They’re not killing sideloading, they’re just building the gallows and sharpening the axe.

The outrage doesn’t stop anything, it just makes them slow their plans and wait out the public outrage.

I actually feel the same, but I was trying to not be too much of a downer.

Yeah, it can wear on you.

I keep my subscribed feed clear of politics because the political content that spreads on social media is evolved/selected to be compulsive/clickbaity so I don’t even want it touching my eyes.

Dull Men’s Club is a great community because everything that makes for compulsive content isn’t ‘dull’ and I suspect it’s a lot more of a bipartisan community than most places given the types of expertise that some of the user’s display.

That’s pretty slick.

It looks like they’re ‘just’ creating 2d planes and attaching Wayland Surface or TopLevel (Desktop, App, respectively).

I use XSOverlay and you can attach individual windows to the overlay (VR Smartwatch, kinda). This seems like a much more in-depth extension of that.

Attaching individual applications is way better than the whole desktop in my experience. The desktop experience works well with a high resolution monitor… but in VR headsets you’re still resolution limited, so having JUST the application window can make it much easier to read/navigate.

The only feature that I would like is the ability to pin windows to specific locations. I’d like to be able to pin a HomeAssistant application window over my thermostat, or have a monitor displaying the feed from my security camera next to my front door, etc.

There are already virtual desktop applications that can do the desktop/windows trick, but they all seem to be anchored on you instead of being aware of the space that you’re in.

I’m cynical to think that proper legislation won’t happen even after the crash. There’s simply too much money available to buy bribes/motorcoaches for Supreme Court Justices (Clarence Thomas) and other cheaper politicians.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

I invite you to shelter against the storm: https://lemmy.world/c/dull_mens_club

It is already happening.

The distractions is that you only see the AI companies which have been blitz scaling, dumping unlimited amounts of money into orders and plans without any revenue plans for the other side. This move only pays off if they can essentially buy the entire market and lock out any competition (and then the rent-seeking enshittification will being). The long-term prospects of these companies is shaky at best, but that doesn’t matter to the people currently dumping funding into them… they’re going to sell everything at the IPO and leave some other suckers with the bag.

Because of this, there are many many times the amount of advertising and promotional hype than is justified by the actual progress in the field.

Everyone is familiar with this. If someone says AI, do you think of ChatGPT or an LLM? That’s because you’ve been affected by this hype wave that is being intentionally propagated in order to drive valuations for AI companies who are looking to hit an IPO so all of the early investors can get out quick before the bubble bursts (It’s like a crypto rugpull, except it is using the stock market instead of a meme coin).

‘Actual’ AI. By which I mean machine learning, including neural networks, has made huge progress in a lot of fields following the discovery of the Transformer model (the T in GPT). The, very real and impressive, improvements that have been gained are not flashy, they do not make for immediate next-quarter profits and are mostly public discoveries coming out of academia so they benefit everyone which makes them worthless to the people trying to horde emerging technology in order to push this bubble/rugpull.

Your life will be WAY more affected by the slow and incremental work being done in the field of robotics than having a slightly more personable chatbot. Your life or the lives of people you love will be saved by the advances in protein folding which allow rapid development of new treatments which can be customized to the individual. Cancer therapies that are optimized for the exact mutations in the patient’s cancer cells or customized medicine aimed at reducing side effects or harmful interactions.

Oh yeah, certainly. The US Government isn’t openly censoring the Internet and most of the ‘censorship’ is done by private individuals (who, I would argue, have even more power over the average person’s life).

I’m not making a false equivalence, just pointing out that even if the government isn’t doing it the people in the US shouldn’t be so smug because they are also getting viewpoint-filtered Internet, except their viewpoint dictator is some tech bro billionaire of questionable morality.

I will say, to the passive readers, it’s very possible to live without a site that recommends you content. Avoiding those sites avoids a huge amount of propaganda and emotional priming (which affects you even if you know it is misleading, very important!). Get your news from reputable polls, primary sources (like court documents and case filings) and trusted news organizations (which absolutely exist, despite the drumbeat of ‘don’t trust the media(trust Elon instead!)’ propaganda over the past decade).

Delete Meta, TikTok and X as if your sanity depends on it. Stay away from Reddit, stay away from Lemmy communities that primarily pedal in content that makes you angry, outraged or afraid. If you see a piece of media that makes you outraged, angry, afraid or to think conspiratorially stay far away. Those emotions can be primed into your subconsciousness through content that you rationally know is misleading, knowing that something is misleading does not protect you from being conditioned by it.

Read psychological textbooks about how this works. Look for terms like respondent conditioning, semantic/context/social priming. The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack are excellent documentaries that show the technology involved(The Social Dilemma) and how it can be used to affect political outcomes like Brexit and Trump’s first campaign (The Great Hack, and also any journalism covering Cambridge Analytica).

These are techniques that have been used for advertising purposes for a long time. Now instead of promoting body shame to make you buy makeup, they’re selling conspiratorial thinking so that you doubt the reality that you see with your own eyes or fear of government agents so you avoid the polls and fear of social/career/legal retribution so that you don’t speak your mind on social media.

Get rid of that garbage and protect yourself from this kind of attack, anyone who is paying attention can see the damage being caused in the world… this is how it is being done. Delete it.

I don’t think promoting population growth through cutting off porn, there’s no data to suggest a correlation between those two things.

