And surprise, surprise, almost half of his “I use Linux now guys” video is showing off the window manager hyprland, which got a lot of bad press over the past 2 years:

https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html

You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can’t just decide to become survival hunters - we’d simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you’re living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can’t support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @subignition@fedia.io is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative […] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

I can’t tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don’t see how “people prefer convenience” is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don’t think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

Unless I’m mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn’t tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn’t produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

Don’t get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn’t come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @subignition@fedia.io that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.

Also, wasn’t Trump the reason the largest non-nuclear bomb in the USA arsenal was first used in combat? The bomb that had never been deployed in the almost 15 years since it’s creation specifically because the US military thought it would create too many civilian casualties?

The same Trump that allegedly wanted to nuke hurricanes to disrupt them before they hit the US’s coast?

The dude just wants to play with the shiny toys and see things go “boom”. He has literally stated to his own biographer that

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different."

(source: The Week)

I suppose it suits him just fine that Israel is now flirting with open warfare with their neighbors.

Paging Ray Bradbury… https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/storiespdf/the-veldt.pdf

I have gotten cynical to the point of assuming the “endgame” here is properly kicking off WW3, so that Trump gets an excuse to drop a nuke or two on an adversary.

“The last time we had a world war, we won it! We were the best - and we won it with our nukes, our big beautiful nukes - it’s really a shame we haven’t used them since, don’t you think? We ended the war by dropping 2 on Japan, and now Japan is our best friend. Why don’t we drop some nukes on Iran? Don’t we want them to be our friend?”

Super initiative!

Yeah, that’s closer to the truth. Also, state education makes sure that we are at least aware of a certain few parts of our history, from executing our King and subsequently fighting off most of Europe to preserve the republic, to armed resistance when the Nazis occupied and the state capitulated, and finally De Gaul’s staunch non-alignment (as far as Western former empires go). Not to mention that the biggest improvement in the collective safety net for our society was obtained thanks to an ostensibly leftist coalition in the 1930s.

So it’s very much in our collective consciousness that we can protest, and that it’s a pretty normal thing to do, all things considered.

More to your point, I don’t know how many people here in France still expect protests to meaningfully obtain anything nowadays.

The magazine coming with a free operating system is something that will probably never happen again. Wild to think about.

Does this make “be gay, do crime” easier or harder now?

I don’t expect ai/LLM tools to make it easier to create nice looking art, but they should make it easier for anyone to create their own placeholder graphics that at least would allow them to run the game on their own.

It just takes a little effort to filter to see and reach the right people’s content. Otherwise, I don’t think completely withdrawing would be very beneficial in my industry and the era I live in.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.

As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can’t just “take a break from computers” for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can’t just ignore what’s going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn’t stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.

Some are talking about “dark forest”, and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.

The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it’s already happened to the web. And that movie doesn’t even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.