Maybe they meant the end of “the United States as we know it,” which could be right. Or, arguably, already is.

But as a lifelong resident of the US, your point about how long regimes can last is extra scary. Two of the biggest facets of this country’s identity have been that we have a lot of money/resources and that we have a lot of weapons. Plus we have our special brand of “fuck y’all; got mine” culture.

It seems like a nasty recipe for a fascist regime to isolate and turtle up and just grind along for half a century.

Well, if the output varies in a way you can’t predict, then even if one of the inputs is “don’t do anything negative” it might not always follow it exactly.

Remember that M365 stuff works in a browser too!

I am not going to argue that some people – both creative and technical – don’t have a need for the native apps. If your line of work standardized on a Microsoft product, fair enough.

If you are not one of those people though (and you have a choice, of course) Teams & Outlook work great as webpages, and they have web versions of the rest of the office suite which I assume work fine for occasional work. I’ll usually just try LibreOffice with the file anyway and it works fine.

However, if someone went to a phone store with a stock graphene on display and anything else next to it, which one do you think they’ll choose?

Given the past couple years I’d like to think the fraction to choose graphene would be multiple times what it would have been 5-10 years ago. But not close to a majority.

“How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”

Spoken like a true sales/con artist. I can almost hear the brand guidelines poking through… Always mention safety before privacy, always treat safety as a given and privacy as the buffer zone in which to find compromise.

The compromise is how far each town chooses to go above security tier 0: emergencies with immediate threat to life or property.

• tier 0 is defined as covering 100% of law enforcement requests of all agencies with jurisdiction in the covered area.

Even if generated images originally could be traced to the training data, I think that maybe just maybe the shady gigacorps would have some incentive to remove or obfuscate the copyright & IP violation paper trail from their trillion-dollar toys.

Oh no, I will be sure to keep an eye out for these scary vandals invading my peaceful town over these next few days!

I mean, you never know when a passionate young person needs a “thumbs up” to brighten their day and boost their confidence.

And in case any of them want to step to me, I can threaten them with all the old power tools I have in my house that they could learn to use.

Oh I didn’t mean that it couldn’t be done. Just that it wouldn’t be. The people who control such things are actively moving our system in the opposite direction.

Making it so corporations cannot directly own some random valuable thing?

It’s a nice thing to think about, but it has 0% chance of happening in our current system.

Absolutely, plus since index funds are cap weighted, ordinary retirement fund investing folks are very much vulnerable to it.

If I pull up VTSAX (vanguard total stock market index fund) what I find is…

Sectors: Technology is 38% of the fund and I see 11 sectors listed.

Top 10equity holdings, in order from the top:

NVDA MSFT AAPL AMZN META AVGO (Broadcom) GOOGL TSLA GOOG BRK.B (Almost like its own index fund)

This is fine!!

Ooh, I have not read this and it sounds pretty good. Just got lost reading a couple pages of it. Thanks for the link!

To that I say, welcome to Lemmy!

Just yesterday I wiped the drive and installed Linux on the 3rd old PC for the LAN setup I’m putting together, literally “for the children!”

It’s an i7-920 from 2008. It has TRIPLE channel ram, baby. I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon and it was as quick and painless as usual.

I already get the warm fuzzies when I walk into the room and find my 3rd grader playing on my PC instead of their tablet or even the console. Our first LAN party is gonna be sweet.

Oh same here. I’m hopeful that valve brings us a linux phone, not a gaming phone. I’ve never really gotten into gaming on mobile either.

However, if they DO make a linux phone, I’m sure it will be Steam branded and have all kinds of gaming-specific tweaks.

But again, to me that just sounds like it will have good hardware specs. So not a problem!

I wonder if Valve would ever get into the Linux Phone market.

But for the platform itself to be open, I wonder how much would have to be recreated.

FOSS is free and open source software. And the word “free” does a lot of heavy lifting there because it refers to much more than it typically not costing anything. It means that you have the freedom to do what you want with your stuff, basically. You (or others on your behalf) can see the source code for what the software is doing, and you can even change and improve it.

You’ll see the word “libre” thrown around in this context too, for that reason. For many people the liberty side of free matters a lot more than the no-cost side. But they do go hand in hand, because not needing to protect a revenue stream makes it a lot easier to not enshittify software. You’ll see names like LibreOffice and FLOSS instead of FOSS.

So it’s basically the whole Linux world that is very well represented on Lemmy and the fediverse. :)

Sent using FOSS Voyager web client …in FOSS browser LibreWolf (a fork of FireFox) …on FOSS operating system Linux.

I use Mint btw.
(This is an inside joke for the other Linux people – a play off of “I use Arch btw” where Arch Linux is a hardcore distro where you kind of build your operating system piece by piece, but with excellent documentation. Valve switched SteamOS to be based on Arch a while back)

Longtime lifetime Plex Pass holder here.

FOSS is important. Having control over how you use your own hardware and files is important.

But even if none of that mattered, once I actually used Jellyfin for a few days the snappy bloat-free feel of it won me over. Switching between Plex and Jellyfin felt like switching between windows and linux.

American here and I agree.

Even within the borders of this asylum, the “6 in 10 don’t trust the US and/or the average American” feels like it would be in the ballpark for the locals. For the people living next to this shit, yeah more like your numbers.

In my very limited knowledge of the household appliance market, Samsung has been a no-go for a long time. Like, the most expensive but also the most disposable.

And that’s before we even get to the enshittification and ad invasion.

It’s incredible to think about trying to explain the problem to my younger self 30 years ago…

“Yeah, computer hardware continued to scale pretty well so now even this refrigerator here has a computer inside it, a high resolution flat panel monitor, and even multiple ways to connect to the internet for remote control and feature updates.”

“wow, that’s amazing!”

"Yeah but nobody uses it. At least, nobody who understands tech and reads the news. You don’t even connect it to the internet in the first place. "

“What!? That seems totally backwards. What’s the problem for educated users? Are there hackers everywhere just waiting to connect to this iffy computer embedded in your home?”

“Oh no, it is much worse. The company that made the fridge could connect to it like they designed it to do!!! And to make it even more frightening, they usually have the infrastructure to be able to connect to EVERYBODY’S fridge at the same time!”

(begins playing spooky halloween music)

This seems backwards. Let’s just assume we’re always going to be willingly beholden to tech giants, and so we’re going to pass a law to make our masters treat us well.

Maybe instead campaign for a law that says all publicly funded computer resources must be reliably usable for 15 years. So you either go FOSS and save money too, or you get guarantees in writing before you hand over your hand over money to the people who won’t even let you see what their code is doing on your hardware.