[edit] I’d posted something to go into more detail. But I’ve decided that branch of conversation is not really the way forward.

I’ll just say that the software is not installed by choice, and it does things that people don’t want it to do… so it could be described as malware. But if you want it on your computer, then I guess for you it is not malware. In any case, it doesn’t look like we’re going to agree about this regardless.

Anti-cheat software is very clearly and explicitly spyware. That’s the entire purpose of it. It spies on how you use your software in the hope that if you cheat you’ll be seen by the spyware watching you.

This spyware is generally not something people want on their computer - as evidenced by people complaining about it. So effectively whats happening is that people are being spied on against their wishes. Spyware is a common category of malware.

So I think it’s pretty easy to see why people might describe anti-cheat software as malware.

Chrome is already spyware on its own. That’s basically the reason Chrome exists.

Is Brave the one with the built-in crypto scheme and its own ads?

That could force a change in the DNC, but the change would be to push them further to the right. The issue is that the right-wing party won the election. They got more than 50% of the total votes. So the democrats aren’t going to see splitting their own base as a viable pathway to victory. If a left-wing faction splitters off, then the DNC will be forced to try to capture more votes on the other side instead.

If the democrats won the election then we’d be in a situation where we can talk about pushing them further left. But when they lose, that’s not really an option. (Most of these strategy problems disappear with ranked choice voting… but I doubt the current government has any interest in pushing for that kind of change!)

Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.

There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.

I love how none of these comments account for fiber, something you won’t get from granulated sugar but which you will absolutely get from any actual fruit, which at least one of these yogurts actually references in its label.

It’s definitely true that eating fruit is a very healthy way to consume sugar. But the amount of actual fruit in those fruit yogurts is pitifully small. Advertising aside, it’s not like eating an fresh piece of fruit; and it is not why the yogurt has so much sugar it in.

Is he still going for that? When all the different smoked fish etc. were introduced, I thought he might have to change plans. (Getting 999 of every quality of every fish sounds pretty rough.)

And as I understand it, the existence of an inner planet (Vulcan) was a reasonable explanation consistent with Newtonian gravity. (The only problem was that the planet wasn’t there.)

Also, I’ve seen a video of an experiment done in a vacuum chamber. (Although they kind of botched the point of the video by showing lots of slow-mo and junk like that.)

Unfortunately, USA doesn’t have ranked choice voting. So voting for someone who doesn’t have a chance of winning is basically the same as throwing away your vote.

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?

This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.

I find Widelands to be slow and relaxing; but also challenging and engaging.

By default there is a shortcut to the terminal shortcut on task bar. From memory it is one of three default shortcuts. (File browser, Terminal, Firefox.) You can also find it by pressing the menu button (the ‘start menu’). From there the terminal has a prominent special position where it is always accessible. And if you don’t notice it there, you can always start typing to search for it - as with any other installed app. I find that if I type ‘t’, then “Terminal” is the top result; and obviously I can kept typing to eliminate the other results if I want.

So if your difficulty in finding the terminal is your main complaint about about Mint… I’m not sure what to tell you. Do you want it to auto-launch or something?

Mastodon isn’t a person. So I don’t know who you are talking about when you say ‘mastodon was attacking people’. I certainly didn’t see anything like that. Perhaps you have an example link for context?

When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.

But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.

• People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
• Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
• Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
• Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.

A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!

I’d say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you’re not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I’m sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They’re not doing it for your benefit.

That said, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I’m expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.

Why are these posts always shitting on teachers? I don’t know what teachers you’re seeing, but I’ve never seen any teacher of any subject / age-group ever discourage anyone for thinking about something a different way. Quite the contrary, different ways of approaching problems are always encouraged.

And this is why it is ludicrous to believe that ultra-rich people earn their fortune with hard work or good ideas. Being rich generates its own money. Being poor is expensive. There should be no billionaires, for any reason. Such concentrated wealth is very bad.

While I disagree that “billions is beyond being halved”, there is some truth to the idea that numbers can get so big that halving doesn’t make much difference. That seems very very counter-intuitive, so I’ll try to briefly explain.

Consider (10^10 + 2). That’s 10000000000+2. I think it’s fair to say that the +2 doesn’t make a lot of difference. It’s still approximately 10^10.

So then, consider 10^(10^10)×100. That’s a huge number, too big to type here, then multiplied by 100. So the result is 100 times bigger than the huge number. But… writing it down we see this:

10^(10^10)×100 = 10^(10^10+2) ≈ 10^(10^10).

So although ×100 does make it one hundred times bigger… that just doesn’t really make a lot of difference to a number as big as that one. As numbers get bigger and bigger, they start to take on properties a bit like ‘infinity’. Addition stops being important, then multiplication, then for even bigger numbers exponentiation doesn’t huge much of an impact either.

Mathematically, I think this is really cool and interesting. But I don’t think 1 billion is that big. 10^9 is big enough that +2 doesn’t matter much, but not so big that ×2 doesn’t matter.

[edit] (I’m struggling to get the nested powers to look right… So hopefully my meaning is clear enough anyway.)