You’re not alone. I recall getting sniped from every direction at some points, with very tough 1:1 battles and boss battles that just kinda “happen” out in the open.

That’s alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn’t take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that’s just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there’s tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it’s probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.

What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the onion metaphorical tequila worm¹ and are now parroting these trolls?

1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You’re not thinking straight and did something you wouldn’t do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it’s totally normal to do.

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up

Wait, what?

Real question here: has anyone else had luck side-stepping the Live365 signup during/after install? I’ve done this, and I’m very confused that more people haven’t.

I totally get that: use the right tools and you’ll be okay. This applies to many technologies in this space.

With respect, I still take this advice like hearing “look out for rattlesnakes if you’re hiking there.” It might be safer to just hike where there are no rattlesnakes, instead.

I swear, overcoming fixed functional-ness is like a superpower when you can apply it.

I once shared a small office with a co-worker. I had the idea to move the desks away from the walls and place them back-to-back, diagonally, in the middle of the room. Other co-workers scoffed and remarked at how dumb and unconventional this looked. Then I explained that we each now had nearly full privacy from each other, much more personal space in our respective corners, no more glare from the window, and nobody could sneak up on us from the door anymore. Things got pretty quiet after that.

Useful? Not exactly. But you’d never look lazy or idle, that’s for sure.

/me goes back to get second folding chair.

Pascal went to military school.

I’m not in love with the idea, but a language that cuts out the BS has a sudden appeal when on a group/team project.

I take this as less of a “I can’t use this intuitive feature reliably” thing and more of a “the truth table will bite you in the ass when you least expect it and/or make a mistake” thing.

Is that MIT (munch it today) or GPL (generally pleasing w/lettuce) licensed?

I’ve been in situations where I wanted to retain credit/ownership of ideas and code, but wanted to be able to use them in the workplace. So building a MIT/BSD licensed library on the weekend and then importing it on Monday was the only game in town. I get the portfolio piece and my job is easier as a result. But I stick to non-novel and non-patentable stuff - “small” work really, as Stallman is quoted here..

In some work environments, GPL or “GPL with an exception” would never get the kind of traction it should. Lots of places I’ve worked lack the legal and logistical framework for wrangling licenses and exceptions. It’s hard to handle such cases if there’s literally nobody to talk to about it, while you have automated systems that flag GPL license landmines anyway. The framing is a kind of security problem, not a license problem, so you never really get to start.

The two licenses have distinct use cases, and only overlap for some definitions of “free” software. I also think both the comic artist and OP set up a fallacious argument. I’ll add that in no way do I support Intel’s shenanigans here.

The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product. This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one, situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed, and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind). From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it’s a really bad argument.

But don’t take it from me, learn from the master of logic himself.

commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy, by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing. Permissive licenses absolutely do allow others to modify code without limit, but that is suggested to be a bad thing on moral grounds alone. That said, I’d love to see a citation here because that’s the first I’ve heard of this pejorative used to describe software licensing.

I think what burns people the most is that after Photoshop 5 or so, GIMP stopped keeping up with all the improvements in the later Photoshop versions. People making the jump from 2024 Photoshop to 1996 Photoshop UI/UX are gonna have a bad time.

Edit: as a software developer I can say that I’ve never seen a user more frustrated, sometimes even irrationally so, when they are forced to re-learn muscle memory to perform a familiar task. I’ve also seen people practically riot at the mere suggestion that this will happen. If you wish to curry favor with your userbase, never ever, remove keyboard accelerators, move toolbars around, break workflow, etc.

The worst ones are safety rules: those are (sometimes) written in blood, with stories to match.

Company: Provides amenities and services that would (technically) allow a person to live on premises. Pays you enough to retire early if you didn’t have to bother with rent or a mortgage.

Also company: “We can’t hire you without a permanent residential address.”

I also worked at multiple places that had fully decked out break-rooms: free food, game consoles, VR, and 60-inch TVs. Everyone was afraid to use them for fear of looking like they were screwing around. Except the interns. They used the hell out of that stuff.

I’ve seen this kind of thing too many times to count. First it was in high school, then the workplace.

1. Person notices there is no explicit rule for a thing, or maybe there’s a loophole somewhere
2. Does the thing
3. Annoys someone
4. Now there’s a rule for the thing

Some people just want to push the envelope. Other times, people can have a poor grasp of social norms, or they simply don’t respect others. But on the other side of the coin, people get annoyed for good and bad reasons; sometimes, no reason at all.

Bottom line: it’s a mess, so we get rules. But nobody wants to spend time writing these things and enforcing them, so there’s usually a reason/person/event why they’re there.

Hate that my government is apparently dead set on all of us driving massive trucks and SUVs spending thousands to money lenders, auto manufacturers, and dealerships over realist vehicles.

Doubly so if those parties are campaign contributors. Always follow the money.

Yes. Not enough daydreaming about winning arguments, mixed with intrusive thoughts and general self-loathing.

Kinda? I figured that there’s some portion of the population that’s not smart - bell-curve statistical distribution and all that. But I always thought that the problem was education, or rather, access to a good¹ education and all the socio-economic and political boundaries around that.

To be blunt: modest to insanely powerful people have something invested in keeping such barriers high, and it’s worrysome.

1. Good = a program that teaches critical thinking and has access to liberal arts, trades, traditional arts, libraries, and information technology.