This is beautifully familiar.

Am I seeing too many similarities between how Twitter/X was taken over and singlehandedly being irreversibly ruined?

While Windows is stubbornly becoming increasingly user-adversarial (advertising, constant intrusive updates, forced transition from your favorite browser to Microsoft Edge, etc.) and unintuitive (sometimes even counter intuitive) interface design, placement and inaccessible settings.

Well, delighting in schadenfreude, I won’t complain. Microsoft is inadvertently helping me help transition many friends, family and colleagues to various flavors of Linux systems, namely Linux Mint (whichever desktop they prefer) and/or Pop!OS most of the time, but also occasionally Fedora or a particular flavor of Ubuntu.

I never recommend Arch or rolling release systems or immutable systems to first time Linux user so as to preemptively avoid additional layers of complexity, learning curve, downtime and troubleshooting.

I’ll skip. Just like how I skipped AOL, MySpace, LiveJournal, 4Chan, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, Bebo, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, Blogger, Google+, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, Twitch, YouTube, Vine, Netflix, OkCupid, Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, Discord, TikTok… oh all of the Apple ecosystem, and many other I missed by being oblivious or simply never heard of…

I liked the Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and now the Lemmy format/style. Will continue to move on to whatever I find stupid simple and publicly accessible I guess. I am naturally lazy, advertisement averse and hate having to provide personal info just to use something non-governmental or non-essential.

Now, with the increasing prevalence of LLM based bots, I will probably ineluctably reduce my time spent posting anything (I certainly hope it doesn’t get that bad, only time will tell) on any kind of “social media” and focus on current and new family, friends, coworkers, colleagues and acquaintances.

• Alpine on Pi4.

• LMDE on recycled AMD systems (phenoms, opterons, FM2 APUs, oh and a recently dead bulldozer fx-8150).

• TrueNAS, OPNsense on dedicated hardware.

• VMware ESXi on my older workstations (currently transitioning toward LXD/Incus and XPG-ng).

The essential part at the end:

“ When reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt directed me to Reddit’s API FAQ page and said the company couldn’t comment further because it’s in a quiet period and doesn’t “comment on confidential business conversations and/or agreements.” ”

We can infer that it was not the fountain of money they thought it would become.

More telling is their silence. Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.

Wow, asbestos pipes, that’s something new I learned today…

Total genius move by whomever designed it and the organization that approved/certified it for human potable water use.

How am I still surprised by these things, long ago we once thought lead pipes were perfect for moving/transporting potable water (apparently, one of the many things that contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire).

Nowadays, high density polyethylene pipes are selling like hotcakes and certified for potable water use. Will we find, in a few decades, that micro-plastics are more prevalent than expected and cause innumerable long term health issues? Hence, the new thing to avoid like the Black Plague.

What is wrong with plain old copper pipes, outside of just being expensive due to low supply vs huge demand? (I may have missed the news on how they too affect health)

Je parles en français la plupart du temps, cependant sur Lemmy c’est rarement en français.

Il va simplement falloir attendre que les lois du Canada ainsi que ceux du Québec rattrapent/suivent ceux de l’Union Européenne en ce qui concerne le «Side-loading» dans l’écosystème Apple.

C’est lent, mais ça arrivera ici éventuellement 😆.

Why is Canada also excluded from side-loading? 😭

I regularly “deep freeze” or make read-only systems from Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, Linux Mint LMDE and others Linux Distros whereas I disable automatic updates everywhere (except for some obvious config/network/hardware/subsystem changes I control separately).

I have had systems running 24/7 (no internet, WiFi) for 2-3 years before I got around to update/upgrade them. Almost never had an issue. I always expected some serious issues but the Linux package management and upgrade system is surprisingly robust. Obviously, I don’t install new software on a old system before updating/upgrading (learned that early on empirically).

Automatic updates are generally beneficial and helps avoid future compatibility/dependency issues on active systems with frequent user interaction.

