I grew up with Windows and I constantly had to fix shit just for my own casual use, the biggest barrier to moving to Linux is about learning a new OS from scratch, we already go through that learning curve with Windows normally so we forget how much time and effort it took us just to understand the system well.

That aside, I’d argue that for most productive work that doesn’t require proprietary software, you also don’t need to understand Linux that well to be productive. You just need to know how to log in, launch whatever you need, and then turn it off before going home. The biggest reason why we can’t just make people switch overnight is that they’re probably used to proprietary software that just won’t work well on Linux, like Adobe or Microsoft Office. If you train your personal to first switch to FOSS alternative, when you do make the switch to Linux the learning curve for what they need to do is small and they won’t be as intimidated. But now, if you’re talking about how their years of learning Word or Excel or Photoshop doesn’t translate 1:1 because of different UI and behavior, they’ll be very uncomfortable and less productive when they switch.

Things inevitably go wrong no matter what system or software in general you use, we’re just used at tolerating it when it’s something we know and use already, but there’s no reason why we should think Linux or FOSS software has to be strictly much more stable than its counterparts, as long as they’re good enough for the person or the use case, it’s already good enough to switch, with the caveat that you should never switch everything at once, but rather first switch your productive software, retrain to feel confident in it, and then switch to Linux. That way you’ll not even remember you’re running Linux after a few weeks, other than when you see the login screen or something.

That’s amazing, especially considering China has even more people than the entirety of Europe combined, may we soon follow over here

Personally I think everyone should be benefitting, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen if the big corpos lobby successfully to ban foss alternatives or if hardware stays perpetually expensive, but for coders as a whole it wouldn’t be the worst if we can simply run a foss model locally for a use case that makes sense, especially stuff like debugging. I do agree with most of your points, for what is worth. I just don’t agree with copyright law or IP law a whole lot even if it sometimes benefits regular workers, these laws were reshaped long ago to protect big owners of capital and we need to move away from them at some point.

If you don’t let them in they just break in and claim they own the place

Regardless of what you or I believe, most workers and even many comrades are still religious and the last thing we want is to be push them away, as long as they accept a materialist framework for organizing society and we work together to progressively reduce religious harm over time they can pray all they want imo. The only reason why reactionary religion is so powerful is because capitalists have overfunded them for decades, and even then you have examples of anti-colonial resistance led by priests and imams. We can and should work together as much as we can, of course without compromising analysis or praxis.

While building more is obviously necessary, there’s still more than enough houses in the US to house all the homeless, but it’s less profitable, and in a profit driven system this is just the cost of doing business. Like, sure, people normally want to live in more urban places, but I don’t think many would want to stay homeless if offered an empty house elsewhere. Building more under neoliberal capitalism won’t do anything to fix homelessness, unfortunately.

Read communist leaders rather than accept whatever a school book that whitewashes colonialism and ignores Churchill’s genocide in Bengal tells you. You may disagree with them but you’ll notice most of them were fairly literate and understood dialectical materialism.

Your signature made me giggle

I didn’t say it was the sole reason, rather that it is measurable and clear as day (look at the difference in the number of voters between the last two US presidential elections). You don’t need foreign actors to explain why democrat voters didn’t bother to show up.

Trump’s numbers were more or less constant for the last two election cycles, but look at the difference in voters between Biden and Harris in the same two elections.

I’m not a fan of the Russian government, but let’s stick to the facts. The biggest reason why the democrats lost is because they didn’t give most people a reason to care to vote, they didn’t listen to their more popular base on things like healthcare and a certain genocide as that could push away their corporate donors, and they promised continuity with an impopular administration that had the bad luck of governing during most of the economic hardship of the pandemic. Still, they could have done a decent campaign and ran on more popular policy.

Obviously powerful countries do try to influence elections to a degree, but the idea that Trump only won because of Russian interference has been disproven already.

Might be a vibecoded docker container or something, but I agree with your skepticism here

I’m completely with you there

Linus clearly meant that the tech is useful, and based on his history he probably meant for debugging more than anything else. And he’s absolutely right, there have been lots of vulnerabilities found by the thing. He didn’t say generated code is great, or that no human review is needed, or how we can adapt to incorporate gen ai in our workflows, etc. He only said it’s a useful tool, and that he doesn’t care about the ethics behind it (which is dumb, but we shouldn’t be surprised, especially if people are trying to push him into a direction, he’ll lash out and pick whatever is pragmatic in his view).

Not to defend any comment, I have no horse in this race, but being rude to people doesn’t usually help your point, and unless you’re being rude back in the same thread no one will have enough context to give you benefit of the doubt

I ran debian testing for a while and I agree with this advice. I hadn’t bothered to read that the debian website itself said testing isn’t meant to be used like I was using it lol.

I think Debian stable is awesome and it’s what I’m running atm, but for people who want or need newer packages I agree it’d be better to go with a rolling release or at least with a distribution that has a quicker release cycle (like Fedora).

Your country has been in decay for a while, and instead of doing something about it your politicians would rather point at each other as if they don’t share the same foreign policy and even mostly the same economic policy. I’m glad Trump is at least so wildly incompetent people are finally noticing.

I don’t disagree that LLMs are very useful when debugging and such, but it’s disappointing that he talks down to people trying to do the right thing and fighting so we have jobs and we don’t end the world. I’m not out there doing any of that but I appreciate folks that do.

I was thinking more that lots of people don’t have the hardware required to begin with, and it’s really hard to purchase now (especially in poorer countries like mine), hopefully memory prices will come down at some point after the bubble bursts so we can afford shit

Artisans own their tools, that’s what makes them artisans (rather than wage workers). I believe after the bubble pops there will be legitimate uses for the tech, and we’ll be able to run a pretty good iteration in our own hardware, but as it is now I’m uncomfortable with my employer having the power to decide whether I have the tools they want me to use for the job, whereas with code that’s less of a concern.