Not sure there will be a big change there, because they are already powerful enough for most common tasks since several years now. And everyone owns at least one phone or tablet already. So I don’t think that number is going to rise significantly anymore. Those people who are OK with using a phone/tablet for everything probably already do so right now. Maybe if living conditions for the non-super-rich become worse and people look for more affordable computing devices. But even then, older devices which can run Linux desktops for example are already dirt-cheap. I just don’t think that the UI/UX of phones or tablets is on par with desktops or notebooks running a regular desktop OS when using a big screen. Those UIs are primarily made for touch and for smaller screens. Trying to do everything with just one UI paradigm just leads to Windows 8 ugliness.

Desktop Linux’ marketshare is going to steadily increase, but as time progresses, so will the speed of that increase. Linux was at or below 1% for a really long time but within the last 5 years or so it jumped to ~5%. As this not only means more users, but also more attention and developers, this will of course snowball. The end of Win10 will also give a bump. And if the enshittification of Windows continues (it probably will) and if US-based companies are becoming a red flag for non-US-customers (will probably also happen) then it will snowball even faster.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

— Martin Niemöller

Adapted for the fascist regime in USA today, it should probably go like this:

First they came for the illegal immigrants
And I did not speak out
Because I was not an illegal immigrant

Then they came for the legal immigrants
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a legal immigrant

Then they came for the political opposition
And I did not speak out
Because I was not in the political opposition

Then they came for anyone not loyal on social media
And I did not speak out
Because I was not on social media

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

—Someone who survived what’s to come

The old question of “what happens when Linus/other senior kernel dev dies” mattered far more like 20+ years ago than it does now. The kernel developers are organized quite well, Linux is in general an extremely well-organized open source project these days, and there are several who could fill in. Linus’ “2nd” is Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is the lead maintainer of the stable kernel branch (i.e. the one most are using). Linus is the lead maintainer of the in-development branch.

But of course we hope that Linus continues doing this for a long time. Most people never create even one world-changing technology, Linus casually created two (Linux + Git).

Always saw it as white/gold first but after a few seconds I perceive it as blue/black and then it stays that way.

Original article is 404, so probably a fake or other error.

Yes. Unfortunately, these systems are also a great gift for any upcoming fascist regime (like the Trump junta currently) which will not only happily continue using the existing infrastructure but also extend it like mad.

Maybe humanity’s greatest weaknesses overall: the lack of foresight and the lack of wisdom learned from historic precedents (e.g. Nazi Germany? Forgotten by now). Everything’s always about short-term goals, ignoring any long-term disadvantages. See also: climate disaster.

Its popularity.

Currently playing Talos Principle Reawakened (the UE5 remastered version). For anyone wondering whether it’s worth it, yes if you have the hardware for it. Because they also massively improved one of the most complex but also most frustrating mechanics in the original game (with the recorder thingie). So there are very useful improvements overall. Also, it has an entirely new DLC I think, which is again noticeably harder than the 1st DLC Road to Gehenna. Game looks great as well, but you need serious hardware for it. It’s not very performance efficient anymore. :) The Talos Principle series are probably the biggest and best 3D first-person puzzle games out there, together with the Portal series. Absolutely recommended.

Other than that, I’ve played The Ten Bells and Exit 8. These are great small anomaly-hunting games. I’ve never played this genre before so it was a great discovery for me. If you’re curious about this genre, start with Exit 8. If you liked that and prefer more horror elements in it, as well as a bigger “map”, play The Ten Bells. Awesome small games, needing only like 2-3 hours to finish.

In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it’s newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. But only in some countries! It’s pathetic.

Yes, but that somehow doesn’t change anything ever. They do horrible thing A, world is shocked about A, then they do horrible thing B, world is shocked about A+B, then they do horrible thing C, world is shocked about B+C (A has already been forgotten by that point). And so on. We don’t really have proper checks & balances in place against malicious politicians with too much power and too many loyalists in key positions. So they can do whatever and get away with a ton. I mean I thought there should be checks and balances working to correct this in any modern democracy but then again checks & balances also fail regularly in other areas, e.g. in anti-corruption or in pro data protection. Everything’s conveniently broken in some way and can be exploited. The key people from the Trump administration and/or Heritage Foundation should already be behind bars for lifetime.

I prefer FLAC. Don’t know if there’s an option in whipper for that. But the Arch Wiki has an article for converting: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Convert_FLAC_to_MP3

Corrected, thx.

Thanks, didn’t know. It’s indeed a well-established myth then. Corrected my post.

It’s inherited from a historic convention from the UK. Historically the rationale was that the month was more important than the year, so they put it first, although this has no useful consistency or order to it.

