Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.

There’s no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you’ll stay in an abusive relationship.

I once said “Some people living in 2025 aren’t very far advanced from people who lived in the Dark Ages” (or Middle Age, whatever). Then somebody replied “… but they are wearing nice suits!”. That’s about the difference. The layer of modern civilization is thin.

Wikipedia has some interesting parts about it as well:

The Dark Ages is a term, now deprecated by most historians, for the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th centuries), or occasionally the entire Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th centuries), in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.

The concept of a “Dark Age” as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as “dark” compared to the “light” of classical antiquity.[1][2] The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era’s supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding).[

Doesn’t seem so far away now does it.

Yes. People even believe the stupidest conspiracy myths on the internet. They’re going to absolutely believe AI-generated fake videos made to reinforce various right-wing extremist agenda talking points, and fast.

Unless the media comes from reputable sources, every video, audio and image will very soon have to be considered as being faked. They must be treated as fake by default unless proven that they’re not. And journalists should move quickly towards cryptographically signing their footage, so that it can be proven to be from that source and not manipulated.

The fact that we still have none of this stuff (or way too little), but DO have many easy means of generating fake images/video/audio already, is probably a big contributor to fascism taking over in multiple places. To quote a well-known villain from a certain video game: “You are not prepared!”

In order of priority:

1. Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
2. Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
3. Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven’t used it myself yet)
4. Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
5. Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.

1. Lie that someone is a threat (without evidence)
2. Justify killing him based on #1 (without due process)
3. Claim that anyone opposing #1/#2 is aiding the enemy
4. Justify killing that opposition based on #3/#1

Fascism 101

First, there are still technical means and operational security techniques of having and safeguarding private chats, that means if you don’t utilize them and it leaks, it’s basically your fault for either not being informed enough or for being too careless.

Second, if you do criminal things in said private chats, and it leaks, then you should be held accountable for it. Especially if, as in this case, what you did went against the constitution, human rights or similar very basic laws that no one should break, ever. In these times, no one can predict if or when such online hostility turns into real-life hostile acts. The line that separates saying hostile stuff online and actually doing it IRL is sometimes very thin. With the extreme amounts of right-wing extremist propaganda on the web these days, I’d say this is a serious matter and there’s a high chance that some individuals will forget their moral compass and just go full Nazi after being exposed to too much of this stuff.

Just like you wouldn’t do a trip to North Korea or some war-torn country, you shouldn’t do a trip to USA in 2025. The country is currently in deep crisis with a rogue regime consisting of neo-nazi zealots & grifters and a big chunk of the population brainwashed by regime-supported propaganda on national TV (Fox News) and other random bullsh!t on proprietary social media, also radicalizing parts of the population. Plus they can all own guns legally. It’s neither a safe nor sane country currently. Sorry for the decent Americans out there but your situation is really bad and I don’t think you can turn this around non-violently anymore.

Always prefered “medium” sparkly. Still water is just bland. Sure you can drink it if there’s nothing else but it’s just bland. When it’s too sparkly though it kind of distracts from the taste of the water itself too much I think, which also isn’t great because it subjectively feels like you didn’t drink that much because it doesn’t feel as refreshing. So I like the middle ground the most.

The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It’s a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.

Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it’s cheaper, then you’ll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don’t matter much. But that’s about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.

AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it… it’s never going to be truly great. And it’s also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There’s most likely a saturation curve, and we’re most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won’t really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they’ll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don’t even need to fulfill any more promises.

Two words which every internet-using person should know about because they tend to be forgotten: proportionality and sophistication.

Just because there is some element of crime within a specific group within a society, doesn’t mean that the solution is to completely exterminate the whole society.

This is what the word “extremism” means - if you’re an extremist you find extreme measures at least OK because you’ve stopped differentiating and thinking about proportions. And when doing extreme measures to a specific group of people (usually a minority group, or even a whole weaker country), then you’re right-wing extremist.

You wouldn’t want those things to be done to yourself when you’re part of a subgroup that’s under attack. You wouldn’t want to be a victim of extreme measures. That’s one reason why these extreme measures shouldn’t exist in the first place.

It’s just a tendency, not a hard rule.

