I’m not sure it’s targeted at anyone “important” (what a classist term!). It is just analyzing the situation and predicting what happens next, for you and I to be prepared. It also hastens the end of the bubble ever so slightly, which is good - the sooner this poison-laced bandaid is ripped off the world’s economy, the faster we can start to rebuild something more meaningful, but now with new productivity tools by our side.

I don’t think he’s necessarily a genius, but he is a force for good and a great writer. We do need someone to keep stating the truth, keep saying what’s right and what’s wrong, this is literally how we win the information war currently waged against us.

It’s the same with the genocide experts calling out genocide, or the eco-activists calling out climate change. It might be obvious common sense to you, but it might not be to other people, and this is precisely why it needs to be shouted from every rooftop we have available.

Oh, and also, if you actually read his works he clearly does more than just state the obvious and coin new terms (even though both of those are important too). He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power (it is more dialectical-materialist than most tech journalism out there). Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us, and practices what he preaches too.

When has he actually approached the Taiwan govt with any respectable offer of long-term cooperation?

Under more reasonable Taiwanese rule there was a lot of goodwill and cooperation going both ways (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Cooperation_Framework_Agreement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_Service_Trade_Agreement etc).

Under new, even more pro-imperialist government, there doesn’t seem to be much room for cooperation when Taiwan repeatedly rejects attempts at cooperation and beefs up their military with american weapons. I agree that Xi could be more accepting and cooperative, but it’s not primarily his fault.

I think it’s almost verbatim what Xi is saying - cooperate, build more and more economic and cultural ties, wait for the decline of capitalism and the people of Taiwan will want to reunite with mainland eventually. They are already really close socially, culturally and ethnically (most Taiwanese are Han), the only thing separating them is politics.

I don’t know of China doing that either, apart from made-up stories from some guys, directly affiliated with the US government, who weren’t even there. Seriously, try to look up a source for your claims that isn’t eventually attributed to “Ethan Gutmann said…”. Uighurs do have their rights systematically abused and face unfair persecution as an overreaction to terrorism. This fucking sucks, but it’s clearly not a genocide and nothing like what you’re describing. Even English Wikipedia, which historically is biased towards US propaganda because it is sourced from western media, has stopped classifying it as a genocide.

Meanwhile Germany is sending weapons and diplomatic support to a literal genocidal apartheid state, which has been bombing civilian infrastructure and shooting children for fun since the founding, with at least 100k dead (at least 27k of them children) just in the last 3 years; France & UK are still empires which hold land overseas and continue doing “soft” - cultural & economic - imperialism in their sphere of influence; and all western quality of life improvements are sustained on exploitation of cheap unregulated labor from many global south countries, enforced by the US invading and/or overthrowing everyone who tries to stop it.

Some of what China is doing domestically sucks. The Uighur thing is bad, LGBT rights are not enshrined into law and instead exist in a legal vacuum, the internet censorship is shit, the wealth inequality is growing, the one-child policy was a bad idea which led to a femicide and creation of “second-class citizens”, there are still regions where the rural population lives in slums (the last two are being slowly addressed though).

But it’s not even close to the current level of suffering caused by western imperialism.

1. China has not used their military offensively for the past like 30 years, I don’t see why start now
2. Xi has said repeatedly that he will not use military force and instead will use the existing economic and cultural ties to push re-integration
3. If they invade Taiwan militarily they risk a nuclear war, definitely will suffer heavy casualties, will destroy the world’s economy (which will hurt them a lot as well), and the only thing they would gain is a pile of burning ash. There is no practical reason to do it and you can call Xi many names but not impractical.

China hasn’t been directly involved in anything even resembling a genocide since the death of chairman mao at least. There are human rights abuses and questionable decisions (such as not sufficiently opposing the ongoing gaza genocide) but nothing compared to the horrors on earth supported by US and some european countries right fucking now.

I don’t think they’d ever get people to do the same for the newer OS’s

Just sayin, if you host a Linux install party you can get a copy of most Linux distributions for free. You can also get it for free if you don’t host a Linux install party, but that’s minor details.

Heh, that is really quite old. There might be a chance.

See if you can get by with a combination of Krita and GIMP. The former especially has improved a lot lately and is now a fairly professional tool. New-ish versions of Photoshop are very difficult to run in WINE (which allows you to run some Windows apps natively - it’s the thing that powers all recent linux gaming advances). The best you can do is run it in a VM with a window passthru, like so: https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

Depends on what you need from your computer. If it’s just web browsing and some light “office-like” tasks, it’s very easy, especially if you’ve interacted with a computer before. If you need some specialized hardware support or rely on some complicated proprietary app (looking at you Adobe), it can get complicated quickly.

In any case there will be some pain as you get accustomed to the new OS. But overall it’s not as bad as it used to be.

Oh my, I hope she knows how to sed the release name in /etc/apt, or else it’s very out of date by now…

The functional elitist is actually running Yi in XMonad on Guix.

Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won’t be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come.

(emphasis mine)

I think Cory was pretty clear that it wasn’t just about copyright and DRM, and the enemy will come up with new ways to achieve its goals. That article was about the first battles in the war, we’re now entering the midgame.

The reason I see the connection is that big dogs like Apple or Microsoft will be able to get RAM from those suppliers (or build it themselves like Samsung), and will be able to sell you walled-garden “computer appliances” which only run approved software. But you won’t be able to afford to build your own computer from parts yourself, and won’t be able to install whatever you want on it as a result.

This sounds like they are joining the war on general-purpose computing, and not on our side. Fuck em.

Given the potential damage from it, it’s more like saying it can drive while being confident the brake pedal is always the left-most one, because it’d seen it on reddit.

Documentation will always have to be actually written by the author(s) of the code (or at least someone who understands the code really well), because only the author knows the intent behind a certain function or API endpoint, and that’s what the documentation is for.

LLMs don’t understand shit (sorry AI bros), they will sometimes produce accurate descriptions of the function code as written, but never the intent. Even if the LLM “wrote” the code, it doesn’t “understand” the real intent behind it, because it is just a poor mashup of code taken/stolen from someone else, which statistically fits the prompt.

What LLMs could help with is generating short, human-readable descriptions of what is happening in a given function. This can potentially be helpful for debugging/modifying projects with poor documentation, naming, and function separation, so that instead of gleaning through multiple 2000-line C functions in a 100k SLOC file, you can kind of understand what it does quickly. I’ve used deepseek for this before, with mixed-to-positive results.

But again, this would just be to speed up surface-level digging and not a replacement for actual documentation or good practices.

1. This is not a problem that needs solving, it’s an artificial barrier to prevent you from using the device which reduces profit for the manufacturer. Being able to install and run whatever software you want (apart from actual hardware limitations) has been part of personal computers since the invention of personal computers.
2. Google is trying its best to do this as well, if you’ve missed the news.

I think the actual headline should be “Apple forced to remove some illegal barriers to app installation for users in Brazil”.

I am annoyed by the headline giving Apple the agency to let users use their device. Screw that, if someone buys a device they should be able to use it however they please, including installing their own OS and their own apps on top, and replacing any part of the hardware. Anything preventing that should be illegal.