cecilkorik

I wish you were right. I don't mind governments and political parties who aren't fascist. Democratic socialists and responsible environmentalists can AI-pump their ideology all they like and it's not going to do much harm to civilization. But if they are doing it at all, they're not doing it anywhere near the level that fascists and kleptocrats are. The latter benefit from radical change, and they are using AI to achieve that.

This also has big implications for consumer rights and society as a whole in other areas of digital technology and right to repair, it is a foot in the door to start actually holding manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of their products (digital and real) that requires them to actually relinquish their control when their product reaches end-of-commercial-life, instead of turning everything into digital garbage out of what basically amounts to apathy and compulsive rights hoarding.

I think we can all agree it's probably a bad idea.

Does that mean you shouldn't? Maybe. But maybe not. Sometimes it's fun to do something "wrong", because you want to, and maybe you'll really enjoy it anyway. Maybe you'll learn a lot about why it's a bad idea, and maybe you'll find those learnings enrich your life and give you stories to tell. I'm not trying to recommend this at all, I'm just saying you should consider it from all angles and outcomes before you make a decision, especially if this is something he really wants to do for whatever reason. Life is for living, it's not for making a series of optimal choices to result in the highest score. Experiences, both good and bad, are their own reward. And as long as nobody's going to get hurt, and you go into it with your eyes open and an understanding of the risks and potential downfalls, and do what you can to mitigate and protect against them as much as you can, maybe it's something you can try.

If it's really something you're not comfortable with, and he is, well then you two are going to have to have a long and hard talk about it and come to some mutually agreeable compromise. But even if it is objectively a bad idea, you also need to think about whether he's just naive and is going to hate it, or whether it's going to make him happy that he tried it, and whether it's an experience he needs to have in his life. Meanwhile, is it going to cause you resentment if you go there and hate it and he loves it? Will he listen to you if you decide you really do hate it and don't want to continue?

That's not something anyone can answer for you, but it has little to do with whether it's a bad idea and much more to do with what both of you want out of life.

The US has a "left" it has just been beaten into submission and told to vote for D or it gets the hose again. And I think now it's realized it's not alone, and it's fighting back. This country fought a war to depose a king. This country fought a war to end slavery. This is a country that has spent basically all its history trying to protect itself and others from what exactly is currently happening. Yeah obviously they didn't do a great job stopping this earlier, but this is not a country that is going to let itself be taken over by conservative right-wing religious fascist authoritarianism, despite the current evidence to the contrary. The country just needs a little time to remember who it really is and shake some of the rust off, because yeah, it's been quite awhile since any of us in the west actually needed to fight for anything significant in our lives. But I also think it's silly to expect we won't. I don't think the great American experiment is over, I think it's going to continue and we're going to see how that actually works.

Maybe I'm wrong, but there are still way too many good people down there, and there are good people outside the US who want them to succeed too. The real fight will come eventually. It's anybody's guess when, where, and how. They may be down right now but don't count the US out just yet I think they've still got lots of rounds left in them.

PikaOS is Debian based, and they've built the deps they need for Steam in 32-bit, so it's not the end of the world AFAIK. GloriousEggroll seems to be part of it too, so if any refugees are looking for something not Fedora-based there you go. Although his efforts for now seem focused more on Nobara (which is Fedora-based) maybe this will cause some shake-ups there too. I can see Pika is already picking up speed from this though, the Discord is super active.

Even if Fedora doesn't ever drop support I think even considering the possibility is shaking people's confidence in using it as a base going forward, sort of like how Unity's quickly-walked-back disasters drove people irrevocably towards Godot and other engines. Arch and Arch-based distros are probably starting to look much more appealing too.

It worked for Enron! Until it didn't.

and why they treat their drivers like subhuman robots already.

I am still of the opinion that they aimed too small and focused too narrow. Games are a "luxury" anyone can live without and it's hard to rally grassroots support behind protecting something that people only use for entertainment. Yeah it's low stakes to force them to let you continue to play it after servers shut down but the same low stakes also makes the petition itself pretty ignorable to anyone who's not a very invested "gamer".

Actual right to repair and right to continue to access to the software and services and devices you buy goes SO far beyond mere games, there are other huge impacts to society from exactly the same problem that leads to game servers being shut down, and this petition ignored them completely to focus exclusively on games. I know that was done purposefully, but I think it was a miscalculation.

I'm convinced it could have got a lot of support if it had broader aims. Yes if you go after the big boys who are locking down tractor parts and integrated electronic modules so they become obsolete and unrepairable and directly impacting farmers and our food supply, you're going to REALLY piss off some very big business interests who are going to try and kill your petition, but you're also going to help educate and hopefully get a lot of support from politicians who already know this is a problem and from the general public who doesn't care about games but does care about society (at least once they're properly educated about it, which is hard but also a necessary and positive step to even attempt).

That "are we the baddies" clip is starting to feel closer and closer to reality every day.

I still just can't respect a rainbow road that has guardrails.

I absolutely love that you describe PikaOS as porno filthy. No judgement, no defense, no argument, I just think it's a hilarious description while perfectly making your point, and is pretty much the best thing I've read today. Thank you!

And just to stay on-topic, yeah I've found flatpak invaluable in working around some of debian's unfortunate packaging limitations. I try to use the debian packages first if possible, but if the version is too old, not available, or has crappy dependency conflicts, flatpak to the rescue!

No nobody ever has to admit anything, they just have to be able to be plausibly implicated and plausible deniability is achieved.