MudMan

dark

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.

I genuinely never engaged with Reddit at all, so I’m not in a position to compare, but I don’t think the numbers suggest that Reddit “is dying” or even that it got significantly impacted.

Which is fine by me. If anything, the vibe here is less Reddit and more “late 90s/early 00s forums” and that’s an improvement on my book.

I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

“Unknown” goes from 3 to 6% in the same time period, so I think technically it’s the year of the Unknown desktop. Sounds catchier, if you ask me.

It’s all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use ~ and | as commonplace characters.

FWIW, I don’t even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I’m using constantly, it’s all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it’s not what I expect.

I came here to joke that judging by what toy stores look like, they probably just sell merch. I was extremely not ready for that to be the canonical explanation and now I feel more respect for the writers. More empathy, too, because… you know they know.

The stuff my dad made. My mom worked past our lunchtime, my dad did not.

https://media.tenor.com/WUwtwTKCvicAAAAC/reexamine-personal-biases.gif

No, hey, let me be clear, I don’t think you’re actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.

What I do say is that the notion that “it’s not free, it all comes from taxes” is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn’t the same as paying for a service, and public services aren’t “services you pay with your taxes”, they’re… well, public services.

And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it’s a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you’re definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that’s not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that’s not the same thing.

So hey, I get it, you don’t ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you’re still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You’re right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you’re willing to explore.

Yeah, for sure. I’m just wary that the line between cynicism and defeatism is thin, and defeatism leads to conformism.

If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn’t root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling “obligated” to pay, they either won’t pay anyway or won’t use the software. That’s not a viable option.

So you’re left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is “broken” or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is… well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that’s where the effort should go.

It’s not a strawman argument. My response (which wasn’t to you) was triggered by the notion that we “need to normalize paying for foss”. I don’t think that’s true, and I do think it’d lead to generating a “tipping system”. Plus, again, not what the linked article is driving at.

I’m also not fond of “we live in a system” as an argument for playing by the system’s rules. I mean, by that metric people should just charge for access and call it a day, that’s what the “system” is encouraging. We need sustainable flows of income towards FOSS, but that doesn’t mean step one is normalizing end users feeling obligated to pay.

We absolutely must financially incentivize software developers. But charity is not a substitute for financing in a healthy system. The sources of financing can’t rely on badgering individuals to feel guilty for using resources in the public domain (or at least publicly available) without a voluntary contributions. I agree with the OP and the article in that the support system shouldn’t be charity. Tax evaders, redistribute wealth, provide public contributions to FOSS. We should create a sysem where FOSS is sustainable, not held up by tips like a service job in an anarchocapitalist hellscape.

No, it’s not, and it’s not the argument the article is making. The article is arguing for developers receiving public supoprt financed by taxing corporation who are currently evading massive amounts of money.

This is not a case of “no one”, anyway. Throw a coffee if you can is already how this works. And it’s not just “a coffee”, plenty of openly available software has alternate revenue streams, support from corporate backers and other sustainability tools besides voluntary crowdsourcing. The OP is pondering a systemic solution, not a moral obligation based on capitalist conceptions of how much time is worth and charity.

I hate this argument so, so passionately.

It’s the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.

So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can’t do it any other way (or hey, maybe it’s already funded by corporate money, that’s also a thing). But no, you’re not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it’s publicly available. That’s some late stage capitalism crap.

Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it’s coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don’t contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don’t know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it’s owed not so much.

To be clear about what I’m saying, the setup is subtitles in the same language as the audio. So if you’re learning French you set French audio with French subtitles.

That REALLY helps bind the pronuntiation to the writing and it actually makes it far easier to understand the speech. Assuming you’re reading the subtitles at the same time, of course.

You won’t understand a lot of it, and you’ll have to put up with the frustration of losing the plot often for a while, but it does help, in my experience.

Subtitles in your own native language just make you tune out the audio and read the dialogue. That’s not helpful.

This is the answer. The answer is Netflix and Youtube. Anything with media using both audio and subtitles in the language you’re trying to learn.

You still need a teacher to get you past learning enough basics of vocabulary and grammar to get started (and no, language learning apps are probably not an effective way past that) but once you have enough basic words and you understand how a sentence is put together the answer is to watch media even if you don’t fully understand what’s being said, paying attention and stopping sometimes to use dictionaries and translators to get you there on sentences you almost get.

I know people who spent years spinning their wheels on learning apps while refusing to sit through media in the target language because they get frustrated or tired by the effort of trying to keep up. It’s a bit annoying, but it really works.

“We’ll have the durability and cost solved in two years” has been in news about this for what? Five to ten years now?

That’s not to say it won’t get there, but I don’t know enough to be able to tell the difference, honestly. You’d think half your appliances would be coated on this stuff by now, even if it’s a bit more expensive. At least specialty applications would suggest some industrial readiness.