Can you evaluate the directory tree of a tar without decompressing? Not sure if gzip/bzip2 preserve that.

How tf does one do that

It’s free?

Did you respond to the right comment? I was trying to say that instructing new/novice users to disable snap updates is probably a bad idea.

Does anyone genuinely prefer Windows for a reason that makes sense? Or are they just a captive audience?

unless you completely disable [snap updates], which is hardly trivial for a new user

Tbh it probably shouldn’t be trivial for new users to disable updates. I’ve seen way too many Windows/macOS users running a years out-of-date version of Chrome.

Turns out IBM is three hot messes in a trenchcoat and always has been.

International, business, and machines?

Ah, how could I have forgotten the legion of MSFT contract employees scouring… fucking… furaffinity for that sweet, delectable anti-Linux propaganda lmao

Because Microsoft cares so much about an 18.6K-member community called “linuxmemes” on a small federated Reddit alternative known for being filled with die-hard Linux fans and furries?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=2017..latest

But the issue of laissez-faire capitalism persists, and crypto, in my opinion, is poorly equipped to deal with it

I mean, proof-of-stake protocols didn’t exist until 2012, and that was a hybrid protocol. Exclusively proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies weren’t available until long after that IIRC. There’s a lot we still don’t know about what blockchains are capable of, and it’s entirely possible that we figure out how to regulate them effectively.

But you point still stands;

And that is why it shouldn’t suddenly become the main means for payments.

I agree wholeheartedly.

…did you respond to the wrong comment? Cryptocurrency is available from wherever you are - that’s more of a core feature than wishful thinking.

That’s not what I got from the article. (Link for anyone who wants to check it out.)

My interpretation was that decreasing solar/wind electricity prices slows the adoption of renewables, as it becomes increasingly unlikely that you will fully recoup your initial investment over the lifetime of the panel/turbine.

In my mind, this will likely lead to either (a) renewable energy being (nearly) free to use and exclusively state-funded, or (b) state-regulated price fixing of renewable energy.

But, I’m starting to realize that no amount of evidence is sufficient for folks who want to federate with Meta

This is an incorrect assumption, because

And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I’ll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.

I would be very interested to read this! There are definitely limits to my optimism here. I think Meta is a horrible company and I don’t expect them to act in the best interests of the Fediverse; I’m just not yet convinced that them giving up what is essentially free and ad-free API access to one of their platforms cannot be used to our advantage. Threads federation could absolutely be catastrophic, but it’s also possible that it’s a good opportunity; that’s all I’m saying.

They will corrupt and exploit any environment they are a part of via any means they can.

Right, unless they can’t, though. Ideally the Fediverse should be resistant to this kind of influence without resorting to defederation. I’m also concerned that defederating from Threads will make more Threads users than Mastodon users.

We don’t need to be able to predict every last detail of how they will do so to know it is true.

I mean, some idea of what they might do would be nice.

They have a track record of being awful, anti-consumer corporate citizens. WHY would we want to try to invite them in and try to contain them?

I couldn’t care less about Meta itself. My interest begins and ends with Threads users. There are a ton of people that would never give the Fediverse a try for one silly reason or another—predominantly, I would argue, the fear of the unknown—and this seems like it could be an opportunity to overcome that obstacle if leveraged correctly. The prospect of everyone and our parents using social media that is not completely beholden to Meta is exciting to me.

Again, maybe I’m wrong, but this whole thing is basically an experiment, isn’t it? I’d like to see what happens before reaching any conclusions.

Maybe I’m just being naive, but this seems like an argument in favor of federating with Threads. One of the reasons Facebook and Instagram are so effective at driving engagement is that users have basically no ability to curate, sort, or filter the content that they see, especially since third-party clients are banned. You can’t even view most things without logging in.

The implementation of ActivityPub in Threads is a strange departure in this context - (federated) Mastodon users can view all of the content Threads has to offer without subjecting themselves to Meta’s arguably predatory curation algorithms. It almost seems like an escape for people who want to use a Meta-sized platform without Meta getting its grubby little fingers all over your mental wellbeing.

If people are worried that Threads will affect likes and comments (and therefore like/comment-based sorting algorithms) on other instances, it should always be possible to exclude Threads’s contribution to those metrics, no?

I said “fine”, not “flawless” haha. I don’t think your experience is invalid, just that it is verifiably atypical. If your experience were commonplace, nobody would use it.

WSL works fine. The only issue I’ve ever had with it pertains to mouse weirdness with SDL, and I had the same exact issue in a level 2 VM due to the way they handle mouse input. I still use it all the time when I’m not working in Linux for one reason or another.

More importantly, that’s not the point: bringing up WSL already means we’re talking about at most 1% of Windows users. You’re failing to consider the user experiences of

1. the person who can’t tell you the difference between an OS and a web browser (usually also the person that thinks pressing the power button on the monitor turns off the PC)
2. the prolific email answerer, who generally refuse to use anything other than Gmail (see person 1) or Outlook (bonus points if they still have an Exchange server with a custom “lastlame.com” domain they set up before the dot-com bubble burst)
3. the godmother of lost kitten posters and printed-out recipes (LibreOffice doesn’t have Comic Sans or WordArt, and my beige-plastic printer from 2001 is difficult enough to use on Windows!)
4. the Gamer™, who would be pissed to find out they can’t install Razer spyware to make their $500 in peripherals induce seizures to the beat of skibidi toilet
5. the Nvidia user, who wouldn’t have that bad of an experience these days, but has heard enough horror stories to not even consider it
6. the artist (unless the state of drawing tablet support has changed recently; I haven’t checked)
7. the hi-fi boyz (this post was brought to you by HDR gang)

THESE people represent a strong majority of PC users, and they all have reason (good or bad) to avoid Linux. The fact of the matter is, if you’re a programmer like me or yourself, your opinion is skewed strongly towards Linux because the last 20 years of development were mostly fueled by the Android kernel and enterprise/datacenter deployments, both of which disproportionately benefit our use case.

I don’t think anyone is deranged enough to call Windows “perfect”. It’s just the most supported operating system by virtue of being the most widely used operating system. And it will likely stay that way until enough people like us show up in the usage statistics for manufacturers to consider first-class Linux support.

My laptop camera still doesn’t work on Linux lol

I’ve spent 0 minutes trying to fix it, but in my defense, that’s exactly as long as I should have to spend fixing it, and it’s exactly as long as I had to think about it on Windows.