AnonymousPlanet

I used to recommend KDE-Connect left and right but stopped doing so because it went from rock solid and dependable to a complete disaster in a couple of years.

Linux, Android, iOS, macOS all worked in harmony. Now not even two Android phones using the same software version can see each other, file transfers keep failing after a brief while. And all with the same devices that worked before, across various networks.

Not to say anything about connectivity between Linux and Android or iOS.

I'm curious, could you be more specific as to what exactly you mean by "schlock"? The ads? Product recommendations? Political content? Opinions?

For something that has a massive amount of videos added to it every minute, it's a surprisingly sanitised place.

They could introduce a kids friendly subdomain that would make it easier to filter at a proxy level. But then parents all over the world will be pulling their hair out about what is deemed to be kids friendly. The staunchly atheist might balk at content that is open towards Religion, the religious extremists will balk at content that is open to things like homosexuality, and the dietary extremists will complain about endorsements of the wrong choice of food. Humans like to make up lists of purity rules. But those lists rarely match.

So I'm curious, what does your list look like?

In that case localhost is their competition.

I believe this is an important puzzle piece for understanding the rapid shifts that are currently taking place. Thank you for laying it out so clearly.

Android is losing a unique selling point. This will have an impact on what a techie may recommend to a non-techie in the future, because everything is beige now.

I have the feeling Google has given up on using nerds as beachheads. The market is saturated enough and they don't need us anymore to do grass roots spreading of their products. It's the same with Youtube. As long as there were enough people who were unencumbered by ads because of their ad block and kept spreading links, the importance of Youtube was growing. After market saturation that vehicle isn't necessary anymore and they can squeeze them out.

> [...] the cops can't keep up with robberies and theft, turn a blind eye to drugs and illegal immigrants, and don't even bother with murders and rapes in some places.

Not a boomer, so I don't have first hand experience, but I think you aptly described large US cities in the 70s. Ever watch Taxi Driver? The boomers are the ones who saw places go from 50s/60s petticoats to exactly what you described.

Karl Popper made the point of democracy being the only form of government that provides getting rid of those in power without bloodshed and violence.

If voting will not remove them, what will?

Why single out one company? Microsoft's mobile platform was just as locked down. Microsoft's hold over boot keys is a lock down that even spreads to other OSes and will be very relevant in the future I foresee. All pieces are falling into place for the final rag pull.

And like I said, I do not believe this move is because Apple paved the way. If they hadn't, Apple would make a similar announcement to Google now in 2025.

I don't believe for one second that Google is doing this because Apple does so too. They would have done so long ago. I would rather bet this has to do with recent political shifts that are also pushing for mandatory digital IDs and spying on encrypted messages (see UK and EU). This and Windows 11 depending on certain hardware are all pointing in one direction: a war on general computing.

It could also mean "now that someone else has seen it, we can finally act on what we have only privately seen but couldn't admit seeing"

Every place I ever worked at made sure to curate the dependencies for their main projects. Heck, in some cases that was even necessary for certifications. Web dev might be a wild west, but as soon as your software is installed on prem by hundreds or thousands of paying customers the stakes change.

This is also true for any US model from a European perspective.

The nerds are the ones who pave the way for technology, enabling people around them to adapt more easily to it. They find new paths into the undiscovered land that then get either shut down or commercially exploited. Companies like Google have piggybacked on this volunteer work.

I have the feeling that these companies don't need nerds anymore. Who needs pioneers if everything is paved and regulated?

Back in the 90s Sun sold you computers with X amount of space. There was an option to upgrade. If you took it, they sent a technician around to do the upgrade. All they did was making the already existing space available. Sun always sold hardware with all the space installed but gave you only what you paid for.

There's a podcast [1], which features him as a guest to talk about Linux in general. The main impressions I got from it: he is very confused about what UNIX is and he apparently despises UNIX.

I think he's well suited for his new employer (Microsoft).

