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It is worth making the point: a lot of people simply don’t see it (yet?) for what it is and still support the people doing it.

"Love the fetus, hate the mother and child"

In answer to the first question... there's been an isolationist streak among the right for decades. But in answer to the second, expecting consistency from the American right is a bad idea. They do not care about being consistent, any so-called principles are only applied to others -- not themselves. (And I acknowledge that all humans and all groups have the ability to be hypocritical in some circumstances, but it's far more pronounced in the American right.)

No, because “better products” won’t exist. That’s the complaint: every company is rushing to throw AI into their stuff, and/or use it to replace humans.

They’re not trying to satisfy customers: they’re answering shareholders. Our system is no longer about offering the best products, it’s about having the market share to force people to do business with you or maybe two other equally bad companies that constantly look for ways to extract more money from people to make shareholders happy. See: Two choices of smartphone OS, ISP regional monopolies or duopolies, two consumer OSes, a handful of mobile carriers, almost all available TVs models being “smart TVs” laden with spyware…

(I’m speaking from the US perspective, this may not be as pronounced elsewhere.)

Some of that has a lot to do with COVID and streaming. Obviously people aren't staying away from theatres now because of COVID, but I think it had a big impact on habits. Once the habit of going to the movies was broken, enticing people back got harder.

Making the experience worse, though, is an awfully novel way to encourage people to return.

My wife and I tried to see a movie a few weeks ago. I say "tried" because we went to an AMC theatre that had, oddly, a nearly sold-out showing of a movie that had been out for weeks. We could only get seats in the front row, all the way to the right.

I've never loved front row seats, but this was ridiculous - I sit farther back from my television in my own living room. I don't think there was 10 feet distance from the screen to our seats, and we were at an angle to boot. It was unwatchable - we got a refund and left, after we'd already blown money on snacks, of course...

No, because it’s not realistic for me - I’m not going to leave my siblings behind, nor my inlaws. If this was happening when I was single? I’d have been out before Trump took office the first time.

It’s no longer a reliable place to live, either.

Correct me if I'm wrong here -- let's say the Signal folks are breached or have been secretly waiting for just the right moment to push out some malicious code. How would they coordinate rolling it out to client devices to take advantage of that gap? I mean, depending on what the exploit was, they might be able to whack some percentage of users -- but it would be caught fairly quickly. I'm curious what sort of attack you're theorizing that would be worthwhile here.

"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."

I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.

What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...

There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.

In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.

All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)

It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.

* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.

Not arguing for Nix here, but couldn’t you use Distrobox on Nix to mitigate some of the author’s problems while still getting benefits from Nix for the basic install?

Note: I’m not a Nix user - primarily Fedora and Debian, though I’ve used Bluefin a lot and used to use PopOS as a gaming desktop. (Rarely have any time for gaming these days…)

I must have missed the part of the article where the author said it was NixOS’s problem.

If you want to use it as your desktop, nobody’s stopping you. They’re making the case why they think it’s unsuitable.

What's "fun" is when companies try to be different and schedule meetings at :05 or :10 past the hour, so if you have any regular meetings with people outside the company that do the :50 or :55 thing, it's complete chaos.

FWIW I've never seen top-down efforts to make meetings more efficient stick. Humans are humans, not automatons. They're chatty. They're messy and unorganized. And attempts to build "culture" that curbs those things isn't going to stick when people constantly change jobs because it no longer pays to stay at the same company for decades. (You know, assuming they don't just lay people off because that's the way the wind is blowing...)

"Discord servers and other contemporary solutions are much worse on the long run, but it does not matter. Software is like startups, long term is not a goal when you are not sure to survive (or in that case, being used and having contributors) next week."

I don't think I've read anything that I disagree with so strongly in a while. "Software is like startups" is about as user and contributor-hostile a concept as they come.

The long term absolutely matters and projects choosing convenience today over long-term thinking are screwing over their future. It's damn near impossible to find information about these projects outside the proprietary silos they've dug themselves into and they will regret the choice one of these days when Discord or whatever proprietary service starts tightening the screws to make money.

