I had moved from Slackware to Debian but by 2004 the long release cycles of Debian were making it very hard to use any Debian with current hardware or desktop environments. I was using Sid and dealing with the breakages. Ubuntu promised a reskinned Debian with 6 month release cycles synced to Gnome. Then they over delivered with a live cd and easy installation and it was a deserved phenomenon. I very enthusiastically installed Warty Warthog. Even bought some merch.

When Ubuntu launched it was promoted as a community distro, “humanity towards others” etc despite being privately funded. Naked people holding hands. Lots of very good community outreach etc.

The problem for Ubuntu was it wasn’t really a community distro at all. It was Canonical building on the hard work of Debian volunteers. Unlike Redhat, Canonical had a bad case of not invented here projects that never got adopted elsewhere like upstart, unity, mir, snaps and leaving their users with half-arsed experiments that then got dropped. Also Mint exists so you can have the Ubuntu usability enhancements of Debian run by a community like Debian. I guess there is a perception now that Ubuntu is a mid corpo-linux stuck between two great community deb-based systems so from the perspective of others in the Linux community a lot of us don’t get why people would use it.

Arch would be just another community distro but for a lot of people they got the formula right. Great documentation, reasonably painless rolling release, and very little deviation from upstream. Debian maintainers have a very nasty habit of adding lots of patches even to gold standard security projects from openbsd . They broke ssh key generation. Then they linked ssh with systemd libs making vulnerable to a state actor via the xz backdoor. Arch maintainers don’t do this bullshit.

Everything else is stereotypes. Always feeling like you have to justify using arch, which is a very nice stable, pure linux experience, just because it doesn’t have a super friendly installer. Or having to justify Ubuntu which just works for a lot of people despite it not really being all that popular with the rest of the linux community.

Non-murican - strongly feel preference should be given to genuine refugees fleeing war, famine etc where they have absolutely no ability to influence their fate other than escape. The US is a failed democracy but the people there have barely begun to challenge their government compared to what we have seen elsewhere in the world. And there is still refuge available in blue states. US citizens need to stand up and fight. Then if they fail, only then do they get to go in the queue with the genuine humanitarian refugees. I don’t like queue jumpers. Sorry but impingement on your civil liberties doesn’t compare with families in war torn parts of the world living in fear fear of having their limbs blown off every night.

Ofcourse business around the world would like to cherry pick talent for in demand jobs. They prefer not to invest in developing local people when they can import experienced talent for less. So people with in demand skills will get in that way, not as refugees.

As we dont have the gaps in my country my guess is it a US interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as applied to the shitter.

I expect in the USA people, particularly the out groups, are believed to be inherently criminal/immoral and need to be observed to make sure they aren’t doing anything undesirable.

As the US public toilet is primarily a place for moral judgement and not elimation of waste you then get the crazies questioning if people’s gender and equipment meets moral standards for use of the facilities based on casual assessment of their appearance.

It’s just another money/power grab. Tech bros want to spy on your kids to train their mythical AGI God, make shit loads of money and be in a position of influence.

Take away people’s economic independence. Take their intellectual capital. Take their capacity to learn and think independently and ultimately their capacity to play and imagine.

The sheep are being led towards a very fucking grim world.

Lets be clear it isn’t the tech that is bad. Self hosting a model for a task that suits it like speech recognition for a disabled person is righteous and liberating.

I hate to agree with the Marxists of Lemmy but the problem is very much capitalism as it is with global warming, pollution and a social inequality. Where I will split with them historically is I still believe in liberal democracies capacity to regulate capitalism for a common good. But when everyone has outsourced their thinking to a corporate AI from birth to death democracy is fucked isn’t it.

We need to be aware of how we are being fucked over, sceptical of people pushing this shit and engaged politically to make sure it is regulated appropriately otherwise these cashed up AI fuckers are going to write legislation for our politicians to rubber stamp.

Paying to get access to data and eyeballs. Social media is about mass surveillance and influence. The customers pay the service for access to the stupid people. Always have.

Niri is very promising on a ultrawide. Not so good on a 3:2 laptop. I maintain a config to experiment with it but it’s a big commitment to change not just your desktop environment but your whole workflow and then to have different environments on devices with different screen aspect ratios.

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Not just the kids. The kids who were exposed to this stuff way back now have kids. It’s generational now.

I live in Australia and the local winery is owned by a Californian company that sends all their output exclusively to the US domestic market. It would be such a shame if those US companies fucked off and profits went back into the local economy.

