As much as I hate "AI" myself, rhetoric like this does more harm to movements resisting "AI" than to help them.

I don't believe your analogy holds water. I believe computers are a lot closer to steel than "AI" is, in that they're both foundational technologies with a very very wide array of proven uses such that the benefits of the development and use of steel/computers far outweigh the associated costs. Weapons/"AI" on the otherhand are both specific, narrower applications of steel/computer technology with a few particular beneficial uses, but those uses pale in comparison to costs of the existence and development these technologies, so much so that both weapons and "AI" should be put on a metaphorical shelf out of reach until we as a global society can grow up to develop and use these technologies in a more responsible and conscientious manner.

Am I missing something or do two cloud computing services, two database systems, and a search engine have nothing to do with a game engine? Cuz this looks like a false equivalency whataboutism two-for-one combo to me.

From my digging on alternatives the main contenders are (in no particular order)

• Stoat
  • Essentially 1:1 on discords format
  • UK based, so its future there is uncertain
  • Infrastructure is lacking, was crippled by the initial influx after discord's announcement.
  • Missing some minor UI and UX features, feels unpolished.
• Spacebar
  • Reverse engineered discord
  • Greatest potential, IMO, but as of a few days ago all it has is potential.
  • lacks significant client development, relying on an external client named Fermi, which feels quite amateurish.
• XMPP
  • Highly mature, looks very promising, but lacks any kind of guild/nested channel grouping support which makes it unsuitable for my group, so I didn't look too deep at it.
• Matrix
  • IMO the most likely discord successor.
  • Minor functional hiccups, that vary from client to client
  • Of the clients I tested, Cinny is the most discord like, but I hear commet is closer.
  • Nested spaces provides the minimum format equivalence.
• Fluxer
  • Slightly sus vibes
  • Lacks self hosting instructions
  • Media is non-permanent, which is I guess fair to keep infra costs down, but its unsuitable for my groups media usage habits.
  • Looks promising, but I've not actually tried it given the lack of self hosting instructions.

One thing that's wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I'd like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links, server side channel ordering, and space membership over channel membership. But that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

EDIT: Forgot Fluxer. Added.

Bruno has telemetry users can't opt out of: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337

Which, IMO, is unacceptable.

Well that explains the strange bug I started encountering in xfce recently. I guess I'll be spending tomorrow researching DEs, though I'll probably end up just using TDE or maybe CDE.

EDIT: clarified that the bug is in xfce, not xfwl.

The thing is the average person either can't or can't be bothered to remember even a dozen actually secure passwords, so they fall back to a couple of simple derivations of a common password, meaning each and every site a user signs up on represents an additional single point of failure.

They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.

Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?

Absolutely not. Power companies don't get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.

Honestly, same. I initially dismissed Zig due to their insistence on making unused variables an error even in debug builds but if they keep this up I may have to just Get Over It.

I suppose that's true, but then the question becomes: how many people proselytizing Godot/OSS use these services personally vs in a corporate environment where they may not have a choice? Because I'm not sure the supposed hypocrisy the meme is "joking" about actually exists.

There was a bit of drama on tumblr (owned by Automattic) not too long ago where a relatively well known trans blogger got banned as a part of an alleged harassment campaign. I recall Matt Mullenwag (Automattic's CEO) being accused of following the user on to other platforms and harassing them. There were also accusations of, IIRC, tumblr staff taking payments to ban users. Which isn't great. So if my memory is accurate, your gut feeling is probably right.

Edit: typo, slleged -> alleged

C++ is pretty alright, IMO, but the syntax is kinda clunky though, I think probably because of some historical baggage.

Minor clarification: your Arch Linux link is for archinstall, the easier install script, not Arch Linux itself. IIRC it's not even the officially recommended way to install Arch.

Your use of Luddite as a pejorative outs you as willfully ignorant of both the matter at hand and the history of the Luddite movement. Your alignment with the corporate narrative here makes you sound like far more of a republican than any "AI" critic I've ever seen. Especially that "foreign operative" call out, that's peak republican right there.

Definitely. As nice as it would be, I don't think it will significantly change any time soon, for several reasons. Not least of which is because several programs would likely just flatly refuse to implement such a change, judging by some of them refusing to even consider patches to implement the XDG Base Directory Specification.

There are valid criticism to be made about cosmic desktop, like

*Lists two positives*

If that's the best example of criticism to be had about COSMIC, then it's practically flawless. Except of course, though, it isn't. Aside from the general lack of polish, I'd argue that there's not enough customization. E.g. things that should really be a slider or spin control (or better yet multiple sliders/spin controls) like corner radii are multiple choice button things (not to mention that the 'square' style is anything but.) Some of the sliders that do exist (particularly the size ones) have very few set points that make them essentially disguised drop downs. I could probably find dozens more things to criticize if I cared to sit down and nitpick everything.

Where are you getting three years of abandonment from? The branding repo OP linked was last updated 10 months ago, while the server repo appears to have had pretty steady development for the last month at least (as far back as I bothered checking on mobile)

A program that I use often uses an embedded MPV window for video playing, and Wayland doesn't support that, and apparently won't: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/74

So until something changes with that program, MPV, or Wayland, or I decide to rewrite the program myself, I'm stuck with X11.

I belive just Matrix and XMPP.