I know the comments section will be full of jokes about the Year of the Linux desktop, but I can remember when Macs were less than 5% of estimated computer usage. Linux growth was glacial until relatively recently, but it's becoming a much more serious contender. Even prominent YouTubers have recently been making videos about trying Linux and giving it praise for its ease-of-use, customizability, and ad-free environment. You don't need your marketshare to get to 100%, or even 50%, in order to have a major impact. Now let's get some better drivers and improved VST plugin support!

Tomorrow we'll see ads for MissileVPN offering lifetime subscriptions for only 20% more than BulletVPN used to offer.

So did they finish rounding up all of the immigrant criminals and gang members or did they just completely lose focus on them to chase quotas? Trump isn't shy about celebrating accomplishments and I haven't heard anything about all of the criminals being caught, so I'm assuming it's the latter. And in this case, these people were here legally but Trump altered the deal, which changed their status to illegal.

Every dictator-wannabe needs a group of people to vilify and subjugate so that they can normalize the terrible treatment of a specific group of people. Once that is normalized, they can shift that behavior to their ideological opponents and begin suppressing opposition. It's so weird watching this in real-time and seeing people who are either willfully ignorant or actually support dictatorship (since it's their guy).

Their immigration status just went from legal to illegal as a direct result of this policy change. Now that these people are considered illegal immigrants, and jobless at that, do you really think that ICE is just going to stand around and not pursue them? ICE is already having trouble meeting their quotas and now they have a ton of new people to target.

How does this look from Nintendos perspective? Is the problem of piracy worth this anti-piracy effort?

Nintendo has been screwing over their customers for many, many years and their punishment has been record-breaking sales. I can't think of any malicious behavior Nintendo could perpetrate that would prevent people from buying their consoles. So what incentive do they have for not doing this shit?

An example where the business case is at odds with the best situation for the user.

Isn't that just capitalism?

Also do we have data that there is a stronger trend of couples "trying and cant conceive" versus "couples aren't interested in having kids at all"

Try taking a step back and looking at just the number of couples. Thanks to online dating, women are being more selective than ever and many men are noping out of dating altogether. Either of those conditions leads to fewer children but together it's a much bigger problem. And this is only one of many social changes that are contributing to decreasing birth rates.

you should if that guy is injecting his personal politics into the fucking tool you are trying to get information out of!

None of the answers I've received have any noticeable signs of being tainted by politics. However, I only ask fairly objective questions.

and when musk decides to say europe gdp is dropping because too many brown people are soiling the white maidens

At that point, I will purge the last remaining bit of Musk from my life and never look back. Luckily for me, so far none of Grok's responses have any references to brown people or white maidens.

grok is musk's personal playtoy that he interferes with so much it is now checking his tweets before offering answers and was recently calling itself mechahitler.

I can't stand Musk anymore, but for a good while Grok's answers were significantly better than the ones from the free version of ChatGPT. I haven't tried ChatGPT in a while, so maybe it improved or maybe other LLMs have surpassed Grok. Regardless, I'm not going to let someone's politics prevent me from using the tool that is currently providing the most utility.

economic numbers are published everywhere, you can actually go and read them yourself

I'm trying to do work. I took a quick break and saw an opportunity to make a quick contribution to the conversation but I didn't have the time to search and aggregate the GDP of all European countries.

When I asked Grok for the combined GDP of all European countries (not just EU countries) for 2024, it was over 90% of the U.S. GDP for the same period. When including only EU countries, it was about 66%. So if he's talking about just the EU, then of course their GDP is down due to England leaving it during that time period.

So you're saying you don't have an ISP nor a cell phone plan?

Those are essentials, which is why I said I avoid subscriptions "every chance I can".

You don't make any purchases online?

These are not subscriptions and thus do not require cancellations.

You don't have utility accounts?

These are also exemptions since they're essential, although I wouldn't categorize them as subscriptions. In my case, I have had the same utility providers since I bought my house, so I've never had the displeasure of cancelling service.

No mortgage

Fortunately, no. When I did, they kept selling it to different lenders and each lender seemed to have their own Terms of Service. I never consented to having a different lender and I never had a choice in the matter.

Hell, my used car came with services I had to cancel and those companies still physically mail me new sign-up offers nearly a year later

I may be buying a used car soon and I will keeping a very close eye out for sneaky subscription services after your experience.

We really need better anti-harassment advertising/services laws.

I couldn't agree more.

The Military Might Finally Win the Right To Repair

With as many deadly weapons as the military has, I'm surprised it took this long.

I heard there's a lot of fuck circles on Wall St.

Or you could just never sign up for the service in the first place. With that, you get:

• - No monthly fees
• - No one-sided Draconian terms of service
• - No forced arbitration with an arbiter of their choice
• - No billing "errors"
• - No non-consensual changes to the Draconian terms of service
• - No fee increases
• - No onerous cancellation process

I'll take that every chance I can.

Who cares about Dorsey? I hate it because it uses Bluetooth. Although I can see a potential value when used in countries with dictatorships. But luckily I live in the U.S. where that is highly unlikely to happen anytime soon.