Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.

Well yes, in the sense that sandcastles exist on the beach until the tide comes back in but worry not they are quickly trying to solve the problem of their own existence in as many ways possible as they can whether it be killing themselves with reckless and proud self exposure to Covid, lack of clean water in the places they spend all their money on a big house, mental health, lack of healthcare etc… you just have to give them time to kill themselves off (and make sure your loved ones don’t get mixed up in their collective self destruction if you can).

Change takes time unfortunately :(

Do you understand you sound like someone at a cult claiming that because your robes are a different color that your sect is totally way different than the other sect of the cult that split from your sect because of a disagreement over the color of the robes worshippers should wear?

Economics isn’t a real science (I almost used “hard” instead of “real” but I honestly have infinitely more respect for the soft sciences than I ever will for economics and I don’t want to conflate them), it is an ideology masquerading as a science with lots of math and handwaving to shove reality into shapes that please the people who control the status quo blended together with a potentially lethal dose of cargo cult style beliefs.

If you think there is a crisis of reproducibility and trust in real science…. don’t take a closer look and honestly ask at what people around you generally think of economics “experts” or you aren’t going to like it…

Bro I bet if you did allll that work and took all that risk just to make your life maybbeee better that at the end of the day the people living in the place you made it to would be blown away by your incredible bravery and resolve and would welcome you with open arms into their society and economy!

………

Or maybe they would just pay their coast guard to troll around drowning migrant boats with heavily armed speed boats with expensive lights on and an automated voice message that says “go home” and shrug and say “well we tried!!” as families drown right in front of their eyes.

The worst thing about many programmers and tech people is that in general these types of people will always be more obsessed with the next technology that will save us by allowing us to consume more and become more selfish than with genuine solutions to actual human problems not neatly defined computer/math problems.

Like problems computer programs are useful for, techbros see the climate crisis as an optimization problem with easily definable numbers and quantities. Politics, ideology, emotions and systematic oppression and suffering don’t enter the algorithm in quantifiably explicit ways so they are considered trivial for the purposes of solving the problem. Most computer programmers I have met would have no problem writing a computer algorithm to save time for cops having to manually choose who to pull over and instead use a crime prediction algorithm trained on who police officers have previously pulled over in the past to “solve crime” and “make policing unbiased”. Maybe that is changing, but it isn’t because most of these people actually get what is so evil about writing a program like that in their hearts, they just understand they get shamed every time they suggest crap like this.

Thus you get legions of these people decrying environmentalists and their strategies with a fatalist cynicism in places like hacker news while they simultaneously trot out whatever lame Elon musk style “revolutionary technology” that they think will solve the crises we face that revolves around catastrophically stupid global scale geoengineering or tech that is eternally 30 years away just magically becoming distributed and ready for mass market use tomorrow.

Everything is optimization, everything must scale as quickly as possible, everything is about bigger and bigger regimes of control that enforce rigid operations and interactions. These people think the entire universe can be seen through the lens of factorio and it makes me vomit in my mouth a little every time I think about it.

This is of course by far the most dangerous part about many programmers and tech people, by and large they seem to believe that because they understand computers that they understand everything they need to know about the world. It is really no different than any other kind of hubris, it’s just the rest of us give tech people more leeway to engage in it because the tech world preys so intensely on our practical real world hopes and dreams while laying claim to large swathes of our imaginative capacity to envision different realities.

There are also many amazing tech and programmer type people, I am speaking in generalizations that will never include every instance of the type. I love you, cool and radical lefty techies!!! This isn’t aimed at you.

Very Sharp

I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.

But it will die down. People will just accept it. They always do. They always will.

I understand the frustration and cynicism that comes from wanting something to happen and waiting a good stretch of your life for it to do so but I am sorry, this is not reflective of reality.

Don’t mistake your own fatigue for the behavior of people in general.

