I think you should take a more constructivist approach - what we have now, rather than what we might have in the future. Currently we have a network of like 20 major servers, mostly federated with each other. If one of those servers becomes insanely popular and overrun with bots and garbage, the rest will simply defederate from it. From the perspective of users on those other servers, they’ve only lost 5% of the network they liked. From the perspective of users who were on the popular server before it went to shit, they now have to move servers but still have 95% of the old network as they remember it.

Do users all move to the new instance?

What incentive is there for them to move? By the very nature of hype explosions, they are exponential, and as such most users will have joined when it was already quite popular. They won’t remember the “good old days” of their server being federated, so for them it’s fine to be isolated on a garbage server, at least initially. I suspect if something like this were to happen, most other servers will also limit signups for some time, to keep the spirit of the network alive and growing organically.

Politicians care because they literally get bribes for this shit

Yes, exactly, I mention it in my comment. It almost did the right thing and blundered in one detail.

This is what the California law requires BTW (except it makes the field mandatory which is shit). IMO in this case the EU solution is overcomplicated, it just feels like they needed an excuse to get more out of the COVID certificate investments…

Windows 11 is less of a poop smelling ice cream truck and more of a Kaiser’s Coffee Shop van. And you ain’t in the driver’s seat.

Better still, in the Nix world there’s https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager which allows you to set up all the settings exactly once, and then auto-apply them on all the machines!

Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight

Actually, one of main applications for batteries in the near-to-medium future is gonna be grid storage to supplement the explosive growth of renewables, and home backups to make the grid more distributed and replace diesel/gas generators during blackouts. For those purposes you don’t really care about the size, really don’t care about the weight, and a cheaper, more stable, less fire-prone chemistry suddenly becomes very appealing.

I agree with you that lithium is not going anywhere for a while, it’s the best fit for many applications like EVs, drones, etc. But I wouldn’t be surprised if its share in the battery market drops significantly over the next 10-15 years.

Can’t wait for one of them to be chasing me down for the crime of “thinking unfavorably about Peter Thiel”

Ah yeah, that makes sense. But I feel like it may be a bit easier to run away from a ground-based drone than it is from an aerial one. For one, they’re much slower so you’d probably have a more advanced warning.

Many labor movements throughout history started out due to advances in automation resulting in unemployment and rising inequality. This time around there’s also a huge cost of living crisis too, so things are lining up (you might hear “contradictions are sharpening” in marxist circles). If anything I’d have expected violence to start sooner and be more widespread, if someone gets laid off due to AI in this job market they literally have nothing to lose at this point.

It’s been happening for a good 20 years already. Do you think US drone strikes were all military targets? Do you think both russia and ukraine didn’t absolutely dronefuck multiple population centers? Do you think israel didn’t use drones to carry out its genocides? There are probably tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dead civilians due to drone strikes already.

Honestly for desktop usage it doesn’t really matter. All inits have their idiosyncrasies (“A stop job is running for Session”/logging hell on openrc/etc). But for managing a fleet of bare-metal servers I find systemd to be the best, most polished one out of the lot.

And the moment they have a nuke and show it off, all hell will break loose

As you can see, all hell has been broken loose for them already even though they don’t have nukes and weren’t planning on making them. I think it’s time they armed themselves against the aggressors, with the only weapon those aggressors actually fear.

Nukes are the epitome of hard power tho. There is very little need to understand anything apart from “if I bomb that country, they nuke me (or, in this case, israel)”. I’m sure the financial markets would not appreciate a nuclear war either, so the profit incentive is there too.

Iran not getting nukes ensures that this war will happen again too. The only ways to keep sovereignty in the face of imperialists are:

1. Be economically irrelevant (a-la Cuba)
2. Kick their ass in a land war so hard that they are scared to even try (a-la Vietnam)
3. Have nukes (a-la North Korea)

If you don’t have any of those three you’re bound to be coup’d by US-backed fascists at some point, see: history of South America and West Asia.

Iran has oil and control over the straight of Hormuz, so (1) is out of the question. (2) is more likely but I’m not sure if the US leadership is dumb enough yet to just go head first into another land war in asia, and in any case this would lead to hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. This leaves us with (3) as the most viable strategy.

Windows disappearing is a hiccup while things adapt

I would argue it’s not. There’s still a lot of professional and industrial software that doesn’t run on Linux at all, even through Wine. I’ve had a glimpse into the world of industrial automation, there’s a bunch of devices that simply don’t have the drivers to run on anything but a specific (old) version of Windows. Supply chain issues would persist for decades.

Great assessment TBH. Iran is clearly posturing here, they haven’t won yet, even though the US did lose already.

US plutocrats don’t actually care that much whether the stock market is red or green in the short term, they will make money from it either way. I think the existing strategy of jacking up oil prices (which will impact the economy long-term) and also hitting their assets directly where possible (e.g. datacenters and oil refineries) will have more impact.

However, it is also possible that with some reshuffling of the demands the ceasefire might actually hold. If they allow Trump to not lose face, they could get most of their demands practically met and be the ultimate victors in this. I hope this is how it goes, otherwise we might see a worldwide famine due to fertilizer shortages by the end of this year.

That’s just not true. Most ATMs still run on Windows. There is a lot of industrial machinery running Windows 98 or XP to this day. A lot of POS devices too. Almost all accounting is done on Windows. The amount of chaos if it disappeared would be immense, it would probably be on the same order of magnitude as the last pandemic in terms of immediate economic impact as businesses have to manically switch to alternatives, and hundreds or thousands of people would die from financial chaos alone.

Linux is probably still worse because it would mean that more than half of smartphones are suddenly bricked, literally all of the internet just stops working, and a shitton of industrial automation stuff is gone.

I really think we’re gonna lose a carrier to swarm drones before this is over.

Paraphrasing donald trump, “inshallah”

Yesterday I was thinking that trump might get angry that Iran is letting through some ships and try enforcing a complete blockade… this seems like the first step towards that