This got to do with bogus AI reports, doesn’t it?

I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)

She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.

The author could downgrade it, and that’s what he did… or alternatively bite the bullet and go for Linux.

Even dual boot is an improvement, since the author mentions “programs I use daily (like Scrivener) and are essential to me”.

Using Wine is an option… well. Buggy option.

Not really that buggy any more. Once you get a prefix well configured, it tends to run really smooth.

“Guys, there’s someone threatening us with an AK-47. But do not worry! I’m bringing a rubber duck against the bully! It’s an incredibly powerful rubber duck!”

I saw in a recent Youtube video that between web services and AI, Windows licencing is only about 10% of Microslop’s business.

That’s correct. Here’s some data on Microsoft’s revenue:

40%     Server Products and Cloud Services
22%     Office Products and Cloud Services
10%     Windows
 9%     Gaming
 7%     LinkedIn
 5%     Search and News Advertising

IDK if that number is true, but it sure would explain how much they’ve put into user experience.

It does but it’s really short-sighted from MS’s part. Sure, Windows might be only 10% of its business, but the other 90% heavily rely on it. Or rather on Windows being a monopoly on desktop OSes; without that people Windows servers, Office and MS “cloud services” (basically: we shit on your computer so much you need to use ours) wouldn’t see the light of the day.

“This is an LLM — Linux Libre Machine!”

From the mailing list:

Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2021 14:57:55 +0200 [thread overview]

Note this is a rather old topic.

The article says “One could argue that their process was similar, in principle, to that of white-hat hacking: play around with software, find bugs, let the developers know.”. I’m not buying this crap; what the university of Minnesota did was closer to an adult randomly beating the neighbourhood’s kids, stealing their money, and then someone claiming “he’s teaching them self defence”. It is completely unethical and immoral.

I also think both Greg and Dolan were pushovers, trying to be reasonable and co-operative towards a clearly hostile entity. And, in the process, bringing guns to a sword fight:

• submissions with a umn.edu address should not be “default” rejected; they should not be accepted at all. If you belong to a hostile entity you don’t get to put on your CV “I contriboot with OS projex”
• Dolan’s demands boil down to “help us to fix your mess, don’t benefit from it, and ensure it won’t happen again”. That’s the bare minimum.

I’m from the times Rei would write “/me turns into Fanta” instead.

I blame @[email protected]! He’s always breaking them 🤣

(Seriously, he does some amazing job promoting this side of the Fediverse.)

Fixed #7 to include the beans 🤣

Rules of the Fediverse:

1. You do not talk about the Fediverse.
2. You do NOT talk about the Fediverse.
3. If a user says “disengage”, goes limp, or taps out, the shitposting is over.
4. As many people shitposting together as you want.
5. One dogpile at a time.
6. Eat the rich, fuck cars.
7. Memes will go on as long as they have to - including beans.
8. If this is your first time at the Fediverse, you have to do the no poop challenge.

Okay. I could spend hours and hours criticising GNOME for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. It is not removing functionality, as the article implies; as others here highlighted, it’s simply changing a default. That’s completely fine.

No need to apologise - you didn’t come off as a pedant, and the stuff you said is completely relevant.

Plus as I mentioned my German isn’t exactly stellar, and I only realised there was an English audio after @[email protected] pointed it out. That increases the odds I got something wrong, by quite a bit.

Thank you for pointing out corrections and clarifications. (I fixed the party’s name.)

I called it a “spiritual successor” because it’s basically the same right “appeal” to the masses, but I’m aware it isn’t a direct successor to the National Socialist Party. If I understood its history correctly, the process AfD went through is similar to the one of the Lega Nord, in Italy: the party starts gathering people for one cause (for AfD it was euroscepticism, for LN it was independence), but internal composition changes and so does the ideology, going further and further onto the right.

That [lower income people are easier to rally into supporting fascism] is a simplification.

