Windows, I will always remember it being the best thing for business’s as Microsoft pushes licenses and such business related features.

Most businesses I’m familiar with deserve to have to deal with Microsoft BS.

From the content of this thread, I’m betting there’s a lot of selection bias going on. The ones who don’t scroll past. The ones who do post.

And I’ll follow that pattern. I still live with my mother. Never moved out. Live in the same house I was raised in. But my mother was never really financially stable. My grandmother with whom my mother and I lived… well, she managed to keep us housed and fed with credit card debt, which honestly worked out very well.

Anyway, I was kindof the only person who really made much of an income in my household and have been financially supporting my parents for decades now. (Though my grandmother passed on a few years back and left me a life insurance policy.)

I’m 37 now.

Don’t post the Down The Rabbit Hole documentary on Furries. Don’t post the Down The Rabbit Hole documentary on Furries. Don’t post…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aF2GxWi7Ag

Dammit, I posted it.

(I’m sorry SavvyWolf… For everyone here, that documentary doesn’t paint an entirely representative picture of the furry community as a whole.)

Wait, for real?

On the chance that you’re serious, this should tell you way more than you’d ever want to know about furries. (And if you aren’t sated by the time you’re finished reading that article, there’s a link to the page “Furry Convention” in the first paragraph.)

Yup. I can. I have around 1/20 of a Bitcoin, so the amount I have should be worth about $3,000 USD (unless the price has crashed since I started writing this post. 😈)

Cashing it in would make me feel dirty. It’s basically just handing the bag to the next bagholder. (Though, I’m not really a baholder per se. I’m not really invested to speak of. The only investment I made to get this Bitcoin is to leave my computer on for like a month or less.) Feeding the ponzi monster, as it were.

But then again, it’s $3,000.

As much as I hate myself for admitting it, the possibility that the price will climb a little higher is probably part of why I didn’t trade it for real money back in late 2021 when the price of a Bitcoin was so high.

But, yeah, you’re probably right I should just sell it. Maybe I’ll just make whoever I sell it to promise they’re not giving me next month’s rent or their kids’ college fund. Lol.

Edit: Ok. You’ve inspired me to make a post asking other crypto-skeptics what I should do with it.

Bitcoin. I mined some (might’ve even been on my CPU at the time) back when it was easy to mine it. Not a ton, but enough that now I have to explain that despite thinking blockchain is just straight up a scam, I do have some Bitcoin in a wallet on my hard drive somewhere. (That I’ve never done anything with.)

You’ve heard this, haven’t you?

It’s more… “up-beat” than what you posted, but the vibe isn’t 100% dissimilar.

Here too. Weird.

Thank you for bringing more awareness of this. I’m what you might call an “AI skeptic” and don’t really care what happens in the AI space as long as it doesn’t screw up things I care about.

But I care deeply about FOSS and AI is screwing it up. I don’t want to have to explain why XYZ thing absolutely is not Open Source and that “Open Source” has a specific meaning beyond “you can look at (at least some of) the source code.”

(Compare it to the term “hacker” that has among at least a lot of muggles taken on the exclusive meaning of committing some kind of fraud with computers. Originally it meant something very different. And it’s unfortunate the world has forgotten the old meaning.)

Another project that is diluting the term “Open Source” is Grayjay, a video streaming app that is a FUTO project (and FUTO is a Louis Rossman thing.) Rossman has called it Open Source in YouTube videos, but it’s not Open Source. (The license is here and forbids things like “commercial use” (selling the software or derivative works) and removing facilites for paying the FUTO project from derivative works. Which is a lot less restrictive than the license was last time I checked it. Previously it didn’t allow redistribution or derivative works at all. But it’s not Open Source even now.)

I was the unofficial “security” guy where I worked as a software engineer. (Web apps, mostly.) We had a scanning tool (Burp Suite Pro, for those who want to know) that we ran against our apps on a regular basis to find any security issues. I was almost always the guy who did triage and remediation of any issues that came up. And when I had fixed a hole, I’d put a summary of the issue and the fix on the internal wiki page where we tracked such things.

For one particularly interesting vulnerability, I had to create my own implementation of a subset of the Java serialization API in order to remediate the vulnerability in a way that maintained backwards compatibility and didn’t inconvenience users. In the summary I wrote that the fix was “a hack” but it closed the vulnerability, which is all the PCI auditors would care about anyway. (If you don’t know what a PCI auditor is, don’t worry too much. They’re a regulatory thing that’s required if you’re a big enough business that process credit cards. They have to audit your security practices annually.)

My boss pulled me into his office to tell me to change the wording. He was worried the auditors would see the word “hack” and think that… I dunno… I committed some kind of financial fraud in the process of making the code change or something? Or maybe that we’d failed to disclose a security breach?

