Exactly. They’re okay with the fascist Xitpool, but if any regular dev ever crossed those “guidelines,” they’d be banned in a heartbeat.

Probably true, but iirc, there are already people planning to keep X11 going, because change means fucking up their personal workflow.

I’ll just download some, no biggie.

Same with CachyOS, but Loss32 isn’t just trying to run an on-demand emulation layer within your DE, it’s trying to be the always-on default. It’s ambitious, to be sure!

…OpenAI now faces calls for sanctions and demands to retrieve and share potentially millions of deleted chats long thought of as untouchable in the litigation.

Proof that chats are never deleted, they’re just hidden and archived. Stop giving the slop bots free training data.

Similar ideas but different approaches. ReactOS is trying to essentially reverse engineer Windows, whereas Loss32 is going to run literally everything in Wine.

I’m kind of excited about this one, because it’s likely to uncover issues in Wine and upstream any improvements they make.

Good anecdote but this is just hegemonic propaganda. Social media has also revealed the reality behind the hegemonic narrative. That’s what they’re actually afraid of.

It’s not propaganda, it’s a fact. The rise of conspiracy theories becoming mainstream, the rise of fascist groups that are currently undermining global peace and stability, the ability for long-debunked pseudoscience to be treated as equal with science: all of that is facilitated by social media giving an equal platform to people that do not deserve one, particularly the platforms run by capitalists. Social media has indeed done some good, but my argument was never that social media is wholly bad, just that it’s a net negative.

I agree that “they” are afraid of The People organizing and seeing through all the bullshit, but that’s not something unique that social media is able to facilitate, and it’s not something social media has been particularly effective at doing. People of the past were able to see through the bullshit without social media, and if we all lost the internet tomorrow, people would still manage to communicate and share ideas. We did it for decades through books, newspapers, speaking events, zines, etc.

We don’t need social media to progress, and I would argue that recent history seems to indicate the contrary.

It’s not true. What about the people in charge of this platform? The bulk of the issues arise from capitalism and this type of censorship is designed to abolish its criticism.

There are no people “in charge” of this platform. If you wanted to, you could spin up your own instance with the sole member being you. You could fork the code and start your own Lemmy v2.0. We are collectively responsible for the operation of this federation of services, and even here, you still find the tolerance of bad actors and the spread of rotten ideas.

Has the Fediverse been a net positive? Maybe. But we are small fish compared to the fat cats that are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Xitter, etc., and there’s no dispute that their influence has reached far and the ideas they’ve allowed to fester for profit have been destructive, to say the least.

Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s within the context of a global society run by greed, and the fact that it sometimes does good doesn’t outweigh the capitalists who weaponize it against us.

Yeah, I even tried rolling my own downstream distro based on Bazzite by trying to install it at build time (when they do most of their system changes), but I kept running into trouble either with extracting the files or moving the files where they needed to go.

I mean, it has enabled every goober and bad actor with an opinion to essentially have a megaphone and build platforms and movements. I’d argue that’s a net negative. Even the Fediverse isn’t immune to propaganda and conspiracy theories.

I think putting a warning on the tin is appropriate, especially for platforms run by billionaires whose explicit goal is to get people hooked and keep them feeding the machine by any means necessary.

It’s true that the bulk of the issue arises from the people in charge of the platforms, but nobody currently in power is going to do anything about the billionaire problem. This is at least a vague gesture acknowledging that a problem exists. Also, it’s just a sign. When have warning signs stopped people from doing things that are unhealthy?

Oh, Private Internet Access. The way it installs itself is wonky on immutable systems (i.e. it was written for mutable systems in an odd way). I remember seeing someone say on the PIA GitHub that there’s a workaround, but I haven’t given that a go, and my own experience trying in the past still led to problems, even if you got the client and daemon working.

You can utilize the OpenVPN configs just fine, but you lose out on some nice features in the client, like WireGuard and some other QoL things.

I love them, too. Ironically, I’m not currently running one, but that’s more because I need a VPN client that I haven’t been able to get working on immutable distros, but I’d use one if I that was solved

I’m not familiar with this library or this dev, so I can’t say if this is intended or not. There’s plenty of bad actors out there who would love to get their hands on existing projects with a base of trust, which they can weaponize for their nefarious means.

I think everyone here has offered good advice, so I have nothing to add in that regard, but for the record, I fucked up a Debian bookworm install by doing a basic apt update && apt upgrade. The only “weird” software it had was Remmina, so I could remote into work; nothing particularly wild.

I recognize that Debian is supposed to be bulletproof, but I can offer commiseration that it can be just as fallible as any other base distro.

Batman: Return of Joker is also an amazing feat of NES technomancy. Not a supremely great game, mind you, but what they were able to achieve graphically on the NES rivals some SNES games.

Especially with big AAA companies, I think devs have gotten lazy with their optimization passes, because bigger cards means they can just continue cramming more into a game without bothering to budget for optimization.

It’s not truly a discount either, it’s a subsidy. That cost is recouped by the aggregation and sale of your data, which is far more valuable to Meta than a single product sale.

Wait, they are? I thought I was going crazy and missed a big shift in the latter’s project goals! Thanks for pointing that out

It’s probably still a good option if you don’t have a VPN, though.

…or they should just move to Linux, kill two birds and all that.

I like the idea of Portmaster, but it didn’t work with dynamically assigned VPN IPs when I used it a couple years ago. It’s also not easy to temporarily switch off; iirc, I had to uninstall everything to get my VPN to work again.

Unless they’ve figured out how to fix that issue, it’s a caveat anyone with a VPN should know about.

i dont care about all that data stuff.

Multibillionaires certainly seem to, though. That fact alone should concern you.

Privacy should be your fundamental right, not something you have to demand from those who command or can buy influence and power (e.g. billionaires, politicians). What you buy, what you play, who you talk to is what fuels a nearly trillion dollar industry, and you don’t get a dime of that, nor do you get much of a say in how that data gets used; if you’re a citizen of the EU, the GDPR offers some protection, but it is being undermined all the time.

To say that you don’t care about your privacy is like saying you don’t care about politics. Maybe you truly don’t care, but it’s going to affect and influence your life anyway, and not caring only helps the rich and powerful—to the detriment of us all.

It shouldn’t piss you off. You should be cheering for that behavior, and it would be wonderful if every dev was that brave.

The reason the Quest is relatively affordable is because you are the product. Meta is harvesting your data for free, and the cost is partially subsidized by the sale of your data. Continuing to support the Metas, the Googles, the Xitters, etc. does not ultimately benefit anyone but the wealthy.

I get that it can be frustrating to lose out on some fun, but I think not buying their products is a worthy sacrifice to make for the good of us all.