Population growth is more influenced by providing the population with enough income and secure housing so that they’re not stressed and scared all of the time. This would hurt earnings and that would upset the handful of people who control most of the private/public equity in the country, so obviously this will not stand a chance of happening until they can’t buy politicians.

Banning porn is mostly a ‘I’m going to do this thing for this niche group in order to get votes to get/stay in power’. It’s to give the social conservatives/Sunday preachers an excuse to talk politics and to do campaign rallies for the people voting for the bills.

You’re welcome. It is way easier than you’re expecting I promise.

Not that you won’t run into problems, every OS including Windows has problems that require reading, troubleshooting and jumping through hoops. An example I love is that trying to create a local user account on Windows 11 has more steps than the entire Linux Mint install.

The problems in Linux often come with logs, error messages and debug information which can make it a lot easier to diagnose correctly (instead of just changing random shit as dictated by assorted Googled Reddit posts from 5 years ago). It may look like heiroglyphics at first, but you’ll be able to see the matrix soon enough.

If my account still exists, you can reach out if you have problems and I’ll point you in the right direction at least. Enjoy :)

They’ll probably still get pornhub though, right?

Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.

Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

I agree with you, but it looks like you intended to respond to Sierk directly :P

I’d be happy to help (and if you run into problems going forward, just message me directly).

Linux Mint is probably the most often recommended for new people coming from Windows. But EndeavourOS will let you tell everyone that you use Arch without having to install your system via the terminal (EOS uses a graphical installer also).

For Mint, Choose the Cinnamon version (this can be changed later but this is a good default choice). KDE Plasma is the most popular DE and you can change to different DEs just by logging out and changing a dropdown menu.

I linked the install guide above. TLDR - copy iso to usb stick, reboot, click through the graphical install process. If you’ve ever installed Windows, this will be very familiar (where do you want to install it, what username, where in the world are you, and login to wifi)

It is much less complicated if you can have a Linux-only machine. But if you want to keep Windows around for a bit, you can dual boot: Mint

All of the software is installed with the package manager from the official repos. Everyone is familiar with this method of installing software because smartphones use them but call them App Stores/Play Store. You don’t download executables from the Internet and just run them 😒

There’s a lot of new terms and concepts so it’ll be overwhelming. Lean on the official Mint communitues, they’re generally helpful (there are assholes, like everywhere else of course), be prepared to read documentation and don’t be afraid to ask an LLM to explain concepts if you can’t get a community answer fast enough but don’t trust the commands that it gives you yet (you’ll learn how to do this safely but not at the start).

If you game, Steam can be installed from the repo, via and Heroic Games Launcher for GoG, Epic Games Store and(???, there are more but you get the idea) make the process as simple as pressing Play.

You’ll probably use different software to do the same tasks so don’t try to find ms-paint or notepad, but Krita and Kate do the same thing and there are many alternatives to those. If you can’t figure it out, dm me.

Good luck. It’s a lot at first but it is 1000% a better experience once you become comfortable with the software.

If the President chooses to sanction them, yes. A judge cannot impose that kind of sanction because they have limited jurisdiction.

The court can order you to pay, and it can order US banks to seize your money. But a US court cannot order France to seize your money.

Basically, judgements are a judicial function with a more limited scope and sanctions are akin to foreign policy but can extend as far as we are able to force/negotiate.

OK, so if I set up a lawsuit against OCLC in my country where they don’t reside, and they fail to show up to contest the charges, I get to claim they admitted guilt by default?

Assuming your country’s laws are roughly based on British common law, yes.

Winning a case is easy. How you enforce the judgement is much harder.

This is why the speculation is that they will not comply. If the servers are not in reach of the US, the owners are not in a country that will extradite them, they don’t store money in US banks and the US doesn’t stupidly commit war crimes in order to capture them… then ignoring the court order is about as hard as you ignoring North Korean law.

If you want to make Microsoft’s CEO cry then you install Linux and convince all of your friends to do the same.

Using their OS, feeding them telemetry, being opted into their cloud storage but swapping some letters in your browser content is about as useless as mopping a sewer pipe.

Did someone say Linux? Hello fellow human nerds, I use Arch, btw

I create a new account and am shadowbanned almost immediately for posting a single comment on r/Politics too soon?

Completely new accounts posting in r/politics is a category of users that contains a massive amount of bots. Most subreddits have a minimum karma/account age to post specifically to mitigate some of the bot problem.

You didn’t lose anything, your voice is just going to be drown by the 20,000 LLM bots and vote manipulation accounts.

LLM-driven web scraping is intense for some sites, so their bot detection software is tuned in a way that creates a lot of false positives.

Obscuring your browser fingerprint, or blocking javascript, or using an unusual user-agent string can trigger a captcha challenge.

If you’re not doing that and seeing a site suddenly start giving your captchas then they may be being DDoS’d by scrapers and are challenging all clients.

A site that archives content is especially vulnerable because they have a lot of the data that is useful for AI training.

It is incredibly annoying, but until we have a robust way of proving identity that can’t be gamed by bad actors we’re stuck with individual user challenges.

Those simple and easy devices are not simple and easy inherently.

That is a result the company paying a lot of developers and designers to anticipate your needs and fix your problems before you have them. Those companies want a return on that investment and they get it in the form of your privacy and platform-enforced dependence on their services.