While I appreciate the benefits of DVD that you highlight, I couldn't in good conscience recommend it as a solution. There's just too much unnecessary waste to deliver media/software via physical media. The DVD itself plus the packaging and then additional pollution from distribution (and driving to the store to buy it).

One thing that could help with many of your complaints is to drastically shorten copyrights.

We count gaming PCs but most gamers don't really use their PCs as a desktop beyond "some movies [porn] and lite web browsing."

In all seriousness, though, I think it does help Linux desktop adoption because it normalizes Linux for these users. It's very common on ./ to see posts where people say, "I only use Windows for games." Gamers tend to build their own PCs (or buy weird custom rigs), so unlike most computer users the OS isn't just baked into the cost. Also, judging by their hardware, ricing Linux should be right up their alley.

Steam legitimizes Linux gaming and you get extra nerd cred for doing it. That's not to say the "year of the Linux desktop" is upon up, but the market is won one niche at a time. Personally, I don't care if Linux comes to dominate the desktop like it does the server world. I just want it to gain enough market share so the big developers have to support it and I don't have to use macOS for certain things at work at Linux for everything else.

You linked to a post you made that has nothing to do with the UI. Your gripes are oddly specific and probably only apply to you. But your original post blasts LibreOffice for having a "terrible interface."

It's kind of a dick move to discourage people from using FOSS that provides a viable alternative to the proprietary nightmare that is MS Office because it lacks a KEYBOARD SHORTCUT you like and you have some weird complaint about its autocorrect (I won't pretend to understand that one, as I find autocorrect on any program to be an annoyance that I immediately turn off). If those are the things that keep you on MS Office, fine. But from UI best practices LibreOffice is the clear winner, and that was your original criticism. For most functions, it takes less clicks and less searching on LibreOffice than MS Office (also, LibreOffice provides the option to switch to that terrible ribbon interface to make the MS Office users feel comfortable).

What do you consider a good interface? The stupid ribbon thing where you have to futz around with tabs to find the oversided icon (that may have a dropdown) to the thing you need, that may or may not switch you to a completely different window?

The LibreOffice UI is much more efficient and intuitive for users. It looks better, too.

That's true. I certainly wouldn't say my post should be translated directly into legislation, but I think the basic idea is solid. We need to do something to eliminate the quick trading, increase shareholder liability to discourage risky behavior, and try to eliminate weird games where stocks are just used as casino chips.

If there was a way to enforce it I would also like to see the elimination of any automated buying/selling.

That's like someone in the 90s saying that they need to keep using NT servers because Linux as a server lacks certain NT features. When open source is on the heels of the proprietary options, it's not long before monetization requires much more than the software itself. While cloud platforms are glued together with all sorts of proprietary software, what they're really selling is scalable hardware. Most of the software is the same open source stuff you can run anywhere.

You might be paying for LLMs now, but in this race to the bottom the software itself will soon have little to no value. But it will always cost to run it, and that's what will really be monetized. LLMs just provide a new revenue stream for cloud computing. That might explain why Apple is in no rush to have a homegrown solution. With iCloud they decided that it was preferable to pay Oracle to run it.

So in the future they will release pro-Nazi games?

I'm not so sure. There are already a ton of open source models. It appears that all sorts of people are capable of making LLMs. The main barrier appears to be hardware. The successful monetization is already happening—it's Nvidia! If anyone else makes money, it will be the cloud computing companies, but even then it's a complete race to the bottom where margins will be razor thin.

We have no idea whether AI will be successful or if this bubble will burst and the trend will fade. But even if it is successful, the AI hosts will have to compete with the ability of users to run AIs locally. In that case, the only surefire winner will be Nvidia, because they sell the GPU whether you self-host or pay a cloud provider.

The truth is we don't know. Look how much Facebook dumped into the whole "metaverse" thing. Never happened and all that money went down the drain (meanwhile, their core business lost significant share to TikTok).

Look at smartphones. Microsoft invested a ton into them before anyone else. They were determined to own that space when it became a reality and. . .they failed to properly image what a smartphone ought to look like and so despite some major acquisitions and major investments they never became a real player in the smartphone space.

