I’m fairly sure the reason the tech bros’ cheerleaders [flagged] this link was not the paywall, but because they find deeply offensive when people doubt their “vizhuns” about “eh eye”.

Anyway. I couldn’t find a non-paywalled version. Here’s how I think it’ll burst:

• Vulture capital (Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, Geode, and others) get impatient because GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) CEOs promised them mad profits, and they aren’t getting them.
• CEOs pressure their workers further to deliver it. Market team makes even more outrageous claims about how AI will even poop for you, product designers manage to put even more AI per squared kilobyte as before, etc.
• Popular attitude towards AI reaches a low. Not the low those CEOs want, “AI gonna replace our jobs!”, but more like “this shit is useless, and a waste of time and money”.
• The potential customers for AI — bosses who want to fire 9/10 of their employees and replace them with a bot — realise they’ll lose money if they do it. So they don’t buy AI.
• Vulture capital gets tired of waiting. They sell their GAFAM shares and buy shares for whatever - blue popcorn, labubu factories, potato trees. They also sell their Nvidia shares because they know the gold rush is over, so no reason to keep investing on the guy who sells shovels.
• Supply and demand. Stonks go down. The market enters in recession. GAFAM and Nvidia survive, but in dire straits; “Open”“A”“I” is absorbed by Microsoft; everyone else involved with AI goes bankrupt.
• A few years later, neural networks are mostly a subject of research. There are only a handful of vendors sticking to what LLMs are actually useful for, but they’ll market it as something else.

Still a better love story than Twilight.

I was going to write a huge wall of text, talking about the core of this article. But the article is so good and sensible I’d rather not discourage people from reading it.

Instead I’m going to comment on a few excerpts. Mostly sidelines.

and getting relentless bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn’t understand crypto. And then, when I made it clear that I did understand crypto, insisted that I must be a paid shill.

*Sigh*. This is like a bloody bag of everything I fucking hate: assumption of ignorance, followed by assumption of the motivations. But then, those are crypto bros; rationality isn’t their forte.

Start with what a reverse centaur is. […] Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur.

Lemmy-friendly way:

• centaur = tech that empowers, elevates you
• reverse centaur = tech that disempowers, subjugates you

“There is no alternative” is a cheap rhetorical slight. It’s a demand dressed up as an observation. “There is no alternative” means “STOP TRYING TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE.” Which, you know, fuck that.

That reminds me the speech acts of Austin. If anyone here wants to go through that rabbit hole I got a Wikipedia link for you, but to keep it short: Doctorow’s interpretation of the situation is spot on. Don’t be fooled by the hordes saying “I’m just chrying to inform you lol lmao” or similar crap, this shit is a demand to give up, dressed as an epistemic statement. Don’t give up dammit.

Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels.

To further reinforce Doctorow’s point, check the “institutional shareholders” behind a few of those tech companies.

• Google/Alphabet: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, Geode Capital Management
• Apple: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, JPMorgan, Geode Capital Management, Fidelity (FMR)
• Facebook/Meta: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity
• Amazon: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, Geode Capital Management
• Microsoft: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, Geode, JPMorgan
• nVidia: Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity

This is like South America between 1580 and 1640. Portugal kept violating Spain’s turf of the Treaty of Tordesillas, but no way Spain would declare war on Portugal — because their king was the same person; there was no violation, only the same guy deciding how to organise his belongings. The same applies to GAFAM+nVidia — they don’t compete; their common owners simply decide which company should get which part of their turf.

It goes deeper. Who owns those companies that own the big tech companies? Well… “BlackRock is publicly traded and primarily owned by institutional investors. Vanguard Group (8.87%) is its largest shareholder, followed by other institutions like BlackRock itself and State Street.”

So when Amazon bids against Target for a key acquisition, or a key hire, Amazon can bid with shares they make by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet, and Target can only bid with dollars they get from selling stuff to us, or taking out loans, which is why Amazon generally wins those bidding wars.

