I’m pretty sure you can donate to Mozilla, are you saying that donations to Mozilla don’t accomplish what we might want? I only know a little about how much Mozilla sucks so I’m ready to learn more.

I don’t know if this is true but I once read that people expected the cotton gin to improve slaves’ conditions because that part of the process was incredibly labor-intensive, so it would be saving them work. Instead it made cotton farming more profitable and boosted slave ownership. ☹️

In fairness, I didn’t vote for him. And I voted for obama, twice! /s

Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop?

This is an excellent point: there are potential features I wouldn’t mind trying out. But of course those features aren’t available, because aren’t the features that Mozilla leadership’s buddies in tech are pushing, and often work against what big tech wants.

Actually they’re using it to generate documents required by regulations. Which is its own problem: since LLMs hallucinate, that means the documentation may not reflect what’s actually going on in the plant, potentially bypassing the regulations.

This website is going to be very busy when the LLM-designed nuke plants come online. https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

I understand that you might want to run your own JavaScript and not others’ JavaScript, but I had a brief laugh at listing “no JavaScript” and “MOAR JAVASCRIPT” together.

This post is so unrealistic SMDH

Seconding Miniflux! It’s my main RSS reader. I pay for the hosted version, it’s super cheap and works great. And since it’s simple HTML I can write Greasemonkey scripts to customize it a bit.

I got lucky: my back pain was from tight hamstrings and sitting in a desk chair for too long, then doing heavy deadlifts. I WFH and get out of my chair as much as possible and I’m religious about stretching my hamstrings, and the back pain is gone even when I deadlift.

So everyone with back pain should figure out why — sometimes it’s preventable. (Other times not so much ☹️)

This is very true. Linux is great if you just want to check email, or if you want to compile your kernel or dig into incredibly esoteric config files. But if you want to do something between those 2 extremes, the learning curve is extremely steep. My Windows box and Mac Mini both do all the things I want them to, but my Linux box keeps breaking and I don’t trust it with anything important. I usually try to do things on Linux first, but when it inevitably breaks I switch over to Mac and get it done in a tenth of the time.

I’m sure I could get my Linux box to do everything I want. I’m busy and I don’t want to fight with it and spend all my time learning about its eccentricities. I want to point and click and occasionally modify a text file.

I was wondering recently if the idea of opportunity cost is the same for governments that can print their own money versus all other entities. I’m not entirely clear on how the that automaker bailouts were financed but would that money even have existed if they hadn’t used it for the bailout? It’s not like the government was going to create that amount of money and put it in a savings account.

A more appropriate way to look at it might be whether the money earned more than it cost the government to service the debt. IIRC servicing government debt is not inflation-adjusted, so it’s probably more informative to compare it to the cost of the debt not inflation adjusted-growth.

But this gets pretty weird since it’s not how finance works for entities that cannot print their own money.

Over 1 billion people use Microsoft products, but let’s all listen to @lefaucet@slrpnk.net 's anecdote about his IT dept. I genuinely believe your anecdote, but it’s irrelevant. And until OSS evangelists (of which I am one!) realize that other people exist and have different preferences and experiences, MS will keep winning.

Oh no, some crank who can’t understand that other people have preferences won’t take me seriously. This is a major loss. I am so owned. This definitely isn’t emblematic of the problem with the OSS community.

I started the name calling by saying “tech brained” so I apologize and I’ll ease off on that.

With that said, I have to strongly disagree with you. I use MS Office, LibreOffice, and Google Docs regularly, and IMO the ribbon was a huge improvement for word processors and spreadsheets over traditional drop-down menus. Drop-Down menus have their place but for document editing they are not ideal.

This an incredibly tech-brained answer. “Sure, lots of OSS is difficult to install, breaks frequently, and lacks key features, but did you know Microsoft sometimes moves a menu item?”

I love OSS and I want it to succeed but “an item moved” isn’t in the same ballpark as the barriers to OSS adoption.

The problem: our desire for convenience

Bring on the downvotes, but: When it comes to tools like computers, convenience is synonymous with productivity. People aren’t unreasonably demanding to have their hands held, they want to get stuff done. We need to stop acting like convenience productivity is just one of many concerns. It is the primary concern.

Freedom is nice but to most people it’s only important if it helps us do the things we want to do.

Loool, all the people who are trying to help you troubleshoot are 1) probably correct and 2) completely missing the point. I have a Windows desktop, a Mac, and a Linux desktop at home and this kind of shit only happens on Linux these days.

Weird about Syncthing, it works for me on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. But I find file permissions difficult so that could be it.

It’s nice for my use case: I tend to download things on my phone but I often want them stored permanently on my computer, so I just dump them in a Syncthing folder and It takes care of the transfer automatically. Once it’s on my computer my backup program (Backblaze) will back it up too. But not everyone has that particular use case so it’s not for everyone.