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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • “Fair Use” doesnt even enter into the equation: copyright protects distribution, not reception. It is illegal to send the data; it is not illegal to receive it. It is not illegal to read something you didn’t pay for. It may have been illegal for someone to provide you with that content, and it may be illegal for you to share that content with others, but it is not illegal for you to receive it and to read it.

    It is the copyright-trolling “you wouldn’t download a car” types that have spread the propaganda that downloading is somehow illegal. It is not. Uploading is the illegal part: distributing without permission is the violation of copyright. There is nothing illegal in asking for a copy, nor in receiving an unauthorized copy.

    Don’t let the zealotry against AI lead you to fight against your own interests.


  • Then I’ll continue:

    P.S.: the antivax movement happens because of lack of trust in medical institutions.

    They learn not to trust medical institutions. This is a learned behavior. What antivaxxers are learning about medical science is not reality. Whoever is teaching them is an utter moron who does not understand the subject themselves.

    Likewise, the people who denounce the CLI as “unfriendly” and try to hide it away from the user. All they are really saying is “I don’t know how to use it, so nobody else should use it either.” What actually happened was they never learned it, never learned how useful it was, and never made an informed decision as to whether to use it or not: their decision against using it was based on ignorance. Just like the antivaxxer.

    people shouldn’t need to be “medicine savvy” enough to know what each drug or procedure does

    One does not need to know every single command and utility available on the command line. It is sufficient to understand broad, basic concepts like pipes, and man pages.

    If anything, this need for “medicine savviness” is what pushes people into “doing their own research” and becoming antivax.

    Ignorance and naïveté are never a part of a solution.


  • The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes.

    Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile. They just park a higher percentage of their wealth in wealth-generating financial assets, which leech wealth from the rest of society.

    We need a tax on all registered securities, (with exemption for the first $10 million owned by a natural person.) That tax should be paid not in cash, but in shares of the security: the IRS should slowly liquidate those shares over time, such that IRS sales never constitute more than 1% of total traded volume.

    We further need the punitively-high top-tier tax rate we had for most of the 20th century. That tax rate pushed businesses to spend their excess income, turning it into other people’s paychecks. It discouraged the kind of wealth-hoarding investment that is stunting consumer spending.








  • EVERYTHING? I enjoy doing things that aren’t eating and sex on a intrinsic level that I was never trained to enjoy.

    No, not “intrinsically”, you don’t. Food, fuck, sleep, that’s about it. You likely enjoy other things as well, but not intrinsically. I enjoy Sudoku, but that is something I learned. There is no “enjoy sudoko” element within me that I did not put there myself.

    Why didn’t people adopt personal computers en masse before Windows came to be then?

    They did. Everyone I knew back in the Windows 3.1 days already had computers. Most of those people didn’t have Windows, and used standalone applications. The increase in ownership came when hardware prices finally fell enough for them to be affordable. Windows development was a result of that uptick, not the cause.



  • Do you also think that anyone that wants a car should be a mechanic?

    I reject the premise.

    I think that anyone who wants to be a driver should be able to understand that the brake pedal squeezes the pads against the rotor.

    I don’t think that everyone who can identify a brake rotor is a mechanic.

    Anyone that wants a drug should be a pharmacist?

    I think that anyone who wants any sort of medicine should have enough medical, mathematical, and statistical knowledge to understand that vaccines don’t cause autism. I don’t think that everyone with such knowledge is a pharmacist, mathematician, or statistician.

    The idea that the command line is “unfriendly” and that decelopers should hide it away is, in my opinion, the computer equivalent of the antivax movement.



  • Most people don’t care about automation. They just don’t.

    Microsoft would certainly have us believe that. Decades of operant conditioning by Microsoft and Apple have given us that attitude.

    Most people certainly do want automation; they don’t know how to automate. There was a meme floating around recently about a temp who replaced hours and hours of tedious, daily transcription between two applications with ctrl-c, ctrl-v.

    We have all seen plenty of examples like this, with users doing excessive manual labor out of simple ignorance of absurdly simple automation.

    And your still refusing the point.

    The point arises from the very attitude I am challenging, so yes, I am refusing the point. We should not be encouraging or supporting the behaviors you describe, but should instead be promoting the tools that allow the average user to identify menial tasks and relegate them to the machine.


  • In my opinion, Linux and its various distro’s main goal ought to be to undermine for-profit OS. Not to turn everyone into computer techs.

    Turning everyone into “computer techs” is how we undermine for-profit OS. The command line is a spoon. In the hand of a toddler, it goes flying across the room, along with the mashed potatoes it held. Microsoft’s answer to that flying spoon is to teach the kid that they can never touch the spoon; they must let mommy do it for them (and here is “mommy’s” bill for that “service”).

    Microsoft teaches that it is a “pipe dream” for the average person to ever have sufficient mastery over the spoon to be able to feed themselves. They taught us that spoons are scary and dangerous.

    Linux keeps putting that spoon on her tray, and encouraging her to use it.

    My “goal” has less to do with bringing Linux to the masses and more with bringing the masses to Linux. The “pipe dream” argument you presented should not be ported in. The “normie” should be taught from a very young age that the command line isn’t “unfriendly”, but wildly powerful, and well within their capacity to wield.


  • if my whole family is to use a Linux environement thet moment they will see a consol they will run away.

    Then they will never script anything. They will never automate a task themselves. They will only ever operate a computer manually, interactively, rather than programmatically.

    Windows pushed users to remain toddlers their entire lives. They charge us for the privilege, so they want to keep spoon feeding us for our entire lives. When we see a spoon anywhere but in their hands, they want us to throw it across the room rather than pick it up and try to use it.

    Microsoft wants your family to run away screaming, rather than asking what that console is and what it can do.

    The objective of Linux is to put the spoon on the tray of your toddler’s high chair. Linux encourages her to pick it up, poke it at her food, and keep encouraging her to learn, to develop and build on her skills, until she is asking for the fork, the knife.




  • The user is never be expected to type a command into a terminal.

    Nope! Absolutely not. This is where Windows 95 fucked us all over. Prior to 95, windows was an application executed from a DOS prompt. Users may not have known many commands, but they learned that commands could be given.

    Windows 95 tried to convince us that a GUI developer knew better than the user everything the user wanted to be able to do with that computer. It did make simple use easier, but the way it did it was by hiding the average user away from any simple ability to automate. It took away virtually all command line utilities that could be scripted to run themselves, and replaced them with GUI-driven applications that required the human’s time and attention, repeatedly and monotonously sorting through graphical menus and prompts to achieve a task that the computer could easily be “trained” to do itself. It did it by dumbing down the user, reducing their expectations to the few idea the GUI allowed them to express.

    GUIs are Fisher-Price toys. They are the bright and shiny, but functionally crippled. There is no need for a distro that deliberately impairs the user in the way that you describe.