My mom died.

My father taught me to hate myself.

You invite my “billionaires shouldn’t exist” TED talk.

Yeah, and folks know “scruples” as a noun which some people have and some don’t, but “scruple” as a verb is a nice archaic version that I really like, which you don’t encounter much outside of, say, a Jane Austen novel.

I would say “meaningful”. Billionaires can have a very noticeable effect with their philanthropy, while making essentially no sacrifice on their part. The Gates Foundation does very noticeable good, but Bill Gates isn’t giving of himself very much.

“scruple” as a verb, meaning “hesitate due to conscience”.

It was coined by Cory Doctorow.

Windows has problems, no doubt. But in terms of surfacing functionality in the GUI, it does it a lot more thoroughly than Linux does.

Not to mention having to know things like what my window manager is, am i running “Gnome” or “KDE” before i download an app in a software store. And on and on. Linux is so much less friendly.

Every print dialogue in Windows, they all pretty much have all the same basic options, called the same things, so that inconsistency isn’t that big a deal.

My experience has been filing a bug on a FOSS app, and having it almost immediately closed because it was a dupe of a bug reported ten years prior which remained open and unfixed. I’m not a programmer, so it’s just, “Well, I guess I’m out of luck on this ever being fixed.”

I’ve done a fair bit of UI/UX work in my career, so I have a lot of sympathy for naive users, and FOSS devs mainly do not. If there’s some functionality that is only exposed with a command line parameter, well, that’s good enough. Read the man page.

Linux users are self-selected for increased tech savvy, so they’ll say, “Yes, it’s the best,” but really, the Linux community is still extremely forgiving of terrible user interface, and value things like FOSS over things like apps with robust, accessible feature sets. Linux users are happy to fix functionality holes with writing a shell script, and think nothing of it: it’s not a lack in the OS, it’s a testament to the power and flexibility of the OS!

I’ve used a few flavors of Linux, and their GUIs are almost uniformly terrible, only partially functional without using a terminal. For instance, they have various software and OS update apps located in semi-random menu locations, and none of them work as well as “sudo apt update / sudo apt upgrade / sudo apt full-upgrade / sudo apt autoremove”. And there’s a huge part of the Linux community that thinks this is great and not a problem at all.

Windows hides the ugly sausage-making from typical users, and forces IT folks and other developers to wrangle with it. Linux makes IT/dev lives easier while making typical users somewhat hamstrung if they’re scared of a CLI. So, if that has meaning for you with regards to the question “Is Linux as good as we think it is?” then you may have your answer.

US universities are pro football teams with a sideline in education.

They have ARPU targets (Average Revenue Per User) and UAC targets (User Acquisition Costs). Whales contribute significantly to the game’s bottom line. Non-paying customers are vital, because player population is a game quality, and Whales need a population to notice how awesome they are.

But game companies don’t tend to separate Whales from other players (at least not the ones I’ve worked for), they tend to care about ARPU, which is more stable, and a much easier target to shoot for. And they want to keep UAC down, which lowers the required ARPU for a successful game.

Boost is my favorite. Clean UI and attractive icon.

I would chalk most of that up to relative nascence, and mostly volunteer labor. I would expect things to improve. In the meantime, I’m fine with my lemmy and mastodon instances, and don’t feel a lack of much.

Just because they can take control of the domain doesn’t mean they somehow have access to the data any servers that used the domain have. Those servers were, i feel confident, not in Afghanistan. Domains are just redirects, so the Taliban have nothing on any of the users.

Embrace, Extend, and Enshittify.

Cory Doctorow termed it “Enshittification”, and wrote about the process here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys