Kind of true, although for many, the comic starts at the 3rd panel.
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Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.
There's no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you'll stay in an abusive relationship.
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I once said "Some people living in 2025 aren't very far advanced from people who lived in the Dark Ages" (or Middle Age, whatever). Then somebody replied "... but they are wearing nice suits!". That's about the difference. The layer of modern civilization is thin.
Wikipedia has some interesting parts about it as well:
The Dark Ages is a term, now deprecated by most historians, for the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th centuries), or occasionally the entire Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th centuries), in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.
The concept of a "Dark Age" as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the "light" of classical antiquity.[1][2] The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding).[
Doesn't seem so far away now does it.
In order of priority:
- Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
- Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
- Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven't used it myself yet)
- Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
- Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.
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First, there are still technical means and operational security techniques of having and safeguarding private chats, that means if you don't utilize them and it leaks, it's basically your fault for either not being informed enough or for being too careless.
Second, if you do criminal things in said private chats, and it leaks, then you should be held accountable for it. Especially if, as in this case, what you did went against the constitution, human rights or similar very basic laws that no one should break, ever. In these times, no one can predict if or when such online hostility turns into real-life hostile acts. The line that separates saying hostile stuff online and actually doing it IRL is sometimes very thin. With the extreme amounts of right-wing extremist propaganda on the web these days, I'd say this is a serious matter and there's a high chance that some individuals will forget their moral compass and just go full Nazi after being exposed to too much of this stuff.
With low-effort crap posts like this (made even easier with GenAI) he is "recruiting" stupid people who believe anything that's not from reputable sources (mainstream/science is boring and hard to understand, conspiracy myths are easy to "understand " and exciting) into his MAGA cult which is also consisting of right-wing extremists and "conservatives" who are easily dragged to the right and made into extremists as well.
The wealthiest entities in the economy are then allying with that cult and push more propaganda in the hopes of "recruiting" even more people into the cult.
The goal of these political and economic elites is to establish an autocracy without any painful regulations of the economy, so the goal is to get even richer at the cost of a functioning society and democracy. It's the capitalism endgame - merge corporations with politics (going much further than previous lobbying and corruption), establish a fascist ruling class based on wealth and influence, and try to keep the population in line through lies and propaganda. They need stupids, crazies and extremists as supporters of this coup. This works best with right-wing crazies because they are the most gullible and easiest to manipulate. And by pushing propaganda on proprietary platforms, they can convert more people into the cult.
Inciting a culture war between the cult and the other part of the population protects the elites from a class war occurring. If the population is busy fighting with each other, the elites can sleep easy and continue to extract as much money as possible, for as long as possible.
Job requirements for working with the orange Hitler:
1.) Be loyal to the fascist administration
2.) No Morals/Ethics or other woke things that make you a civilized human being
3.) For women: be somewhat attractive
4.) Everything else is optional as long as it doesn't interfere with 1.-3.)
It's been downhill since W7
At this rate, there might already be civil war or at least no regular elections anymore in the US.
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Okay why is your distro the best?
I use Arch since approximately 2006 or so. I like its stability (yes!), performance, rapid updates and technical simplicity. It never stands in my way and it's fairly simple to understand, administer and modify. It's probably the most convenient OS I've ever used - sure it takes time/effort to set it up but once you're past that it's smooth sailing. It also doesn't change dramatically over the years (it doesn't need to) so it's easy to keep up with its development. Plus, I have a custom setup script for it that installs and sets up all of the basics, so if I ever need to reinstall, I'm not starting from zero.
I am eyeing NixOS as "the next step" but didn't yet experiment with it too much. Arch is just too comfy to use and the advantages that NixOS brings aren't yet significant enough for me to make any kind of switch to it, but I consider NIxOS (as well as its related technologies like the Nix package manager) to be the most interesting and most advanced things in the Linux world currently.
If you're reading this as a newbie Linux user: probably don't use any of the two mentioned above (yet). They're not considered entry-level stuff, unless you're interested in learning low-level (as in: highly technical) Linux stuff from the start already. NixOS/Nix in particular is fairly complex and can be a challenge even for veteran Linux admins/users to fully understand and utilize well. Start your journey with more common desktop distros like Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu.