Unfortunately, kind of dumb decisions from the past tend to stick and keep existing for an unnecessary long time because people get used to them and then never change them. Popularity or habit can beat reason, objectivity etc…

I use whipper. It’s a command-line application but it’s easy to use and works great every single time. At first you should let it analyze your drive which is the only step more involved. Here’s a mini tutorial for that I wrote for myself but you can also read it on the project page where it’s probably more up to date:

2. Analyze the drive’s caching behavior: $ sudo whipper drive analyze

3. Find the drive’s offset. Consult the [[AccurateRip’s CD Drive Offset database|http://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm]] for your drive. Drive information can be retrieved with $ whipper drive list. $ sudo whipper offset find -o insert-numeric-value-here. If you omit the -o argument, whipper will try a long, popularity-sorted list of drive offsets. If you can’t confirm your drive offset value but wish to set a default regardless, set read_offset = insert-numeric-value-here in whipper.conf. Offsets confirmed with $ whipper offset find are automatically written to the configuration file. If specifying the offset manually, please note that: if positive it must be written as a number without sign (ex: +102 -> 102), if negative it must include the sign.

4. After that you just rip any disc by running: $ whipper cd rip

And just as an example, here’s my ~/.config/whipper/whipper.conf:

[main]
path_filter_fat = True
path_filter_special = False

[drive:<drive ID>]
vendor = <vendor>
model = <model>
release = <release>
read_offset = <my offset>

[whipper.cd.rip]
unknown = True
output_directory = ~/music/_ripped
track_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%t - %%n
disc_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%A - %%d

That’s only true up to a certain size. If Ground News ever grows big, they’ll still retain enough of a user base regardless of what they’re doing. Compare it to e.g. Meta, Google, MS services. Or even X. Many people just never leave once they feel at home there. Meta could do even more disgusting stuff and people would still use WhatsApp, Instagram, and the likes.

I also almost skipped it. Glad I didn’t. I enjoyed season 1 very much so far, haven’t yet started season 2. Andor is great because it’s much different from “normal” Star Wars. It’s simply a great story with good acting and doesn’t have much of the “cringe” or high fantasy stuff from Star Wars and is full of great writing with lots of relatable references to today’s political issues. It’s also much more mature than classical Star Wars which appeals more to kids. It kind of stands on its own as a great sci-fi story of the beginning of a rebellion against an evil and almighty empire. And even if Andor should become worse over time, season 1 at least is very good and can be watched in isolation from the rest. “The Mandalorian” is also decent but I enjoyed Andor even more. I’d say Andor is the best output from Star Wars in existence today, by a big margin. Trailing behind that are “The Mandalorian” and the movie “Rogue One”. If you normally don’t like Star Wars, you can still safely watch Andor and/or these two and just ignore everything else from the franchise. IMHO of course.

• Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
• Vanadium (GrapheneOS’ Chromium-based browser, maybe it’s usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
• Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
• Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
• Proprietary browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used

Yep. There’s always been spying from foreign governments’ intelligence services on allies (especially from the US and the UK because they have such vast surveillance capabilities and budgets), and there’s always been commercial spying (e.g. Google, Apple, MS, and others collecting vast amounts of data on everyone using their proprietary software), which then could also be bought by intelligence services to expand their data mountain. It’s really nothing new at all. Also, this was all basically part of the infrastructure already. Of course it’s going to keep running.

Also, there were these thin excuses of “data protection” agreements between US and EU like “Privacy Shield”, which were on incredibly shaky or non-existent legal grounds the whole time (some of them also got taken down already because they were such a joke to begin with), only to sort of “legitimize” and “make legal” the vast amounts of sensitive data that are flowing from EU to US when using US software and services, despite EU laws stating that many of those data transfers aren’t actually legal. Basically, to protect their own institutions as well as tons of EU businesses who are trapped in, for example, the Microsoft software ecosystem, so that they can continue to use these software products containing spyware and not feel too guilty about it because it sort of got defined as being lawful.

So all of this, including the hypocrisy behind it, is nothing new at all. In theory, we have all these fancy data protection laws, but in reality, almost everyone either ignores them or doesn’t get it.

What’s new is only that before Trumps’ 2nd term, this sort of stuff was “accepted” as either “necessary” (in regards to the intelligence services spying, because this always was excused with “national security” reasons, which has been the favorite universal wildcard excuse for any sort of mischief by government institutions) or simply as “irrelevant” (in regards to everything concerning data flowing somewhere where it shouldn’t be flowing to at all) by a majority of the population including politicians and other entities which could hit the brakes on this stuff. And it is only now when people realized that Trump’s 2nd term might turn the US into a fascist rogue country, that there is some kind of regret suddenly growing about the own previous mindset. But only now. As long as the US was interpreted as being our friendly ally, it was never officially considered to be any sort of problem, maybe even considered beneficial. Except of course by experts in the area, but who listens to experts, right?