I'm not sure what you find hostile about their web appearance. It's a light, clean page with text that doesn't throw tons of JS at you, pop-ups, or a cookie accept/reject/ponder bullshit dialog. It could use a bit of a copy edit / redo and a screenshot (I always complain when a project doesn't have screenshots...), but I don't find it hostile in the least.

Upstream requested that the SUSE team take a look at it. It seems that development is understaffed and the upstream may not have the expertise to maintain it properly. Which, if true, is sad -- I know that tmux and others exist, but a lot of people have used Screen for many many years. It sucks when a tool bitrots.

As someone inside the United States... I sort of agree with you, though not entirely. Where we are today is the culmination of decades of attacks on our institutions and public discourse. This is not majority will, but it is a failure of the majority to curb the attacks on our institutions. Collectively, we're to blame -- but at the same time, is it hard to understand why the majority of people in the U.S. haven't been able to push back given what people are up against?

The wealthiest folks have the resources to continually and almost casually undermine institutions, while it takes enormous effort for the larger public to push back. Most people are just trying to live their lives while the Murdochs, Kochs, and others can keep throwing money and bodies at corrupting the country. For every win against the anti-Democratic corruptions, there's two or five losses. They pile up.

But the fall of the U.S. has seemed inevitable for decades. As someone who is here and isn't likely to leave -- my family is here, too many people to muster out and I won't leave them behind -- this is going to suck pretty horribly for some time. If we're very lucky, this will be the wakeup call the U.S. needs and when the dust clears we may rebuild something better. If we're not... well, I don't want to dwell on that.

The same reason I hate cancer. Musk is a threat to me and people I care about. His DOGE bullshit will, if it hasn't already, result in harm and deaths of people who have received assistance or support from programs in the U.S. and abroad.

My question is why this is even a question, and why should Musk care if I hate him? He's gone on record as saying that empathy is a weakness. Fine, I'll compromise -- if Musk wants a world without empathy, then I see no reason to extend any to him.

He's a petulant man-child who has more resources than millions of people combined, but somehow is not satisfied with that and wants to spend his time and resources making the world significantly worse. His companies receive huge amounts of money from government contracts, but he hypocritically targets government spending that benefits other people.

Plus... I'm just fucking sick of hearing about him. It's damn near impossible to go a day without reading about him and seeing his face. I didn't care much for several presidents in my lifetime, but you could go a few days without them being in the headlines from time to time. Not Musk. Every. Damn. Day.

Sorry, was this a rhetorical question? I could go on...

I wish people would stop with the “Trump doesn’t understand $thing” stuff.

It doesn’t matter whether Trump understands $thing. Pretending that he’s acting in good faith to make things better, but is somehow failing because he doesn’t get X, Y, or Z falls right into the trap. He’s trying to destroy American “soft power”. It doesn’t interest him.

Neither does a good economy, schools, NATO, etc. All of these things are being destroyed or mangled on purpose.

The Linux Foundation pays Linus’s salary, not LWN.

That kind of assertion really needs some backup or it's just noise. I'll be honest and say that I have no idea what the usage stats for Valkey are -- and it may be that it's a drop in the bucket compared to Redis. But I don't know. Can you back this up or is this just your gut feeling?

The thing is, subscriptions do add up. Lots of folks are carrying a bunch of $10 a month subscriptions that individually are no big but when added up start tacking on $100-$200 a month to their bills.

I'm a big proponent of paying for things instead of using ad-supported things, so I don't mind paying for Kagi -- but I also have subscriptions and other monthly payments that make me think hard before signing up for a new one. $10 a month for Kagi, $10 for a webcomic Patreon, $5 for a musician's Patreon, $10 a month to support Mastodon.social, $10 a month to Internet Archive, and an assortment of other monthly (or yearly) subs/payments... plus streaming, plus ... it adds up.

Ideally if more people were supporting these things the monthly charges could be less -- e.g., if Kagi had more users their monthly could be $5 instead -- but pricing and getting people to pony up is hard.

