Linus is not at all a moron. The trouble with him is that he plays the role of a boulevard journalist. So he constructs bs narratives to have something to talk about, even when it makes absolutely no sense to create these little plot points.

It seems to have gotten to a point where he can not switch his style off. Seems to have gotten this way since he started LMG.

Haggling makes sense for transactions revolving around used cars, bulk goods and the like. A grocery store is a completely different setting. Everyone expects that they’re getting the same deal for a given location. Kind of feels too close to what is legally considered fraud to be feasible.

Yeah, shame on you. Even if this is used to make things cheaper it still fits the definition of ‘discriminatory’. As a company you’re not going around doing handouts, you’re doing the very opposite because your whole existence relies on maximizing what you take over what you give and the more desperate someone is the more you take. Which is why rich people and business owners in general pay less for a pack of cornflakes than some poor mom raising kids on her own.

Does having your unemployed, deadbeat uncle or kid do the shopping from their phone make it cheaper for the household?

Au contraire

Ghettotax for individuals everywhere incoming…

How is that not illegal in Germany? This has to fall under some anti-discrimination law

I can totally see how this has a positive impact in cognition and general well-being. Personally, I wouldn’t want a day in my life where I consume short form content and giving free reign to all the other behavioural mind-killers.

Props for going down the right path.

This is why you use Emacs, Kate, Neovim and so on. Never understood how anyone could use a software as confusing as VSCode.

You have a lot say on this. Its good that someone thinks about these thing. I’m sorry that I can’t really provide you with a good discussion. I don’t know enough about markets etc and I don’t want to spend too long online.

I mean I have a lot to say. I don’t expect people to engage in discussions nor do I really want to create discussion as it eats a lot of time on my end as well.

I agree that can’t really stamp out openness and anonymity online (which is beautiful in a way) but I think that will mostly be reserved to technically capable users in the cracks and niches of the web who can navigate the restrictions. This is a massive tragedy.

You’re right, but we don’t know if the more technically capable users will create elegant solutions for the rest.

I’m sure you have opinios on that

Opinions probably. I try not to judge things though or impose expectations.

I am saying that the internet is as an international object antithetical to nations as its control panel sits not in one nation but all and that nations therefore seek to nerf it, only for it to return stronger and even more difficult to regulate as more and more people adapt to internationalized organizational patterns. As a corollary, there is a real cultural unification happening across borders as a secondary effect. I’ve read people terming it a “discordization” because people are starting to talk the way people talk in Discord chatrooms.

Yes, so you do have to restrict access and notably deanonymize users. California is trying to force OSes to implement age checking, which is of course a way to unmask people online. Protectionism cannot merely be understood as a set of possible tax policies, it is exactly the regaining of nation-centralized control in any sphere of life. States do not want people to be able to choose who to hang out with if the pool is the entire world, states do not have an interest in letting subjects learn about reality beyond a certain threshold where the scope of a person’s understanding exceeds the boundaries of countries.

What I am getting at exactly is the social structure that humans find themselves in. When relations/hierarchies are on the brink of flattening, that is everyone is linked to the next in a symmetrical fashion, like in a family or within small communities 5000 years ago, states, companies and even small businesses will feel compelled to work in such a way that preserves their asymmetrical stance in society. As it happens the internet is extremely good at producing flat social structures, anonymity, reach, openness and near-infinite scalability make it possible. You may be able to neutralize one netizen or manipulate one online community, by the time that has happened five hundred heads of the hydra have regrown. Cost and expenses don’t work out.

Our market has coexisted with an extremely fast global communication network for decades now. Given that the market feels like a quite organic thing, on what authority is the market not meant to coexists with the internet?

I’ll try to explain my thought.

The condition for markets to exist as self reproducing and self-stabilizing objects is government, usu. in the form of a state-entity, which itself is an economic actor that exists in competition with other states and in cooperation within free trade zones. Important note: government forms from market activity, specifically from the control of estates. Taxation is a form of rent, for example. I am not putting the state-before the market.

There is an interest for governments to:

1. Maximize economic output

2. To do so through cleverly tricking other economic actors outside of the own taxation system. I.e. trade agreements with built-in asymettries.

3. And to minimize damage to domestic production. Outsourcing can lead to cornerstones of the economy eroding.

Throw in the internet. We can now communicate and exchange with actors that are not in the same tax system. First and foremost this leads to issues with intellectual property. I’d cite geolocked internet radio stations and piracy. Japan doesn’t care about its citizens pirating manhwas, and vice-versa, Korea doesn’t care about anime piracy, and so on and so on. Then there is trade of physical objects. Say you need a laptop battery for your Linuxed MacBook M1 and a Chinese seller has batteries in stock that are cheaper and better than Apple’s own (happens rather frequently), with taxation at the border factored in you are still getting the most optimal deal. Some might find ways of circumventing customs which sweetens the pot further. Obviously there are issues to the domestic economy that can arise from this.