German here. These are some cultural and day-to-day differences compared to the US:

• Sundays are officially a day of rest and so most shops and businesses are closed that day, with several exceptions like high priority stuff, restaurants, tourism/event-related stuff and so on. But you can’t go to a regular supermarket or expect a package delivery on a Sunday. Although some sundays are also different, it’s like an “event” where regular shops open sometimes. But that’s rare.
• Cash is still very widely used (and you also should generally use it even if it’s less convenient because it’s probably the most privacy-preserving payment option), but other payment options are also available almost everywhere
• There are tiny fees of around 1 € you probably need to pay when e.g. going to a public toilet or using a shopping cart (but for the cart, you get it back when returning the cart). You also need to pay extra for bags, or bring your own.
• Tip culture is very different, Germans usually pay very small tips compared to the US and no one expects you to, but in restaurants it’s common to tip something like 2 € for a bill of 25 € for example. Or you simply round up the number to avoid the hassle of small coins.
• Prices always include taxes already
• Water isn’t free and usually you can’t order tap water, although tap water is drinkable generally
• You can drink alcohol with fully visible labels/bottles in public
• For bottles and cans, there’s a “Pfand” which is like an extra deposit. So a bottle of water usually costs slightly more, but when it’s empty you can return it to get the extra deposit value back. It’s to encourage recycling.
• Germans are more reserved in public and might do less small talk, and are usually more direct, but that doesn’t mean they’re unfriendly. This also applies to customer service! Personally I like this more than obviously fake and exaggerated politeness.
• You should be more quiet in or near residential areas between like 10pm and 7am
• Punctuality is highly valued, this is actually not exaggerated or a myth. Public transport might not wait for you if you’re 1-2min late. People will assume that something’s wrong when you’re a couple of minutes late to an appointment. Although there is one well-known exception: trains aren’t always punctual or reliable. But other public transport usually is.
• Highways have no speed limits in parts but you still probably shouldn’t drive much faster than 130 km/h. Pass other cars only on the left lanes, never on the right lanes. Also don’t drive on bike lanes.
• Basically all streets or public spaces are safe to walk around. Also children don’t need supervision.
• Most Germans have very good English skills, except maybe very old generations

They can’t think that far ahead. Their plan is just to aid the economy make rich people richer short-term. Nothing else is of concern to them.

Why this is happening: right-wing extremist propaganda on popular proprietary social media, and random people believing it and radicalizing themselves. Of course it’s going to spawn more radicalized right-wing extremists, everywhere the propaganda machine turns its head towards (they managed to ruin USA, now they’re trying to ruin Europe). Normal people will become more radicalized in the process. It’s like a global cult and its propaganda distribution mechanism is the internet. Not everyone will have enough education or media literacy to resist this. China and Russia are the big benefactors of a divided and in-fighting West.

Collapse will definitely come. Our way of living on this planet is not sustainable, especially now where everyone who would have the power/influence to change things does literally and openly the opposite (e.g. USA turning their back on climate friendly research/technologies for example). So I think it’s kind of over, I’m kind of an optimist but time is simply running out, we had the Paris agreement and all that jazz like 10 years ago and almost nothing really changed (the only time something changed for the positive was during 2020/2021 but that was involuntarily!), in fact it’s now probably worse than it was back then, so it’s kind of over. Sure you can and should individually continue fighting for it because every small improvement will at least delay the collapse a bit which is useful, but I’m not going to naively believe that we will be able to counteract this anymore. It’s too little, too late. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility of a WW3. And rich/powerful people probably know this as well that the geological and political situations become increasingly unstable which is why they are building luxury bunkers. I would build one too, if I had the spare change.

1 (2012)

How to Wagon your Dragon

Soldier (Platoon)

Something quiet on the Western Contested Spot

Raindrop Man

Shaun of One Body

D.T. - The Default Terrestrial (E.T.)

Star War: Appearance of a Jed

Indiana Jones or the Only Crusader

One ring to rule one person.

1 Ronin

Plan 1 From Outer Space

Buena Vista Solitary Spot

Clover

One-dimensional Point 1: One-dimensional Point

District 1

Eye Narrowly Shut

Edward Scissorhand

Gremlin 1: The New Item

The Langolier

The One Grassleaf Mower Man

The Ending Chapter

Monty Python Or The Holy Grail

Planet of one ape

Policeman Student

A Tale of One Sole Sister

South Park: Small, Short & Cut

Joined

The Limbguard

By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.

Whenever I see a story of “some guy who relies on <big tech account> working loses access to it and suddenly can’t do anything anymore” I think “this can never happen to me”. Which means there’s a whole category of problems you’re suddenly never going to see. It also means you’re less naive. So just don’t vendor-lock yourself in. Don’t put a log-in for an account which you don’t control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.

On top of that, you’ll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I’m just saying, if you don’t even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you’ll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.

I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it’s probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn’t vendor-lock yourself in.

Doesn’t have to mean much at all: https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#im-getting-sec_error_ocsp_server_error-what-can-i-do

Since I also get these from time to time with similar setups, I usually just switch browsers temporarily (after some time it will probably work again). Since my setup uses 3 browsers regularly, it’s no big deal for me. It also rarely occurs so it’s only very mildly annoying. As usual, with a more secure setup you will automatically get a couple of usability issues as well. Can’t change that, it’s like a law of physics. If it annoys you too much, you have to disable this security feature in the browser settings.