In general, things have meaning because people assign meanings to them. Nothing inherently has meaning as meaning exists only within the human mind/soul. If you are searching for meaning, you will find nothing.
The gun is there. It’s just pointed at that dictators’ heads. If a vassal gets too out of line, the US initiates “regime change” or there’s an assassination or there’s a color revolution.
The issue is more that an individual has a right to be secure his/her belongings, is free from warrantless search and seizure, and a right to refrain from self-incrimination. All of these are violated by constant surveillance. Further, no such right was granted to government in the Constitution and is thus prohibited by the 10th amendment.
Features to replace installation, cloud metadata uniformity, better secure boot support, boot loader support, and improved TPM support. None of this sounds user hostile, but taken together and handed to the corporate Linux vendors? This easily becomes a way to make Linux a licensed appliance. Yet, handed to a group like Arch, it just enables wildly cool stuff. Incentives are a thing.
So many people talk about wanting Linux on Apple Silicon, and while Asahi can run on M1/M2 and has some support on M3, it's not optimal. Also, software quality in Linux, while higher than most alternatives, has been trending downward. I am more eager to have NetBSD's Apple Silicon support improve than I am Linux's.
Give IBM some time, and there will likely be similar stuff on Linux distributions. The Linux kernel has been dropping hardware support, and systemd has been getting some... interesting features.
Naturally, the benefit for Linux is still the variety available in distributions. While IBM's RHEL and Canonical's Ubuntu may adopt some questionable stuff, Slackware, Devuan, Omarchy, and such likely won't.
I recently had to buy RAM for some on-prem servers at work. 256GB was around $3800, and it wasn't even particularly fast RAM... it also wasn't ECC, because that would have spiked the price still higher.
Right now, demand exceeds supply. As new fabs come online, supply will rise. Eventually, either through greater efficiency of the models and inference systems or through the collapse of AI companies, the demand will drop.
Regulatory capture of our legislature and regulatory bodies, intense bribery, proof of need legislation, and people consistently providing an obviously corrupt system with more money and power thinking that somehow, magically, the people who’ve obviously been corrupt and dishonest will be made angels when given more money and power.
So much this. When my son turned 12, I told him how some of the various social media sites and smart technologies work, and he’s avoided social media altogether ever since (he’s now an adult). He always uses ad blockers and content filters, and he generally made good decisions around phone use, and other tech use from a privacy respecting perspective.
Prior to this discussion, he was eager to be on social media apps because other kids his age were on them. People respond to knowledge about these topics, but there isn’t a mainstream popular individual talking about it. Everyone is so silo’d, it would be quite difficult to reach people, and depending upon the political leanings of such a person, half the population would reactively go the opposite direction… on what really shouldn’t be partisan.
Sure, but people could also just use BSD. The point is not vim or Linux. The point is that what the author appears to enjoy, a simple editor and a book, is easily accomplished still today.
Most Linux systems just symlink vim to vi, and it launches in a compatibility mode. Vim without plugins is still close. Old workflows can still be achieved. The user simply has to really want that experience.
I never found systemd difficult, but I do find prior solutions to be simpler. An init script is easy, and the order is also easy. If people are accustomed to UNIX systems, the sysvinit is better. For people who never experienced those systems, systemd is their friend. No need to use UNIX tools when Systemd ships with batteries included.
I see all these comments about Linux not having this issue, but Linux has a similar issue. Canonical’s uutils being forced before being ready, Wayland adoption initially before it was ready, KDE4, GNOME3, PulseAudio, Avahi, Bluetooth support, etc. Linux systems do tend to get better overtime, but Linux systems also tend to release without sufficient testing. So, while you can expect things to be great after several patch releases, everything may break initially.
The owners of the social networks are billionaires with great lawyers and lobbyists on staff. They get politicians to introduce bills pushing the responsibility to the OS instead of the social network.
Of course, I am not sure why anyone trusts the global elite after JE. Telling any system the age of a user could be more harmful to that user than the supposed harm of the software itself.