headed by the gal who cleaned up Romania.

While Kövesi did a bunch of good stuff and got some convictions, Romania is far, far from clean as far as corruption goes.

Nope. Ukraine was a lone wolf and Putin thought it’d be easy pickings (though I’m sure he realized pretty soon how much he fucked up), but no way he’s going up against nations that are part of actual defensive pacts.

Except that’s not true, and Russia had precedent already from 2014. Oh and also Ukraine is not in NATO or the EU. So not really that surprising that Russia tried something.

There is quite literally no chance of this. If it happens, I’ll buy you a year’s worth of beer.

Did you mix up your buzzwords?

You accuse me of being afraid. Of what exactly? You’re the one afraid Gaben is going to pull the plug on Steam and other stuff like this. I’m not. You’re the one saying everything needs to be self-hosted FOSS. I don’t care if it’s not.

I don’t want to take anything as a win, but I realize now that you are so divorced from the reality in which we live that there’s no point continuing to debate. 80-year olds who can barely afford food should… hire businesses to root their phones and install self-hosted mail servers for them? That may work in some highly privileged places in the world, but do you have any idea what conditions the vast majority of humans on this planet live in? What their priorities are?

You say you “never talked about replacing each and every technology with FOSS.” but that’s exactly what you said in your first post and that’s what irritates me and what I take issue with. If your stance would have been “I like to self-host stuff for myself and family and use FOSS. You should look into it, it’s cool and not that hard”, I’d have upvoted you and not batted an eye. But you came in here with the sweeping generalisation that if you can’t root, self-hosted FOSS something “it ain’t worth doing”.

I never called anyone a nerd and I’m not sure why you feel like that’s the case.

And not that it should matter, but I’m not on reddit anymore since they killed RIF and I a) didn’t like their stance with regards to third party apps and b) can’t stand the official mobile app. Not really because of my privacy, and no I didn’t get banned.

Anyway, I accidentally came across another one of your posts on a different topic on here, and now I understand. I’m sorry for having engaged you at all and please accept my sympathies.

Your claim: “root server, self-hosted everything and FOSS. If you can’t do your things with that, it ain’t worth doing anyway.”

Do you really think I need to “reason” why this is utter nonsense? Fine, here you go. My elderly technically barely-literate father and mother are supposed to self-host their email servers so as not to just use Gmail? Old people who don’t speak English and use Netflix or HBO or whatever to stream movies and TV series are supposed to self host Jellyfin and torrent their stuff? They’re supposed to use OpenStreetMap to find directions around the city instead of Google Maps, because “privacy”?

Maybe my grandparents should run GrapheneOS.

Or perhaps you’re suggesting that, since they can’t root server and self-host FOSS stuff instead of using off-the-shelf products, they should just not watch anything other than cable TV, and write letters by hand and post them. And if they need to go somewhere that they don’t know the way to, they should just ask for directions on the street (and hope the person they’re asking doesn’t just pull up Google Maps, since then they’d be using it by proxy!), oldschool style.

This is not viable, feasible, or possible. “Millions and millions are doing it” tells me you have little understanding of the scale at which modern technology is used. There are an estimated 7 billion smartphones in the world. Almost 2 billion gmail accounts. So the fact that “millions” are using self-hosted FOSS alternatives means… basically nothing.

Home cooking has been a staple human activity for millennia. It is widespread, it’s a skill passed on from one generation to the next, slowly ingrained in people. And even then, the majority of people are absolutely trash at cooking, can barely cobble together one or two recipes, buy ready-made meals, have others cook for them, order out or go to restaurants. Your “root server, self-hosted everything and FOSS. If you can’t do your things with that, it ain’t worth doing anyway.” could be “buy your own ingredients and home-cook every meal you eat. If you can’t do your things with that, eating ain’t worth it for you” and it would still have been utterly ridiculous despite billions more people in the world having the ability to do it.

You need to accept that self hosting and FOSS is for a fringe part of the population and suggesting it as the solution to the issues that currently exist with services like Steam or Google or Netflix is counter-productive. Maybe many generations from now it will be possible to have a sizeable amount of people using technology that way, but now ain’t it.

And by the way, I’ve been on the Internet since like 1998, I went through Napsters and DC++ and I torrented tons and tons of things for years and years. But even for me, the idea of doing what you suggest is absolutely exhausting and not something I really want to find the time to engage in. “It is just a matter of lifestyle and how much one values their own authority over things.”, you say, and you’re right. That’s a much more reasonable stance than your original comment. The truth is I don’t care too much about the authority I have over “my media” or “my data”.

Yeah, it doesn’t make much difference, I just commented on the low-hanging fruit of what was clearly incorrect.

My bigger problem is with your fear-mongering and the gibberish that assumes that self-hosted FOSS solutions are somehow a viable alternative for the majority of users. I’ll pick privacy-compromised convenient products 9 times out of 10 and actually spend my time doing things I want to do, and I’m pretty bored reading all the privacy nutjobs trying to tell me how to do things.

The Valve guy doesn’t run a publicly owned company. But go on, keep spewing.

Yeah, vegetables and legumes and grains. Horrible, horrible. Woe is you.

In their defense, it was pretty clear to me what they meant from the get-go and your replies seemed unnecessarily hostile.

For shooting the younger brother.

Absolutely not what they’re saying. They are clearly making the point that the non-Hamas people who are having to use the hospital have no real alternatives (such as hunting down Hamas members) and shouldn’t suffer the consequences of Hamas choosing to be there.