Be that as it may, FOSS tends to be a meritocracy and it takes some skill to contribute to it. Contributors are driven by seeking solutions to their own problems. There’s no incentive to cater to any particular user demographic. There’s a big gap between those programmers in their ivory towers and any practical application.

That gap is filled by commercial interests. And in this particular market, the PC desktop, there’s a company called Microsoft with huge resources and a vested interest in not allowing any competition. For 20 years now nobody has managed to break their stranglehold on the PC desktop. Companies like Apple and Google managed to bypass the problem by creating completely new, alternative platforms.

The elitism of a handful of nerds is the least of the issues preventing Linux on the desktop.

Humanity actually needs an easy to use open operating system.

Humanity already has Linux, and it’s taken over pretty much every computing sector.

Does it have to be “easy”? I think that’s a matter for the desktop interfaces and whoever is choosing to support them, not Linux itself.

An OS is serious business and requires a certain level of savvy from its contributors. And conversely people who are not contributors should not shape its development.

Besides, people who aren’t computer-savvy aren’t going to turn savvy just because of an easy installer. If you cater to the lowest common denominator you’d just be dragging the whole thing down.

Depends what kind of newbie. To the right kind of nerd a well-organized technical installer is not a deterrent, on the contrary.

I don’t think people realise that most Linux distros had arcane install processes not unlike Arch until around 2000, when a few of them started introducing simplified graphical installers (Corel, Caldera and Red Hat’s Anaconda I think were most popular). Debian for instance only switched to graphical in 2006 with Etch beta 3 (although tbf they did have a text-mode UI before that).

Very, very carefully.

Whatever they need. Alphabet Inc. is made up of a dozen companies with thousands of products. There’s always something that can benefit from such insight.

The location data that Google collects through Android phones, alone, is mind-blowing. Just from your daily movement they can figure out where you live, where you work, shop, eat, drink, vacation. Indirectly they can figure out who your friends and relatives are, your partners, extra interests and hobbies etc. They sell all that to advertisers, there’s a reason why so much of Alphabet revenue comes from ads. Then there’s more complex patterns like traffic for example that they can sell to city planners and so on. And that’s just location data.

It works but it’s subject to the same limits – it can only find your most recent comments via the Reddit API. But you can upload files from your data request to help it find all your comments.

All DNS servers have “fast record changes”. They publish the records instantly on their own servers (if they don’t they’re a crappy service). But they can’t force other DNS server to update, each server does that at its own pace. In theory they have to obey the TTL for each record but in practice many cache the information and update much slower than the TTL.

You need to have “address or nationality in one of European Union states or Island, Liechtenstein or Norway” to buy an .eu domain.

There are other EU ccTLDs that are fairly cheap and have no restrictions of purchase, like .nl, or .ro.

Yes. If a TLD has the so called “premium domains” feature then it can unilaterally decide that certain domains are worth more, based on their popularity. Then they’ll ask you to pay tens, hundreds or even thousands at renewal time, and if you can’t pay they will auction it away.

This isn’t something that registrars do, this is something that the entity that manages the TLD itself is doing.

For TLD’s without “premium domains” the TLD sets a single base price for all their domains. Registrars can demand more but there’s competition so someone will always sell it for closer to the base price, and if they change their price at renewal you can transfer to a different registrar.

You can’t do this with a premium TLD once they’re targeted your domain because the TLD forces all registrars to raise the price for your specific domain.

Bottom line, never buy from a TLD with premium domains.

LinkedIn (Microsoft) has also been slowly introducing identity verification, and they’re also using Persona.

Persona has also been used for several years now by American companies hiring EU citizens, to verify their job history and background.

I’m betting that Persona “forgetting” your information is bullshit, and whenever you use them they add more of your info to your profile. They’d have your job history, your LinkedIn activity, your Reddit activity etc.