Support for software on Linux or Wine is now orders of magnitude more complete and functional than it was 5-10 years ago. There are fundamental changes going on, just because we operated in a paradigm that suffocated the possibility of Linux adoption in the past doesn’t mean that paradigm will continue indefinitely.

There is a difference between being permanently powerless and being powerless under a certain arrangement of forces and actors.

We are entering a period of the status quo being smashed for better or worse in almost every dimension of our lives, what was likely to happen in the past 20 years does not reliably predict what is likely to happen in the next 20 years.

There is actually a true opening for Linux here in a way there never has been.

It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).

Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).

I have no interest in supporting a “less bad” pro-genocide person. I would sooner die, and there is nothing that anyone can say that would cause me to change that position.

Unlike Biden, when I draw a red line, I actually mean it. If that means we go to hell together, so be it. Genocide is fundamentally unacceptable.

I agree with this 100% and I would go farther. The genocide of Palestinians is a test by the ruling global western order to see how far they can push things before their citizens will revolt.

If we vote for Biden anyway despite this horrific genocide, because Trump!, we are sending a clear message to Biden and the rest of the world that liberal and centrist governments can keep moving forward in a direction of murdering citizens in cities on mass so long as they have a complimentary openly fascist rightwing opposition party to set the Overton window and lend them legitimacy as the only adult choice for voting against the fascists.

Gaza is a prototype make no mistake, we have to reject it existentially NOW. There is nothing to fight for if we don’t because the degree of violence coupled with the degree of willful blindness US media and politicians are engaging in points directly at mass scale violence that is about to come home from the colonies to the colonial powers and world order (there is a good chance if you live in the US that your cities police department trained with the IDF, if that doesn’t terrify you, you are a fool).

Look at the Herero genocide in Africa among other colonial genocides (Belgium should have been leveled to the ground for what it did in the Congo as well) and WW1 suddenly becomes quite clearly an inveitable slingshot of massive amounts of colonial violence turning inwards back towards Europe.

https://amp.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war

If Biden can successfully win without having to acquiesce to progressives and normal humans with empathy and stop the genocide of Palestinians… the resounding message it sends is that this is a new world paradigm where that is ok and it is open season for everything up to and including genocide being committed in broad daylight in the western world.

We aren’t necessarily on the precipice of WW3, but rather on the precipice of a period of increasing genocidal violence from state and pseudo-state actors (see the rightwing Gaza zionist colonialists for an example) applied to citizens, not only in manufactured events of mass murder but also in complete abandonment of the state’s duty to mitigate environmental crisis (example A being Hurricane Katrina and the US’s lack of giving a shit about the mass suffering in both Louisiana and the Caribbean).

At that point, the magnitudes of violence that are going to continue to unfold in rapid fire will make this question of Trump vs Biden pretty meaningless though Trump is of course an out in the open fascist wannabe dictator and is worse than Biden.

I will happily vote for Biden if he picks up the phone with Netanyahu and tells him it is over full stop. It isn’t even a long phone call if Biden isn’t too much of a coward to lay things out in crystal clear non-negotiable terms.

As it stands, Biden along with the rest centrist democrats are aiding and abetting conservative violent movements in the construction of an alternate reality where the genocide of 50,000 + innocent starving people can be written off with a simple phrase like “but what about the Hamas tunnels!”.

I too would rather die than live in that world and I don’t say that lightly, so yes this is where I put my chips on the table. Others can join us or not join us shrugs but this isn’t a time to live to fight another day, this is a time to escalate what was a minor tactical fight (from Biden’s perspective) into an existential one where Biden has to either give up his close ties with Israel or lose the election.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

^some internet commenter probably? not sure where the quote came from

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Billionaires have no legitimate right to exist.

Period.

It doesn’t matter if some of them “do nice things” maybe.

Billionaires should not exist.

