There are two kinds of freedom, negative and positive liberty. US has a lot of negative liberties, they dictate little in what you can or cannot do, but is lacking in positive liberty, they don’t support you very well to do what you want to do.

While Europe might have less negative liberty, their generally better social welfare system grants people more positive freedom.

What a strange selection of censored words… “fail to comply”, “The billionaire owner…”, “would strenghten the Australian”, “has yet to be passed”

Nix on non-NixOS distributions would be great, if it would support installing apps into the users home directory instead of a global directory (without recompiling everything).

(When I looked into it, it wasn’t possible, but if you made it work, please share.)

I used to use Ubuntu in the past, and it wasn’t Unity, Upstart, Bazaar, Mir, Launchpad, Snap, Amazon ads integration etc. that convinced me to look elsewhere, it was that I found out how other, not commercial distributions, integrated and instrumented its user base into their development.

Instead of having to sign a CLAs when contributing and signing your right away to some corporation, you become part of the community. (Update: It seems they have switched from their Copyright assignment, so something not as invasive in 2011, which is good. But they still require you to sign a CLA.)

So always look who is developing the distribution first, are they individuals or is it one company. And don’t let yourself be bated into the dependency of one company, because then you will be the victim of enshittyfication eventually.

Sure it isn’t a good system, but it is the one we have. And if you have concrete improvement ideas, it would be interesting to hear.

I mean, where ever we set the age limit for instance voting to 14, some 10 or 9 year old will feel disenfranchised. We could remove it completely and let toddlers vote. What would the consequences of that be? I have no idea!

The reason is to protect the physically or mentally weak from the strong while also having rules that are easy to follow and to enforce, that don’t require psyche exams, which depend on the examiner.

Age might not be a good metric of evaluating maturity, but it is the best and most practically useful we have. (I use “maturity” here as having reached certain physically and mental level where they can operate, think and decide independent, and the risk of being manipulated is low.)

Because age is not a good metric, that means that we have false positives and false negatives on a maturity tests based on age, which we need to balance. And I would rather have more false negatives (wrongly ascertained immaturity) than false positives (wrongly ascertained maturity).

If someone comes up with a better and still practical maturity test, that would be interesting. “Solutions” like every citizen has to do a yearly physical and mental exam in order to keep their rights as an adult, seem much to harsh and easily manipulatable. Especially around blurry lines like disabilities.

Wherever certain thing needs a maturity test or not and where that should be, I cannot say. Just if the age limit is too high, then mental decline will raise the false positives, which would be bad as well.

Personally, New Atlantis deserves a side-quest where you either start a revolt together with the people from the the well to take on the bourgeoisie government (which might end up creating a fascist state), or change the system electorally, establish unions, social security and public healthcare, with its own risks. Or even play the part of a populist, or help one to take over the government. The “liberal utopia” in New Atlantis is just not a stable system, there would be too much disgruntled people. Being part of change here, would be very interesting.

But that would take too much courage from Bethesda. No, I have to support my parents there, because the government doesn’t care for their people.

I do hope so. However that also means that the base game needs to have a good base experience for people like to get back into it.

Personally I really like Starfield for what it is. I think it is a unique mix of RPG and space sim. I am not a big fan of pure sandbox games, and other space sims with quests often felt doing impersonal jobs. In Starfield you meet people and learn their individual story and can help them, etc. Which is just not something I have seen before in a space game. (Mass Effect is maybe the closest, but that isn’t really a open world space sim game)

Of course the game could be better. One of their error was relying on procedural content generation, which is often bleak, uninteresting and unexpiring. Also the main city, New Atlantis, is just too clean, too huge and very bland. It doesn’t look like it was build for people. It got a very MMO feeling to it. It looks like megalomaniacs build it, but that isn’t really addressed in game. Other cities/locations are better. But the political of societal critique, which is normal for the Sci-Fi genre, is missing or not apparent enough. The devs where IMO not bold enough there, to make a clear statement.

So IMO there is a lot to do for modders, we will see if enough of them are interested in fixing that game.

Right, they saying “We are just following the law.” as if that was an apolitical statement. While they still get to choose whom laws to follow by deciding where to make business, which are political decisions.

As you see with Twitter or starlink, they decided to be do business in Brazil, but when the country actually have laws against uncontrolled mass propaganda and hate speech, they are suddenly against the law, and do not try to stop or limit doing their business there, when they do not want or can’t abide by these laws.

Well, I consume more open source software that I will ever produce, so I am in a dept to the community. If it means working a bit more to make my contribution useful to others and fit it into the bigger whole, I will gladly do so.

Valve contributed to Linux before, so the fact that they don’t have any direct upstreaming plans right now indicates that something is causing friction.

I would avoid reading too much into it. They and their developers are still contributing on other stuff. Also when working together, there will always be some friction, in any public collaborative project ever.

Nothing of this is a burden, it is just part of being a good contributor that reads and follows the rules. Contributing is pretty easy, when you have read and are following the guides. If you haven’t already, you should give it a try.

I am pretty sure that this isn’t the first contribution of Valve to the Linux kernel. It sounds more to me like “works for me, don’t care about others” attitude. Which is not a good attitude to have when working in any collaborative project. (Not necessarily against the developers, could also be management.)

Well, it is about code quality. And the same codebase should work on different hardware, which is not something that is required in downstream forks.

But it is sad to see that the driver was submitted in the past, is still actively developed and improved, but there doesn’t seem to be plans of submitting them again.

Also I don’t think that a platform driver is so complicated that it requires such a long time for mainlineing. It not a filesystem or VPN.

On a more interesting topic, the SteamDeck platform drivers are still not merged into mainline Linux… :'(

Last news about it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Deck-Platform-Driver-2024

So similar to kakoune? I tried that for a while, but it was missing some features so I went back to vim/neovim.

I need to know vi anyway, because that is available everywhere (as part of busybox), so using vim/nvim for bigger systems just fits.

What about Lua/Luajit?

In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.

E2E is just one part of the puzzle, you got to have a open source P2P or federated architecture as well, otherwise you have to trust a nebulous company or person intrinsically. People change and companies can be bought, but you will be stuck with their platform in order to contact your acquaintances, and changing that means loosing your contacts.

That is why the DMA is important. But you will be even better off just directly choosing a chat platform, where the users are in control.

“Corporatism vs Capitalism” was invented by capitalists to create a strawman that they can blame instead of blaming capitalism for everything wrong with captitalism.

The rest of the world uses Corporatism for something else entirely, what you might mean is corpocracy or corporate capitalism, which are just manifestations of capitalism.

Yeah, the whole article is a bit fishy:

In addition to generating clean electricity, the new ITO-silver window coating creates a cooling effect by allowing only the visible part of the light spectrum to pass inside. Other parts of the spectrum are reflected outside.

So how would a room actively cool down, when you let only the visible light spectrum inside? Sure it might not get as hot as if you let all light inside, but it will also not get colder.

I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.

“Some firefox users like firefox” vs “many chrome users enjoy what they have” sounds to me like something that could have a source. Many sound to me more than some, so this is a comparison, which can be given a better foundation by supplying some numbers.