The OS itself, Debian. If I have to pick a component, Mate Panel. Compared to the Windows 11 start menu, it’s useful, customizableand has no ads. My IT department at work can’t even figure out how to remove the Windows 11 start menu ads from my computer.

Benjamein has my sympathy. No person should have to watch a commercial.

chmod can do 95% of everything I’ve ever needed, just with the “user” and “other” category. Private files, public-readable files, public read-write files, programs I compile but anyone can run… all that is just in the “user” and “other” category of chmod.

It gets 99% if you add the sticky bit (used on /tmp) and the “group” category. Serial ports are owned by root:dialout, and mode 660. To get serial port access, just add the user to the dialout group. For group assignments in college, each partner pairing had their own group they could use. Group work files were mode 660 so groups could edit each others’ work, but other groups couldn’t peek.

For the last 1%, use setfacl. It does everything that explorer.exe’s security tab can do.

Proton’s systems are built on proprietary software. I don’t trust them.

Ok, here’s one about China’s current crimes: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/05/hong-kong-unexpectedly-canceled-one-of-its-biggest-lgbtq-events-china-may-be-to-blame/

What countries would you consider Marxists-Leninist?

Don’t forget about present failures. In Russia, you still can’t be gay and talk openly about it.

“You’re a distinct character” is a compliment, not an insult.

You mean get Microsoft to take it down? And then it goes back up on a self-hosted git repo? This does not enable Bambu, Microsoft, or anyone else to sue Rossman in China.

6. It’s like eating a cracker.

Does Rossman have any presence in China? If not, and if the files are hosted outside China, there’s nothing China can do.

Because machine learning is already basically a mass copyright infringement. The training data contains copyrighted material. The model is clearly a derivative of the training data. The output is clearly a derivative of the model. Yet somehow, it’s legal (probably because they can afford good lawyers).

I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, “it’s easy to work around that. You just have to…” and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.

But even if it’s easy to do that, it’s not easy.

1. You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there’s a different one for every problem.
2. You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
3. You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don’t want you to be able to remove their trash.
4. You have to vet the tools, make sure they’re not malware. And continuously make sure it’s not replaced by malware in the future. There’s no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.

If you convince someone to pull the sword out of the stone, you get to be the new wizard.

LLMs and current generative AI won’t. But there will be better AI systems in the future.

And consider the scale of the datacenters they’re building: New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses. They’re installing 9GW of natural gas turbines on site. They’re planning for better AI that will be much different from the current batch.

While we all know that current AI is much worse than human work, consider that they might just use it anyway, and not care that their product is shit.

Anyone got a mirror of the post? I’m getting this error message:

Sorry, a potential security risk was detected in your submitted request. The Webmaster has been alerted.

Reference ID: 18.a104d217.1777692249.4596f77

You can proceed to www.senate.gov.

If this problem persists, please contact the Office of the Secretary Webmaster at webmaster@sec.senate.gov.

Clicking the www.senate.gov link gives the same error message.

No idea about this. I drive a Honda Civic in the US, and hardly notice gas prices. I’m much more concerned about food prices, rent prices, and unemployment rate.

A car warranty lasts like 2 years. I can’t afford a car less than 2 years old.

$100-$500 according to the article. No discount for the biometric data they’ll sell.

I took psychic damage. I’m especially annoyed by the part where they rendered it at the slanted pixelated low resolution, and then upscaled it with a bilinear or bicubic interpolation.