Well yes because customers will be sunsetting support for Microsoft products with the end of Windows 10 :P

I feel like most people at Microsoft must know it and don’t care, the upper execs are either out to lunch or they are pre-emptively throwing away away the consumer desktop market because they just don’t value it anymore for whatever reason.

I think for the richest and farthest looking powerful people at Microsoft, the desktop battle is over, desktop OS software has become commodified (even though… it hasn’t actually yet by the numbers just by the practicality of the alternatives) and it isn’t worth investing seriously in maintaining their operating system long term as anything but a skin for their particular corporate flavor of Linux.

Internet Explorer to Edge but repeated with Windows.

Good riddance I say, but the complete divestment from giving a shit is pretty shocking, I don’t know where they think the on-ramp for customers is going to come from that will bring people fed up with Windows 11 onto friendly Linux distro where they can still use Microsoft software and services. I think it is more likely the bulk of people will just stop using desktop operating systems and…. Microsoft lost the battle to have relevance on mobile years and years ago?

It is weird because it feels like if Kodak saw the digital photography revolution coming 5-10 years before it happened and pre-emptively gave up on the entire film photography market and started releasing crap film and film related products and invested all their money into R&D for digital cameras… except that because Kodak was by far the biggest player in the film market before Kodak could develop a decent digital camera (if they were ever going to do that) the personnel photography market collapsed, fed up customers left, and there wasn’t a market for Kodak to sell personnel cameras of any type by the time they finally got their shit together to make a good one.

Digital photography in this metaphor is a consumer computer market where most people run a Linux based FOSS operating system with proprietary Microsoft services bolted on top and thus Microsoft finally can truly tell its customers to fuck off when they demand their operating not be trash (not that linux is trash). Certainly many many people are going this route, the year of the Linux desktop is no longer a joke these days and I am hyped, but it will be nowhere near enough for a company the size of Microsoft.

Tired : Cybertruck

Wired: MeatSpaceHatchback

ACAB

Why? Using a car you can lock up seems like a better alternative intuitively, I am pointing out that other than the emotional distress of having an object of yours stolen, owning a car is a regular rolling disaster of costs and suffering that dwarfs somebody running off with your $800 used e-bike every couple of months.

How is this a bad take? It is literally a documented phenomena that people don’t rationally take into account how expensive owning and using a car is.

Alright buddy so you want to burn it down and cause utter chaos just cause you don’t like how things are going?

Well, when you put it that way it actually sounds a lot like the US military/government! You too should be friends!

…or are you only interested in blowing up pipelines in rich countries where the correct oil companies and defense contractors already own everything and are making money hand over fist?

If so would you hurt the soul of America like that? It would be like burning down Fenway or smashing the liberty bell to bits. Those poor executives would have to go home to their families and explain through tears and sobs that the halcyon days of shitting on the future of humanity for the next 15,000 years are over, and that consequences for the ruling class have officially arrived.

shudders what an awful thought!

I mean, how much does your e-bike cost? If you can get one, especially a used one for a relatively affordable price and you actually sit down and tally up car costs like insurance, gas, maintenance, AAA, tires, any number of other costs…. I don’t think it matters if someone occasionally steals your e-bike (outside of it being extremely frustrating and inconvenient). Someone could steal your e-bike every 6 months or so and you likely will still be spending FARRRRRR less buying a new/used electric bicycle than you would just owning a car and using it and then having to deal with the insane never ending bullshit costs of keeping a car on the road.

So idk, build up a savings so you can replace your e-bike if you need to and then just use it. So long as you get a years use out of it or so it has already earned you quite a bit of money from cutting car costs.

Get one of those e-bikes with a removable battery with a key lock, then take your battery so if someone steals your bicycle they can’t steal the actually expensive part.

Hey, I agree with the sentiment but sex work is a respectable job unlike being a crooked as shit congress person ruining the future of countless people :)

Also being a slut is a respectable job too, the world runs on sluts like me.

Gimp and Inkscape are my two trusty revolvers and I am a lone cowboy