Having an ID is a high bar when it can take a day or more at the DMV to get one. Right now in NC you either have to book an appointment - none are available for months - or show up like you’re queuing for concert tickets in the 80s at 6am before the office opens, get a number, come back at one, and hope they get to your number. (Source: daughter just did this procedure last week for a learner’s permit.)

The GOP has also closed polling places in predominantly D areas, fought drop off boxes, etc. It is intentionally hard to vote for minorities and people in D areas.

Yes, it’s going to get worse. But it isn’t good now.

"I don't think it is that hard to vote"

Says a person commenting on HN that almost certainly isn't in a demographic that it has been made intentionally difficult to register, stay registered, and get time off an hourly job to stand in line for hours to vote.

Flirting? That was years ago. Fascism has its shit in U-Haul and is ready to move in.

I can't speak to what audiences find boring now -- I know that I watched it as a kid when my attention span was not at its peak, and I found the pacing to be just fine. (I did see the much-panned version with the narration first.)

I've re-watched it quite a few times and find new things to enjoy each time. The aesthetic is hugely influential, but it also has a fantastic cast and superb acting. The soundtrack is also perfect.

The love story between Deckard and Rachel is ham-fisted, I will grant that, and if I were giving notes I'd say we need to see more of the backstory for the replicants. But IMO it succeeds far better than the book.

A title doesn’t have to do anything other than draw the reader’s attention to the work. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is, IMO a great title — and it does relate to the humanity of the androids.

It’s a far superior title compared to “Blade Runner,” which is actually better than the book.

Anyway, I’d say that the fact we’re still talking about his work nearly 50 years after his death suggests he might not have sucked at titles…

Oh, I assure you, it's hard to escape knowing about Nix if you write about this sort of thing. Someone will be along almost immediately to inform you about it.

Nix wasn't mentioned (I'm the author) because it really isn't relevant here -- the comparable distributions, when discussing what Fedora is doing, are Debian and other distributions that use similar packaging schemes and such.

Are you referring to a model for supporting YouTube hosting the videos or for the people who produce the videos?

YouTube already has subscriptions. An ad-free YouTube could extend that and maybe add lower tiers of subscriptions for X hours per month viewing. This would be a double-win, if YouTube's were centered around catering to users and not maximizing time on site with The Algorithm(TM) to ensure people see more ads -- which also encourages some of the worst content on YT.

But a big shift like ridding the world of advertising would, of course, have tradeoffs. Maybe that would be "long tail" videos on YouTube. If you can get rid of ads and have to lose those, is it worth it? Conversely, what has advertising killed off that we might be able to have again if it was gone?

Check out Foliate, it's a really nice reader and Standard Ebooks display quite nicely using Foliate IMO.

"This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise"

You seem to be assuming that, in the absence of advertising, the company will sell as much as it did before -- just with lower overhead costs -- rather than advertising driving more sales and possibly lowering costs because the company has more customers. For some items / things this may be true-ish. I'm going to buy paper towels because I need paper towels, and advertising has little influence on that -- except, maybe, which brand I buy. But I'm going to spill things, and my cats are going to keep barfing on the floor from time to time, so I'm going to need paper towels regardless. And I'm not going to buy a bunch of extra ones just because the ads are so good.

Don't get me started on soda advertising and such because the amount of money those companies spend on ads is mind-boggling and I don't think it moves the needle very much when it comes to Coke vs. Pepsi...

But, would I go see a movie without ads to promote it? Would I buy that t-shirt with a funny design if I didn't see it on a web site? Sign up for a SaaS offering if I don't see an ad for it somewhere?

If a SaaS lands 20% more customers because ads (and other forms of marketing) that's not necessarily going to mean I pay more for the SaaS because ads. It may very well mean that the prices stay lower because many of their costs are fixed and if they have 20% more paying customers, they can charge less to be competitive. If a publication has more subscribers because it advertises, it may not have to raise rates to stay / be profitable.

In some cases you may be correct -- landing customers via ads equals X% of my costs, so my prices reflect that. But it's not necessarily true.

"But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out."

The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising.

It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.