Steam is not the only means of distribution anywhere, and you can often buy the same game both from Steam and directly.

It’s too early to hate it.

(Well, I mean, I want a FreeBSD native Steam client with native Proton and all infrastructure, but I can understand that it’s a small percentage, even if not that different from Linux support.)

Chrome shouldn’t be worth more than an IMAP client. If it is, then the web should be torn down and built anew.

as long as its secure and 100% recoverable by the user

These two are fundamentally incompatible.

And having a central authority obviously compromises security.

I dislike this idea that government run is bad.

Nothing is inherently bad, but putting yourself into a hierarchy (at the bottom of it too) that you don’t need seems a dubious decision.

Having postal service support e-mail services is fine, maybe.

People have invented cryptographic identities. Maybe unbinding email identity from service is long overdue.

I’m biased, but seems much better than what you are suggesting.

Typical.

Especially when that ad was released, nobody considered piracy a crime seriously then.

Those making the ad could probably be thinking like: something business-made, with workhours put into it, shouldn’t be pirated, that’s theft, but something made by enthusiasts can, it’s taking what doesn’t have an owner, just toys in the Internet, and also GPL is dishonest for having rules, it’s cheating and poison, it’s ownerless too, only companies doing business should be able to sue for IP violations.

The governments need encryption less than regular citizens. Wolves and sheep are not equal, one wolf among hundreds of sheep is still safe. It’s the sheep who need protection against that wolf. They’ll still have their hard power in any case.

You can, you also can have very seamless and unnoticeable surveillance over those few who would put effort into protecting their privacy.

There’s a rule of the thumb here: if someone with power doesn’t yet do what’s clearly unacceptable and outrageous, but does painful things which are not but on the fringe, this means you just don’t know what they are really doing. It’s the same with Russia, its state security services were never hindered by any laws, but less visibility of that helps reduce public pressure.

When someone even approaches backdoors, surveillance, nothing to hide nothing to fear, we know better, we can’t have direct democracy here, we have institutions and rules, all that, - even in words, - then you should start killing them. Immediately.

It only seems to have many years to have totalitarianism and mafia rule all together. In reality this happens in a few weeks. You had transparency and rules and responsible citizens and democracy, a week passes, and you have undocumented prisons where people die without being convicted, surveillance of anyone even to walk near something of interest, “politicians” all knowing each other for decades, no real grassroot movements at all, even fake grassroot movements’ leaders being murdered in plain sight and never properly investigated. All this happens momentarily. The slow transition is only in appearance and only to reduce effort spent on damage control.

No way, how can that be if they have so many laws protecting children, must make more, surely voting for something and putting it on paper always solves problems.

What it really does, though, is to give people authorization to use force with a stated goal of fulfilling them.

It’s a more general thought. Our actions do not have immediate visible consequences. Thus we can break everything and think we are winning.

Also on the subject of Nazis it does possess some value, they loved analogies between relevant modern techologies of their time and sociopolitical events. Where the word “anschluss” comes from, by the way. It literally translates like “connecting”, as with electricity. Well, electricity wasn’t new, but radio was, Nazis used radio a lot and referred to use of radio to show how modern and revolutionary they are.

Important because it applies to leftists often, if you say “leftists made Trump” or “leftists made MAGA” or “leftists broke American democracy” or something like that, it’ll sound clearly wrong, but it won’t be. USSR was a clear case of using what others made and thinking that it’s their own achievement by its administrators, most of its history, while first they were using the tremendous results of Stolypin reforms and then NEP (Lenin was a bit smarter than his buddies), and then selling fossil resources to support visibility of a working economy, but that’s kinda off topic.

I’m not talking about x86 architecture, I’m talking about everyone using Java and Sun idea of the web, just slowly worsened and degenerate, first of all. Or Windows NT, it was fine in year 1999, but being stuck there for 20 years is just wrong.

So, back to our day and how it’s useful, systems should have smaller latency for evolution to work well. Like those temples in Japan, which are constantly being rebuilt in all of their parts. You should be able to tear down a republic and build a new one in a couple of years.

Getting back to Nazis - if the system they captured had smaller latency, they wouldn’t have managed to even annex Austria.

That’s the intended effect. People with real power think this way: “where it does work, it’ll work and not bother us with too much initiative and change, and where it doesn’t work, we know exactly what to do, so everything is covered”. Checks and balances and feedbacks and overrides and fallbacks be damned.

