Havatra

I moved from a decently sized city (100k inhabitants) to a small city (10k inhabitants) in a different country. I enjoy the more peaceful environment, but I miss being able to casually greet and talk with random strangers, as I don’t know the language here and very few people here know English. It was so much easier to find events and things to do when I knew what everyone around me were talking about, and the posters were easy to read. I oftentimes find myself using a translating app, but it’s a hassle, comparatively.

Despite there not being a lot of activity in the communities mentioned in the comments here, I think posting there might still yield some results. Even if just a single individual engages with you, that single individual may very well turn out to be a great conversation partner.

I’ve personally had some quite deep and dark conversations myself, and one good individual can in many cases be “sufficient”.

I hope that you find some cool people out there, and keep up the hunt for achievements in both games and life!

An artist sneaked an AI-generated print on to a gallery wall (…)

Isn’t it “snuck”, and not “sneaked”?

Anyhow, I’d agree with both parties: AI generated art can be considered a form of art, but not in the same league. Just like you have people who perform sports with “artificial enhancers” are separated from the naturals.

They’re using Unreal Engine 5 for this one, iirc.

“Its implementation could jeopardize existing and future investments, employment, and compliance with recent trade agreements,”

Jfc, they think they know best, and threaten with “here’s your potential future if you don’t agree with us”.

"Venture Global is grateful for the Trump administration’s final approval of CP2, a critical project that will supply American allies with low-cost LNG for decades, support thousands of jobs and greatly benefit the US balance of trade,” Sabel said.

And they’re vastly overestimating their prospects, having a mentality of “the US is the greatest nation!”.

I have hopes that these people in power will eventually stop their high-horse ravenous capitalism, but I imagine that day will only come after my lifetime…

[Meta] This is a great high-quality comment with proper references! I personally really appreciate the effort of elaborating on media articles that are often sensationalist or clickbaity. Keep up the good work!

I’m also curious about this. If there are any transparency reports, I’d love to read through that.

The Wikimedia Foundation are trying to implement some AI solutions (for helping humans, not write articles/information), which is likely quite costly, unless someone donates it. However, I imagine many others’ scrapers for AI are constantly demanding a lot from the Wikipedia servers since some years ago, probably resulting in increased costs. Hopefully the AI builders use a local copy of the torrent instead, but I fear they don’t…

I’m still happily donating though, as I think the Wikipedia Foundation are still doing a solid job, despite me not always agreeing with their decisions.

It is reasonable to assume, indeed. Though in the bigger picture - long term - I think the pros outweigh the cons wrt. letting tourists in. The espionage will happen a lot regardless, only to a slightly lesser degree if we were to ban tourism, I imagine.

I think the answer to your second paragraph is a mix of corruption and conflicting ethical values (freedom of speech). Showing any form of double standard is know to be very potent propaganda ammunition, after all.

This is very reasonable of Navalnaya. I concur, that further isolating ordinary citizens will only make the bubble of propaganda and misinformation within Russia grow, which is to no one’s benefit.

Even if it’s a hard pill to swallow, given the hatred circulating, we should aim to help the common people whom show their dissent towards Kremlin, as they are yet another way of curbing Kremlin’s power. And all the political tension considered, who would want to travel the EU as Russian tourists these days, apart from those who have a positive perspective of the EU?

I’ll try and answer seriously, with some non-exclusive options, in no particular order:

• Feeling ashamed, mostly because they’re realizing they’re either wrong or sounding stupid.
• Not wanting controversial stuff related to them to be “saved” for others to find and use for scrutiny.
• Honest mistakes (wrong community, thread, etc.)
• The post becomes a cesspool in the comments.
• Other personal reasons (feeling threatened, wanting a clean inbox, question got answered and they don’t care about historic purposes, etc.)

These are just my guesses though, and I try and not delete anything personally. I’m aware that anything I put on the internet will be immortalized, and that the healthiest thing I can do is own both my mistakes and my opinions, even if I’m convinced of my stupidity or ignorance at a later time. I’m only a human after all, and doomed to talk before I think. Best I can do is to learn as much as possible from it, and hope that others can also learn from my actions.