[1] (in German) https://cre.fm/cre209-das-linux-system

What if you make people do the hard part voluntarily by making the device desirable to them? Including a receptor inside the scull. Then you just have to pick up the pieces.

Ever watched Ghost in the Shell?

> Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose-tinted view of the past.

No. For the most of history people could look decades into the past and be quite confident that things would be the same decades in the future. The only aspects that mostly changed were local leaders and maybe some fashions. A farmer was a farmer and a carpenter was a carpenter and their sons and grandsons likely too.

Ever changing times with regards to technology and professions is a rather modern thing.

The same is probably also the case for most superhero comics. They are made for teenage boys going through puberty. Boys with a changing body that now is much stronger than the younger kids. The stories try to give guidance: You have to restrain your new power and use it for good. Some aspects of your transformation you should keep to yourself. There are other kids undergoing these changes too who use it to bully their weaker peers. Those are the bad guys. There are also bad girls who abuse their new powers (which are not defined by muscle strength) to entice and manipulate other people.

That's an arrangement I also really appreciate. But the origins are different from what most might assume.

Apple introduced copy and paste in 1983 using the command key. Microsoft later copied the idea using the control key because PCs lacked a command key [1].

X had super, meta, hyper keys before the PC's stunted set of modifiers became a standard [2]. Microsoft and the PC are rarely the origins of things, mainly because CP/M, DOS and later Windows were poor, amateurish, and incomplete copies of other systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)

Have a look at r/LLMPhysics. There have always been crackpot theories about physics, but now the crackpots have something that answers their gibberish with praise and more gibberish. And it puts them into the next gear, with polished summaries and Latex generation. Just scrolling through the diagrams is hilarious and sad.

Does the amazing OCR in the macOS Preview app count? As someone who sometimes gets tracebacks sent to as screenshots, I'm really happy about it.

> That scene isn't for me anymore.

They will learn. At least when the competition beats their solution with a hybrid approach they can't begin to understand.

But then you're stuck in the 90s together with the two aging guys who maintain it.

I'm joking of course, but that is a bit how I always feel when trying BSD. It reminds me a lot of Linux in the 90s, plus its development appears kind of glacial compared to Linux.

This might actually be brake dust. In that case, the situation most likely will be improved by electric cars because they use their brakes far less often, decelerating with their motors.

Europeans thought they had finally gotten rid of the Puritans when the Mayflower set sail. But four centuries later their overzealous character still haunts them.

I think you might be missing the mark. The "cyberpunks", the original authors who started the genre, raised eyebrows because in their stories technology wasn't described as something that invariably had a positive impact on people's lives, quite the contrary. That is was what set them apart from the techno optimistic utopianism that dominated science fiction at the time. The authors were called punks because they were going against the grain and, like punk, did a sort of reset of science fiction.

Their works were also big on the impact of globalisation (corporations become more important than counties) and the cultural impact of technology.

The caper plots are just a coincidence.

If you write a crime novel with technology set in the near future, you might just end up with the kind of science fiction that the cyberpunks were trying to get away from.

When I say 'place' that includes entire countries. Adapting then depends on the kindness of strangers towards foreign refugees.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the near future something like "Adapt. Life is what you make it" could be read in big bold letters above the entrance of a place like Alligator Alcatraz.

We're talking about places that even after decades haven't recovered. What do you think is happening there right now?

There's a common fallacy that tries to argue that it'll be alright over time, no matter what happens. Given enough time, you can also say that about atomic wars. But that won't help the generations that are affected.

Not exactly. It depends on how many professions get extinct at the same time. If you have ever lived in a place that is in an economic decline because professions have moved abroad and the new professions replacing the old ones just don't provide the scale or only benefit a few in society, you know where things might be headed.

InTune is part of Microsoft's strategy to make everyone dependent on their cloud. It's like switching from Heroin to Fentanyl because you want to get off of your addiction.