However, on embedded/single purpose/long distance/dedicated or ephemeral application, (unsupervised) automatic updates may break how the custom/main software may interact with the platform. Causing irreversible issues with the purpose it was built for or negatively impact other parts of closed circuit systems (for example: longitudinal environmental monitoring, fauna and flora observation studies, climate monitoring stations, etc.)

Generally, any kind of update imply some level of supervision and testing, otherwise things could break silently without anyone noticing. Until a critical situation arises and everything break loose and it is too late/too demanding/too costly to try to fix or recover within a impossibly short window of time.

Man, is this seriously going turn into into the Iraq has WMD boondoggle/fiasco:

“Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003, in which he detailed false intelligence gatherings provided by the Israeli government regarding Iraqi WMD.”

Source 1: Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence

Source 2: Israel knew Iraq had no WMD, says MP

I forgot it was Israeli Intelligence source back then 🤔. I only remember Bush insisting there are WMDs and Colin Powell’s declaration at the UN. All of it was proven fake of course, and 20 years later it has become the biggest and most expensive Intelligence blunder.

Hopefully, I am wrong and we were smarter to verify everything before repeating the same reckless mistake.

I try to not comment on controversial issues particularly when I don’t have any qualification or first hand knowledge/experience, however this is looking more and more like an unmitigated overreaction.

All these first-past-the-post voting systems (here in Canada too it’s a problem) need to be relegated to a bygone era, it’s so bad that even placings names on a board and throwing darts blindfolded for every MP positions would probably give a better and more representative outcome.

Welp… it will probably be after something akin to world war 3 that we (the ones luckily still alive) would all sit down and set out to fix the many obvious and perhaps not so obvious issues with governance, lack of immediate consequence to lying, independently peer reviewed education system absent of political/religious/vested/private interest or influence, broken taxation system enabling billionaires, the lack of thorough independent study of environmental or health concerns before even granting any permit (problems tend to always be discovered long after it was commercialised/contructed/).

Sad to see the state of affairs in every country 😰😱, nevertheless just as we can see/imagine/iterate/improve our ideas of what each one of us would consider better systems, we should implement, test, cross pollinate, evaluate (scientifically, quantitatively and qualitatively) and keep what works better than before and reject/shun/disqualify what obviously causes issues or collateral damages.

Wow, thank you for expanding my vocabulary in ways I did not imagine possible.

I did not need to know that 🤢.

Sad to see another country descending into perpetual civil war and slowly turning into a failed state (hopefully not, and I’m completely wrong).

The people deserve better, but old power cannot let go of their darn solid gold toilet (metaphor).

Good for them for fighting back, but it should not have gone this far. As too many innocent are being sacrificed.

I want that‽ 😆

When I’m old and decrepit with an out of sync heart, I would like to go with a nuclear pacemaker.

I could then say that I am henceforth Plutonium powered 😎.

I think it is too late to avoid the workforce and demographic squeeze.

Considering the following simple thought experiment:

1. Even if every abled, capable and freely willing women in China were immediately given:

• 1.a. unlimited financial support

• 1.b. complete freedom in choosing their partner

• 1.c. flexible maternity leave (2 to 5 years)

• 1.d. readily available at home cleaning and at home cooking/cartering services

• 1.e. best in class psychological and medical services and follow ups

• 1.f. excellent daycare and world class education;

  2. the first children born the following year won’t be able to work and contribute to the economy until 18 years later (or whenever they enter the workforce; at best 14 and ideally at 23-25 after university).

Hence, I am inclined to suppose that, at best (least controversial), the Chinese Com·unist Part.y could do is to try and attenuate the economic slowdown and decay. How? I do not know.

At worst, they implode on themself and/or start a looks-like-we-are-doing-something war.

Random shower thought:

When a group of people that have been historicaly subject to genocide, take measures to commits genocide themselves; do they lose their “Victim of Genocide” card?

As in two opposite cancels each others? Or as in two negatives becomes a positive?

(An awful way too put it, but I kind of wondered about that just now)

Hmm…

Looking at just the title I was expecting something else entirely.