At work I dual boot Windows 10 and Linux Mint. It is astounding how much better the user experience is for updates on the Linux side. Or maybe I should say, it’s astounding how much worse the Windows experience is. I think Mint takes about as long to update Firefox, vscode, and my freaking kernel all at once as Windows takes to update Microsoft Defender definitions.

I feel like they snuck in a little square of reasonable terms with

Best practices Optimization Industry standard Authenticate

But now that I’ve typed it, I’m scared that optimization and authenticate have gross business-speak definitions I just don’t know about yet.

I almost expect that we’ll see some company reveal it has been letting an AI control the top level decision making for the business itself, including if and when to reveal the AI.

But the funny thing will be that all the executives and board members still have jobs and huge stock awards. They will all pat each other on the back for getting paid more money to do less work, by being bold and taking a risk to let the computer do half their job for them.

True democratic culture lies not in bourgeoisie domination (as many Americans like to believe), but rather in mutual trust and cooperation in order to solve common and big problems.

American here who has visited Scandinavia a couple times.

There are so many little differences, but they add up to a staggering divide in the amount of mutual trust and cooperation you see in little everyday interactions.

You really think the NSA will get involved to track someone who wants to get an abortion?

Probably not, unless it’s an exceptional case where they are already interested for another reason.

But if, say, county sheriffs across the country also got access, I would be surprised if I didn’t hear about women’s and doctors’ lives being ruined by them.

Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.

At first I wanted to reply about how one can HOPE that capitalism’s never ending extraction of value from labor might build a better future and enable more happiness.

But there’s a deeper assumption in that statement, and in my limited personal experience it affects conservatives the most. That is thinking that happiness is caused by external factors: money, toys, status, power, etc.

How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI fad was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?

I’m using Linux mint all day at work, while I have a couple of rarely-used Windows machines at home. I think the swap to Linux on those home machines is going to be a winter project this year.

It might be more accurate to say the project will be setting up the Linux version of a few key pieces of software. The actual installation of Linux Mint is the easiest part!

The first rule of [REDACTED] club, y’all.

I have to admit that one does look really good too.

I have a couple of old windows machines at home, so eventually (maybe as a winter project) I’ll need to decide if I want to try some other distros long term.

It’s a great intro AND a great one to stick with. It is basically Ubuntu, the most popular distro(which is built on Debian), minus the controversial Canonical stuff, plus some additional conveniences and polish.

If I switched from Mint to Arch it wouldn’t really affect how I use my PC unless it broke functionality. 95% of usage is in terminal, Firefox, or vscode. And that includes browser-based M365 work apps.

I absolutely love Linux mint. I use it daily for dev work, but I’d also install it on my mother’s old laptop so she could keep using Facebook on it or whatever.

The saltiness comes from all the jizz.

My experience is that search engines are still decent at finding niche information that would normally be hard to find. But for anything mainstream, for instance any household product that should be easy to find information about, instead how about these 300 pages of top 10 lists of Amazon affiliate links buried under AI generated filler?

Oh to hear the AI give us the “well I guess you should have thought of THAT before you did something WRONG” line that some humans use to dehumanize others.

You know that thing where reality is so ridiculous that people would reject the same stuff in works of fiction?

Yeah it bothers me that you said that, lol.

I always found it tough to get upset with them much for that one. They had to deal with battery aging because they were the ones to support their devices long enough for it to matter. Plus I had a Nexus 6P at the time, and when its battery started getting weak the damn phone would just shut off while at 30% or whatever.

Them sneaking it in was obviously bad though.

I use MS teams for meetings every day at work, in Firefox, in Linux. It’s nice that even the camera works when I need it to.

Fair enough. Thanks!

Fortunately with Linux, choice is the name of the game!