I love and hate how Eugen starts this whole project, leads it into being something truly unique and wonderful that directly challenges some of the most evil and wealthy people on the planet, sets up institutional guardrails to make sure it will not be corrupted by any one individual gone mad with power, gives away his position after 10 years once he's sure the organization is in good hands, and then concludes in reflection that he does not "have the right personality" for running a project like this.
I hope it has not been to hard for him, and that he'll look back at it all as a positive experience in spite of the negative interactions. I don't think any sane person has a personality that is "right" for the kind of abuse public figures receive on the internet. But from the perspective of Mastodon and the Fediverse, it seems pretty clear that he was exactly the right type of personality for the job—including by stepping down when the time felt right.
I wouldn't say art is subject to facts in this way. Some of us enjoy art that is produced through skill and intention rather than some idiot shitting in a jar. The meta debate is just one incredibly lame branch of art that incompetent snobs manically jerk off to while outbidding each other for a fucking banana.
Of course, context matters for interpretation. Guernica is a more meaningful piece with the background of civil war; dadaism only makes sense in opposition to fascism. But both depend on skill and intent to become impressive, not merely the meta context of positioning in art history.
I hate this discussion and I hate that by interacting with it some idiot in a beret will tell me "AHA! So it did provoke you!!", as if they were making a point or ever had an original thought in their lives.
Opposition to this bullshit is not a problem of the "tech world", it's a problem of the art world having obsessed over the same idiotic joke for a hundred years because it's harder to appreciate something that contains genuine intent and talent than it is to pretend like you understand the genius of stapling a piece of crap to the wall of a gallery.
I hate the debate over "what is art". Honestly I think the best answer I could give to the question is "something that was ruined by a bunch of idiots asking 'what is art'".
That said, and not wanting to go into that discussion, calling this guy an "artist" seems like a mockery. He's not an artist, he's just some idiot with double sided tape.
There was also the practice of giving people a new name upon arrival in Ellis Island, establishing pretty early on what kind of names were considered "American".
I guess it worked wonders, at least if the stereotype is true that they managed to transform the Irish into a bunch of racist cops.
But yeah, you certainly had a lot of German Americans voluntarily backing away from their cultural heritage in the 30s and 40s.
It's pretty fascinating considering the history of the US that Americans tend to be worse than the English at pronouncing various European languages. You'd think at least some people would cling on to the correct pronounciation of their own name, as the bare minimum.
I don't really care how Americans pronounce their own names—if anything I think most Europeans are happy to be easily distinguishable from Americans with shared ancestry at this point—but it is a bit striking.
It seems the running application remains responsive, but not anything else.
I was running RStudio on an external monitor once when it froze, and I could keep using the window. Even when I used touch gestures to "zoom" the window out, I remained in control over it and could execute code in the smaller window. But I could not interact with GNOME at all, including changing to another program on the same screen.
Another time it froze as I wrote a PieFed comment, and I pressed tab and enter a few times. The comment was published so I could continue where I left off.
First time in almost 20 years of Linux usage I'm encountering real problems, and I'm much too primitive to do anything clever about it.
Well, yeah, they're run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they'll turn on their customers. So fair enough.
I think that's part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that's not possible.
Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.
I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it's prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it's the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.
Their search results were good though. I wouldn't mind supporting a subscription based model, but I'm sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.
There are some user friendly Android based alternatives out there, since it's based on open source. Personally I'm running a device with /e/OS, which you can either install yourself or buy a phone with it pre-installed. There are also some other user friendly options out there such as the Volla Phone.
But yeah, iOS is probably a better bet than stock Android, as Apple has a history of being abusive towards their customers in other ways than by selling their data. But crucially both Google and Apple are American companies, so you should avoid depending on their cloud services to whatever degree possible. There's no such thing as safe data if it is stored by an American company.
Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this entire fiasco is yet another reminder of the precarious position open source projects with a solo maintainer leave their user base in - especially when that maintainer is a teenager whose priorities are subject to changing rapidly as they get older and discover more about the world than discarded Ubuntu interfaces
What a terrible takeaway. I'd rather say that the takeaway is that all things come to an end, even Unity 7 which it's honestly incredible didn't die ages ago.
Those interested in keeping on working on Unity should perhaps focus their efforts instead on Lomiri, the community continuation of Unity 8 and default environment in Ubuntu Touch.
‘No restrictions’ and a secret ‘wink’: Inside Israel’s deal with Google, AmazonTo secure the lucrative Project Nimbus contract, the tech giants agreed to disregard their own terms of service and sidestep legal orders by tipping Israel off if a foreign court demands its data, a joint investigation reveals.
May this be a reminder to degoogle your phone and boycott amazon. It's not hard, and there are thousands of people on here eager to help. :)
Bluesky hardly challenges the establishment as far as I can see, they're just more venture capitalists waiting to enshittify.