My old mother, who is completely disinterested in technology, has used a Linux desktop for a decade now without major issues.

If you aren’t a power user the differences between it and Windows are minor. You have windows, icons, menu bars, x closes the application, the box makes it big, right-click to open a menu, left-click to select, it’s all the same stuff. Besides, most of your time is spend in a browser anyway.

Yeah things break some times, but no more than in Windows. Being on a very default Ubuntu installation she can just search for her problems online and blindly run some random console command that probably fixes it, just like on Windows.

Hardware is easier because drivers are generally just magically there. Software is easier because it’s mostly in a repository which automatically installs dependencies and updates and doesn’t come with malware.

By far the biggest problem has been documents and executables that can only be opened in Windows. Mostly PDF forms (fuck you Adobe).

Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.

You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.

The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.

Butter is rather low volume, so maybe it’s doable. But it’s very hard to compete with self-replicating organisms that have evolved specifically to use the energy sources, materials and conditions that are abundant on this planet. I’d be more more interested if someone had made a plant make butter.

Having a bunch of machinery sit idle waiting for power to be cheap isn’t particularly good use of resources either. We’d be better off trying to store the power.

“Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water”

I’m no expert but direct air capture of Co2 and water electrolysis both use a lot of power. So using them for this purpose is likely just a marketing gimmick that doesn’t make any sense either economically or for the climate.

I was considering putting scare quotes around “communism”, but refrained in order to avoid an argument about what is and isn’t really communism. Yet here we are. So much for left unity! ;D

In a fascist dictatorship, they have a lot more in common than opposition.

But if the dictatorship is a communist one they have more in common with the nazis! Or if your country is invaded by Russia you might find yourself fighting side by side with the Azov battalion.

There are libertarians who genuinely care about free speech and might make useful allies on those issues.

Just because someone is the enemy of your enemy, or an occasionally useful ally, doesn’t mean you want to unify with them.

The idea that all “leftists” should just work together is stupid.

Leninism, Anarcho-primitivism and Social democracy (for example) are not different approaches to “leftism” that ultimately want the same things; they are completely separate ideologies that naturally come into conflict. The people who follow them disagree with each other because they want and value completely different things. If they were to put aside their differences there would be nothing left.

That doesn’t mean arguing on the internet about ideology is meaningful, or that there can’t be common goals or enemies, just that you should give up the idea that all “leftists” are somehow natural allies, because it doesn’t make any sense.

There are LED bars for mounting in your rear windows to display text to those behind you

Aluminium smelting is so energy intensive that Iceland, a country with a population of less than 400 000, is the world’s 12th largest producer of it, even though the raw materials aren’t mined there. Iceland just has cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.

In the real world there is no entirely reasonable code base. There’s always going to be some aspects of it that are kind of shit, because you intended to do X but then had to change to doing Y, and you have not had time or sufficient reason to properly rewrite everything to reflect that.

We tend to underestimate how long things will take, precisely because when we imagine someone doing them we think of the ideal case, where everything is reasonable and goes well. Which is pretty much guaranteed to not be the case whenever you do anything complex.

Then you just pay the president for a pardon. No worries.

It’s petty funny to see them rediscover why we have all these financial regulations

Being “fungible” means that something is functionally equivalent with something else.

For example even though every dollar bill is unique (they have unique serial numbers), they are all fungible. If you deposit $100 in the bank, then withdraw $100 later, you are not getting the same bills, maybe not even the same denominations, but you don’t care because it doesn’t matter.

In the digital world copies are cheap and perfect. There is literally no way to tell a copy of an image from “the original”. So in the digital world all copies of something are fungible, and originals don’t meaningfully exist.

NFTs try to introduce artificial scarcity to the digital space by creating a distinction between “the original” of something and the copies, by introducing a sort of chain of custody tracking system.

What if we took the art market, where prices can be whatever, so it’s really easy to launder money. Then we let people easily set up multiple accounts for wash trading. And we supported currencies held in stupidly large amounts by people who can’t legally use them for anything useful.

I just assumed that if a motherboard had an RGB header you could control it from the BIOS, because that’s how it worked ten years ago. But no, these days you need their software, which crashes on install under windows and doesn’t support anything else.

If you are lucky OpenRGB might work.

Or it measured how rare it was for them to get candy. The most interesting thing about the experiment is honestly the many ways in which it was flawed.

The French trade union Solidaires Informatique has pursued both criminal and civil charges. Not sure how much that accomplished, but at the very least a bunch of assholes were fired or resigned, so they weren’t completely ineffective.

Yeah, like the music or movie industry, it’s rife with abuse because there are so many young people who dream of working in it that there’s always fresh meat for the grinder.

And selection pressure means the industry veterans in charge are people who somehow thrived in this environment, so they’re unlikely to change things.

I have a friend who worked in vfx on some very high-profile movies and shows, stuff you have definitely seen. And that industry actually seems even worse! Everyone is a contractor, so you work on one project, and then you don’t have a job anymore, and you better make the bosses happy if you want to get another contract ever again. Everything is stunningly poorly planned, with deadlines that are impossible to meet without working all night, constant last-minute changes from fickle directors and incredible amounts of nitpicking and demands of perfectionism.

This is likely exactly the type of industry they are turning game development into. Because it’s maximum profit with minimum responsibility. Hire the best in the world, squeeze the most work in the shortest time you can out of them, and then toss them to the wind when they’re spent.

Many years ago. But as you said, it’s a big industry, and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.