Yup, I’m aware. Or rather, a generalisation, that applies better elsewhere — the trashing of their companies is zbs rather specific to East Germany, but elsewhere you still see fascists trying to gather support from poorer demographics (e.g. rural Southerners in USA, Protestants in Brazil, etc.) I love that you went into the specifics though, this is actually important to contextualise it.

I couldn’t find English subtitles, but here’s some quick rundown, it’s partially from the video and partially from info I got about the topic from elsewhere. Discretion is advised, my German is getting really shitty over the years (and it was never good to begin with).

They’re talking about the spiritual successor of the Nazi party in Germany, called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Currently it got ~1/7 of the German parliament, it’s specially popular in Eastern Germany (lower income people are easier to rally into supporting a fascist party by using immigrants as scapegoat for their poverty), and it’s getting stronger.

Currently the party is legalised but people like those two are [IMO rightfully] trying to get it banned as anticonstitutional. And at this rate the AfD being a problem isn’t just a theoretical matter, they’re already threatening and killing people, right-wing violence is exploding there acc. to the video. Check the graphs around 6:40 and you’ll see (Left: criminality split by political ideology; right: criminality in comparison with the share of the parliament the AfD has).

So they’re gathering evidence of all that shit, and pressing politicians to ban the bloody party. There’s a site gathering all this evidence, afd-verbot.de. They’re also using the fact property rights are non-negotiable in Germany to rent the property facing the AfD hall and doing stuff like projecting Hitler’s Young into the AfD hall, since a lot of the AfD modus operandi is to say “nooo~ we walk like ducks, quack like ducks, do salutes like ducks, but we are no ducks”.

Later on they talk on how fascism’s path to power goes through conservatives, so in order for the AfD to seize power it’d need a coalition with the CDU (Christian Democratic Union), and they’re trying to prevent this. Then they mention a regional CDU president, Walter Lübcke (Hesse); he was strongly opposed to the AfD, and got killed by them, so they’re trying to build a memorial to him etc. to warn against a conservative/fascist alliance.

Comments linked this TikTok video. Here are a few key points from the video, generated by artificial intelligence organic stupidity:

• If you aren’t careful, OneDrive will spontaneously delete all your computer files, without warning you in plain language beforehand. No confirmation, pop-up or anything.
• You’ll notice the bandwidth waste, then look up how to stop it, then as you turn OneDrive off everything in your computer is gone, deleted by Microsoft. Then you’re forced to redownload all your data back into your computer.
• When you eventually get your files back, and try to delete the OneDrive copies, the local copies also get deleted. The only way to avoid this is following detailed tutorials.
• The issue is that people are familiar with cloud backup, so they assume it’s what OneDrive is. But it isn’t; the copy within OneDrive is the primary version, and when you work on files in your local machine, it treats them as temporarily accessing those files.

Here’s my take. It’s based on the video, given I don’t use OneDrive (or Windows).

If you trust Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft, then you’re a moron. I understand sometimes you need to use their services and/or software, in this case Windows, but be aware you can’t trust your own machine if your OS is Windows.

As such, backups are essential. And by backups I mean offline copies, under your complete control. “The cloud” is just someone else’s computer, dammit, once they deny you access the copy is gone.

Odds are Microsoft will never fix this OneDrive mess. It doesn’t look poorly designed; it looks perfectly designed, in a way that is hostile towards the user. I think Microsoft’s idea is to force users to incorrectly believe they need a paid OneDrive subscription, because otherwise they won’t be able to store their files. Rain falls down, fire is hot, and your files are in OneDrive, simple uh.

It’ll likely get worse over time as they refine the design further. Odds are they’re doing everything possible while barely avoiding OD to be classified as plain ransomware.

Some users here are talking about revkas PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair = problem is the user). Personally I wouldn’t say so; users should not be blamed for not being tech-savvy, when the software is made by hostile clowns actively trying to mislead them.