It didn’t sit right with me. For one thing, I’m the sort of person who wants to reclaim the positive connotations of the word “hack.” (And, honestly, using the word “hack” in a positive light never died.) But more importantly, if I were a PCI auditor and I heard that the boss had pressured a developer to alter their wording of the description of a remediation to make it sound better to PCI auditors, I’d probably pitch a shit fit at said boss.

(And, honestly, the boss and the development team weren’t on great terms at the time for reasons. So it sat worse still than it would have otherwise.)

But also, it wasn’t a hill worth dying on right then. I agreed to change my wording without raising a fuss. I decided if I ever got called to testify in court because there was a massive breach or something (I’m being hyperbolic here, but you get my point), I knew who to point the finger at.

But it still stuck in my craw. And when I resigned a few months later, I went and edited my comment back to say “hack” on my last day and didn’t tell anyone.

Actually, when I gave my resignation, my boss didn’t handle the process correctly with HR and they didn’t find out until way later into my notice period than they should have. As a result, they didn’t schedule an exit interview with me until way late. So I contacted HR about it and stayed late on my last day to voice how terrible the management was. (I was hoping to be the first of several to send such a message to HR.)

When I returned to the same company/position 5 years later, the page was still present and had the word “hack.” One of the first things I did once I had access to the corporate wiki again was to check that page. I still work there today and it’s still in the pristine state it should be in.

The boss in question also left and came back, but he’s been promoted up high enough in the ranks that he doesn’t concern himself with little old me and my security remediation reports. I imagine he’s probably forgotten about the whole thing.

Plus, his boss was way worse, and it’s very likely it was that guy who demanded I change it and delivered the message through his underling. And the worse guy isn’t at the company any more, but that’s a story for another day.

It’s small. And petty. But I feel satisfied with myself every time I think about it.

Preferably taxpayers. Not that that part of the analogy relates to Ubuntu.

Yeah, but Canonical locks security patches behind payment or signup, not just support.

Seems really dodgy to me making your business model holding security features hostage for either money or sign-ups, honestly.

Kindof like charging people for vaccines against deadly diseases or something.

But then again, my craw may be extra susceptible to sticking when it comes to such things.

If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product.

(I don’t believe the above quote to be absolutely true, but I’m not sure what motivation Canonical could have to lock some features of the OS behind a free account except $$$.)

I can imagine a world in which I’d be willing to do so. But there’s no way in fuck that that world is ever going to happen.

For sure it’d have to be as open source as it gets. With a solid user base that would maintain the device should the entity that made it end support. No dependency on a remote service that, if it was shut down, would cause problems. No DRM. No tracking. At least the option to disable all “phoning home”. No ads. Hardware off switches for any wireless connectivity interfaces. I’d have to be able to turn off basically all notifications. Decent data backup strategy options. As little vendor lockin as can possibly be achieved for such a use case. All that sort of stuff.

The payoff for having it would have to be pretty great for me to be willing to get it if it required an invasive surgical procedure.

And I sure as fuck wouldn’t be an early adopter. I’d definitely wait a good long while to see what issues early adopters developed.

So, all that to say “realistically, no way in hell.” But in a magical fairly land where every product isn’t made specifically to enslave consumers… there’s a very very small chance I’d consider it.

That little detail of the backwards exit sign (just because it’s viewed from “the back”) is the absolute cherry on the top of this photo.

I’ve run across AI content in non-AI subs before and responded with similar things fully expecting to be downvoted to Earth’s core and was pleasantly surprised at how few downvotes and how many upvotes I got. So I’ve made a habit of calling out AI stuff in non-AI communities when I run across it. (Unless it’s actually strongly related to the purpose of the community it’s posted in.)

This is at least the third time I’ve made such a comment, and the first time I’ve seen a negative net score for more than a few minutes after I posted. Still, it’s pretty evenly split even on this one. Maybe most of the down-voters just don’t want anything negative said about “AI”. (Like cryptobros will deem anything “bearish” to be “FUD”.) Who knows.

And there are places for engaging in mouth-foaming AI bubble hype indulgence on Lemmy. I just don’t want the communities I like inundated with tons of AI PR posts.

Can we keep LLM BS in “AI”-specific subs, please?

It kindof seems like what you’re looking for is Gentoo. Any reason why you’re reticent to go that direction?

When websites could theoretically track me.

I keep my browser on “delete all my cookies/cache/local storage/history/everything (except bookmarks and addons, basically) every time I exit” mode. And I never log into anything without closing out of my browser entirely first to get rid of anything they could use to correlate “you visited this blog” with my specific Google (or whatever) account. When I’m done with whatever I logged in for, I close my browser entirely again.

My phone browser doesn’t have a “delete everything on close” feature, so I just use the “delete all data on this app” feature liberally.