Bill Gates is a monopoly capitalist with zero scruples. He screwed over so many people, vacuumed up so much wealth from all other sectors of the world economy. He has zero qualms about doing this either: There’s video of his depositions in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the whole fucking time he just argues semantics in response to the questions, and when pressed after five minutes of defining every fucking word in a sentence, almost always claims he doesn’t know or recall. Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business. And he does that despite whatever the outcome of the case, he’d be richer than billions of humans collectively. What pathology is this?

There’s so much more shit, like the incessant lobbying for medical patents worldwide, or how, according to Melinda, Gates loved hanging out with Epstein.

Now, why would anyone want to have their picture taken with that guy? Torvalds is such an unprincipled lib.

Edit: Listened to some of the deposition in the background. Here Gates is being extremely annoying for example: The interviewer reads back an email from Gates saying something like “browser share is a very, very important goal for this company”, and then asks what other companies he’s comparing browser share with. Gates goes several minutes arguing he’s not talking about any other companies, since literally there are no other companies mentioned in that very sentence, obviously pretending like he doesn’t understand the question. If you listen to all the shit before, they have to go over whether “browser share” means “market share” (Gates says no), whether “very, very important” and “important” have different meanings (Gates says not necessarily, could be hyperbole), and that sort of stuff for minutes on end. Like seriously listen to this, I cannot even describe how stupid it is.

Also a common liberal tactic.

This is so stupid, what’s Vietnam supposed to do? What stuff does America produce that they can export to Vietnam to offset this trade imbalance? The US is basically ruining that country, again. Because what, they stole jobs growing coffee, assembling phones and sewing T-shirts from the American workers? I’m sure the American worker would love to do that at competitive wages of like $200 per month.

Also, imagine this perfectly balanced trade scenario: Vietnam sells coffee to the US, gets dollars, uses these dollars to buy oil from the UAE, and the UAE then uses these dollars to buy American weapons or something. As per the braindead Trump administration, this would be a problem, because it involves a third country.

We knew about this stuff, but I guess it’s really only official once the NYT writes it down.

Apparently the way to write about one nuclear power being heavily involved in strikes on another nuclear power, except for actually pushing the button, which they strongly advise their proxy to do, is to make it kinda cool and daring and not terrifying. This reads like some character drama. Note how the Ukrainian characters seem a lot more flawed.

That they used euphemisms, like “point of interest” instead of “target”, to obfuscate what they’re doing isn’t that surprising, but seriously fuck these guys. Learn this one weird trick on how to avoid WW3: just call it something else. I wonder how insane someone has to be to be a general.

Also makes me wonder what they’re leaving out of that story. The Ukrainians did that one on their own, trust us. Sink Russian flagship? No US involved. Invade Kursk? US didn’t know about it. Attack Russian oil infra? Yeah not cool Ukraine, not cool. Also no word about who blew up that dam or Nordstream.

Everywhere else though? Yeah basically the US did all that. Total involvement.

We’re told it only went south when the Ukrainians stopped following orders. Not doing exactly what the US says is bad apparently. It’s either reckless or stupid, and it actually for real doomed their 2023 offensive. For sure that one would have succeeded if the stupid Ukrainians listened.

Great partnership guys, why oh why would anyone be wary if the US actually has their best interests in mind, let alone the best interest of the their soldiers or population? No, you see, you need to charge up that hill now! Don’t look at it first! Don’t shell it first! We swear it’s just a small number of Russians. And no, we don’t trust you enough to tell you how we know that. So risk averse these Ukrainians! And btw, I see a lot 18-25 year olds running around in Kiev, what’s up with that? Looks like you are not taking this very seriously Mr. Zelensky! Looks like you don’t want to win!

About what?

Anyone who has never even used a computer before can go to one of these websites, follow the instructions on the screen in front of them, and get it done. Zero experience or skills required.

No they don’t. People who have never used a computer before have trouble even using the mouse. They don’t know what a file is, they don’t know what a filetype is, they don’t know that you can convert one type of file to another, they don’t know even to look for a file conversion website, they don’t know how to upload a file to a website, they don’t know how to find a file in the file dialogue, and on and on. Seriously what are you on about?

Overall fair enough I guess. I didn’t say it was simple though, i said it was not more complicated. Your experience using GUIs and web interfaces probably spans years. It’s not like you’re born with GUI skills.

Making a GUI is more work than making a CLI tool. GUIs are not cross-platform, a pure CLI is more portable. You can code a CLI with any programming language you like, while there are many restrictions on what kind of GUI is available on what programming languages and platforms.

The GUI code is tedious and boring to write. That code can become outdated and broken and might need fixing to run on newer platforms. The CLI has essentially no extra dependencies and the interface hasn’t changed much since like the 70s.

The sort of person who develops free software usually knows and likely prefers to use the CLI. They’re not doing it for users like you, first and foremost. They’re doing it themselves, or because they need it for their job. The CLI tool might be exactly what they want, because the file conversion is part of some backend stuff, something that’s run from a script, so you can automatically run it on all the files.

Anybody with basic web dev skills can then take these tools, slap together web fronted and try and make some quick bucks. They’re basically incentivized to not care about security, privacy or anything like that. Of course that space attracts scammers.