From a link within the page:

Restoring democracy in Venezuela must respect its people’s will, EU countries say

I wonder if someone said the same regarding the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

I believe the cockroaches invaded Venezuela as “testing grounds” of sorts, but the goal is to invade somewhere else:

• It’s a small and politically isolated country. Even “centrist” (i.e. right-wing, but LARPing as fair) governments controlling nearby territories, like Brazil*, don’t want to deal with it. China gave up because of the corruption.
• The local population understandably hates Maduro, so the odds they’ll spread roach poison is lower.
• Nothing fucking works properly here in Latin America, so reactions are delayed.
• Trump is basically doublethinking all the global warming issue: “no, it doesn’r exis!” on one side, but beelining for countries that would become more livable in a warmer world. Venezuela simply doesn’t fit the bill here.

But unlike the article, I believe the roaches will try to infest Canada next, not Greenland. Greenland, thus Denmark, thus EU, is like poking a wasp nest. The roaches would need a very specific context to try overtaking it, probably in coordination with Putler.

* yes, I’m saying it. PT is right-wing LARPing as centre-left. It doesn’t fucking matter if the party’s name has to do with labourism, policies are pretty much neoliberal. No wonders they snuggled so comfortably alongside PSDB, another party with a misleading name. The only reason this crap is in power is that it’s less worse than literal fascists.

Although not from Venezuela, I’m from South America. I’ve been avoiding to talk about this topic here because, once I do, the sheer amount of slurs and dehumanisation I’m going to voice will be nasty. And it’ll attack people who are not to blame for this.

I don’t know. I’ll say what I think.

“Elegance” is a symptom that the structure of the text allows the text to convey lots of information, while still keeping the cognitive load from that information under control. In other words: pretty text = structured text = text that is meaningfully informative and easy to digest.

Dissecting the examples shows it.

An ice cube melts with quiet discipline, surrendering its edges before its core, shaping the drink long before flavor has a chance to speak. Even in something so small, form decides outcome.

At least for me, the second sentence sounds ugly — because the first sentence sets up a metaphor (“everything has human-like attributes”), but the second one doesn’t use it. But note how the first sentence is crammed with information: the edges of ice melt first, this is quick enough to happen before it impacts the flavour of a drink, and its consistency is akin to the behaviour of a disciplined person.

Climate change is killing people. I am upset when people die. I want polar bears to live longer.

This is not meaningless. It’s shallow — devoid of info the reader is likely to benefit from. The first sentence is such a basic and well-known truth that the reader will either say “no shit” or deny it; while the other two talk about things that don’t matter, the author’s personal attitude towards events.

Are we incapable of making mental breakthroughs if the text does not give us a hint of sophistication? Presented a meaningful topic, we should not need linguistic beauty to care. Yet we do.

Based on what I said above, I think this rhetorical question is going the wrong way. The “sophistication” / “beauty” itself doesn’t matter, but it shows something that matters (structure). The lack of such structure makes mental breakthroughs less likely.

Is tradition what binds us to painstaking formality when writing an email? If the conventions of emailing vanished overnight, would I write “wassuh Karen, may you give me an extension on the project, thanks” and hit send? Or would the lack of polish itself feel like a violation, independent of the request?

That formality would show “this is a formal conversation, thus there’s some implicit distance between you and me, and I expect this distance to be respected”; or “this is a formal conversation, I acknowledge the distance between both of us, and I’m respecting it”. It isn’t empty babble.

This essay is half self-disgust, at how easily I am seduced by beautiful nonsense, and half a complaint against a culture that mistakes elegance for truth.

Stop hating yourself, author. You’re seduced by something that actually matters.

And while the connection between elegance and truth is by no means direct, there is one.

Elegance is makeup that hides the scars of battle. // Sometimes it hides the battle entirely.

It’s the opposite: elegance is the zoom that makes you focus on the battle.

[inb4 I know I write ugly in English. Can’t genuinely say I care.]