ZephrC

Authoritarianism is all about concentrating power around fewer people. That what authoritarianism IS. Giving more power to the least powerful people is always anti-authoritarian. Yes, there are always trade-offs, no they’re not always as obvious as this one, but more power to more people is never authoritarian.

The short simple version is that if galaxies happen to be close enough to each other they fall toward each other faster than the space between them expands. That’s what “gravitationally bound” means.

Fallout 4 kind of in a weird place where it’s simultaneously a bad Fallout game and arguably the best Bethesda game. How much you like it really just depends on which of those things you’re more into. I’ve personally never really gotten the appeal of Bethesda games. I usually end up spending 90% of my time going through my inventory analyzing the price to weight ratio of all the worthless junk I’ve accumulated, and the worlds have always just felt really shallow to me personally, but clearly I’m in the minority. I am sort of curious why more people seem to have agreed with me on Fallout 4 than on Skyrim though. I guess maybe it’s just that the people who talk about it the most are more likely to be Fallout fans than Bethesda fans.

Oh, also, it’s a common misconception that publicly-traded companies are required to maximize profits. They can have whatever goals their shareholders want. It’s just that the way modern publicly-traded companies work, most of their shareholders are people quickly buying and trading shares based on who they think will earn them the most money this month, so that sort of inevitably becomes the goal of any publicly-traded company.

It’s not really direct cause and effect, but yeah. The incentives for a publicly-traded company make enshitification far more appealing then it would be for most other organizations.

I don’t know why people keep saying that flatpaks don’t support cli apps. They do. I know it’s awkward to type out flatpak run io.github.zyedidia.micro or whatever every time you want to use a text editor, but aliases fix that pretty neatly, and that example wasn’t hypothetical.

I’m pretty sure the reason is that the hole isn’t deep enough for it to matter. That’s nowhere near big enough to be a manhole.

If that were an actual manhole you’d be right, but its obviously not.

I mean technically yes? There’s kind of a post pandemic return to normal still going on, and before that there were consistent record low crime rates for the first half of the 10s, so they’re not that low, but they’re still pretty low. Nowhere near as bad as the terrifying dark ages of the 90s.

Yeah, and none of them can actually design bridges. Some of them can be useful tools for engineers to use while designing bridges, but this isn’t tech bro fantasy land. You’re gonna need some engineers. That’s gonna take more than a day.

Engineers using a specialized AI to make a design slightly lighter and then using a 3D printer to print that design isn’t a 3D printer using AI.

Did you actually even read the article you linked? It’s about a type of generative AI that’s slightly better than humans at finding the most efficient way of providing structural strength with minimal material. If you think that’s all there is to designing a bridge I can only hope you aren’t allowed anywhere near a bridge I need to drive across.

So uh… how exactly does a 3D printer use AI? Is the AI running the stepper motors? Or is this person actually suggesting that an AI could design a bridge? Because, uh, no. No it can’t. Maybe someday in the distant future, but large language models aren’t structural engineers. Those aren’t even remotely the same thing.

It’s really only more secure in the sense that in general more complicated programs have more things that can go wrong with them. Either bugs, or just user error.

That is a valid concern, and most people don’t need or use any of sudo’s extra features, so it’s completely reasonable to switch to doas because of that, but it’s not like there’s some glaring security flaw in sudo that most people really need to worry about. Especially if they’re not doing weird things in the config, which would mostly be the same people who could easily switch to doas anyway.

No, your employer doesn’t want people to learn what they’re really like, which is exactly why you should make it public.

How exactly do you update the github of a flathub package with no one actively maintaining it? Not sarcastic. That is an actual question.

And I’m not worried about big officially supported apps. A better example of the kind of thing I’m talking about is older open source games. Flatpak could be great for games. No distro out there is maintaining a current version of every open source game that has ever been released, but Flathub can, and it could be great. Unfortunately anything that’s not being actively maintained is rapidly going to become a 200MB download that whines about security every time you update your flatpaks, even if it doesn’t connect to the internet at all. Even if it’s possible for any random person to update it, who will?

Of course, this doesn’t just have to be about games. There are lots of open source programs out there that just kind of get completed and abandoned. And that’s not even bringing up all the closed source software on flathub that definitely won’t be updated eventually. These aren’t unsolvable problems, of course, but I don’t even think anybody working on flatpak even cares.

Sure, they can, and yeah it is pretty easy, but people have lives. They move on. A distro always has someone checking to make sure things aren’t broken. On Flathub it won’t even break. It’ll just waste drive space and start giving users annoying error messages, and there if the maintainer isn’t interested in maintaining it anymore the only option for doing anything about it is to fork the whole project, and who’s going to do that for something that isn’t even really broken?

Not really. It’s actually pretty common for simpler, unmaintained apps to get small changes in each distro made by the distro maintainers to stay compatible with their current library versions. There’s nobody doing that on Flathub.

I don’t even like flatpak very much, I’m not currently using it at all, and I already agreed it was flawed right at the very start of the quote you cut off there. I was just trying to be helpful. Sorry. Won’t happen again. If you want to make things hard for yourself and no one else as a weird self-defeating protest then don’t let me stop you. Don’t pretend I didn’t do the thing I just did and you had to edit out of the quote though. That’s a real dick move, frankly.

Well okay. I agree that it’s a flaw in Flatpak, but if you think adding a single line to your .bashrc is some kind of unbearable burden that you shouldn’t have to endure and you’re willing to make your own experience far worse just to avoid it, then I think you’re being a bit silly. I mean, be as silly as you want. Don’t let me tell you what to do. You are being silly though.