I might get downvoted for this, as I know the emotions are strong in this topic, but I’ll try and voice my humble opinion once again:

The Russian PEOPLE are not my enemy, KREMLIN is! And I don’t need stickers to tell me this. There are plenty of reports coming from independent journalists all over of not only the horrors that Kremlin motivates soldiers to commit in Ukraine, but what Kremlin is doing even towards civilians inside Russia! There’s a reason for the mass emigration and protests across Russia when this conflict first broke out, and that is that most of the people do not want unnecessary conflict. The Russian people suffer more and more, and also want this to end.

As long as Kremlin and its supporters are allowed to abuse their power however, the suffering will continue, so no mercy for them.

You seem to look at it quite pessimistically imho, but I’ll try and counter ;-)

developers won’t support a third platform

We’re not talking about a vastly different ecosystem. Probably Android-derived (which is open-source), very likely Linux derived. So compatibility is not going to be a huge issue, hence developing not hard. Developers will usually follow where user demand goes, not the other way around.

nor will customers move to a platform that doesn’t have the big apps that they need

Most of the big apps today have a smaller equivalent, check AlternativeTo.net.

Doubling your market share is easy when your market share is so low.

Generally true, but we’re talking a growth of millions of users a year. Millions of people is no small number. 5% of the US’ traffic are from Linux desktops, according to StatCounter (here’s an article with many links).

Nope, not in the tens of millions

You’re correct wrt. gaming, as 2.89% of 157 million active monthly users is about 4.55 million, which is not a small number either.  If you look at Linux desktop users in the US however, we’re talking over 5% of 347 million, which is 17.35 million users in the US alone, which is also not a small number. It’s more than the population of Greece and Bulgaria combined.

Purely because of the steam deck (wrt. Steam Linux users growth)

Do you have numbers? I can’t find any official numbers of active users on the Steam Deck, but there are estimations of 3+ million devices sold. I feel like I keep seeing posts of people who move over to Bazzite and similar distros these days for the sake of playing games, but nevertheless, both of these factors weigh in, and are steadily increasing the adaptation of Linux systems.

without [kernel level anti-cheat] it will never take off because the overwhelmingly most played games all have kernel level anti-cheat.

This is denying the antecedent. The amount of games, and money in games, without KLAC is plenty substantial to make a difference in the approach of both developers and DRMs, further increasing ease of adaptation by users. Do not undermine nor underestimate the potential of marginalities.

The Windows phone entered the market while the market was stable, and users had little reason to move away from what they were used to and comfortable with. These days users are getting more uncomfortable, hence why Linux is on the rise. Same with the push for more liberal software (FOSS). I believe if a company can do it right, and offer a stable and comfortable alternative, they can manage to be much more successful than the Windows phone was 10 - 15 years ago.

Disclaimer: I haven’t checked the statistics, but I remain optimistic, and continue making choices that align with my principles.

Availability in the US might be a bit of a challenge, as the Google/Apple duopoly has solidified greatly over the years there. Europe has the entire BoycottUS movement these days, so there are a lot of attempts at developing something independent there. But as with most new solutions, they have the added difficulty of being compared to these bigger companies who’ve already had many years to develop and perfect their solutions.
The choice boils down to how much you value your principles over comforts, and whether downgrading to physical cards is worth it. Personally I’ve recently done just that.

In regards to Android clones becoming worse, I saw GrapheneOS say on Mastodon that it won’t affect them in any significant way. Hopefully this is the case for most, and will remain the case.

/e/OS works with most, according to this list.

The founder of /e/OS has a blog where he talks about alternative payment solutions, and he mentions Curve being one.

I just recently ordered the Fairphone with /e/OS, and will be looking into this myself soon enough…

Not a lot currently, but what’s needed is for the snowball to start rolling. This means the early adopters will have to make the more difficult decision of choosing “lesser” options wrt. comfort and convenience, compatibility, and bang for your buck. All decisions matter, and it will have long-term effects en masse.