Your first paragraph isn’t even an exaggeration. The worst part for me about being around conservative relatives and acquaintances is the negativity. They are addicted to anger and outrage and jealousy. They are always complaining about something or talking about things that other people have or how much money they make.

I ‘member when the reality distortion field was just a Steve Jobs and Apple thing.

We were such sweet innocent summer children.

Yep, I’ll typically use vim or nano for editing existing files, but when in just want to make a quick temporary note or fiddle with some plain text it’s the graphical one that came with the DE.

Is nothing sacred?

At least that’s one use case that Linux will always be awesome for - editing plain text without added bullshit (excepting any keyboard shortcuts you need to learn to save or exit, depending on your editor, lol).

And you can obviously do that on windows with any number of third party apps. But not having the basic clean text editor included in the base OS install just seems wrong.

A wise man once said, If you choose not to decide, You still have made a choice

also privileged people who think that a Trump presidency won’t affect them

I’m a privileged person who probably won’t be directly affected by another Trump presidency. Probably. Hopefully.

But anybody who genuinely holds that opinion, and doesn’t care what happens to everybody else, may as well just be a full-on trumper.

It would still be nearly as bad if it was one of the Republican EC-only victories, but to see him so far ahead in the popular vote is really saddening.

I’m just hoping this comment ages like milk as his convictions pile up with his other trials.

True democratic culture lies not in bourgeoisie domination (as many Americans like to believe), but rather in mutual trust and cooperation in order to solve common and big problems.

American here who has visited Scandinavia a couple times.

There are so many little differences, but they add up to a staggering divide in the amount of mutual trust and cooperation you see in little everyday interactions.

It could be a sign that you’re too surrounded by the stuff. I used to always be tech & specs obsessed. It was like I viewed the world through the lens of technology because that was going to make new things possible.

But then in recent years, my relationship with tech has changed and I am better for it. It’s less core to my personal existence even though it is just as handy as ever and my life is full of screens.

It starts to sound like cliches and platitudes, but most of what makes the world beautiful and life worthwhile has not changed. Seriously just spending a lot of time outside and with the people that matter to me produce undeniable results, even if I have to drug myself to kickstart the process. But after doing that a few times, being mindful and intentional about the whole process being for positive outcomes, I start not just looking forward to those occasions but prioritizing time & money to help.

Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.

How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?

I absolutely love Linux mint. I use it daily for dev work, but I’d also install it on my mother’s old laptop so she could keep using Facebook on it or whatever.

I always found it tough to get upset with them much for that one. They had to deal with battery aging because they were the ones to support their devices long enough for it to matter. Plus I had a Nexus 6P at the time, and when its battery started getting weak the damn phone would just shut off while at 30% or whatever.

Them sneaking it in was obviously bad though.

I suspect that looking dangerous is a positive for a great number of truck buyers.

It’s valid to think in terms of cost IMO even when trying to drive the concept of profit out of the discussion. It’s just a matter of using limited resources in efficient way that leads to more benefit.

The cost units don’t need to be dollars or euros. It could be in tons of a natural resource or some other thing that’s more tangible than money. But as long as those resources are limited in some way, it would be great to get more MW or MWh for the same resources put in.

The sick corporate greed part affects which costs get ignored though, like the externalities. They think “sure I’m poisoning our food supply and killing people every day, but nobody takes money out of MY bank account because of it.”

And if your only argument is money, then fuck off.

I agree with you on this sentiment, but it is still an obstacle we have to work around because a huge chunk of the world is going to make decisions based on money. But that’s what things like government subsidies are for.

MacOS is literally certified UNIX though.

I’m not a Mac user at all, and I’m lucky enough to be able to run Linux full time at work, but it seems like macs should be alright in many cases.

An interesting data point in this discussion is to look at the list of countries in order of population density and see just how far down the list the US is.

We have a lot of people, some big cities, some major institutions, and a huge economy, but we also have a LOT of space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density

I know teams is probably the most hated product in tech savvy corporate America, but I do at least give MS credit that I can let it live in a Firefox tab and my audio & video work fine for meetings.

But when anybody tries to use a Teams-equipped conference room? Whoo boy!