Yeah, but if those low IQ dudes wanted to overthrow democracy and they wanted to tell other low IQ dudes about it they could just shout it out real loud. The media will ignore it. Law enforcement will do nothing. The courts will do nothing. The public will do nothing.

How people have reacted doesnt make sense to me. Like the only reason people would “joke” about such shit is because they are really fucking serious about it. Its a declaration of intent being broadcast to like minded people.

When the president of the US “jokes” about being a king my reading is a constitutional crisis is more of a when than an if.

Who jokes about these things?

Exactly. Have you ever heard an elected president joke about being King or invading their peaceful neighbor? Ever? Anyone? Animal fuckers. Its the only thing that makes sense.

I was reading or watching some news story once and it was about these two blokes getting arrested for fucking farm animals. And it started a train of thought. How do two strangers meet who are into fucking farm animals? It isn’t like it is socially acceptable. Its probably not on their dating profile. I get that if you are part of a comparatively common group experiencing social repression you learn ways to communicate. Even pedos. But animal fuckers? Are they that common?

Now call me autistic if you like but suddenly I realized some of the edgy race jokes I had laughed at when I was younger and dumber might have been actual racists looking to connect with other racists. The sexist and homophobic jokes might have been actual bigots. And the guys joking about fucking animals. Well most of those are just jokes because obviously nobody does that. But perhaps some of them are looking for a special friend because how else does that convo even get started without the plausible deniability of “a joke”.

So now when I see a fascist dog fucker “joking” about their not meant to be serious fascist memes and symbols the illusion is broken for me. And when I see Presidents joking about being Kings or invading neighbors, it isn’t my type of humor any more I guess.

It isn’t relevant to the Linux kernel at all. Even though Torvalds wrote git to support Linux development they operate on a different development model (email, patch sets etc). It is very relevant to the wider ecosystem (Linux distro vs Linux kernel). Most open source software development is hosted on one of these platforms and even non-developers sometimes need to interact with them. Anyone starting a project or looking to share it finds themselves asking the same questions.

I prefer this sort of engagement farming question to the ones asking which laptop to buy or which distro or desktop environment is best. Though it is arguably healthier and more productive for me to be doing almost anything else with my life. I increasingly feel like I am filling out a captcha every time I answer such a question. It feels like something any reasonably competent human could discover trivially hitting a small number of websites and reading. Even the people who cut and pasted low effort LLM responses pretty much nailed most of the facts - arguably more than good enough. What is the point of participating here really?

In my opinion Github in its current incarnation mainly exists to steal the IP of programmers and lock it up in proprietary AI services controlled by Microsoft. It dominates for the same reason Facebook or Youtube dominate. It is the only platform normies know and it benefits from massive network effects. It is US owned and operated which is becoming an issue for lots of people. Github is a proprietary closed source platform. I believe it was originally mostly written in Ruby but they have likely replaced all the performance bottlenecks using other languages. In my opinion their site is a usability nightmare.

Forejo is a fork of Gitea by Codeberg, a community run non-profit from Germany (still a liberal democracy under the rule of law) and hosted in Europe. They provide free hosting for open source projects or it is easy to self host. Gitea is a fork of Gogs and remains active. All those forks are written in the Go language and it requires a single exe, a config file and an sql database to run making it very easy to self host even without containers.

Gitlab is a service like Github or Codeberg that can also be self hosted but it is written in Ruby, a slow and inefficient interpreted language, which like Javascript or Python has lots of crazy fragile run time dependencies. The open source project was originally a work of Dutch and Ukrainian programmers and it was a Dutch company but they took VC money and IPOed and I don’t know that I would assume it is European controlled. Some open source projects like Gnome moved there as it was the main alternative to Github. Can’t recommend vs Gitea/Foejo for self hosting.

For single developers, small groups, arguably all you really need is git and email if you don’t need or want all the extra fluff. That can work even for large projects like the Linux kernel. Sites like github tend to serve as single points of contact for lots of projects. It is their front page, issue tracker, everything which is one hell of a dependency on another company. It has Facebook-ized the code ecosystem. I think it also sort of serves as a linkedn for some people.

Prosecution only happens for criminal offences here and copyright infringement would be a civil matter. I have not heard of civil actions against downloaders for years though I may be out of the loop. The notices scare people off and some ISPs might kick you off under their terms of service but they don’t take people to court.

I have never seen a copyright warning. My old, old ISP never forwarded them on principle. And now there are VPNs.

Reply that you work for Meta and Mark said it will be ok.

I think the ctrl-y vs cmd-shift-z was a Windows vs Mac thing. A lot of commercial gui software originated on Mac including Photoshop (and much of Microsoft Office) and Mac remains popular with the creative crowd. Older Linux gui software used to be weird, either cde/motif stuff or things that looked like they were developed on an Amiga. Keyboard standardization was never a thing with linux - eg emacs and vi.

I believe ctrl-shift-z is standard across many Gnome and KDE apps now. All the ones I could quickly test anyway. Inkscape and Gimp kind of do their own thing but Inkscape definately has ctrl-shift-z showing as the primary redo shortcut for me although it seems to support control y as well. So I think Gimp is just weird as usual. The UI doesn’t conform to the expectations of contemporary Linux users let alone people from other platforms. I would probably just assume Gimp was broken, close it and open Krita instead.

AMD is by far the best choice for foss drivers. Intel might be an option in the future but I have no experience with their new cards. A second option would be good for Linux users but it’s unlikely to be NVIDIA.

