The correct solution here is for courts to throw out the policies on grounds of vagueness etc. and hold the companies for the digital stalking they do. If not in the regulatory-captured US, at least somwhere else where they still give a shit about consumer rights.

How many Ubuntu users (who are usually novice in Linux)

Don’t be so sure of that. I used to use Gentoo 20 years ago. I use Kubuntu today. Why? Because I don’t care anymore and just want something that works with minimal effort.

The last time I reinstalled my OS, about a year ago, it was because I replaced the SSD. The time before that was seven(?) years earlier, when I built the system in the first place.

Snaps mildly annoy me though, so I might change. Eventually, after probably several more years.

I bet there are more people like me (long-time users picking boring, “basic” distros) than you think. We just aren’t usually very conspicuous compared to the “I use Arch BTW” crowd who are new enough that they still feel the need to make distro choice part of their identity.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook

British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling – is largely responsible for heating the globe.

The term would literally not exist in the public consciousness were it not for BP using it to shift blame. But yes, the concept itself is valid.

That’s for the fork with a UI implemented in Qt.

GIMP being worse doesn’t mean WLBR isn’t bad.

Are plastic recycling and “what’s your carbon footprint?” scams to shift blame away from Big Oil? Yes.

Should you try to recycle and reduce your carbon footprint anyway, despite that? Also yes!

I mean, even in an LTS distro, it sure would be nice if the packages were reasonably up-to-date on the day the version was released.

Perfect Strangers

You are weirdly combative and rude about this.

Honestly, I’d be inclined to hire the high school’s ornamental horticulture class.

In general, I feel like students/recent grads might be the best way to get somebody who’s at least trying to do a good job, for a good price, at the cost of a higher chance of a genuine mistake due to inexperience rather than apathy.

I’m paranoid enough about it (and also stingy enough) that I mostly do my own work. I hired somebody to fix my HVAC once or twice because I know very little about troubleshooting it and they satisfactorily replaced the compressor capacitor, but later when the blower motor quit working (and I was able to figure out the problem on my own) I replaced that myself. Everything else, including plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc. that’s been done to my house in the last decade and a half, I’ve done myself.

I need to replace my roof soon, which (being critical to finish quickly once you start) is not a job I feel comfortable DIYing, but I can’t bring myself to try to hire anybody either. It’s a dilemma.

Just had one set of subcontractors throw away material for other fixes… Lead group days that the ones involved are no longer a part of the project, so we’re on the hook for even more.

Surely that’s not how that works. Somebody owes you the money for that material, although you might have to sue to get it.

I see every reason to anticipate the possibility and look for actual solutions (not just workarounds) that would head it off, such as organizing to defeat “age verification” politically in the first place.

Having a cavalier attitude like yours is a great way to fucking lose in the long run.

From a basic physics research perspective (as opposed to an engineering process development for production perspective), are we even sure graphene semiconductors have that much potential headroom for improvement beyond the best possible silicon ones? I’m not convinced it buys us more than a couple of process nodes. I mean, we’re already making transistors so small you can damn near count the individual atoms in them today. Is making them out of atoms with one less valence level gonna be enough for a 10x, 100x, or 1000x improvement, even in the long run?

There’s no reason to think this case will be different.

Not even the end of Moore’s Law?

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but processors aren’t really getting much more efficient anymore. They’re just getting bigger (more parallel), which is why the price for the newer generations of GPUs has been skyrocketing. A new top-end GPU costs twice as much (or more) as a previous-gen one because it has twice as many (or more) compute units, since they can’t make the individual compute units much faster due to fundamental laws of physics.

What are you going to do when it’s at the hardware and/or ISP level, and there are no workarounds for it?

I’m involved with my community association and do bike/ped/transit activism.

I started shortly after I bought a house, since owning rather than renting meant I’d be a member of that community in the long term.

Keep it up, and Mister Spelled is gonna come after you.

First of all, how close is the closest non-super market? I mean, I could say “omg I’ve got to drive 20 miles to get to the nearest Costco” but that doesn’t give me an excuse to pretend the Lidl in walking distance doesn’t exist.

Second, even if there really isn’t any way to get groceries without driving 25 km, just because some particular town is designed stupidly and lacks necessary services locally now, doesn’t mean it has to be that way in the future. It’s somebody’s fuck-up that needs to be fixed, not an immutable natural law inherent to how small towns work.

No I didn’t. First of all, forgetting and disregarding aren’t the same thing.

Second, living in a small town isn’t an excuse. Small towns are inherently walkable (due to being, ya know, small) unless you somehow manage to design them spectacularly wrong. And contrary to American belief, it is actually possible to provide rail transit to them: the US itself used to do it 100 years ago, and Japan still does.