Next link, Wikipedia on Greshm’s Law: bad money drives out good money.

If shares from those companies can be further “minted” (issued) at will by the companies in question, they’re “bad money”: the face value (how much you pay for it) is still the same or increasing, but each new share has a lower inherent value (you go from buying 0.2% of the company to buy only 0.02%). In comparison, real money behaves here like the “good money”, since the company can’t fuck with its inherent and face values.

And, based on Greshm’s law, those companies are likely not using real money to trade with each other. They’re using shares. Couple that with the “GAFAM’s Iberian Union” I mentioned above, and this means that, once the bubble bursts for one, it’ll burst for all of them.

This will be way, way worse than the dotcom bubble.

I tried it some time ago, and I didn’t like it. Dictionary lookup, Wikipedia lookup, calendar, reading statistics, news downloader, it litters the directory of the file with a subdirectory for “metadata”… too kitchen-sinky.

And as usual, a completely different interface from everything else, that sticks out like a sore thumb, and looks more like something you’d use in a cell phone than in an actual computer. Even Qt plays nicer in GTK DEs and vice versa.

The best one I’ve found was the one Jako³13 recommended, Zathura. Not perfect, but good. But that’s only because Okular is rendering images really bad.

(I guess it’s time I stop being a lazy arse and make my own reader. With blackjack and hookers!)

I’m trying it now, based on your recommendation (thank you, by the way!). Had to grab a file from some PPA to enable EPUB support, but it worked. Just Mint things, I guess.

The lack of UI is a bit meh, but I’m okay with it: mouse and keyboard controls work really well. Way better than xreader’s. And unlike Okular, it isn’t ruining the pictures. I’m keeping it, at least until KDE fixes the Okular bug!

That brings me back to the topic. I’ve been using Linux for, like, 15 years? And in Linux nowadays there are lots of options, but they usually boil down to

1. I don’t need an interface.
2. Half-working, half-broken. Our alternative is also like this, but the working halves are different, so use both of us together.
3. I got a kitchen sink~ it plays Merry Christmas, once you send an e-mail through the pipe!

Then I look at my Android phone and it’s the same. And based on what people say about Windows and Mac, it’s the same too. Perhaps I’m being nostalgic, but shouldn’t we (people in general) be rethinking what we want from software?

For example, Calibre. I personally don’t want a library manager, but plenty people do so that’s fine. Which are the features that they expect, that actually improve their experience when reading books? Do they really benefit from plopping an AI system into that? Isn’t this a bit already too outside the scope of what a library manager is supposed to do?

You know, what I really, really want? A good EPUB/CBZ/PDF viewer. Simple, with scrolling mode that works seamlessly for all three filetypes (yes, including between EPUB chapters), and that doesn’t pretend to be some sort of library or bookmarks system or whatever. It should do that one thing — to show the contents of my ebook — and do it well.

The nearest of that I got was Okular. It would be amazing… if not by a certain little bug, that makes all EPUB/PDF pictures look like arse.

But no, we can’t have that in 2025. Instead we have a bloody book “manager” that was already bloated before the AI bubble, becoming even more bloated so you can ask it what to read next. *sigh*

This looks like a twist of what I call the “cat shit problem”:

A cat shitting on your front yard is bad. But an elephant doing it is even worse. Both are shit and you want neither; but elephant shit is a considerably worse problem.

However, every bloody single time this subject pops up, you’ll see two sets of muppets:

• “They’re both shit, so there’s no difference.”
• “Elephant shit is worse, so cat shit is not shit.”

So. The orange guy in your comic is in the first set.

[rant]
If you trust anything Google in '25 you’re a muppet. Or at least uninformed. Either way you’re part of the problem, and deserve to be treated as such.

I get it’s impossible for some to completely de-googlefy their lives. Myself still use YouTube, either directly or through Piped. But there’s always that bloody risk Google will fuck with you and your digital belongings, that you need to take into account.