Systemd provides a modern user space which fixes a huge number of problems. At first I found it difficult to learn but it had things I needed and I made the effort. I will always be nostalgic about things before systemd because I started using linux in the mid 90s.

I’m not going to throw away my GPU and multi-core CPU and go back to a 386 running dos because multithreaded applications and speculative execution scare me. There is no way to match what modern systems can do by taking old architectures and just adding more gates or faster clock speeds. And there are parallels in software architecture.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with running a BSD or a non-systemd linux distro if you like. They are still perfectly usable in a lot of situations doing the same stuff people did for years in these systems. If you have a server with a static set of devices that runs a fixed set of services at startup you don’t really need systemd. I still have some systems like that but systemd also handles those cases more efficiently and robustly.

You see these sort of link dumps from people who think vaccines cause autism or that some diet will cure cancer. Whatever the intention behind it I always associate it with a bad faith attempt to fuck with people’s heads by bamboozling them with more information than they can rationally analyze.

Believe what you want but you might want to consider that all the experts working on systemd and using it productively might know their shit.

That is the way the USA works. The country elects a tyrant who runs the executive government stacked with their cronies, people who will back them and who need to be rewarded for their support (the spoils system). It has always been like that. They formed too early and didn’t have the benefit of evolving mature parliamentary democracies like the other British colonies.

It is the job of their sorry excuse for a parliament and the politicised institution that substitutes for a high court to keep the executive accountable but both have demonstrated an unwillingness to hold the executive to account and without a true separation of powers they are clearly in very dangerous territory.

The people of the US are in control of their own destiny. They have the numbers and the power to make their country whatever they want. If they fail to do so, through their cowardice or complacency it isn’t because they lack the ability but the will.

Davinci Resolve is owned by Blackmagic Design Pty Ltd a privately owned Australian company. Australia is still a liberal democracy and a long term friend of Canada. Incidentally Røde Microphones are also Australian.

Canva is Australian founded and bought the UK company that created the Affinity suite. While the Australian founders are major shareholders I imaging there is a hell of a lot if US equity behind them but at least they aren’t Adobe.

I use a 100% free and open source software stack. It involves some sacrifice of features and interoperability that won’t be acceptable to many people but things have come a long way and it’s worth having a serious look before dismissing.

The US businesses mafia has deep hooks into enterprise, education and government markets and can’t be budged. I hope Trump goes nuclear on this trade war nonsense because it might be the best hope yet to open up the software market to some real competition.

I still remember owning a Matrox video card and using Corel applications. Good old days.

Even with growing disparity between the ultra wealthy and regular people most people in developed countries still score very highly for human development with a lot of freedoms, access to health, education and live reasonably prosperous lives by historical standards.

Its been a long time since most of us saw widespread famine or war or plagues decimating our populations. There is good reason to demand more social and economic progress which you would think would increase the appeal of that and not the politics of self destruction. There is no sane reason to burn it all down for most people.

Yet fascism still seems to be in a massive resurgence. Something really odd is happening. There is a huge information war that has seriously undermined society. It has taken over many religious groups, outsider groups like conspiracy believers and alt health, and conservative leaning parties. It is in online gaming and image boards and normie social media. It preys on socially immature young men, appealing to their insecurities. It preys on people looking for spiritual connections and community. Seeing peace and love hippies standing side by side with Christians and full on Nazis is fucking weird but I saw it during COVID.

The fascists were always there but they were not a political force and there is no reason they should ever be again. Not sure why it is happening or why we are letting it happen. It is certainly not in our interests. It always ends badly.

The US has had a stifling effect in its closest allies and partners for a very long time. I am not anti-US historically but the fact is no smaller country can hope to have an equal relationship with a super power and we have all lost locally developed technologies, businesses and capital to the USA to our detriment because the US pushed their interests over those of their supposed friends.

I am very much in favour of developing closer defence and trade relationship with small and middle power around the world and reducing US dominance. Trump may unintentionally be the best thing to happen to US partners and allies for decades. Btw am Australian, not Canadian but I suspect these feelings are widespread amongst US allies

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Probably should point out that DeepSeek is owned by a Chinese hedge fund. They specialize in algorithmic trading. Can’t get much more capitalist than that. Very happy to see Chinese capitalists release an open source model. No doubt Altman and cronies will seek protection under the guise of national security. I guess free market competition is only good when you are not getting your arse kicked.

I recognize many of the deficiencies of Gnome but on balance I still like using it.

I never migrated from Windows or Mac desktop. I got into Linux before WIndows 95 came out and although I had used Mac and Amiga desktops I never owned one myself. I have used tiling wms and plain wms with no desktop environment and I can find my way around on Windows 11 or Mac but I don’t like either as much as Gnome. KDE generally has a better foundation thanks largely to qt but I never enjoyed using KDE. Not surprised it is very popular with the new influx of Windows refugees. To me KDE always had a slightly dated Windows look and feel to it. It is still a very solid choice ofcourse.

Gnome hate became fashionable when they moved forward from Gnome 2 and some people never shut up about it. We get it. Your favorite band aren’t teenagers anymore and decided to make an album you don’t like. It is ancient history. Just use something else guys. Plasma is pretty damn good so use it. Whats the point of a free OS if you can’t accept people want the freedom to develop and enjoy different computing experiences.

What is socialist to Linus is libertarian to Eric Raymond. In huge collaborative communities people need to learn to get along and be tolerant but if they can’t handle that they also have the freedom to fork so there is room for everyone to find their own space.