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(transcribed from a series of tweets) - iamragesparkle

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out." And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.

It’s crypto all over again, but with a less-useless technology underpinning it. Seriously, a computer doing grade school arithmetic is what will threaten humanity? I’m sure it’s interesting from a research perspective how that math is being done, but math is the easiest thing for a computer to do.

It also prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty, and it actually used the Antarctic treaty for inspiration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

Which is not to say that it’s exactly the same situation as Antarctica, but the treaties are more similar than you might assume.

Doesn’t the outer space treaty place similar restrictions on mars?

A far more likely scenario is that they have been overstating what the software can do and how much room for progress remains with current methods.

AI has blown up so fast with so much hype, that I’m very skeptical. I’ve seen what it can do, and it’s impressive over past machine learning algorithms. But it does play on the human tendency to anthropomorphize things.

iOS web browsers are forced to use the safari/WebKit engine, so you don’t get Firefox extensions, sadly.

The main benefits of using Firefox on iOS is if you prefer it’s interface or want to sync with desktop Firefox (which is why I use it).

Reminds me of

This is my beef with basically all modern interfaces. Stuff changes and moves with just enough of a delay to cause me to miss click. Autocomplete changing recommendations on phones, UI elements shifting on web pages, etc.

There will be things to learn and unlearn, but modern Linux distros are fairly smooth sailing for basic tasks if your hardware supports Linux well. Laptop support is a little more spotty, where there may be issues with suspend, or the Wi-Fi needing 3rd party drivers, but desktops will probably work without much fuss (and there are plenty of laptops with no issues).

Gaming has been made much easier thanks to wine and proton, particularly valve’s contributions. For steam games, many of them will just work out of the box or after ticking a checkbox. ProtonDB is invaluable for quickly seeing how well a game will run on Linux.

But as you’ll see as you read some of the reports on ProtonDB, there will likely be a more troubleshooting than you’re used to on windows. As long as you know how to Google the name of your distro + the problem you’re seeing, you’ll usually find a solution.

You don’t need to be a terminal master to use Linux nowadays. But most things are easier to explain with terminal commands than with step by step gui instructions, so many guides online will have you use the terminal to some degree.

Honestly, the best advice I can give is just try it. If you have a spare drive (internal or usb), just go ahead and install Linux to it. If you want to be extra sure you won’t do anything to your existing windows install, remove the windows drive first (or disable it in bios). Then play around with things and see how it feels.

I’m having to use windows+office for work after a few years of being linux only, and god do I hate modern office’s interface.

The ribbon, on its own, isn’t super offensive to me - its just a chonky toolbar. But why on earth did they have to get rid of the classic menus?! If I don’t know where a feature is, it’s so much easier to skim through text menus than flipping from ribbon to ribbon, hovering over each button for tooltips, and popping out secondary toolbars of icons to find what I want. It’s maddening for someone who only needs to use office intermittently.

Some software is absolutely more secure for being open source. There’s a reason why popular cryptographic libraries tend to be open, even those used in military applications.

If the security of your software component relies on an attacker not having access to your source, then your component is only secure until someone reverse engineers it and figures out how it works, at which point it is entirely compromised on all systems it’s deployed to.

So you need something else to provide security besides obscuring how the software works. In cryptography, that comes from a large, highly random encryption key. The reason that your online bank transactions are safe from an attacker snooping on your network is because, even having the full source code to the crypto libraries, it would take a computer longer than the age of the universe to guess the encryption key through brute force.

The benefit of open source is that it gets a lot more eyes on the code to find flaws and vulnerabilities - and to verify that the software does what the vendor claims, which is very much not always a given.

I went from an 11 pro max to a 13 mini last year because I was sick of having a brick in my pocket, and I feared that the 13 mini would be the last small non-budget phone. Hopefully Apple will go back to making small phones, but in the meantime, I will be hanging on to my 13 mini for as long as I can.