Trade speeds up and global supply chains gain importance as cross border communication speeds up. At the level of national governments there is a distinct threat presenting itself. There is less control over market activity leading to a speedup of the self-polluting nature of trade, in other words the boom and butts cycle shortens. As a national government you’d want to lengthen the boom and bust cycle as crises are the natural killer of states, along with expansionist nations.

Everything you are seeing, from Chat Control to China’s firewall are attempts to stabilize economies. The internet enables one to build structures that are wholly outside of state control. The state fails to direct the economy as planning starts happening between turfs. The internet due to its nation-decentralized function can aid in forming structures that oppose the state, should it falter.

Let’s not forget one of the biggest threats to the economy that is open source. Patents and DRM are threatened by the unstoppable pace of Blender, Open Office and co… It’s as if people said YOLO, let’s stop exchanging goods and services and at the same time solve very real and pressing issues, some of the biggest problems in fact. It works with much less friction than anything before, it exists as this hobbyist thing that we cannot call economical in any sense of the current understanding of the word and it would not exist if it wasn’t for the internet.

I think that internet access is restricted because of technological constraints, a technological lag in rolling out higher speed infrastructure, and a the lack of demand for that access which is driven by technological and practical constraint. Some complex function of those factors haha. Still, I don’t really know what you are trying to get across.

India and China have smartphone ownership rates of over 85%. There are no significant technological constraints if you are not someone who needs exorbitant download upload speed and low latency. The Chinese have pretty decent internet speeds, faster than most European countries. I also do not at all believe that there is a lack of demand for practical access. The internet is most generally a sensible thing to have access to no matter who you are.

That’ll never work. The internet is messy like a jungle, I might find bird crap somewhere but it will not get me the bird. I might find a turned leaf, but what turned the leaf will never be known to me. All despite me being able to reason and investigate phenomena that occur.

I view all things like I view particle systems: There are general trends, sometimes we can observe how single particles travel and we can derive rules from their behavior. Yet we are never able to see everything at full resolution, let alone know everyone in the way the “evil” “AI” thought experiments portray all knowing bots. What people say about Palantir is very similar falls into the category of we-don’t-know-the-rest-of-it.

No use going paranoid over preliminary results from a tool we readily use but don’t fully comprehend the limitations of (in the meaning of: we don’t know how shitty and unreliable they are in actuality).

I call BS. We’ll see false positives go through the roof. Just another tool to arbitrarily harass opponents.

Don’t hate the technology. It’s great. Just how people organize themselves around technology is not up to date. Markets are not meant to coexist with an extremely fast global communication network that everyone can access, why do you think economies restrict internet access?

Let the internet as a social activity die. It’s got to in order to be reborn haha

I mean it’s Python. This is what we get for having been overly reliant on it.

All kidding aside, I am a more than a bit confused by this.

you should drive because eating pollutes more

Effective altruist style of reasoning 😹

Debian is kind of too big to fail. Maybe NixOS if you want something that will almost certainly gain popularity in the future.

Don’t think though that distros are the layer which you want to look at. Lots of stuff happens at the level of DEs, drivers and individual apps, which sure is preconditioned by the distro you choose but at the same time not that strict of a thing. You can get anything working provided you have the time.

x11 is still in its last round before retirement it seems, using Wayland is going to future proof what you’ve got majorly.

My 2c. Feel free to critique.

I would honestly love to share my stuff but I’m afraid that what I have to share contains too much identifying information with screenshots and all. I probably spent 24 hours in total with my current install and at least triple as much getting a previous Cinnamon install that I screwed up because I went to the experimental Wayland session to look and act a certain way. Back when I studied architecture we would consider all the failed attempts as a natural and indeed deeply necessary aspect of design, therefore I count the previous install as being the starting point of my current one. I hope that made sense. All of this is to say that I spent an inordinate amount of my recent life on this. I would love to share, but my paranoia is really keeping me from doing that. It took me 24 hours alone to create a decent repository of thematically and aesthetically matched backgrounds with all the selecting and editing of images. There is just so much that you have to do.

Warning you’re going to get the urge to try Gentoo to customize your system even further

Too late

All distributions are easy as long as forum posts and well sorted documentation exists.

And all distribution can be hard when they’re nerfed. Try modding Debian to behave like like a crazy arch setup. Program X requires KDE Plasma 6.5.x, you can only use 6.3.6 because Debian. Then you have to go to a GitHub page and compile an earlier version of program X by yourself. During this you get errors and mess your installs up. You clean up. Rinse and repeat until you have got something working. By then you’ll have spent an hour, if not two. On Arch I would have only had to have typed a little thing into the terminal. This is one of the less complex examples fyi.

In the end it’s gotta work out. A nice evening to you too