You’re absolutely right. Sorry for that (admittedly catastrophic) omission.

It’s 2025. If you are getting a ‘free’ software product, there’s a chance of about 99,9% that the answer to that question is either ‘analytics/tracking/telemetry/customer retention’ or a combination of many or all of them.

‘mostly open source’? I’m intrigued…

I love Lemmy.

Here we are, in this holy year of our lord 2025

Wondering if cats have post-nut clarity

Try Guix instead :)

Big, welcoming community; Fully libre distribution; Time-tested Scheme (Guile) instead of that stupid nix stuff.

Have you never had a corporate job? A technology can be very much useless while incompetent ‘managers’ who believe it can do better than humans WILL buy the former to get rid of the latter, even though that’s a stupid thing to do, in order to meet their yearly targets and other similar idiotic measures of division/team ‘productivity’

Congratulations !

Thx, corrected

It’s also not the first or only 21st century technology that is or was waaaaaaaaay overhyped.

First it was the Blockchain

Then it was the Cloud

Now it’s Artificial Stupidity.

We do. ‘Spring fever’ is very real. What’s less clear is why.

I have a friend who was addicted to both cocaine and alcohol. While he, of course, is convinced that cocaine is one of the worst substances to have ever existed, he is even more wary of alcohol because of: (I’m obviously both paraphrasing AND excluding most countries with a Muslim majority here)

a) Social acceptance. No one is ever going to judge you for quietly sitting in the corner of a bar drinking your beer. Try snorting a line on the same setting and see what happens.

b) Availability. Even in sparsely populated areas, you are never too far away (say, a 10 minute walk) from a bottle of wine/spirit/beer.

c) Practicality (which is what answers your question). You don’t need a syringe, spoon, knife, bill, bong or lighter, not even another recipient, to start binging on booze. Once you buy/steal the stuff, you’re all set - and drinking something definitely IS more ‘natural’ (as in, it’s a reflex) than injecting or smoking something.

Shit, man. WHY did you have to bring this up…

Because they are such a tiny AND unprotected minority, they are fairly easy targets for othering / discrimination.

[ I am not condoning, just informing ]

So you see…up to a certain point it’s kind of our own fault too

I’d love to, but I can’t. Colonialism’s ‘Divide and conquer’ rule is only applicable and effective if the targets are either willingly in the game (i.e., corrupt enough to collaborate) already relatively divided (i.e. Already fragmented enough), or stupid enough not to realise what’s being done to them.

I don’t want to be that person either, but I really don’t think that Sykes is personally to blame for Britain’s shitty policies in and for the Middle East, the consequences of which still play a major role in the mess the region still is. Point being that, besides Gringoland, Britain should also be held accountable for the role they have played around the world in everything from ethnic cleansing all the way to supporting brutal, even murderous, dictatorships.

Can you explain why you find the suggestion so outrageous ? I’m not advocating a 35 year old woman dating a 15 year old boy. I’m only saying that biology matters.

This is the one thing that’s hardly ever mentioned in the whole age gap debate, though I would add that there are constellations that are creepy by default. Being a 35+ old man, I feel that I’m at kind of a landmark age where dating someone 20 years younger than me would be gross, let alone illegal in most jurisdictions, so the ‘it depends on your behaviour and intentions’ argument doesn’t really hold. In contrast, I can very much imagine dating a 55 year old woman - and no, it’s not a MILF fetish. So in the end, your intentions/behaviour AND Gender AND actual age gap do matter IMHO.

Regarding the last part of your comment, a dude called Christopher Simon Sykes, whose last name you might recognise, wrote a book called ‘The man who created the middle East’. It’s a biography of his grandfather, and an attempt to vindicate him.

You can argue all you want about TPM and its ‘security’. I ALWAYS thought that forcing users to use TPM 2+ hardware is planned obsolescence and nothing/no one will convince me otherwise.

The only thing affected users can and should do is to leave that PoS of an ‘operating system’.