I think I’ve had it happen once over something like a decade of using them. From what I remember it was because I was running something in the terminal that ignored the signals it was sent, so the laptop didn’t properly go to sleep. Of course, the program ended up failing because a lot of the things it depended on did suspend themselves and that caused major breakage.

Luckily I noticed a whining sound (fans at maximum speed) from my backpack before anything too bad happened.

She doesn’t use facebook, just conspiracy forums.

My ultra-religious mother “heard from someone” that AI “is the devil” so she wouldn’t use it. That’s great. Unfortunately, it made her really scared of everything. She was super anxious because AI was in the news all the time.

I really don’t want her to use AI, because she already has such a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality. But, I still had to try to explain to her that LLMs are just fancy auto-complete, and how often they get things wrong to reduce her stress level. I hope she continues not to use them, but now I hope she just shakes her head and sighs when someone else uses one, instead of thinking they’re letting evil into their bodies.

Apple laptops are typically extremely good when it comes to sleep and suspend.

A major advantage of having a very small range of hardware you have to support is that it’s pretty easy to test all possible combinations and make sure they work well together. As far as I’m concerned, Apple has been, and probably always will be the undisputed champion of doing this right.

Ok, but you’re wrong.

Unfortunately, even if they didn’t succeed, it would be horrible for everybody involved, especially the invaded country. Trump is definitely the type who would wipe Winnipeg off the map if some Winnipegger killed someone important.

Yes, that’s the distinguishing feature of the GPL. The ironic thing is that the only thing that gives the GPL its power is the thing it’s trying to fight. If IP laws didn’t exist, the GPL would be unenforceable, but it would also be unnecessary.

And has that made the people selling that software rich? No.

My point is that to get rich making software you need a moat. You can still make a bit of money without it, but it will be a fraction of what you can make if you can use intellectual property laws to make sure you don’t have to worry about competitors.

Red Hat doesn’t even exist anymore. They’re nothing more than an IBM subsidiary. Canonical is hardly rich. It may be influential in the free software world, but in terms of market cap, they’re half the size of “A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp”. Have you ever heard of A2Z Cust2Mate Solutions Corp? I hadn’t until I started looking for software companies comparable to Canonical.

Yeah. Let’s say this extremely unlikely thing does happen. There’s some kind of false flag attack, like a person wearing a Canadian flag does a suicide bomber attack on the US congress or something. An event that riles up Americans enough that there’s enough support for an invasion of Canada that Trump could get away with it.

Now imagine the result of invading a country where almost none of the locals want you there, and all of the locals can pass for Americans. European countries might be too cowardly to actually send their armies against the US for doing that. But, they would almost certainly find a way to fund and train Canadian freedom fighters. The Canadian / American border is completely indefensible. It’s simply too big to ever be properly guarded.

So, you’d have Canadians slipping into the US easily, they’d be trained and armed by Europeans, Australians, Japanese, Koreans, and all the other former US allies. And, once in the states they’d have no problem finding support networks to help them attack American targets.

Just because Trump would be insane to try this doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. With their massive propaganda networks in place, they might get a fair number of Americans to support it, at least at first. But, the most they could ever hope for is a Pyrrhic victory.

It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It’s similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the “artist” to work, even though the thing the artist produces can’t be owned by the employer.

I think if you combine all those various things the need for “intellectual property” goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.

Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.

What many people don’t think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.

Since all software is bits, and it’s free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”. A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.

This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it’s much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.

Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can’t do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.

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This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints

That’s because cops don’t need a warrant if you use a face or fingerprints, but they do if you use a PIN. What you’re talking about is for protection against casual, warrantless searches.

What I’m talking about is a subpoena where you’re required to present evidence. The fact that it’s encrypted is irrelevant. If the data is subject to a subpoena it doesn’t matter if you store it encrypted or unencrypted, you’re still required to present it to the court.

If you keep you stuff updated

Keeping stuff updated is a chore, and it can take hours out of your week, often when you don’t expect it or don’t have time. When that’s someone’s full time job and they’re updating it for hundreds, thousands or millions or people, there’s a better chance they do it right, and a much better chance that they do it in a timely fashion.

I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.

I hope you’re not anybody’s lawyer, with your lack of knowledge of the law. Did you graduate from Dunning-Kruger law school?

Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

Uh, those can all be shut down. You may control the server but you don’t control the datacenter the email server lives in, unless you’re hosting out of your house, which is a bad idea. You also don’t control the pipes to and from these servers. There have been many plans over the years requiring that ISPs ban users who are accused of copyright infringement. And, even if you don’t infringe copyrights, we all know about how the DMCA can be weaponized against people who have done nothing wrong.

File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

Sorry, your own file storage can be subpoenaed, you just don’t have a lawyer on call to help you through the process. If you think “haha, I’ll just delete the data”, you can be in much worse trouble. AFAIK in some cases the judge / jury are allowed to assume that evidence that you deleted was incriminating.

I self-host things and think it’s a good idea. But, don’t go overboard with how good it is. It’s still vulnerable to government and corporate actions. in many cases you’re more vulnerable because you’re on your own, you probably don’t have a lawyer on retainer, etc.

It doesn’t matter if the excuse is plausible. People who want to show their loyalty can do it by claiming to believe the unbelievable thing.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. – Frank Wilhoit

By claiming to believe the lie, you also lay a claim to being part of the in-group so the rules (like telling the truth about things) don’t apply to you. Of course, the truth is that 99.9% of the people who think of themselves as part of the in-group were never part of it, and will eventually be treated the same as the people who they’re trying to trample on.

NFTs were bought with crypto, which had various hidden costs, scams and thefts, so it’s basically the same.

True, but while you’re still paying those timeshare fees, you still have access to the place.

The real difference is that a time share is never thought of as an investment where you buy low and sell high. It’s thought of as getting a good deal on something you plan to use. For it to be similar to an NFT it would have to be something like a dude in Nebraska buys a time share in Australia and then tries to make money from Australians or something. AFAIK almost everybody who buys time shares does it because they plan to use the place as a vacation property and actually do use it that way, at least for a while.

Gambling / FOMO. The more informed people at least realized they were gambling. The less informed thought they were missing out on a big money-making scheme and that everybody else was getting rich except them.