Game theory would like a word.

Considering the smallest non-fragmented group has resulted in the current 2-party system in most western countries, and results in tribalistic xenophobia, I’m quite content stating democracy is not the egalitarianism it is purported to be.

And I quite resent the insinuation I’m a lapdog.

Democracy: Dictatorship of the majority. Mob rule.

Exactly. Apple is literally half of the US government’s current propaganda conduit.

Not to mention, if you’ve got even 1 billion USD to burn, you can hire one heck of a merc. group.

Apple grosses between 150b and 170b annually.

Demanding they pay more than they make in a year would lead to a 3 trillion dollar company going to war against their government. And not just a court battle. We are nearing the point at which corporations can contest with governments.

Imagine the entire next generation being brainwashed into disrupting supply chains. Gen Z children sabotaging transportation routes, physically protesting, because their status symbol told them the government was corrupt.

Could the USA take Apple? Yes. But that’s a fight they’d be wise to not incite.

Depends on how big the fine is. Anything with an ‘m’ instead of a ‘b’ is just the cost of doing business.

https://www.itpro.com/software/linux/fedora-workstation-devs-face-community-backlash-over-plans-to-collect-telemetry-data

Anonymous data is useless. Most any data can be de-anonymized. And tracking data is always to “improve services” until the companies are offered significant sums for it…

I’m still furious they intentionally broke CentOS. And then had the audacity to emulate SmallFloppy Glasspane and bake some spyware into Fedora.

Back Track 5. Now Kali Linux.

I had not suitably prepared. I was a Windows Vista power user who heard how I could crack some Wi-Fi and gave it a whirl.

My chips went into one basket and me, oh my, was the transition ever so uncomfortable. What was dual booting? Who knows. Long story short, I made a mess for myself. I went through a significantly steeper learning curve than most, though it introduced me to script kiddie tools, programming, and eventually exploits.

Now a decade or so later, I’ve settled away from Arch to Debian. Though I miss the bleeding edge, my update frequency has lost much of it’s zealous edge.

You can only win the war on cartels, if you kill the demand for (illegal) drugs first. Then they will go away on their own.

I like your take kid, but unfortunately you need to web search “cartel avocados”, or “cartel limes”.

Mexican police went to America to be trained by their military. When police were sent back, they abandoned the government and became one of the most vicious and capable cartels on the planet.

No. I’ll use it when it’s stable enough for Debian to merge it.

Possibly in 5 years?

I very much agree with, “don’t break userspace”, and this was a wise choice.

On the other hand, if capital becomes the developers’ core objective and they would not have made the same action for plebeian users, this would be an outrage.

universal generalism

It’s hard to go to work and have these conversations over and over again

I had a conversation with one of my mates, who was convinced, “AI is creative in the same way humans are creative. Therefore AI is actual intelligence.”

It was a struggle to try to explain how LLMs aren’t creative at all, can’t conceptualize understanding, and are unable to determine whether they know something or not. I think I used painting terms, and AI being unable to consistently categorize a new color without being re-trained. He disagreed. Full blown nutter with no more understanding of the tech than you can find on FB, but he’s certain he knows best.

gImageReader or ocrmypdf will get you the pdf text, but after the text will need fiddling with and cleaning. Use LibreOffice, languagetool, write-good, etc to make finding the oddballs easy.

pdftk is what you want for editing pdf metadata.

Gimp is what you’ll need for editing images, Looking for watermarks, smoothing edges, lowering quality, introducing random noise, etc.

exiftool is what you’ll need for image metadata. Or take a screenshot, add a bit of noise or de-noise, and add back to the new pdf.

Scrivener or LibreOffice if you want to polish/republish, though that’s a ton of work.

um… Emacs. I mean, Oh My Zsh.

Way to go, you’re awesome!

They must, by definition. So yes. But for the sake of illustration, let’s assume someone who acts like a sea lion isn’t arguing in bad faith, but they aren’t arguing in good faith either. Whether they and unintentionally annoying, or not, ultimately makes no difference to the people around them.

Let’s say a specific oblivious person is combative and persistent. They are not truly trying to understand something, they just want to be right. You try to explain why their responses could be considered rude and prompt self reflection.

A) Will they evaluate themselves and realize what they are doing? B) Will they argue because they insist on being right?

The former is a rude person, but they are someone trying to figure out the world. Whether you engage with them or not, eventually they will realize their actions are causing disengagement. We’re all trying to learn and become better versions of ourselves. This person made some mistakes, realizes it, then changes.

There is no point in engaging the latter. Their lack of self awareness is irrelevant to the outcome and your mental state. Leave them alone, and don’t respond. If you do respond, and they realize they are wrong, but continue: they become a sea-lion if the fake politeness, and troll if they become inflammatory.

Don’t feed the trolls. If they want to, “be right,” they can be alone in thinking they’re right, and you can get back to learning and bettering yourself.

None of this is in the comic.

No satirical comic literally explains the intent of the comic; intent must be inferred based on the events it depicts. Or you can search the internet, Know Your Meme attempts to track culture and context. Yay for them.

because they don’t let people talk shit about them

The manner in which you engage in dialogue is important.

Pretending to not understand another person’s viewpoint, and annoying them into compliance, is arguing in bad faith. Arguments in bad faith are malicious deception.

Nobody wants to speak with sea lions because even if you explain in good faith, it won’t amount to anything except your own frustration. A summary of the heart of the sea lion: Arguing with me is pointless. “And now that you’re mad, you’ll know better than to talk shit about sea lions.”

Don’t be a sea lion. You can protest opinions without being manipulative or rude about it.

The point of the sea lion is persistent argument in bad faith.

The difference between, “prove your opinion,” can be subtle in its difference from, “why do you think that?”

Insinuating someone is badgering and being maliciously dishonest, because they asked for context, is poor etiquette.

You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.

Butterface excels at keeping data safe-ish or at least lets you know when to throw in the towel, and which bits you’ve lost. It’s also write intensive if you open a file with write permissions, which is harder on your drives.

Btrfs is great for the data you want to keep long term.

Also UEFI has some nice advantages if your computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.

Do what works for you, and keep on keeping on.