Not burning fossil fuel causes less air polution than burning fossil fuel? How amazing. ...
Is this some kind of premature April fools thing?

... understood FOSS from day one and wouldn't touch anything proprietary for anything mission-critical with a ten-foot pole ever since. All the setups I've built in the last 25 years won't even miss a beat when the entire SaaS landscape finally turns into the nuclear wasteland it was always destined to be.

I will enjoy the fireworks though, thank you for those. Getting the popcorn ready as we speak.

I'm smack center in the Gen X demographic and am not too worried about ageism, since the demographic decline is going to be in full swing once I close in on retirement age and we're then likely going to need every able body to pitch in. ... AI and robots actually have me more concerned, given the current situation.

... are done and over. Anyone not sleeping under a rock is aware of this. Novelists are among those bound to be replaced by AI.

Point in case:

Two years ago I had a longer talk with Germanys most prolific fantasy author, Bernard Hennen. I've known him for a while since I used to live in his home town and we bump into each other at various German fantasy and RPG conventions. Anyway, it was in that discussion that he noted that he's mentally preparing for AI to basically take his job and he back then already was getting ready to fall back to world building, self-publishing - his current publisher is only a shell of its former self and used to be one of the largest and most successful in Germany - and live events.

As I said, that was two years ago. We all know how things habe progressed since then. And still are.

... made by Mr. Musk, shall we? His track record with those is a little spotty. Sort of like Valve time. Let's first make that FSD from 2021 happen and take it from there.

... actively preventing me from watching videos I legally purchased from them (DVD region code), the DMCA-crowd can print out their DMCA on sheets of plywood and shove those up their butth0le. Without lube.

Matrix is a protocol. It doesn't have any user facing "features" just like TCP/IP doesn't have any. Applications using matrix can have all the features you want, you just need to implement them.

I don't get it. Google already has two OSes on their hands. What's this AluminiumOS thing? It it an own development or just yet another rebranded Linux? And why are they doing this? Or is it just Chrome OS renamed? Or a more sophisticated merger between 'droid and ChromeOS with some new name?

I genuinely want to know, so please enlighten me.

Let's not adopt the language of the dark side, shall we?

A console that has the same performance as the Series X but is cheaper with a more conservative form-factor would be the best way to go IMHO. Doing that while keeping the famous backwards compatability would be the right way to go IMHO. And perhaps just release one version and not two, to make it easier for the developers.

SaaS has always been a shady business model. Now AI has experts as the only people left doing anything with building new Software, at a massively hiked productivity that still is rising almost by the week. And since AI does not care if it's working on FOSS or proprietary Software - it's actually more likely to deliver for FOSS, since FOSS documentation isn't hidden behind a paywall and can easily be processed by LLMs - experts will be using AI to work on FOSS, because they've long since come to love the advantages of FOSS.

That non-IT people are starting to notice that SaaS is only castles built on sand is by and large just a side-effect of AI coming on to the scene.

Another thing is quickly devaluing SaaS: It used to be a quick fix for single devs to avoid having to wrangle to many layers in Software. Just subscribe to a SaaS hyperscaler and never worry about servers or security again. And have an easy scapegoat. AI is partly doing away with that too. Another nail in the coffin of these waaaay overvalued products.

USA-type processed food has roughly 1200+ additives which are banned in the EU, some of which are actually officially classified as toxic waste in the EU (true thing).

As a European, I would strongly suggest you guys skip the "health-warning label" part and go straight to flat-out banning most of that shit. Tell RFK to just copy those EU regulations verbatim and take it from there. Save yourself some work. Otherwise, good luck!

Trough out the 2000nds I did professional rich client development with Flash & ActionScript. One of my last gigs was as a senior FE dev building a large non-trivial Flash client for a commercial internet/web game. The project closed down after 2 million Euros were spent because FakeB00k changed the TOS and closed up their platform for Zynga and FarmVille/CityVille. Shortly after the official iOS blocking/prevention of Flash became a widespread fact and Adobe completely dropped the ball on utilizing Flash as a toolkit for developing for the new and upcoming high-resolution/multi-resolution mobile screens. Shortly thereafter Flash was canned.

My team got a few weeks to faff about with new technologies and everybody was gung-ho about Unity, the proprietary 3D/gaming toolkit. I told everyone that I am never again going to bet on any non-FOSS technology and that Flash was and will forever be the only exception (for good reasons btw.).

After 2011 I focused on LAMP, Ajax and eventually PWAs, in recent years a return to modern frontends and a deep-dive into the Jamstack and SVG-centric web components is bringing back some of the old vibes, in a good way.

When I focused my career on Macromedia Flash which eventually became Adobe Flash in 2000/2001 I absolutely knew what I was getting myself into, so I wasn't totally devastated when Adobe eventually screwed up the whole Flash thing entirely. Shifting away from Flash/AS and finally coming around to a feasible web-centric dynamic frontend that was entirely FOSS based took roughly 15 years, but it was well worth it. Adobe Animate, the successor to Adobe Flash, was a trap and anyone with any sense could see that. I looked into it a few years after it's conception, but quickly dropped it again and lost interest. Not least because I still clearly remember Adobes fraudulent misleading of customers in the Flash era.

The contemporary web isn't still quite there yet where Flash/AS was 20+ years ago (that's how far ahead Flash was), but WASM, Web Components, WebGL and modern FOSS web toolkits with their compilers and modern standardized browser APIs and web animation and game engines are more than good enough to make up for what we lost. Super powerful and completely FOSS, with no single company ever again being able to shut down an entire technology just because some beancounter doesn't get it.

I haven't touched Adobe in more that 15 years and as far as I am concerned they along with every other proprietary software vendor can go and die in a fire. The sooner the better.

IIRC this wasn't really a thing back then and there was a general open debate if software shouldn't just be free for all to pass around, including the source. The " piracy" and "theft" narrative was pushed by Gates and Co. as a result of this debate, yes?

Fill us in on some details please. Great to see you here on slashdot BTW, didn't know you were part of the crew. Nice. Like it.

Demographic collapse, de-globalization. Less people, over-the-top excess money printing, etc. The side-effect being that money loses its worth extra-fast and you get (hyper)inflation. It also means that more and more stock-trade growth prospects turn into pipe-dreams and ginormous money-vortexes like the recent bazillion dollar AI ringtrade involving big-tech. That is on top of l00ny b*llshit like a sad-and-sorry IRC rippoff or a PHP website that stores text and images being "valued" at half a trillion dollars on the stock market. Or the world dumping their money into German housing (because they actually build houses and not cardboard fortresses) and turning any monetary transaction for housing into a pointless endeavor for anyone actually living in Germany.

It's not that we lack money, we lack culture and people (decendants). See todays US or parts of the EU for details on the culture thing. See todays China and Italy for the demographic details.