I’d argue that Java is not bigger than ever, it’s more of an established legacy language used almost exclusively in business applications today. Comparing it to COBOL in that sense would be mean but there are similarities. When I started with Java in the late 90s it was something completely different. It became popular because it was open and easy to learn. Java gained a huge community quickly. Now there are some technical reasons why Java lost its popularity among the general tech community over time but as I witnessed it the major downfall happened when Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle and the new licensing model was just horrible. Many of us didn’t want to use a language that wasn’t open and moved on. Others created open source forks like you said. I remember we were forced to move to OpenJDK in the company where I was employed. At that time OpenJDK was was neither fast nor complete. It was a shitshow and I can assure you we did not have a good time. Eventually we phased out Java entirely and built the next version on a new stack. And today there are a lot of open and modern general purpose languages available so there is no need to use Java for new projects unless you want to integrate it into an existing Java ecosystem.

And it was basically the same story with MySQL. You actually said it - “people do their best to get his stench off of it if they can”. In most cases that means moving on to something that isn’t owned by Oracle.

The good news is that everything Larry Ellison touches dies slowly and painfully. Oracle’s touch of death is well known in the tech community… Java, MySQL, etc.

It will probably fail silently, if it doesn’t pick up enough momentum. * Sad failed platform noises *

Y tho

Sorry you had this experience. Not all of us are like that though. I just thought of my own experience and I usually try to find an answer with a web search instead of asking in a forum. Most of the time someone else already had the problem and was brave enough to ask. This is especially true for beginner problems. As rough as some of those people can be, there already is a tutorial for almost anything imaginable. And it goes both ways. Don’t ask for stuff that can easily be found on the web. (I’m not implying you did, this is just a general tip)

That’s exactly the reason why you get good results when prompting a chatbot. You have the knowledge to ask the right questions with the needed keywords and lingo. What’s problematic is that Microslop and big tech in general are advertising AI as a generic tool for everyone and their grandmother. The result is garbage in, garbage out. It’s not going to work as advertised.

I knew I forgot something… Yeah dolphin is good, but it has some questionable UI design decisions too. For example I always have trouble finding the quick filter instead of the find menu. It’s hidden somewhere and it does not persist. And the find menu itself is such a mess that it’s easier to use find . -iname *whatever* on the command line. But maybe that’s just me and my way of thinking.

Hm never thought about it, but now that you mention it, I feel the same. Mostly using non-KDE apps with a few exceptions like Spectacle and Konsole

Most of the hype isn’t about machine learning stuff for cancer diagnoses though. When the average C-level guy talks about AI they mean almost exclusively LLMs. Fancy autocomplete is their solution to everything, from summarizing an email to agentic OSes. And that’s just not going to happen.

I don’t have a link right now, but if you look it up at the usual suspects like wired, ars technica, the register, 404 media, or even Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of stuff. The search degradation started around the time Sundar Pichai became CEO at Google and it made quite a splash during all that time. Also, there have been several “rollouts” in recent years which changed the search result appearance, content and the page rank algorithm over time, this was published by Google itself. They did of course not disclose how the algorithm works.

First of all, gather information about why data centers are bad for communities yourself. You need a clear understanding of what this topic is about if you want to be able to communicate these facts clearly. Otherwise anyone can discredit your concerns with a few questions you have no answer to. Secondly, find allies instead of trying to accomplish this on your own. Find local politicians who are likely to be on your side and contact them. Is there something like a regular town hall meeting? Environmental groups? Unions? You could present something there to find people willing to help. You need to amplify your voice to be heard.

The fact that search engine results gotten worse itself and that this was done deliberately is well documented, and it is documented that Google and others have a history of trying to prevent users from clicking through to the actual websites and keeping them in their ecosystem. They have developed similar things in the past, like Google AMP.

I have no definitive proof that they worsen their search results for promoting AI, but if you look at this thing there are a lot of indicators for this to be true. Controlling what the user will see and where they will go next is vital for these companies and it’s the reason why content algorithms exist and why they are creating “bubbles” to put individual users into. It’s all about controlling the content the user will see. Now if you think about it and ask yourself if having an AI box dominating the upper half of the screen giving you answers that the search results below don’t is beneficial to these goals, the answer is most likely yes.

Also you can do your own experiments which will make it pretty evident. Search for a few more obscure search terms. Use niche topics that will not yield a lot of results. In most cases the AI will nail it and the search results below won’t. Even if you use advanced search techniques it is really difficult to get the information that the AI gave you as a regular search result. But when you ask the AI for a source you get a website which has the content you were looking for.

Now the question is: Why is the AI that much better than the regular search engine? If you have used Google in the past, only a few years ago, it was perfectly possible to get those results through regular search, which is now bordering on being impossible. Odd, isn’t it? It seems like they gave AI a much bigger index to work with than their own search engine.

Oh, I meant the ping pong loop of the GitHub bot and it was pure technical nitpicking. But since you’re asking, the definition of recursion is a function calling itself. I find it difficult thinking about capitalism as a single function. For me it looks more like running an infinite loop on finite resources. But applying a technical term as a metaphor leaves a lot of room for interpretation, so there is no right or wrong

Funny but I have an itch to note that this is a simple infinite loop, not a recursion.

