gvid.tv has a downvote button. And it actually does something useful.

Arch is one of the most vanilla of Linuxes. Everyone wanted to run an opinionated distro. But what we needed was the opinions of developers and fewer opinions from people who think creating a distro is a sensible way to distribute art.

Arch - every package is just the software the original developer shipped, kept up to date.

“I have art work I want to share. I know. I’ll make myself responsible for the reliability of a thousand people’s operating systems. I hope my cooky ideas never come into conflict with that.” <- Not who you want indirectly changing files on your system when you use the package manager.

I blame low interest rates.

Speculating on someone who themselves are speculating that their customer’s speculation will be fruitful is exactly what low interest rates encourage. Everyone likes the extra activity that produces on the macros, but it just makes the market less accurate.

Interest rates basically set how permissive the market is with its todo list. The problem is when you let yourself do anything, and then also let yourself get distracted doing something that might help something that you maybe shuldn’t be doing anyway. This is not a functional life. It’s a busy life, but not functional.

If you want to kill AI, raise the interest rates. It will cause a recession, which sucks. But frankly, humanity will survive a recession and it will be temporary. A higher interest rate market solves real problems that benefit actual people within a near horizon. What we don’t need is people working 14 hour days, slaving to keep their heads above water, working for companies engaged in far-off speculative race for world dominance; we wouldn’t want them to succeed at anyway. That’s 100% what we’re all doing, and it is interest rates that modulate that.

Raising interest rates will kill all of those jobs involved in that, and sadly a few more from the shock. But those people weren’t doing anything productive for humanity anyway. It’s better to have them lose those jobs and then later redirect their labor towards something productive. In the long term they are digging themselves out of having a job with their current path anyway.

I’m starting to be a fan of countries walling off vs the alternative. To be clear, I’m not for it. I would prefer open internet. But what’s worse is countries trying to project their jurisdiction across the globe.

If you don’t like that I don’t comply with the laws of places where I don’t live, block my site. I don’t block you. You block me. I shouldn’t even have a responsibility to know what your laws are to know if I should block you. It’s your laws, your job.

And if a country finds it easier to block off the whole external internet, fine. That’s still better than someone who I didn’t elect thinking they can tell me how I must do my job. Certainly better than 152 different governments and municipalities trying to do it at the same time.

So we should make it clear. When someone in a foreign country visits your site, you are not operating in that country. The user is visiting yours.

Semi-corporeal ghosts as well. They can also type.

Government. We are not the government.

https://cdn.mises.org/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf

It’s a very short book. And it’s covered pretty convincingly in the first chapter no less.

Or delay it. How would the government having 50% stake in an industry make it less stable? Now the government will form policy around protecting its stake. This will delay a collapse that we should want to happen sooner than later, and ideally be as divested from as possible.

But the government will actually own it, not you and me. So the government will write of its taxes to itself?

But watching youtube for your decompression doesn’t get you to a well rested state. It can do the opposite. So you aren’t making any progress toward actually getting free time.

Better decompression. Turn off all networking. Read something for 5 minutes and go for a walk. Successful decompression in 10 minutes, not 10 hours.

Whether intentional or not, or just progressive improvement on algorithms, youtube thrives by providing a need, and then providing it poorly so you keep your watch time going forever. This is a fun feature of machine learning. Non-willfull conspiracies. A system can do something malicious to get ahead that is equivalent to a highly calculated malicious action, while no one, including the model itself or the algorithms that trained it, or the people who trained it, understands what it’s doing.

I don’t mind that communism has starved people because it hasn’t starved me yet.

If we want to avoid giving into age verification we’ll still need to be selective about the Linux. But we have a chart.

https://github.com/BryanLunduke/DoesItAgeVerify

I will gladly lose a California market. Users can use a VPN anyway.

This is why I’m going to argue for pure Arch or Artix. Ultimately, what a lot of these distros bring to the table is artwork. But they bite off a lot more than artwork when doing so. And in time they can start to suck at that administration.

It’s not very hard to set up your system with a vanilla DE and adjust it into something good. You don’t need to get fancy. And to the extent someone else’s art work can be good and accelerate getting to a nice system, there are other ways to distribute that.

You should want your distro to be 95% administration and 5% art because in the long run that’s whats going to keep your system stable and avoid future headaches. But some artists are overly ambitious and envision creating an entire version of an operating system, including the parts they aren’t passionate about. And some people buy in on this premise and install these projects. …instead of just releasing dot files.

For it to go well requires that both the leadership and the contributors are passionate about all of the parts and passionate about them forever. Not very likely. If you want a distro that is administered well, get a distro where administration is all they do, and then get your artwork as a separate selection.

Now you can get your art from artists who put 95% of their effort into art. And your package stability by people who put 95% of their effort into package stability.

Everyone has romantic feelings toward a system that is integrated. But what they should realize is that integrated and modular are opposites. And modular is what they should want, with effective roll separation.

If they fork Majaro that is good. If when they fork it they scope down to just distribute a dot file set, and maybe create their own easy installer for Arch that isn’t a seperate whole distro, that is better.

Well… with Arch it’s unsafe to install new software to a system that isn’t up to date at least semi-recently. But you really only need to update as often as you install new things. Or more often if you want to.

A related thing I’ve done is I’ve made it so pacman can’t run outside of Tmux. At least not in that shell profile. One of the reasons is I got so fed up with Ubuntu server that I decided I’d experiment with a few servers being Arch. Some might consider that crazy but it’s what experiments are for.

I can’t afford to have an ssh disconnect break a system and forcing Tmux prevents me from doing something lazy. Side benefit… it also means it’s easier to not babysit it.

I feel like no one got the hint I was talking about the World Trade Center. What I’m saying is Al Quida basically already did what he is arguing for. I’m calling him an unaware al quida sympathizer. Advocating for terrorism is bad. Worse if you are actually arguing for 9/11. Even worse if you know so little that you don’t even realize that’s what you are doing.

Android apps do solve a lot of UI problems a that are unique to the phone interface. If only Linux could run APKs. Oh wait, it can. Linux can run anything.

Terrorists tend to act across borders and so they are interested mostly in global corporations. If only there was one single building that housed all of them at the same time. Some buildings where they all engaged in trade around the world, centralized.

Then that would make your scheme easy.

What we need is a good linux phone that is affordable, has hardware that isn’t slow, and isn’t over sold to an annual pre-order.

Sadly, if the first two are true, the third one becomes an issue.

What we need is a large company to see that is a sign of huge pent-up demand. Apparently, HP and Dell are both talking about switching to Linux as their default OS for desktops. Once all the desktop manufacturers find themselves in the business of selling hardware with Linux on it, either mobile manufacturers will copy, like Samsung, or the desktop folks decide to make their product smaller.

What everyone has wanted from the beginning was a desktop in their pocket. The amount of time that no one has produced that despite major demand, and the amount of development that has gone into building any other stack, just feels like willful suppression at this point.

Is there some government somewhere telling large-scale manufacturers that they can’t build something as free and open as a desktop that isn’t at least the size of a laptop? Because it actually takes less technology to make something that’s open than something that is closed. And there is just as much appeal for the consumer to not restrict them.

How do you want them to be for the people and not for corporations if you want them to subsidize an industry? At the end of the day that will be paid to corporations, and you are giving corporations more incentive to get into your congressperson’s office to help them figure out how to divide it up. Why would you want more cash exchanged between them and more face time between them? Bad idea if you want corporations out of politics.

More money for [industry x] literally means the government working for some corporations. Doesn’t matter what industry x is.