Interesting read, somewhat enlightening.

But IMO, from the point of view of interoperability, it was bad enough having competing corporate social networks. We don’t want to replace that with competing open meta-networks. And yet ActivityPub and ATProto seem to use completely different paradigms, which would make bridging them pretty hard. Frustrating.

Interesting. Possibly useful to some. I have also discovered that the simplest, most privacy-friendly way to update location is just to do it manually when you change location.

I have a simple script that does this by querying OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim server with the city name. It feeds the resulting coordinates thru a Python library that deduces the timezone, and sets the system time to this.

But a very, very credible voice on this subject. Let’s not fall into the easy trap of tribalism.

Good to know.

This is somewhat defensible. PDF is the de-facto alternative to HTML for documents. The web is also full of JPGs and nobody claims that the browser should not render them.

Useful. I hate shorts and portrait-format video in general.

NB for those who don’t know: a server is not needed to make Youtube RSS feeds, they exist natively: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxxxxxxxx. You just have to find the channel_id buried in the page source, which admittedly is a bit of a PITA. But no native way to exclude shorts, though.

And so what? Why are you so bothered by it? I’m a Linux user of 20 years and I couldn’t give a fig that someone is running a forum called LinuxSucks which, unsurprisingly, contains little “positivity or praise” for Linux.

So: you posted a serious contribution in an unserious community, and got treated unseriously. It’s not very newsworthy.

As for that community’s existence, why is that even up for discussion? As a Linux user I’m happy for people to say what they like about Linux. If the jokes are funny, all the better.

I use Ubuntu btw and it doesn’t suck. Well, not that much.

This is the best answer. Most of the others jump straight in at the deep end. The entirely predictable outcome of asking this question to a bunch of earnest geeks.

Well done for taking a stand. The problem, as ever, is that most people prefer to comply obediently even if it feels wrong. And then next thing we know, it becomes standard practice.

BTW I have been in your situation and responded similarly. Usually it ends in the clerk inputting dummy info, sometimes after I irritably tell them to do so.

By no reasonable definition of the word “liberalism” has it caused those things on a scale remotely approaching that of communism. This is not controversial.

Arguing is tiring, and here the payoff will be small since the conversation has moved on, few others are reading. I’ve made my point.

Look on the positive side. Humans being what they are, it’s not usually reason that wins debates, but rather the agreeableness of the participants. So you’ve probably won this one by default.

This feels like arguing with a Jehovah’s witness. To your credit, you’re not getting annoyed or abusive in the face of my contradiction. But then that’s also a hallmark of religious people: absolute certitude, which provides a certain peace of mind.

I’ll admit that I had to look up “AES”, which appears to refer to countries that pass the magical litmus test of Marx-Engels Compatibility.

I will simply sum up my own analysis. The precise terminology of the PRC’s political system is unimportant. What is important is that wherever the recipes of Marx have been tried, the result has been violence, brutality, oppression, famine, economic ruin. I say that as a student of history. Literally: it was my degree. But the facts are in the public domain for all to see. And so I agree with Orwell, who saw it before so many others: there comes a point where you have to accept that the thing is irredeemable, and instead try something else.

That’s really all I have to say on the subject. Of course I respect your right to your own viewpoint.

Do you not think your remarks have a bit of a religious flavor to them? Quoting a couple of eccentric academics from 150 years ago as if transmitting their divine revelation. Defending your interpretation of their holy words as if you were a lawyer or a priest. Why not just look to first principles instead, to the values you considerate important, rather than citing a gospel like this?

I must admit that I am puzzled by people’s determination to defend the record of communism. It’s not worth defending. There are much better ideas for how to replace capitalism, though - spoiler - none of them involve a bloody revolution. This doesn’t mean that Marx had nothing interesting to say. Of course he did. His description of society was revolutionary. But the prescription was disastrous and I feel we would do well to just move on from it at last.

Seriously? I’m not trying to convince you, I’m trying to convince the people reading us. That’s the way a forum debate works! But I admire your earnestness.

Hair splitting. Some ideologies are more dangerous than others.

This is a bit reductive. I accept that liberalism and capitalism are closely intertwined in the historical reading. But the fact is that capitalism won the economic battle, for better and (I agree) for worse. Attempts to replace it completely, in an interconnected world, invariably end in disaster or (China) in a reversion to capitalism. Just look at the list of them. To me this whole question feels like a disconnected high-school philosophy debate.

True but that is a proper name, not the generic definition. Russia’s Liberal Democrats are ultranationalists.

Disingenuous or ignorant. By definition a Quaker or a Jain cannot commit brutality in the name of their beliefs. Conversely, an ideology which puts the collective before the individual, such as fascism or communism, is, a straightforward recipe for brutality.

When I say right, I am using the typical definition, supportive of Capitalism. Social Democrats, Liberals, American Libertarians, fascists, and all their myriad forms.

For two of the words this is not a typical definition. Social democrats do not code as “right” anywhere in the world. And liberals are only “right” when viewed through a partisan US-progressive lens, or else perhaps in southern Europe (where the word is mostly an economic term). Elsewhere they would be closer to left or center. This whole discussion illustrates the limited usefulness of the left-right axis at describing ideas.