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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • It has to be there, because politics is connected with lawmaking, and open source software is dependent on laws.

    A lot of people like to say that politics isn’t in their life or that they keep politics out of their life, but the reality is that’s just not true. The rules that govern society affect you, always, either with or without your input, either with or without your acknowledgment.

    You’re probably trying to say that we should keep pointless politicking out of open source software, and I agree, but that’s going to come down to personal definitions of pointlessness.




  • The article did mention a fundamental obstacle. It said quite clearly that we would run out of resources before we had enough computing power. I suppose you could counter that by arguing that we could discover magic, or magical technology, or a lot of new resources through space exploration.

    Of course things get more efficient. But in the past few decades they’ve gotten efficient in predictable, and mostly predicted, ways. It’s certainly possible that totally unexpected things can happen. I could win the lottery next week. Is that the standard? Are you pushing the stance that says AGI is somewhat less likely than winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning, but by golly it’s more than zero, how dare you suggest that it’s anywhere close to zero?






  • In the US, the cops need RAS to handcuff you. The standard was never and is not “until they know what’s going on”. And RAS depends on the current cop knowledge. Even if they had legal grounds to break into your place, what they see in the next ten seconds is still relevant. For example, if someone said you attacked them with a knife, when the cops see no victim, knife, or blood, their legal authority ceases.

    Of course it’s all highly dependent on specific details.

    (On traffic stops, often they already have RAS. That’s why they pulled you over. So don’t be fooled by other comments about that topic.)






  • Who is “we”, my friend? This all depends on your research and expectations. IMO Linux works great, but you should consider it before you buy a machine. Make sure your graphics card and other hardware is going to work. When in doubt, buy from a reliable shop that preinstalls Linux for you.

    I find that the default settings and programs of Debian (or whatever major distro) do 95% of what I expect and want, and maybe 5% involve some customization. In other words, it’s much simpler than getting Windows or Apple and then purchasing or downloading all the extra programs. But this depends on what you wanna do.



  • What you said makes sense from a technical standpoint but not from a practical standpoint. If I’m losing good adblock on Chrome, but good ad block still works on Firefox, it would be easy for Mozilla to put up some blog posts or tweets or whatever to point out that they are a great option, because they’re adblock isn’t going anywhere.

    This is an obvious concern for many users, Mozilla has the capability to issue a press release or anything at all, and they’ve chosen not to do so. Therefore, people are reasonably questioning why they’ve chosen not to do so. Free marketing but they’re throwing it away, and their best defense for doing nothing is essentially what you wrote, which is essentially to dodge the precise issue at hand.




  • You posted the numbers. It’s not 1% or something small that people might argue is trivial. One trap of political reporting is that people conflate a country name with it’s military or its current leadership or its people. That inevitably leads to extrapolation and unwarranted conclusions.

    Of course this is not unique to Israel. It happens all the time. And it’s not OK, but many people are lazy and others are manipulative, so the best we can do is be aware of the tendency to equivocate.