I’ve heard a conspiracy theory that says that the apps and services that Google dumps were experiments in data gathering and correlation. So basically they make a music platform like GPM, they use it to get a great music prediction algorithm, then kill the platform because what they wanted was the algorithm. They have money to burn so they don’t care about one more tiny revenue stream or about making a great music platform.

Can you even do that anymore? AFAIK Reddit now caps the amount of comment history they show you so how do you find your comments to change them?

I guess if you’re EU you can request a dump of all your data as a GDPR request and find the permalinks for all your comments in there.

Oh this is nothing. They’re currently testing identity verification. As in, “send a pic of your government-issue ID to Persona so they can check who you really are” (and cross-reference you with other sites that use Persona, like LinkedIn etc.)

I’m also surprised they’re still allowing old accounts that don’t have an email. Or that they’re not mandating everybody to add and verify their phone number “for security and 2FA” – another excellent way of cross-referencing people against all kinds of databases. Just imagine what they can get if they work out a deal to share your phone number with Google, or Amazon.

I’ve spent a few years at the height of the blog trend doing WordPress work. It’s a very poorly designed app that has always put reliability/performance/security last and prioritized extensibility and low barrier of entry. Which is why they absolutely dominated the blog world but also why it’s such a big fat juicy target.

With WordPress (or any CMS) keep in mind that if you don’t really need visitor-facing dynamic features (like comments), then you can self-host the admin and content editing completely privately, and only export a static “dump” of the finished website pages as plain HTML/CSS/JS and images.

You can serve these static files fairly efficiently yourself with a small HTTP server, or upload to a CDN service which will take care of things like redundancy, availability, replicated content for faster access from certain geographic areas, you won’t care about denial of service or bots etc.

Meanwhile your CMS software is completely isolated from break-ins or drive-by bot attacks. As a perk, you can experiment with different CMS freely without fundamentally changing your approach, because they all produce static files one way or another. You can try for example Hugo, or a fediverse-enabled microblogging app like Pleroma, Misskey or even Mastodon.

They mean new old stock, not used phones.

Security updates… meh, it’s a mixed bag. Outside of maybe Google I really doubt any manufacturer bothers to keep their Android phones super up to date with all the possible fixes, even within the support period.

And as for the privacy angle… honestly the manufacturer is usually the first one to spy the shit out of you. Using Google services while worrying about a hypothetical security breach is really ironic.

Lol Whatsapp as a system app sounds like a nightmare.

The usuall approach established by Samsung etc. is to bundle a few “shim” apps as system apps for Meta. One shim is used by the regular Meta apps to bypass restrictions and talk to each other, one collects data from any app that uses the Meta ad network, and some are there in case you install the corresponding user app (eg. Facebook) to give it system privileges.

I mean it ends up technically the same as having Whatsapp bundled outright, but you gotta give props to a manufacturer so shamelss they don’t even pretend to hide it. 😃

The problem is that making games (and software in general) has become more high-level, and enshittification has also gotten rid of highly skilled people. So the top studios in the industry are not capable of making resource-efficient, beautiful games anymore. Not because it’s physically impossible, but because they’re not geared for the processes and decision-making that would allow those games to be made.

When you switch from an artisan mindset to a mass-manufacturing and outsourcing mindset without exercising strict control you eventually become utterly dependent on service and product providers that will see to your costs going up so you’ll keep paying more for less.

All the large studios will come to a breaking point eventually because it’s unsustainable, and will be acquired for the franchise rights by corporations that make their money in unrelated industries. But the PC platform is also breaking down so this might be a moot issue in 10 years from now.

isthereanydeal can import your steam wishlist, and you can set a price threshold and other criteria on it. I have a $10 threshold on mine and there’s plenty of stuff on there all the time.

That’s a very warped impression of Silicon Valley. And it probably comes from Hollywood movies, which is super ironic since you mentioned writers and filmmmakers.

Dumb representation of computers in movies has done more to harm their image than actual software ever did. Most of the AI hype is based on fantastic notions of AI as seen in movies.