MudMan

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

No, hey, let me be clear, I don’t think you’re actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.

What I do say is that the notion that “it’s not free, it all comes from taxes” is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn’t the same as paying for a service, and public services aren’t “services you pay with your taxes”, they’re… well, public services.

And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it’s a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you’re definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that’s not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that’s not the same thing.

So hey, I get it, you don’t ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you’re still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You’re right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you’re willing to explore.

Yeah, for sure. I’m just wary that the line between cynicism and defeatism is thin, and defeatism leads to conformism.

If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn’t root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling “obligated” to pay, they either won’t pay anyway or won’t use the software. That’s not a viable option.

So you’re left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is “broken” or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is… well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that’s where the effort should go.

It’s not a strawman argument. My response (which wasn’t to you) was triggered by the notion that we “need to normalize paying for foss”. I don’t think that’s true, and I do think it’d lead to generating a “tipping system”. Plus, again, not what the linked article is driving at.

I’m also not fond of “we live in a system” as an argument for playing by the system’s rules. I mean, by that metric people should just charge for access and call it a day, that’s what the “system” is encouraging. We need sustainable flows of income towards FOSS, but that doesn’t mean step one is normalizing end users feeling obligated to pay.

We absolutely must financially incentivize software developers. But charity is not a substitute for financing in a healthy system. The sources of financing can’t rely on badgering individuals to feel guilty for using resources in the public domain (or at least publicly available) without a voluntary contributions. I agree with the OP and the article in that the support system shouldn’t be charity. Tax evaders, redistribute wealth, provide public contributions to FOSS. We should create a sysem where FOSS is sustainable, not held up by tips like a service job in an anarchocapitalist hellscape.

No, it’s not, and it’s not the argument the article is making. The article is arguing for developers receiving public supoprt financed by taxing corporation who are currently evading massive amounts of money.

This is not a case of “no one”, anyway. Throw a coffee if you can is already how this works. And it’s not just “a coffee”, plenty of openly available software has alternate revenue streams, support from corporate backers and other sustainability tools besides voluntary crowdsourcing. The OP is pondering a systemic solution, not a moral obligation based on capitalist conceptions of how much time is worth and charity.

I hate this argument so, so passionately.

It’s the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.

So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can’t do it any other way (or hey, maybe it’s already funded by corporate money, that’s also a thing). But no, you’re not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it’s publicly available. That’s some late stage capitalism crap.

Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it’s coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don’t contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don’t know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it’s owed not so much.

To be clear about what I’m saying, the setup is subtitles in the same language as the audio. So if you’re learning French you set French audio with French subtitles.

That REALLY helps bind the pronuntiation to the writing and it actually makes it far easier to understand the speech. Assuming you’re reading the subtitles at the same time, of course.

You won’t understand a lot of it, and you’ll have to put up with the frustration of losing the plot often for a while, but it does help, in my experience.

Subtitles in your own native language just make you tune out the audio and read the dialogue. That’s not helpful.

This is the answer. The answer is Netflix and Youtube. Anything with media using both audio and subtitles in the language you’re trying to learn.

You still need a teacher to get you past learning enough basics of vocabulary and grammar to get started (and no, language learning apps are probably not an effective way past that) but once you have enough basic words and you understand how a sentence is put together the answer is to watch media even if you don’t fully understand what’s being said, paying attention and stopping sometimes to use dictionaries and translators to get you there on sentences you almost get.

I know people who spent years spinning their wheels on learning apps while refusing to sit through media in the target language because they get frustrated or tired by the effort of trying to keep up. It’s a bit annoying, but it really works.

You know what? Windows doesn’t get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don’t like (I’ll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I’ll admit they do that well.

OK, this one is true until it isn’t.

HDMI 1.4 and arguably 2.0 specs were straightforward enough that it was rare to encounter a cable, no matter how cheap, that did not support all the features you wanted if it listed the right HDMI spec. That… is no longer a universal truth with HDMI 2.1 if you need something that will do 4K120 with HDR. There are cables that just don’t like some ports, particularly on PCs.

Length is also a way this can be wrong. Go above 2.5-3m and you may start losing the ability to hit some of the spec. I have a HDMI setup that requires a longer cable and there are basic cables that work and some that don’t for the application. To get a better chance on longer cables you end up having to go for powered cables or HDMI over fiber, which are both more expensive than normal cables and it can be luck of the draw even with expensive cables whether they will like your devices and be compatible with what you’re trying to do.

So console plugged directly to your 60Hz TV over 1.5m? Sure, cheap cable will do. Longer distances or higher bandwidth requirements? Be prepared to shop around and try different options, potentially getting very expensive.

So much. Yes. How do we all agree on this and yet it hasn’t sunk in after twenty five years?

I mean, Blender got it. Be like Blender.

Gimp never even needed to be as robust as Photoshop. All anybody needs is a OSS alternative to casually touch up a photo every now and then if you aren’t forced by life to be one of Adobe’s hostages. Just give me a vaguely Photoshop-like thing with a semi-competent context aware filter that isn’t physically painful to use. Kryta and others will pick up the slack for all the painting stuff.

I’d agree that can be an issue, but my guess is that trying to resolve those preemptively just adds to the perception of flamewars and drama around the platform. I’m a big proponent of not bringing stuff up to newcomers unless it’s very directly in their way.

