Yes, IrfanView is one of the very few things I miss from Windows. I've tried many Linux-native options, but none provide the combination of features and usability the IrfanView has. As I didn't want to go down the Wine route, I've learned to live with a combination of tools to get the job done.

On a related note, I also miss Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder . It really was pretty awesome at finding duplicated images, even if they had been resized or cropped. Again, I've tried quite a few Linux-native alternatives but they all either give too many false positives or miss resized/cropped duplicates even though they are visually obviously the same; no matter how you tweak the settings.

I've always liked this quote from Tony Hoare's Turing Award Lecture

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

The first method is far more difficult."

True. The myth of trickle-down economics has long been debunked. But the idea that the rising tide of GDP will raise all boats is still peddled by many politicians and parts of the mainstream media,

Yeah, I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a few years now; both for privacy and search results quality. I've found it generally pretty good.

Lately, I've also been trying out Qwant. It's European-based and, since 2025, they have been building their own independent search index in partnership another European search engine, Ecosia. So far, it looks promising.

The problem is that the investors - and lenders - potentially losing their shirts include major international banks and pension funds, not just private shareholders. Recently, a J.P. Morgan analysis estimated that at least $650 billion in annual revenue will be required to deliver mere 10% return on the projected AI spend. And already banks like Deutsche Bank are looking to hedge their lending exposure to AI related projects.

If the AI bubble crashes hard, it could be a repeat of the 2007 global financial crisis.

There's quite a few Linux distros where that isn't necessary. It's not the 1990's anymore. I haven't had to resort to hand-hacking and compiling to get stuff to work in years.

In fact, Linux now supports hardware that Windows doesn't. I have an old USB-connected flatbed scanner. Windows dropped driver support for it a couple of years ago. But current Linux releases recognise and use it, out of the box, with no problems.

I've been using an RSS reader every day for many years. I'm currently using Newsboat, a terminal-based RSS reader, and I'm very happy with it.

It's a good way of keeping out of the "algorithm bubble". It's also nice to to be able to follow Youtube channels without needing a login, and play the videos with mpv.

Yeah, I block all javascript by default for exactly this reason; it's a major malware exposure. I have a very short whitelist of sites that I'm willing to trust with that. I've already encountered Anubis a few times and, when I do, I just close the tab and move on. I'm not enabling javascript for random sites.

Well I have a very similar setup to you; except I don't use privacy badger and I block all javascript by default with ublock origin. My experience is very different from yours though. I find that most sites that I visit are at least usable without javascript, and I have whitelisted a relatively small number of sites where the extra functionality gained is worth it (and I think the site is trustworthy enough!).

In fact, I consider it a red flag when a site doesn't render at least adequately with just html and css.

In fairness, at the time there were a lot of posts in the Palemoon forums complaining that some site or other "was broken" in Palemoon. And it almost always turned out that they were using NoScript. With NoScript turned off, the sites in question worked fine. I switched to uBlock Origin a long time ago and I've found it very effective, and I haven't experienced these Cloudflare issues.

Yeah, that's part of the problem with streaming. For decades, people in neighbouring countries could (and did) listen to BBC radio stations via good old-fashioned radio broadcast. This didn't require any additional infrastructure in the UK; propagation of broadcast signals did the work. Also, there were no copyright issues; there is a long-standing pan-European legal principle that if it is legal for the broadcaster to broadcast it, then it's legal for the receivers (wherever they are) to receive it.

But the move to streaming is killing that. Streaming does need significant infrastructure investment to scale. And because it is "on the Internet", it has given various media companies the excuse to force the use of DRM and geo-blocking as well. Just another example of enshittification.

Agreed. It does everything I want from a desktop environment, and does it well, and still manages to have a modest overhead. And that matters. The laptop I'm typing this on would struggle with feature-heavy desktops like Gnome, but it runs XFCE like champ.

A/C is not the easy fix that many people think it is.

TLDR: Without major improvements A/C will make global warming worse; A/C units already produce enough heat to measurably boost urban temperatures, and they leak out potent greenhouse gases. Plus, billions of new A/C units will create one of the largest sources of rising electricity demand around the world; it is estimated that energy demand from cooling will triple, reaching 6,200 terawatt-hours by 2050—or nearly a quarter of the world’s total electricity consumption today.

Well, yes and no. Yes, the CEO is an idiot.

But I think Gillian Welch probably voices the view of the majority of musicians in this interview when she says:

"... if you don’t enable musicians to make their living playing music, you won’t get to hear it. I am never going to stop playing music, but if I can’t make a living at it, then I will stop playing it outside my living room."

This is just the logical next step for Surveillance Capitalism

TLDR: Surveillance Capitalism is the amassing by Big Tech companies of vast quantities of individual behavioral data (usually without the individual's knowledge or consent) and, by data mining it, predicting and even directing future behavior for profit. This involves web tracking, app tracking, social media usage, data from smart devices, and more.

People's AI usage will just be another data stream for the prediction and influencing algorithms.