As I said elsewhere, the problem is in fact that search engine providers deliberately make their search results worse to push AI usage. This keeps the user entirely under their control and at the same time hurts the websites the AI training data was stolen from, because no one will bother to visit them any more. I’m not saying DDG does this, but they get their search results from other search engines where this is the case.

You might have been unlucky. I never had serious installation issues when installing Ubuntu on a lot of different computers in the past five years. Just started the installer, click next a few times and reboot into the new installation. It used to be some tinkering required to get everything to work, but apart from having to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver in a GUI (and having to search for it) everything else just worked. My last Windows install however was a shitshow. Took ages and I had to disable a ton of surveillance stuff. On top of that I had to go through some weird hoops to keep the thing from requiring me to create a Microsoft account. What distro did you use? I guess some are more difficult than others

Well, I live in the EU and I still have hope that there will be sufficient regulation to prevent the worst when it comes to privacy issues. There already is a lot of protection in place compared to the US (I know, recent developments point in the opposite direction, but the EU at least has some vocal privacy advocates which do their job well) Also I think there are not so subtle differences between recording telemetry (e.g. with anonymized user stats) and spying on users and selling all the data to the highest bidder.

But you are absolutely right that a working business model that is fair to the user, affordable and open still needs to be found. What we can see is that the US model is not sustainable. My prediction is that the tech conglomerates will enshittify themselves out of business in the long run. Because the competition does not need to improve much when the big player’s products get significantly worse over time. The competition can just sit there and wait until those big tech products become so unattractive to users that there is a real incentive to switch to an alternative. This effect can be observed when looking at Windows vs. Linux for example. While Linux has been pretty stable and easy to use for years now, Microsoft makes the Windows experience worse on an almost weekly basis, and now you need to use command line scripting to fix the worst things. Which is ironic, because it used to be exactly the opposite, Linux was the OS where you had to tinker on the command line to make it work. But these days are long gone. And as Microsoft doubles down in shitting on their customers with restrictions, ads and forced AI everywhere, millions of people feel compelled to stay on Windows 10 and wait how the situation develops or try something else. Windows was always disliked or seen as a necessary evil, but this time they might have gone too far.

Oh and about your last paragraph… people in the US are now beginning to learn the hard way why being the product is bad. When big tech is in bed with a fascist government and provides all the surveillance data which is suddenly being used against “ordinary people who have nothing to hide” it becomes pretty clear why being the product is a very very bad idea. Just takes a while to make the connection I suppose.

Good point… I found that apart from technical interoperability it often works pretty well if you explain to your friends that your alternative (signal,Matrix, whatever…) is just that. An alternative which is always good to have just in case. Don’t try to force them to uninstall WhatsApp, even if this would obviously be the best choice. Instead encourage them to try the alternative and keep WhatsApp in case they don’t like it. Test it with them. In practice this often means they find out that it works just as well and does not hurt to have on the device. Even if they don’t use it actively yet, the next time someone asks them if they have Signal (or whatever) they will be happy to say that they already have it. Patience is key.

There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product

There are many reasons, but I disagree on this one. Most of the existing tech in cloud infrastructure, protocols, social media apps etc. is built on the shoulders of open source software components and operating systems along with interfaces and APIs the US conglomerates themselves have opened to speed up adoption. This of course does not include the surveillance and ad network components, but we don’t want those anyway.

Some more valid reasons in my opinion:

1. Lock-In effect in general: If your friends, neighbors, even governments all use product x (i.e. Whatsapp) and expect you to use those too in order to communicate with them It is very difficult to switch to something else because the people you want to talk to have to be convinced one by one to give it a try. (it’s possible, just very hard to do)

2. Lock-in effect in business: High costs of switching to other products, sunk cost fallacy etc.

3. US Tech for decades gave away their products “for free” misleading customers into thinking that this should be the norm. People understand when something doesn’t cost money but they still don’t understand that they are paying with their data and ultimately with their freedom and well-being. Alternative products and infrastructures cost money. People need to eat. If you don’t take the dirty road of advertising and selling surveillance data there is no way around that fact. At least when we’re talking about products at scale.

On the plus side of this: there is nothing that stops enthusiasts like us from setting up self-hosted projects and providing services to a community. And just like the home computing enthusiasts in the 1980s paved the way for tech we use today, every new movement starts small with a bunch of nerds, aka “early adopters”.

There are plenty more reasons why this is hard and plenty more reasons why we should do it anyway. But I’m on my first coffee so I’ll stop here.

Well, if you want to use that stuff for your personal use that’s totally fine. But there is a difference between doing that and selling your creation as a product. To pick up on your example, it’s great if someone learns woodworking and puts together a table or something. You probably won’t sell it though because unless you get really good at it, the piece of furniture will not meet the standards for a good product. It’s absolutely the same when using LLMs to put together a piece of software. It will fall apart quickly unless you put some serious work in it. A lot of people think LLMs are a shortcut to learning this stuff and then go on and pretend to be professional software developers. I also doubt these vibecoders learn a lot about about coding when they don’t even understand what the LLM is putting together for them as a result of a few wishful prompts.