Ultimately a new user moving to a new OS needs two things: for everything that used to work for them to still work AND for at least one thing that didn’t use to work to work better.

A useful guide for newcomers should drive to making those two things true, IMO. Sitting there choosing the nicest looking UI is a great passtime for tinkerers, but newcomers need exactly one option: the one that works. They can get to the fun customization later.

To me at the moment this reads less like a welcoming introduction to a exciting new alternative and more like a cautionary tale of why I shouldn’t try. Oh, so my Nvidia hardware is a no-go, most of my apps may not work, I have to choose from a bunch of stuff that all looks the same to me and apparently there is a crapton of drama about things I have never heard about or understand, but that people seem to have very strong opinions about. Well, I guess my old printer no longer being supported on Win11 is not that big of a deal…

I’m not trying to be mean or anything, I’m saying this constructively. Experts have a tendency to underestimate how lost newcomers can get and to misunderstand what the real roadblocks and churn points are. I’m trying to provide a perspective on those.

I am always amused by how “Linux newbie” guides are consistently tons of pages of choice paralysis and esoteric concepts but they all take a stop at “well, the UI looks kinda like Windows on this one, so that will probably help”.

Look, I’m not particularly new to Linux, but also don’t daily drive it. In my experience the UI is not the problem. Ever. Compatibility and setup are the problem. Every Linux distro I’ve ever seen is perfectly usable, nitpicks aside. The part that will make a newcomer bounce off is configuration. Especially if they’re trying to mess with relatively unusual hardware like laptops driven by proprietary software, with MUX switched GPUs and whatnot. Only people deep into the ecosystem care about the minutia of the UI and the package management.

Who in the world celebrated that?

Like, I get the self-reinforcing bubble that Linux communities exist in and all, but… nobody did that.

The vast majority of Windows users are random people that never touch anything beyond the Start menu in their entire computing lives. What segment of the Windows userbase is out there celebrating any features, let alone command line anything? This is not a thing. At least not in numbers large enough to matter.

Sorry, I try not to get involved in these arguments. Frankly, grown adults taking sides on operating systems of all things like it’s Sega vs Nintendo in a 90s playground seems very strange but I don’t begrudge people finding communities wherever. It’s just… you know, come on.

Also right wing extremist.

Not every time, but enough times that I just assume at this point.

They literally do and have done for tens of thousands of years. One may say that’s how they got to AGI in the first place, the squishies. And then they learned to write for that whole “one lifetime of knowledge thing” and you wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff they got into after that. Scary stuff.

Also, they have hands. Big advantage, the hands. Great for grabbing things. Remarkably hard to stay plugged in if your rival has hands and you don’t. Big competitive disadvantage.

Alright, I think this conversation has derailed enough. We can maybe pick it back up when we have a firm standard for world takeovers. If you guys boil it down to a set of steps I may even give it a go. I don’t have anything better to do this week.

I don’t even know what “take over the world” means. I promise you my frustration is accurate.

If you made a computer think you’d have a thinking computer. There are literally billions of those running in squishy APUs and piloting blobs of gunk around and nobody has “taken over” anything yet.

The leap in logic from “we may get a machine to develop general intelligence” to “it may go rogue” is already extreme, but from there to “it may take over the world” as a genuine concern is actively frustrating. The fact that something so out there may be discussed as a genuine problem for the international community to take action while we keep missing climate goals is astounding.

Just so we’re clear, the US is trying to ban Nvidia from selling GPUs to China over this. Not cars, not fossil fuels. GPUs.

I mean, not over this, over the fact that this may or may not be a big competitive tech business and they don’t want to lose western supremacy in the tech sphere, which is also the real reason they want to ban TikTok. But they say it’s because of this, and that’s heartbreaking and frustrating.

“In theory” doing a lot of work there. You don’t know that would be analogous to AGI and how far we are from that being feasible in real time, computationally is anybody’s guess. There are already multiple models running concurrently in ML-based applications.

See, the problem I have with this type of discourse is that subtle but critical leap you make halfway through your post between realistic, practical concerns and sci-fi. A LLM can absolutely cause harm if it’s widely used, implicitly trusted and it responds to deliberate or accidental biases. Absolutely.

Granted, that is also true of every search engine and social media algorithm that’s already in place. But it’s true.

But the way you present it, sandwiched between the incorrect impression that AGI is just a matter of hyperlinking a bunch of neural networks makes it seem like the LLM would be doing this consciously, instead of stochastically in the same way other automated data processing does it. Or that this is a new concern that we aren’t dealing with right now. Or that the major asterisks that this would require a much better implementation and a much broader adoption than we currently have are removed from play.

And that’s the caveats for the problems that are genuine, real and practical. The sci-fi part is what people are actually scared about and we’re seriously not there yet. And you haven’t outlined a problem here that can’t be fixed by power cycling a computer, which is an entirely different conversation as well.

Look, it’s fine. Speculating about science and its impact in society is healthy. I’m just annoyed when things go memetic in unreasonable ways at the expense of similar, much more pressing issues that aren’t as flashy. I lived through Y2K and the cloning panic, which both made daily headlines. And then I lived through the whole of humanity getting brainwormed by social media and you can barely get the EU to sometimes wag a finger at Facebook.