The incentives just aren’t there for it to be any other way. You can either learn the CLI commands, written by people who care about their reputations and professional pride and want to share their tools. Or you can trust anonymous internet randos wanting to make a quick buck. And while I sympathize not wanting to have to learn new shit, I swear using a shell isn’t actually more complicated than using a web browser, you’re just not used to it.

Obviously? They’re not able to, and even if they were, the EU economy and population is so much bigger, Russia would become the backwater of its own empire. Why would they want that? The end result would look a lot like the EU admitting Russia.

Oh yeah that’s where I was getting at, but I didn’t have time to write that out earlier. I agree that OP probably pulled out the usb stick before buffers were flushed. I imagine that direct I/O would mitigate this problem a lot because presumably whatever buffers still exist (there would some hardware buffers and I think Linux kernel I/O buffers) will be minimal compared to the potentially large amount of dirty pages one might accumulate using normal cached writes. So I imagine those buffers would be empty very shortly (less than one second maybe?) after dd finishes, whereas I’ve seen regular dd finish tens of seconds before my usb stick stopped blinking it’s LED. Still if you wait for that long the result will be the same.

I don’t think oflags=direct has any influence on the result. Apparently that’s about disabling the page cache in the kernel, which can avoid a situation in which the system slows down due to buildup yet-to-write pages.

This might be the greatest document of pro-Ukrainians-to-the-front talking points ever.

I’m not sure the Trump offer of getting 50% of Ukraine’s mineral wealth was real. The idea didn’t originate from the Trump regime, but it was Ukraine who brought that up first. They’re throwing that back into Ukraine’s face. It seems like they ambushed Zelenski with this ridiculous deal, which was a brazen insult really, and which was immediately rejected (correctly). It might have been the intention to mock them and show them what the actual bill of the US’s Ukraine support would look like, and how Ukraine would never actually be able to pay this debt.

Trump has called for elections, and that’s because they want to get rid of Zelenski. And I’m sure that will happen. They’re basically overthrowing Zelenski.

Either there’s a peace deal, and the fighting stops, or there isn’t (like there isn’t right now) and some poor saps get (insert your rape metaphor here) by the Russian and Ukrainian armies.

In opposite world, peace kills people, and war doesn’t. Maybe you’re from there?

No it isn’t. They may think they have good reasons for not wanting peace talks (they don’t), but definitely every big newspaper, almost all influential Western politicians and your average redditor were against peace talks this whole time. They relentlessly shouted down everyone who even tried to bring it up.

Of course the warmongers say they’re for peace. Peace through superior firepower. Peace through victory. But that is disingenuous. That’s called war.

And I’m no pacifist. I’m for having a war (a class war), but I’m not going around saying war is peace. That’s fucked up.

People are telling on themselves for opposing *gasp* peace talks. Oh no! Not peace!! We want war!!!

This Fehr guy has all the same talking points I’ve seen German politicians use as well. And that’s essentially across all relevant political parties.

For example, Interior minister Faeser called the Palästina-Kongress, which they shut down last year, and which was organized by secular left-wing groups and a Jewish group, “Islamist”. And the press loves to just repeat this stuff. And it’s great propaganda. The average German is afraid of Islamists, hates Muslims in general, and will applaud when the authorities suppress anyone labeled as such, and never look into if it’s actually true.

Foreign minister Baerbock claimed she personally saw, on video, evidence of rape on Oct 7, even though actual investigations by the UN and others have found no footage like that. She was being heckled at the time by pro-Palestine activists and just made that up, so it looks to an misinformed audience like they’re booing rape victims. And people believe this because the press never pushes back on these false claims.

Just straight up inventing blatant lies to cover for the genocide they’re committing. How tf can these people sleep at night?

Scholz needs to be handed over to the Palestinians to answer for his crimes.

How is this reasonable, they’re traumatizing the kid why exactly? 10 year olds are out on their own all the time in Germany and aren’t being chased by police.

Wait do you reply to everyone using the term Zionist with that? Because that’s some random tangent if I’ve ever seen one, triggered by a single word. Good derailing tactic though, you completely changed the subject.

I’m not even sure what your point is. Are you confused about what Zionism is? Because that’s funny for a Zionist to be confused about. It means you support the existence of a Jewish-supremacist state, and it’s a 19th century nationalist idea from Europe. So whatever you’re on about is irrelevant. I’m calling you a Zionist, since you clearly support Israel or you wouldn’t be taking the time to spread incorrect bullshit in defense of the IDF here.

Maybe you’re confused about my comment. Let me explain. You said:

So the IDF controls the border between Gaza and Egypt? You should let Egypt know their border isn’t sovereign anymore.

Egypt controls Egypt’s side of the border. Israel controls the Gaza side, what with them occupying it. Since that should be pretty obvious, it sounds like you think Egypt, in order to be sovereign, needs to control both sides the border, i.e. invade Gaza.

Which is funny to me, because that obviously defeats the whole purpose of a border. So I’m imaging you as a person who thinks the whole point of a border is that both sides should be controlled by the same state, since that’s how Israel does it, and you being a Zionist, you think that’s the normal way a border works. So “Zionist logic”. This is a funny thought, a person so brainwashed they don’t understand that borders are not like a checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank. There, you made me explain the joke.