who’s only new feature is the ability to more strictly enforce IP laws and further tie your technological dependence to one of the 5 tech companies.

But, you can’t play Valorant, have to learn GIMP and you may one day have to type a terminal command… so, I mean, there’s that too

That isn’t the conspiracy that I mean.

When I wrote my comment, there were about 10 other comments, half of whom were saying things like ‘This is because they’re all getting together to jack up the price and hoarding stock’ complete conspiracy nonsense.

So I was posting to show that: “No, the price increase is expected based on normal market forces. There is no evidence of a conspiracy.”

I believe you’re attributing views to me that I didn’t state.

1. I never claimed the price increase itself was “social-media vibes.” My sentence referred to the belief that prices are out-running supply and demand. That belief needs data, not just anecdotal posts.

2. I also never said the price rises “weren’t true.” I said the cause is straightforward demand-pull from AI, not conspiracy or hoarding. Prices can rise faster than CPI when demand shifts quickly and supply is inelastic; that’s consistent with the chart I posted.

3. My first comment was about the aggregate RAM market, not Samsung specifically. The sentence “Memory isn’t expensive because Samsung is greedy …” was meant to rebut all of the conspiratorial comments in the thread, not to build a micro-level model of Samsung’s pricing power. You’re right that an oligopoly can amplify price moves, but that point needs margin data to separate strategic withholding from pure demand-pull. You haven’t provided that data.

If you have evidence that Samsung’s margins have expanded faster than the industry cost curve, I’d like to see it. Those numbers would tell us if the spike is market-clearing or profiteering.

And next time, lead with the data you did find instead of the name-calling; it lands better and actually backs the claim you’re making.

Ok, so who is arguing against that? Certainly not me.

Yes, every company on Earth would charge you $182737854 billion dollars for their product if they could and ever seller on earth would like to buy the product for $0. The market price is the price that both of these two opposing positions agree is fair.

You said:

Memory is high because there is nothing preventing them from charging anything they want above and beyond the cost of manufacture.

It is a requirement of every successful manufacturing business that has ever existed has to charge a price that is above the cost of manufacture. The term for this in academia is profit. If a company does not charge a price above and beyond the cost of manufacture then they’re selling the product for less than it costs to make it and, unless they’re Tesla, then they will eventually go out of business.

I can admit that maybe I did misread you because I assumed that you were trying to make some deeper point, because what you said, if read literally, is that “Memory is high because companies seek profit” which is the most trivially true thing you can say about economics.

So, back to basic economics.

The thing that is preventing a company from charging ‘anything they want’ is the fact that there are other manufacturers (because there isn’t a true monopoly in the RAM market) that are competing in the same market. Nothing is preventing Samnsung from charging $150,000 for a 1GB stick of RAM, but if Micron is selling their 1GB sticks of RAM for $150 then nobody will buy from Samsung.

This a phenomena known as competition prevents Samsung from being able to sell RAM for arbitrary prices. The market sets the price, not any individual company.

I assumed you knew something so basic.

The only way a manufacturer can arbitrarily change the market price is if they are the only manufacturer, aka a monopoly (in which case the $150,000 sticks of RAM are the only ones available on the market) or they are price fixing (and Micron has secretly agreed to sell RAM at $150,000 and no other manufacturers exist).

So if you’re not alleging price fixing then your comment is basically ‘Companies seek to maximize profit’ which is like saying the sky is blue or the sun is hot.

Who is they? Where did capitalism make this announcement? Who was the representative of Capitalism that said that it is okay to crash the world economy?

This sounds like conspiracy nonsense.

You just threw out an insult and didn’t actually make a point so I’m not sure how to even respond.

It looks like you’re suggesting that RAM should grow only at the pace of inflation and any deviation from that is due to greed? I hope you mean something deeper that I’m just missing your point because I find it hard to believe that you’ve ever taken an economics class if you don’t understand how prices can grow faster than inflation.

If you understood economics you’d know that when the aggregate demand for a hot-ticket good (like RAM) shifts rightward faster than aggregate supply can respond, because of short-run capacity constraints (i.e. Samsung can only manufacture RAM so fast), the market-clearing price must rise beyond the economy-wide inflation rate to re-equilibrate. This demand-pull premium reflects the good’s low short-run price elasticity of demand. Quantity-adjustment is inelastic, so the burden of rationing falls disproportionately on price.

In other words, when an item is in demand the price rises. It can rise faster than inflation because the demand for RAM grows faster than the demand for all of the other goods and services. Since inflation is a measure in the increase in prices across all goods and services, any product that experiences a sudden increase in demand will necessarily see a price rise in excess of inflation.

Benn Jordan has some other ideas too(and a bit more detail on the mesh technologies/DIY options available): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk

Yeah, exactly. You could glob with find to locate the directory, store the path in a variable and then pass that to stow.

I’m not sure what you have to do to make Firefox acknowledge the profile, but I believe it simply enumerates all of the folders in the directory and displays all that are valid (but definitely double check on that first).

1. Natural Gas is still fossil fuel.

2. Ok. You still have to push electrons and also not destroy the global climate.

3. As much as you think it is BS, datacenters exist and they are attached to the same grid as your house, so if you don’t want the power to your house to go away then the grid needs more generating capacity. Unless you want to live under the ocean or in a desert then that capacity can’t produce CO2. The only options which generate power are renewables and nuclear. Solar and Wind cannot provide baseline power generation and the renewables that can provide baseline power (hydroelectric, for example) are limited in where they can be deployed.

So what power generating source exists that can generate baseline power, doesn’t produce CO2 and can be used without specific geological formations?

Now you’re suggesting a price fixing conspiracy among the two largest RAM producers, that’s quite a big claim so you surely have pretty solid evidence to support that position.

Being cynical isn’t evidence and calling people names isn’t evidence.

We don’t talk anymore, he’s a Red Hat now.

Yes, that would be true if they had a true monopoly.

However, in an open market when a producer offers their goods for higher than the market rate, another producer can steal their business by simply offering the products at market rate. If Samsung decides to try to price gouge then customers can buy RAM from Micron, the only time that this isn’t possible is if there is more demand than their is supply (i.e. Micron has no stock) in which case, microeconomics tells us that the market price will increase.

It’s more that people want to be outraged and feel self-righteous and also the outrage bots are happy to oblige with deceptively framed stories and social media comment fabrication.

I could be wrong, and there is some evidence that Samsung is doing something shady. I think I’d know about it if it were public because I work in an office that manages large investments so news like a massive company manipulating prices would show up in the various information services that we use.

I mean, the claim that they’re exploiting a situation is unfounded by evidence.

Anybody who is even remotely paying attention could tell you that RAM, GPU and Storage prices will increase.

If you think the prices are increasing faster than supply and demand then I presume that is based on some data and not just social media vibes. I’d be happy to look at any evidence that may exist.

People being angry, even in large numbers, doesn’t make them correct. If you just glance at politics you’ll find that it’s very easy to make a lot of people very angry about something that isn’t true.

That is true, but also not what is happening.

My father used startx and his father before him, so I reckon I’ll use startx too (aliased to systemctl start sddm)

I think the move here, based on recent events, is to hire an AI to do it then fire everyone else and complain that it isn’t built yet.

Stow has no “glob for target” option, so you can’t do *.profile.

You could write a script that, when you’re deploying a stow, symlinks the profile into the right location. You’d have to remember to run it in the future so create a README file and include the instructions.