a ‘product of its time’.

Something like this, indeed. Or more like a product of the situation, plus a few laws - like network effect (the value a user derives from the OS depends on the number of users using it).

Note that not even the devs are to blame for this; it makes sense someone releasing commercial software would focus on the 70% (Windows), sometimes on the 15% (Mac OS), but almost never on the 4% (Linux).

It does, but this is a vicious cycle: small market share → devs don’t release Linux versions for their software → the software ecosystem is fragile → users who’d rather use Linux still need to use Windows → small market share. Anything countering any of those “links” weakens the vicious cycle, including Microsoft pissing off some Windows users; that’s why the penguin gets smug, because they know “Winrows is now an Agenric OS lol lmao” means slightly higher Linux market share.

Your typical Linux user gets really smug when learning about dumb shit Microsoft is doing with Windows. Just like that penguin in the OP. Because that dumb shit is making plenty Windows users consider ditching Windows for Linux.

One of those things is to force-feed AI into the users. Exemplified by Microsoft seeking to transform Windows into an “agentic OS”. People who don’t know how those systems work don’t want it; and people who do, even less.

“Windows is now an agentic OS”.

In the specific case of clanker vocab leaking into the general population, that’s no big deal. Bots are “trained” towards bland, unoffensive, neutral words and expressions; stuff like “indeed”, “push the boundaries of”, “delve”, “navigate the complexities of $topic”. Mostly overly verbose discourse markers.

However when speaking in general grounds you’re of course correct, since the choice of words does change the meaning. For example, a “please” within a request might not change the core meaning, but it still adds meaning - because it conveys “I believe to be necessary to show you respect”.

And AI sucks at that. If you interpret its output as a human-made summary, it shows everything you shouldn’t do — such as conflating what’s written with its assumptions over what’s written, or missing the core of the text for the sake of random excerpts (that might imply the opposite of what the author wrote).

But, more importantly: people are getting used to babble, that what others say has no meaning. They will not throw it into an AI to summarise it, and when they do it, they won’t understand the AI output.

I don’t see a big deal given

1. What matters the most is not the words within an utterance, but the discourse conveyed by that utterance. [Translation: how you say it matters less than what you say.]
2. Word usage is prone to trends. Not just slang. Easy come, easy go.

What I am concerned however is that those chatbots babble a bloody lot. And people might be willing to accept babble a bit more, due to exposure lowering their standards. And they kind of give up looking for meaning on what others say.

Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.

This. Plus what @[email protected] added.

Good communication should be approachable, succinct, complete, and accurate. But those four things are mutually exclusive; if you focus too hard on 1+ of them, the others get worse. With jargon being a tool to make things more succinct, at the expense of approachability.

(Weirdly enough, I noticed this once I tried to make a Fediverse poster.)

Both are owned by the same corporations (Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, Geode…), who’ll win either way. Until the bubble bursts, that is.

On an individual level, Librewolf is a good idea, because it has saner privacy defaults than Firefox; and its devs are rather good at gutting out the crap.

However, on a collective level, the problem still remains: we have exactly two options, Chromium and Firefox (note LibreWolf is a custom version of Firefox). One is from GAFAM cancer, another is from a GAFAM vassal that keeps doing dumb stuff, since it’s nothing but contained opposition.

Mozilla is a mythical beast. It has many heads, but no brain. As such its actions and movement are unpredictable, erratic, and… dumb.

Replacing volunteer work with a bot does not make bloody sense dammit. You’ll actually pay for the bot, and the output is worse. The Japanese localisation community already called it quits, and others will follow. And every bloody thing is unnecessarily complex, from Mozilla’s structure to what it makes, even if there’s a single piece of its software people care about — Firefox. And Firefox only survives because its redeeming quality is negative, “Firefox is not Chromium”, without that negative quality Mozilla would be extinct already.

This is almost a textbook example of the broken window fallacy.

“Microsoft”, who? Certainly not Suleyman, Davuluri, or Nadella.

Even if you’re in the camp that understands memes like “6 7” have more significance than they’re given credit for,

I think 6-7 is a shibboleth. It doesn’t say much on its own, except which group you belong to.

Substance, as ever, remains a relative notion. Nyan Cat perhaps didn’t have the substance of an Andy Warhol image

I’d argue the Nyan cat is more substantial than what Andy Warhol came up with.

If you want a great reset you’ll need a new internet that is outright hostile to corporate interests. No corposlop being produced there, no derailing old memes to sell you junk.

Nah, quoting Stormfront is not a bug. Quoting well-sourced facts retrieved from Wikipedia is.

I’m mindblown at him being mindblown.

Oh wait, I’m not. Because I know those CEOs are completely detached from reality, and take users for dumb cattle ready to be herded.

Funny but insightful comment from the link:

“Never get high on your own stuff. A lesson this guy doesn’t seem to have learned…”

Fediverse, please enlighten me - is Windows a drug? …on a more serious note, “don’t overestimate the desirability of what you’re trying to sell” is sensible advice.

I am talking about the sort of everyday interaction that would make a 5yo get scolded for not being nice. This is clear by context.

Her 5yo got it right.

By default you should be nice to people. Care about their needs, avoid offending them (and if you do, apologise), avoid unnecessary lies, all that thing. And since most people are surprisingly reasonable, they’ll do the same towards you.

However. There’s always “that” arsehole, petty, assumptive person. No matter how nice you are towards them, they won’t be nice to you. Don’t be nice to them - even if on the outside it’s irrelevant, it’ll eat you from the inside and make you feel like shit. Or, like she said, “hurt your energies”.

Yeah, the terminology is currently a mess. Not just due to language changes, but also synchronic variation - different people using the same words for different meanings, at the same time. But for me, it’s a mix of motivations, methods, and morality:

• hacker strictu sensu - like a kid who dismantles toys to see how they work. Sometimes they break things, but they want knowledge the most. Usually grey hat, sometimes white hat, only rarely black hat
• cracker - like a kid who bashes toys with a hammer. Not interested on the knowledge itself, except when it allows them to bully other kids. Almost always black hat.