This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they're all at the mercy of Poettering's Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Completely agree. He just needs to look within his own borders to see why. The Left Alliance scores the largest bloc of the election; then Macron spurns them and looks to the right for a Prime Minister instead. Are we really supposed to believe him when he says he's shocked that people are losing faith in the system?

At this point, it's hard to see how he can be this stupid. The man is a liar and always has been. He understands well that to build trust (no matter with whom - either the Left Alliance in his own country or the Global South, or anyone else), he has to back down and learn to compromise.

But for him, it's much easier to pretend that he doesn't know what's going on, bury his head in the sand, and continue with the status quo - the way he's paid to do.

Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.

Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?

This is the one that broke my back. Understandable that XPCOM extensions had to go, but leaving nothing to replace them, and then going on to push their trash UI redesigns without giving us any recourse to change them back - that was just unforgivable.

Then again, that was still well before they started pushing spyware in their own browser, so in retrospect, those were very quaint times!

Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.

Google, probably

What annoys me most is typical liberals like this talk about "the economy" in a singular sense, and whether something can be simply "good" or "bad" for the economy as a whole. To them, "good for the economy" is a translation for the ultra-wealthy getting even wealthier (because they are the ones most invested in it). No consideration of whether this is beneficial for average people or not. I suppose we're supposed to be happy that our overlords are padding their accounts with even more zeroes? Hooray......

I really hope that we can try to change the dialogue around what the economy really is and how its effects are not uniform across the entire human population.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they're being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don't focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you're on the side of the street with too many people, you don't have any personal leverage on your own. It's in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

In some countries, there are already.

In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.

So yes, basically, it's legal.

Beautiful Game 3 between GG and Tundra. I always feel like GG's strategies are very fragile, but they proved that it's more resilient than I thought. A really nice demonstration of how they can still push their early game advantages late and win, and overall, their map movements lategame looked amazing. I've also been very impressed with how Quinn has been playing. He does so much for them in all of their teamfights.

I'll be cheering for GG in the final, but can't be upset with whoever wins. All 10 of them deserve it so much.

I hear what you're saying regarding the production, but I like it. Overall, it feels like it has been a very chill and enjoyable TI. Sure, Valve is in vesting less and less in TI over the years, but at the same time, I don't think it's sustainable to make TI a huge event every year. We had that for the first ~10 TIs, but now I would be happy to just see a fun event each year that's great while not being over the top.

CIS is still pretty good in my opinion. BetBoom exceeded my expectations, and if they had an easier draw, I think they would have made top 6. They did look pretty terrible against Falcons though. And Spirit had a pretty good season overall - they did win a few tournaments if I'm not mistaken. They just looked like they didn't understand the meta all that well. I also wonder if they have been a bit spoiled by success, and maybe lost their drive to win to some extent. 1W didn't look that bad either to be honest.

But agreed on the other regions. It really sucks because it just doesn't feel like Dota is a global game anymore, sadly.

I'm hoping for the best for Cloud9. Falcons didn't feel like they were on top form at the beginning of the tournament, but a lot has changed since then. But I do think that whoever wins that match will still most likely beat XG/Tundra.

WEU dominance is ridiculous. We started with 5/16 teams in the tournament - the most from any region. And now that we're down to only 6 teams overall, but all 5 from WEU are still present. And fully occupying the winner's bracket as well.

A bit sad to be honest. I really hope we see a revival in some of the other regions in the coming years.

Both teams played great. Game 1 was a bit one-sided, but Game 2 was a really fun game and (in my opinion) proved that they are definitely competitive against one of the best teams in the world. Really hoping Cloud9 make it to the lower bracket final - their games are really fun to watch and it feels great to cheer for them.

But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it's easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It's much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.

Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they're consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don't think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they're inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.

That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can't really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don't see any particular use.

Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they'll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.

(My guess is that there isn't because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)

The biggest theft in history, even.

Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it's okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let's imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!

Not on the outside, at least.

Yes, a lot of developers have done this. Many examples have been posted on this thread (OsmAnd, Conversations, Davx5) - Mindustry is another example. free on f-droid (and Google store too I think), but $10 on Steam.

That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?

It's great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.