So I don’t blame those two for publishing their videos in YouTube. I do blame them however for doing so exclusively. Just publish the same video across multiple platforms dammit — YouTube and PeerTube and Vimeo and Odysee and Dailymotion and everything else you find.

inb4 “AcKsHyUaLlY Rick Beato uploaded it to Instagram too!” — it doesn’t count because:

1. Meta is as trustable as Google; as in, may both die in a fire.
2. Instagram is mostly focused on photos and brainrot videos (akin to TikTok). Not really a good place to share anything with more depth than a puddle.
3. This is just a guess from my part, but odds are Rick Beato only shared the video there after realising something was off with the YouTube version of it.

So my point still remains - they’re still putting all their eggs into the same basket.

Someone might say “But that’s too hard! And the platforms have almost no user!”. Well… then don’t complain when Google goes like “A content creator is a user, not a human being. It’s fine to butcher its videos automatically, no need to ask its permission”. Just like it did.

“AcKsHyUaLlY Ritchie was talking about user trust over the creator” - the same point still stands. Once you have multiple copies online you can reliably say “no, my content is genuine, it’s YouSlop doing this shit. If you want a more faithful version of the video hop into [insert alternative]”.

Some days I really hate human short-sightedness.
[/rant]

HN comments are almost as bad as YouTube ones.

“Two plus two equals five!”
“No, it’s four.”
“WAAH, THIS IS CENSURRSHIP!”

It would be hilarious if not sad.

I am so bloody glad I upgraded my computer last year.

nyaa.si has a bunch. Just be careful to not download the manga instead. (Both are under the same section, “Literature”.)

Yes, and that’s what I’m using. Or trying to - people flat out refuse ditching WA because everyone else is using it. That’s why I’m hoping the barrier won’t be lifted just for Europeans.

Further info on the compound. Wikipedia claims it to be as toxic as chlorine. That was also used in WW1, under the name “bertholite”.

Question: will this interoperability only apply to Europeans? As in, will WhatsApp keep some artificial barrier elsewhere?

I’m asking this because I’m in Brazil. And I desperately want to ditch WhatsApp, but here this would be social suicide, given almost everybody here assumes you have WhatsApp.

Can I send anyone the excess vitamin D I’m getting?

Bloody Spring. (Southern Hemisphere.)

Even then, I think “check nearby people for what they use” shouldn’t be underestimated. Of course you wouldn’t tell them to use Neon itself, but if they’re using Kubuntu you’d probably be abler to help them than if they were to use, say, Mint, right?

My point is, that people underestimate the power of offline help, and having acquaintances who know the system well enough to help you out. And that matters a lot when picking your starting distro.

When “the right thing to do” enters in conflict with “what maximises profits”, businesses almost always pick the later.

What makes this decision particularly stark is the response from other tech giants. The same censorship notice was sent to Apple and Google, as the game has been available on their Russian mobile stores since 2020. Both companies reportedly ignored the request, leaving Flick Solitaire available for download.

It’s a matter of relative power.

Do you know anyone in real life that has some experience with Linux, and is willing to help you out with it? If yes, use the same distribution (distro, or “OS”) as they do.

If not, as others said, Mint is a good start.

TL;DW: an extremely convoluted explanation of the optimal strategy for Guess Who.

Let’s call

• “pool” - the number of characters a player did not rule out as not being the right character. For example, if there are 20 chars and you ruled 8 out, then your pool is 12. Your pool is “a”, your opponent’s pool is “b”.
• “bid” - the number of characters in the pool that a question applies to. For example, if your pool is 12, you ask “do they have a beard?”, and there are 4 bearded characters there, then the bid is 4. And if your opponent asks “does he look like a bitch?”, whatever you do, do not include Marsellus Wallace into the bid.

So. If I got this right, your bid should be either a/2 or b-1, whichever is the smallest. That’s it.

I did because my older computer was a potato, so it was kind of obvious the game took a bit too long to install.