You might be right. Apple might need to invest in AI now to avoid disaster. On the other hand, investing in AI might be the disaster. And even if investing AI is the right move and Apple does it, their implementation might not succeed.

We're all just guessing, including the companies that actually have to make these decisions. Apple ignored the whole touchscreen laptop trend despite arguments that it would screw them over. It didn't screw them over, but having a shitty keyboard did. It's entropy all around.

A fee + a minimum holding time of 1 year. If "investing" isn't really investing, then we still have the problem the OP described.

It would also make sense to have rules that forbid using loans to buy stocks to eliminate shorting and other gambling-type behaviors.

The COVID mRNA vaccines were the culmination of decades of research into genetic vaccines that could be in essence engineered to target a selected antigen without the years of trial and error that are required by the methods we have been using since the 1950s. Within days of the virus genome being published, they had a vaccine design, the months it took to get to the public were taken up with studies of the safety and effectiveness of the heretofore untested technology, ramping up production, and preparing for the distribution of a medicine that required cryogenic storage.

It would be unreasonable not to give the Trump administration credit for not mucking up this process. But the unprecedented speed of development wasnâ(TM)t due to Trump employing some kind of magical Fuhrermojo. It was a stroke good fortune that when the global pandemic epidemiologists have been worried about arrived, mRNA technology was just at the point where you could use it. Had it arrived a decade earlier the consequences would have been far worse, no matter who was president.

The lesson isnâ(TM)t that Trump is some kind of divine figure who willed a vaccine into existence, itâ(TM)s that basic research that is decades from practical application is important.

I almost never agree with that guy but there is entirely no point in making a post where you just paste an AI response. That post is worth about as much as the swastika spam that used to be so common here. It just takes up space and adds nothing to the discussion. Trolls are more interesting.

The only time I have seen that was with Google sites.

The problem with javascript is that it allows developers to offload processes that would be better off executed server-side onto the users. Ideally, we would have a markup language that combines html + css, with the added benefit of dynamically interacting with the server to replace AJAX. Cookies could be replaced with a protocol that has a very limited number of states the user can choose from when connecting to a site (anonymous, logged in anonymous, logged in identified). It could create a unique token for each website and each website would only have access to view the cookie related to their website (we could use DNS to authenticate this). Sites would not have the ability to store data in the cookie—the cookie would just be a key they relate to server-side data.

Javascript is a complete programming language, and that's a bad thing! That means malicious developers (like Google and Microsoft) can use it to build a corporate surveillance state. It also means our web browsers need to do way more work than necessary, store unnecessary data, and have a persistent security vulnerability.

I suspect that the reason "none of the largest companies and stakeholders with a voice are willing to propose a significant replacement" is because the major disadvantages of the current state of affairs for users are all advantages for them. Developing a better system would be costly and if the system was truly better it would neuter their corporate surveillance state. If they did propose a significant alternative, it would probably be one that destroys internet anonymity and offloads even more processes onto the browser. There's a reason Google invested so much in a "free" browser.

That's a pretty disingenuous argument. A universal ban on all plastic is politically (and economically) impossible at this point. Pushing for individual initiatives to eliminate certain kinds of plastic waste are achievable goals that can help us move away from plastics.

If someone has a minor political position or runs a nonprofit with limited funds and they manage to get plastic drinking straws banned in their municipality, they've done a small good. Changing the world for the better, even if it's in such a tiny way that it doesn't change the grand scheme of things, is both laudable and more than most people do. Regardless, the goal isn't to just ban plastic straws in one small town. The goal is to ban plastic straws and then move on to the next thing. The goal is to motivate other towns to also ban plastic straws.

One of the most important things about legislating plastic alternatives to common items is that it creates a market for those sustainable alternatives. And the more those sustainable alternatives are produced, the cheaper they get and the more viable they become even in places where there isn't a plastic ban. It also works the other way—the more consumers become used to using plastic alternatives (and form a negative view of plastics), the more demand there will be for those alternatives. Strategically, drinking straws are a great place to start because they are commonplace, easy to legislate/enforce, and alternatives already exist.

The idea that "Green people" only care about their goals if they try to achieve them with a hopeless moonshot is not a serious argument.