AI will just add more mountains of garbage to the web, on top of the already existing ones. But users will still find what they're looking for because they first need to filter out all the slop. It will probably take longer to find the useful stuff, but the useful part of the web will continue to exist as a part of the whole web.
The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It's a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.
Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it's cheaper, then you'll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don't matter much. But that's about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.
AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it... it's never going to be truly great. And it's also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There's most likely a saturation curve, and we're most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won't really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they'll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don't even need to fulfill any more promises.
My view on the versions of Windows:
- 95 to 98: decent experiences because of a lack of competition back then, but bad at security and stability, but no one really bothered that much back then about such things
- ME: basically 98, just a low-effort cash grab
- 2000: promising new platform based on the superior NT kernel, but not mature yet for widespread consumer use
- XP: probably the first widely usable consumer OS, decent, but it took until SP2 to fix security and stability problems
- Vista: beta version of 7, sold as non-beta
- 7: the last decent Windows version. Windows dominance starts slowly dying after this one
- 8, 8.1: basically still 7 but with an UI experiment gone horribly wrong, plus the first beginnings of unwanted cloud integrations
- 10 (First Windows version with Nadella as CEO): okay so we just need to not do weird UI experiments and then we're probably fine. Oh, by the way you can actually put spyware into everything with some opt-out options and not really get into trouble for it, and this will give us extra profit? Let's fucking go!
- 11: okay so this spyware and cloud integration stuff went great overall, so let's push even more! Also let's add AI stuff which is also even more spyware and cloud integration stuff
<next version>
: will feature even more AI and cloud integrations and thus even more spyware that will be even harder to circumvent. It's likely that at this point or the very next version afterwards, that your Windows will likely turn your once "Personal" Computer into a fully Microsoft-owned and operated one.
In 3 to 6 months,
<AICompany>
CEO says that in 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of the code software developers were in charge of. It's always right around the corner. Just like Tesla's flawless full self driving. In the meantime, please buy our stuff or invest in us, pretty please? It's a very future-proof investment! Just wait a small eternity while spending money on our semi-useful products."No one is above the law" and other jokes you can tell yourself to feel better.
Collapse will definitely come. Our way of living on this planet is not sustainable, especially now where everyone who would have the power/influence to change things does literally and openly the opposite (e.g. USA turning their back on climate friendly research/technologies for example). So I think it's kind of over, I'm kind of an optimist but time is simply running out, we had the Paris agreement and all that jazz like 10 years ago and almost nothing really changed (the only time something changed for the positive was during 2020/2021 but that was involuntarily!), in fact it's now probably worse than it was back then, so it's kind of over. Sure you can and should individually continue fighting for it because every small improvement will at least delay the collapse a bit which is useful, but I'm not going to naively believe that we will be able to counteract this anymore. It's too little, too late. And that's not even taking into account the possibility of a WW3. And rich/powerful people probably know this as well that the geological and political situations become increasingly unstable which is why they are building luxury bunkers. I would build one too, if I had the spare change.
By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.
Whenever I see a story of "some guy who relies on
<big tech account>
working loses access to it and suddenly can't do anything anymore" I think "this can never happen to me". Which means there's a whole category of problems you're suddenly never going to see. It also means you're less naive. So just don't vendor-lock yourself in. Don't put a log-in for an account which you don't control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.On top of that, you'll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I'm just saying, if you don't even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you'll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.
I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it's probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn't vendor-lock yourself in.
Translation help from Fascist English to US English:
- "activist" = a non-politician whose free speech we don't like
- "allow all voices to be heard" / "free speech" = extremist/unconstitutional/propaganda speech which serves the interests of the current fascist regime must be allowed, while every other speech will be labelled as being activist/communist/un-American/...
- "defend [...] all Americans" = at least the part of Americans which we tolerate or haven't jailed yet (subject to change)
Just remember that correlation is not causation. Yes, such things distract from the Epstein case and that's a welcome effect for the US dictator. But he's not thinking "hmm I really would like to have a distraction from that so that's why I'll just commit another war crime or atrocity so they'll all be distracted". He commits new atrocities anyway, and it just so happens that new atrocities automatically distract from older ones. He is causing way more problems than we are capable of mentally tracking.