It looks like it will be handled by third party verification services in Australia. You will likely provide some form of ID with age which is likely to be government id and the service will check it then inform the social media company you pass. The legislation doesn’t allow direct government involvement in running the verification service and the verification companies have to conform to privacy laws.

It is certainly a flawed system. If kids want to access things they will and there is potential for abuse. However when considering harm mitigation you need to look at the whole population.

A lot of the more extreme libertarian views on the Internet originate in the US where their “freedoms” of speech and firearms have obviously just been a distraction while they were robbed blind. They couldn’t even protect their school kids from mass shootings because they put ideology and theoretical bullshit ahead of morality, empathy and the survival of their families. I used to buy into the Internet libertarian stuff in a huge way in the days of IRC and Usenet before the mega rich tech bros moved in and turned the Internet into a shitshow of scams, mass-surveillance and brain washing. Still a big proponent of free software and agree with a lot of stuff from the EFF but the oligarchs ruined it. Now I want to burn it down. Anything to keep these nonses away from our kids is good with me.

The idea in Australia is to place the responsibility on the social media companies.

The government isnt filtering traffic or enforcing behaviour. It is fining companies if they don’t implement a form of age verification that is compliant with privacy laws.

We can’t even make these companies pay tax and obey other laws so I am not very optimistic but at least it raises awareness of the problem.

These systems are based on the flawed assumption that poor people and minorities are less able to manage money that others. It is hugely discriminatory and treated poor people (and specifically the most disadvantaged racial group in the country) like criminals and addicts. It removed personal agency and forced people to use specific retailers, preventing them buying used goods and fresh market produce. The program was expensive and the only people who benefited were the company running it. It is populist divisive nonsense.

Anyway the point is digital payment systems can absolutely be used in democratic states to enforce spending behaviours and you can even see how it starts with people here believing such a system is justifiable. Then it gets extended to other minorities. The elderly, veterans, disabled, unemployed.

Fortunately in a democracy we can educate people as to why overly simplistic solutions that appear to protect vulnerable people are in actuality a really bad idea.

Sadly not entirely true. The incredibly shitty previous government in Australia widely trialed a racist, classist cashless welfare card for indigenous people. Recipients got 80% of their welfare on it and it could not be used for alcohol, gambling or cash incase they spent it on drugs or porn or other “sinful” things.

As we become more dependent on digital systems there are new ways for our privacy and freedoms to be eroded which makes participatory democracy all the more important.

Almost all my transactions are contactless payments and it pisses me off that they all go through VISA when there is a perfectly good local network for debit card payments.

A lot of the deficiencies with Australian health care are due to tight budget control. Insufficient staffing etc. Health care is expensive but I believe our government health care spending is less per person than the US despite having a more equitable system.

Some of the cost pressures on our system are likely due to increasing use of private services. You can feel the dream of universal health and education slipping away here as bits are carved off for the private sector.

Commented this elsewhere as an Aussie. It makes a quick buck for some NZ business person but it kills your reputation. Great country. Should be great products. I would buy 100% made in NZ above anything but local. It’s crazy not to promote local content when you have such a strong national brand.

Public hospital care is free and very good in my experience but we have a mixed public/private system and there is usually a gap between private fees and public compensation. So for most people going to a doctor or specialist isn’t free (it can be but generally isn’t) but it is subsidised.

Prescriptions are the biggest win. Trump wants to take those away. It will be over my dead body.

I love our labelling so much in Australia. Nutrition and origin. The only crap one is health star which is misleading. I occasionally buy NZ products and think we should be closer to an economic union like the EU but their labelling is much worse and I worry that they repackage products of different origin which hurts their reputation for the sake of some quick profits.

Our family does a reasonable amount of editing in kdenlive every week (youtube, education etc). A decade or so ago practically every video editor on linux felt incredibly unstable. I remember trying to do stuff in Cinelerra. Now shit just works. There are a couple of things in the workflow that still need other tools but kdenlive has been fairly solid. It could do with some minor usability tweaks to make it friendlier to people coming from other editors and for beginners. Also I wish the gpu acceleration (movit) was stable enough to be enabled in MLT in kdenlive builds. Focussing on stability makes sense though.

Testicles descent outside the body for good biological reasons.

a lot less CGI than I was expecting.

Less CGI is just invisible CGI Hollywood consistently lies about the amount of visual effects used. If it is done well, as it mostly is in a movie like this, it isn’t too distracting so I don’t know why they lie about it.