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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • All these craptastic US tech companies originally started on internationally developed free and open source software. They hoover up capital and talent then abuse their market power. Fuck them all.

    They all run on Linux - Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. Greg KH who maintains stable is German. So many libraries and core system contributions by Germans like Drepper and Poettering. Youtube ran on mysql for years from Finnish Widenius. Google built a lot of stuff with Python - from Dutch Guido van Rossum and c++ from Danish Stroustrup. All of the video and audio sites rely heavily on ffmpeg, orginally from French Fabrice Bellard. Lots of them also using virtualisation stuff which includes qemu, also from Bellard. So much comp sci research from Europe and UK. Chrome and Safari originated with KDE (German) code. Europe did all the heavy lifting while the US took all the profits. I’m not even European but every country has the same experience. They have no idea how they are viewed.









  • Rebuilding trust for most companies means some bullshit marketing campaign. New catch phrase. Some promotion. It rarely means admitting fault and changing direction. It would take something really huge for that to happen. Perhaps a combination of AI bubble burst, leadership change, shareholder revolt.

    Everything anti-consumer in Windows is a deliberate choice aimed at extracting more revenue from customers. This isn’t unique to Microsoft. They exist to make money for their shareholders.

    If like me you think a lot of companies have been incredibly short sighted and are burning their brands and customer loyalty for short term gains, just look at the stock prices. Short termism is making a killing for tech companies while the rest of the economy is treading water. Is it sustainable? I don’t think so. Does it matter for Microsoft or any of the other tech companies?

    I have been a customer of companies that were awesome for years then sold out and their prices sky rocketed. They were clearly bleeding customers but every time they did they just put the price up more. Some people always stay for some reason. This can go on for years. As long as they keep screwing people faster than people leave they are probably making a lot more money in the short term than they would have made with a longer vision. That is business these days. People aren’t building products for the long term anymore. Now that thinking seems to have moved to companies. Modern business leaders are about gobbling revenues up like a locust plague then moving on to the next pasture.




  • This is very satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way. I have been lectured to by Americans and those influenced by them for decades about the importance of their constitutional freedoms to shoot children and spread hate speech.

    Some liberal western democracies don’t even have a codified constitution and still have better human rights and fairer government than the USA. Without a well functioning representative democracy with preferential or proportional voting, concentrating enormous executive power in a single tyrant without strong protections was always obviously exploitable.

    I think a lot of them are still living in denial and think the good guys are going to come in and defend the constitution at the last minute. Hope they are right. It is one hell of a gamble for them and the rest of us.


  • Guns are still a thing here in Australia. It’s just more balanced and reasonable than the USA.

    My town has a shooting club, game reserves and is surrounded by farms. Seasonally we wake up to the sound of gunfire in the distance from hunters.

    I’ve known professional people in the heart of our biggest cities who love nothing more than to head out bush and shoot feral animals when they can.

    You won’t stumble onto a firearm at your kids school for obvious reasons but there could be some under lock and key in a gun safe at your mates house. It’s not unreasonable to know some basics.


  • For someone who subbed to self hosted almost as soon as they joined Lemmy I am really conservative about what I host. I have tried to keep all media in jellyfin to keep things sinple. But recently I expanded to audiobookshelf and wow!

    Ripped some of my audiobooks and added some podcasts and now we have a family library and everyone has their own progress and settings working across devices. I am still spending a lot of time consuming media but I think it’s a much healthier balance.


  • It was (and is) spot on but Microsoft won the war for minds and lots of people in the Linux community started using Microsoft products like vscode and calling them good guys because they were running Linux datacenters and making kernel contributions. Microsoft employed some really good people working on some cool things. You were called out for being immature and holding outdated grudges if you used slang terms and you couldn’t participate in conversations and be taken seriously.

    Meanwhile Microsoft was still being Microsoft. They bought the defacto town square - github - in an attempt to control the platform. Then they mined the content to train LLMs. Now the LLMs bombard open source projects with crap. Even as Windows is dying they are trying to drag us down as well.

    They are a big company and big companies sometimes do good things. No hate on their engineers. But Microsoft have always been the enemy and they will always be the enemy. It is their nature.



  • The bad guys normalised racism, fraud, sexism and a lot of other evils and had people cheering for them as they flouted the law and protected each other from prosecution. It has been bad for ever regardless of who was in power with the two tier justice system that protected the elites while punishing everyone else. But we are in the end game now. The masks are off

    You too can be allowed to sample the vices of the wealthy elites, in moderation and under their control. In return all they ask is your loyalty. Seems kind of weird and out of touch to me. Regular people mostly just want good health, a place to raise a family, some free time and a decent income. No AI hallucination is going to substitute. They think so little of us.


  • We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.

    Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.

    Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.

    We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.


  • A lot of people seem to feel like this. It’s obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.

    And it’s always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.

    I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don’t tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.