Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.

For Photoshop alternatives, I’d start with GIMP for photo editing

I have always felt that GIMP was the ultimate software Camel. As in, designed by a committee to include everything and the kitchen sink without any coherent UI/UX.

It’s the software industry’s 1965 Lada masquerading as a 2024 model.

If it wasn’t for Paint.NET still missing vectorized/sprite-based text (it instantly rasterizes text the moment focus leaves it), I don’t think I could ever use GIMP.

the atmospheric CO2 is still rising due to emissions from previous decades.

Tell me you don’t understand atmospheric CO2 without saying you don’t understand it.

Atmospheric CO2 represents the immediate, real-time, zero-delay composition of the atmosphere. As in, the current value is what currently exists.

And an acceleration curve in that value means that CO2 production is still increasing. if the curve is curving up, more CO2 is being released today than had been released yesterday.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/f46a3bf9-388a-4cac-92ff-0604e402c291.png

Once that curve points downwards over more than a year or so, then I will become cautiously optimistic. Until then, I will not submit myself to counterproductive hopium.

The growth of atmospheric CO2 is still accelerating. There has been zero evidence that this has changed.

Yes, renewables. But for every solar panel installed, our civilization’s lust for energy means that most of that added solar power is consumed without any appreciable commensurate decline in fossil fuel consumption.

Great summary.

There are fake job postings.

IIRC, there was one very recent (mid-2024) study of job ads that strongly suggested that 60-75% of them were never meant to be filled. As in, the company posted them for entirely unrelated reasons.

It’s why these are called “ghost jobs”: they don’t exist.

And this is why we need to tax or axe billionaires out of existence. I mean yes, let them choose. But one or the other.

If someone owns a billion dollar company (based on the price of their shares of stock) we call them a billionaire but they might not have very much money in cash (say a few million).

And yet…

The moment shares are used as a source of value to leverage, they should be taxed on that assessed value. Because this is also how so many of the wealthy can get away with “$0 income” - they are “paid” in shares, then turn around and use those shares to get loans from the bank to pay their living expenses. They essentially leverage shares for tax-free income.

If any and all leverage on shares are taxed on that assessed leverage, the Parasite Class would no longer have any way to shield their obscene wealth from taxation.

Right, my bad. I read TCP/IP. It’s still early.

🤣🤣🤣 Quite alright. It’s 5AM somewhere on the planet, no?

I believe that makes you older than Arpanet, which is what I was really asking.

If you had asked me if I was older than Arpanet, then no. It first came online a few short years before I was born.

Even though the “IP” in TCP/IP came four years after TCP, the introduction of TCP is frequently cited as the “birth of modern networking”, and as such, the Internet.

But are you older than token ring?

Considering that token ring was first released by IBM almost exactly a decade after TCP (which I was very specific about - TCP specifically, not TCP/IP), then I would most definitely say yes, I am very much older than token ring.

Token ring was introduced as a low-cost networking option for smaller offices that did not require the use of (at the time) fiendishly expensive switching and routing equipment. If you wanted to hook a bunch of machines together into a network and had no need for external access, you quite literally needed only the cabling and the cards that were installed in the computers. No hubs. No switches. Nothing else.

Of course, using token ring also allowed techs to engage in shenanigans such as - when the ring was broken in some way - getting a junior tech to crawl around on the floor looking for the break and the token that fell out of it, to stuff it back into the cable. Sometimes we even did that with particularly difficult customers.

You know class when you can utilize whilst properly and without ridicule or irony.

I am two years older than TCP.

I am quite literally older than the Internet.

A vegan that keeps cats allows cats outside isn’t exactly approaching the situation from a purely vegan-based mentality.

There, FTFY.

Absolutely nothing wrong with cats that are 100% indoors, not only do they have no effect on the wildlife, but their lifespans are something like ⅓ to ½ longer due to the lack of accidents or conflicts.

The fact that the deceased man had his hands and feet tied at the time of his death has led many in the public, including investigators, to treat the death as murder.

So, not immediately being dismissed as a suicide?

Amazing.

Belgian investigators might actually be rubbing more than two functional neurons together, and are realizing how stupid they would look if they actually punted the suicide angle.

Officials, however, continue their illustrious tradition of running entirely functional-neuron-free.

Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.

Because even appending udm=14 only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.

Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.

I have always bought surplussed business hardware, which back in the day came with COA stickers still attached. My latest iron had two attached for some strange reason. So when Windows 10 came along with its “Upgrade Win 7 key to 10” plan, I fired up a VM (for this exact purpose) and went to work. Now (after moving them to 10 and then 11) I have a handful of Win11 Pro licenses for whatever machine I need to license.

Slowly moving away from Windows due to their AI and spyware shenanigans, but hey. Likely always will run at least one Windows rig, even if I have to spend the first day or two after install castrating it.

that usually requires promoting a mixture of amphibians, birds, reptiles, small mammals, and other insects. To do that, you need a habitat full of various plants, trees, and terrains

So essentially, the opposite of the “modern, mechanized agriculture at scale” that is required to sustain our population’s food requirements.

No wonder we are seeing an insect apocalypse and a bird apocalypse, and a massive decline of all species, and hundreds of extinctions each year…

We’re fucked.

About the only problem I have with Paint.NET is that it doesn’t keep text as editable sprites, but immediately rasterizes them the moment focus is removed off of them. This sets text in stone, preventing any further modification (font changes, etc.) and forcing you to completely delete the text and start over from scratch for even the tiniest alteration after the fact.

In every other respect this is a brilliant program, but for the text issue which is a complete retard sniffing glue and chewing on crayons.

The window-wart AC in a vehicle - especially if it never had AC from the factory in the first place - is something I can understand. Ugly AF, but at least it’s functional.

The generator on top? What TF is up with that? Surely it would be simpler to swap out the alternator for something more powerful that can push up to 15A on a 110V converter.