FWIW I do have 2 Linux phones and… they work. The problem IMHO is that non-software companies believe THEY can lock or profit their customers via an “app”. If they only provided a Web page instead rather than a mandatory mobile application then it wouldn’t matter so much.

So, despite have working Linux phones (albeit far from perfect) I’m still relying on a deGoogled Android phone so that I can run mobile “apps” for only a couple of, quite important to me, services.

To summarize, I don’t think it’s the OS themselves that fuel lock-in but rather apps that require those locked down OSes.

That’s a specific technology with resources they have an advantage on (rare earth elements) with a very shaped market (subsidies, tariffs, etc). Countries have historically been very protective of the car industry. They might very much dominate this market more and more (and arguably justified) yet I don’t think it’s correct to generalize from that example. Also cheaper is not a good metric when the country is known for having work camps or that underpricing a market is in itself a strategy.

Again I’m not trying to downplay the progress made there (because it is impressive) but I think when a comparison is made it has to be done properly. Here there are quite a few factors that make it difficult plus there is an extrapolation from an example that is not necessarily representative of a trend.

All that said this it does not justifies problems in the West, including how slow EV adoption was. Both can be painful yet true.

their economic model is better than the West’s.

Curious, how do you judge that? There are metrics like GDP, GDP per capita, currency exchange rate, etc but being able to compare those means having reliable numbers. AFAIK China stopped publishing some of those metrics (US too! labor related numbers iirc) and the exchange rate does not apply because the RMB is fixed. Going in countries themselves to “check” means little as you can walk through Potemkin villages.

I’m not saying you’re wrong only wondering how you reached that conclusion.

So… I’m definitely cheering up for the lady in red.

Why? Am I an elitist asshole doing his best to sound smart?

Well yes, definitely BUT I also appreciate the power of the command line. The CLI isn’t “cool” because of the cryptic command, no the CLI is cool because :

• ls (list files)
• ls *.txt (list all files ending with the .txt extension)
• ls *.txt | wc -l (count how of them are)
• etc

and the “etc” is the FUNDAMENTAL part! Namely that no matter how smart the GUI developer is, they can’t predict how it is going to be used when done with OTHER tools. That’s the true power of the CLI. So yes if you stick to a single command, the CLI is unnecessarily cryptic but as soon as you start to combine commands, nothing comes close to it.

TBH I don’t think he’s wrong, especially in HIS position.

Namely I think having the flexibility of the cloud is amazing… but NOT at the cost of losing sovereignty.

So when Bezos uses AWS he is actually smart because he remains sovereign. When anybody else though does rely on another system that they do not own for critical tasks then then lose sovereignty and thus agency.

TL;DR: cloud or not, maintain your agency.

Neat, my current setup is :

• stream from FIP.fr via cvlc
• when I absolutely love a tune, buy on Bandcamp
• if it’s not available or I bought it elsewhere, e.g. old CD, then get from Soulseek
• scp my ~/Music directory on my mobile phone

I tried LMS for few weeks but honestly just plain VLC is enough for me.

Anyway, point is, this decision makes me want to buy from Bandcamp even more.

Lot of complex discussions here about Ham radio operator, new hardware or protocol like Mestastic, SDR, etc so I’d start with “just” what people already have at home and only AFTER go there, if need be.

If you have WiFi Mesh at home or IoT via ZigBee or Z-Wave you already are doing mesh networking. Sure you might not have Internet access this way but the principle is already there via your existing relative affordable infrastructure.

Does it even matter? Just opening the door of a clean room is enough to make the whole thing useless. Also, even without opening the door, how does one even run an ASML device without their support even without remote shutdown? It’s not a $350M toaster. That doesn’t sound realistic.

😁

No doubt there are better ways … but I believe pure players, e.g. OpenAI or Anthropic, or resellers who get paid with scaling, e.g AWS, equate very large scale with moat. So they get so much funding that they have ridiculous computing resources, probably way WAY cheaper for “old” cloud (i.e. anything but GPUs) than new cloud (GPUs) so basically they put 0 effort to optimize anything. They probably even brag about how large their “dataset” is despite it being full of garbage data. They don’t care because in their marketing materials they claim to train over Exabytes of data or whatever.

controversial take.

Nope, I agree, and so far you get only upvotes so… we agree.

Tech support found that AI bots were crawling the site repeatedly. In particular, OpenAI’s bot was hitting it extremely hard.

Yup… I just had to read your title to know how it happened. In fact more than a year ago at OFFDEM (the off discussion parallel to FOSDEM in Brussels) we discussed how to mitigate such practices because at least 2 of us self-hosting had this problem. I had problem with my own forge because AI crawlers generate archives and that quickly generate quite a bit of space. It’s a well known problem that’s why there are quite a few “mazes” out there or simply blocking rules for HTTPS or reverse proxies.

AI hype is so destructive for the Web.

Canada, Mexico, the EU, and others just refusing to do business with the US.

Seeing how the EU is still doing business with Russian while it’s at war with Ukraine it’s hard to imagine such a scenario. I didn’t run the numbers but AFAIK the EU has no realistic alternative for a lot of things, starting with energy again all the way to high-end chips (CPU and GPU) and services, including software. There could be theoretical alternatives, e.g. FLOSS software and their services on lower-end chips but that would require some pretty fundamental changes.

Since he removed “sustainable” from Tesla’s mission then, regardless of his appalling ideology, this is definitely a GOOD thing.

I confess when he took over Tesla (which he didn’t found) with the goal of democratizing electric car by making them cheaper I was excited. I don’t like cars and believe they are genuinely a terrible purchase, both at the individual level AND at the societal level, and yet I thought this would be helpful for a transition away from fossil fuel, at least.

How wrong I was… so yes I remember this personal mistake a warning tale : do NOT trust a mission of a corporation, only trust it’s past actions.

tiny island of space communism

can you please expand a bit? What does that mean? Never heard this before.

Well my point, which might be different from OP but I still is important and thus why I brought it in the discussion is :

• paying for software is important
• FLOSS is important

and thus ideally we would pay (again, however one can) AND have FLOSS anyway. I don’t see why we would have to settle for proprietary software.

Why are you deforming my words? You are free to have your own opinion and you are welcomed to disagree but when are arguing against something I did NOT say then you are not trying to have an honest conversation.

Anyway, on the spirit of discussing anyway (despite the risk of talking past each other) what do you imagine would happen if nobody, including Linus, would contribute (not necessarily financially) to FOSS? If nobody at all build FOSS or supports FOSS, there is no FOSS, as simple as that.

Linux, KDE, Firefox, etc… we are ALL supposed to “pay” somehow for it, whatever our means and however we can.

When we consider free and open source software NOT paid software, we are sabotaging the very things we love.

Food doesn’t last forever

True but have you tried

• vacuum sealing
• freezing
• glass jars

because to be honest I’m still shocked at how efficient that is. You can cook in batch then if the seal is done properly that stuff will last for a LONG long while. All those techniques require a bit of upfront cost (vacuum seal ~$100, freezer $300, jars $10 each but requires boiling water so ~$100) but when done properly (which isn’t hard to learn) even texture will be preserved and it does not take long.

Source : I do all that even though I don’t cook for 1, it’s great to cook in batch, eat fresh then preserve some to have a rotation of meals that is not boring yet have “last minute backups” when you don’t have the time to cook.

Well I do mean physically opaque but true that implies, as few persons did comment regarding e.g. Poker, that the content itself or the rules do not change the distribution to introduce artificial scarcity.

The point is that purchasing a package in itself should not be a bet.