Humans are apes. When an ape gets to rule an empire, it remains an ape and the power kills its ability to judge.

An Alarming Number of Anyone Believes Fortune Cookies

Just … accept it, superstition is in human nature. When you take religion away from them, they need something, it’ll either be racism/fascism, or expanding conscience via drugs, or belief in UFOs, or communism at least, but they need something.

The last good one was the digital revolution, globalization, world wide web, all that, no more wars (except for some brown terrorists, but the rest is fine), everyone is free and civilized now (except for those with P*tin as president and other such types, but it’s just an imperfect democracy don’t you worry), SG-1 series.

Anything changing our lives should have an intentionally designed religious component, or humans will improvise that where they shouldn’t.

Nazis got to all the points they wanted so lightning-fast that nothing happening now can rival it.

That’s one of the reasons for the cultural shock about Nazis - everybody expected such processes to happen very slowly, in small flashes, as they do now. Thus them to be voted out or pressed out as a reaction, or at least for most potential victims to flee Germany, gradual pressure, compromise, all that.

Instead they came to power, almost momentarily changed the internal balance of power (of armed forces, their own paramilitary organizations, veteran organizations and such), anschlussed Austria, “solved unemployment” (organized massive programs of building autobahns and such, not very economically viable, but a symbol and a working mechanism), attracted investments (various scams on enormous scale, but the funds were attracted and it wasn’t all scams), scaled the military back to something realistic, performed successful rearmament programs … And built concentration camps. They started with something like Guantanamo almost immediately after coming to power, then didn’t lose any time to learn.

See, they had an apparatus, even a social layer of very well educated people, but with indoctrination of service and obedience, and the legacy of German science and industry and patriotism too. They broke that, but not before successfully using it for a lot of things.

That’s the problem with building good systems, they prevent idiots from learning who they are earlier. It’s the same with Sun and DEC and other legacy in tech. Everybody still uses their paradigms and products descended from theirs. Vision, architecture, aesthetic (only hidden somewhere deep). So everybody big has now IMHO wrong ideas about how to solve problems, but since everybody also uses solutions made by those who had right ideas 30-15 years ago, they don’t get the feedback. Today’s tech is a pile of crap reinforced with yesteryear grass, but it doesn’t fall apart in your hands because for the main problems you use solutions from a more civilized age.

Why is ease of hosting a mail server rated so well ? How is “leveraging email hosting services” decentralized in any way ?

Because somebody there doesn’t even understand you’re supposed to host an email server as easily as hosting a web server with a website. While in reality you’ll learn all the Satanish obscene lexicon before making big email providers accept your mail.

I’m exaggerating probably, but ahem.

That said, in my humble careless incompetent “let’s-go-back-to-year-2005” opinion we need a new email standard, spiritually same, but qualitatively different, like the upgrade from prehistoric email with UUCP paths to something more modern, only this time cutting down all the DMARC and DKIM bullshit and simply using pubkeys in To: and From: headers, with the email itself signed by the author, by mail server and maybe by something else. One can make encryption of email content the baseline norm while we’re at it. One can even get rid of the attachment of identities to mail servers and use servers similar to how NOSTR has relays. I mean, what I described already is just NOSTR with nostalgic aesthetics. Maybe also similar to some kind of Fidonet reimagined.

Do they host login servers and supernodes for the actual real Skype? Asking for a friend.

Than today’s Mac and Windows - sure. But take w2k or macos 9 - and hell no. Those are much cleaner and more consistent.

Evil or not, w2k is something everyone should thank MS for, it’s really how it should be.

probably would not want to rebuild to configure something.

It builds in a second. About DWM. It’s 2k lines of C code, all they do is basic functionality. It’s not some cumbersome process of setting up an environment, and then looking at running lines of compiler output as if you were some fscking Neo installing Gentoo.

Apparently Hegseth didn’t get the hint to bend over

To remain polite, I’ll note that this subject has nothing to do with “your average user” or anything else connected to selling something useless to somebody who doesn’t care. All this grandma and average user and other talk is absolutely out of place about tools never intended to be sold on a market or be used by everyone. You are not required to use suckless tools in the first place.

Something having an X-Wing pic keeps out a lot of people too, cause not everyone likes Star Wars. What’s your point?