Typical call to the AI safety hotline:

Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…

It’s interesting to see that Linux has gotten popular enough that a few of the most user-hostile devs are going out of their way specifically to stop people using it. Other than ignorance it’s unclear what their motivations could be. I for one will remember the names of the studios that do it and try my best never to buy or talk about their games.

You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client

ohhhh so that’s how normal people do it. I sort of felt stupid for not figuring out the easy way when I wrote an overly-complicated shell script for it.

While I could imagine reasons to protest against “space radar dishes” it seems that these radar dishes are to be situated down on the ground. They already have nuclear weapons, you know. It’s probably okay if they have radar too.

… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.

I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.

I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don’t want it using up any of my attention or the computer’s resources the rest of the time.

I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.

Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.

I checked the local classified ads and their prices don’t seem too far out of line with what people are asking. I guess there’s still demand even though 2020 seems like a long time ago in computer years. Not from me though, I think the PS3 will be my last. There’s no need for a newer console now that games can run on linux.

The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria

Depends on the argument I guess. Don’t bring a sweet roll to the kind where you need a war axe.

I’ve used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I’m probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I’d say they’re both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They’re quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.

Linux sucks, Windows is worse, MacOS is useless. We must conclude that those systems are not a good choice for regular users. I recommend a simple pocket calculator instead. No graphics drivers to worry about, no firmware updates, if it goes wrong you just press the reset button and it’s ready to go again in a tenth of a second, no need to do backups, you can get a pretty good one for $20, light weight, really good battery life. Much better in almost every way.

Failing to respond in detail to all of the claims you believe to be your most important ones is not what is usually meant by a “straw man.”

While I don’t mind Rust (although I’m not too good at it yet) I really do find the crowd of overzealous enthusiasts claiming in the most hyperbolic terms that the necessity of its universal use is an urgent security issue quite off-putting sometimes.

I’ve yet to see any serious usage of SELinux in the real world

I too have successfully avoided it, but we must acknowledge that not everyone has been so fortunate.

The agonizingly slow progress into mainstream discourse of this idea that we should all stop using twitter continues at its steady pace. Will the obvious truth of it mean that it continues until even the politicians get it? Or will it in time become be one of those “yeah we probably should’ve done that” things that never gets done?

How now, you secret, black, and midnight Tories! What is’t you do?

Indeed the language is extremely fashionable among government types and many others. I did not really mean to suggest otherwise. If accusing me of erecting a straw man is your way of apologizing for your initial comment, I accept it.

Nah. If you’d been leaning on specific statements of any given expert — of which it is of course possible to find plenty that might in such casual rhetoric be used to support whichever conclusion you like — that would’ve been argumentum ad verecundiam, an appeal to authority. Instead you cited an imagined “vast majority” to exaggerate the universality of your opinion.

P.S. Whilst I’m indulging my argumentative side perhaps it is also worth pointing out that you totally mischaracterized my own statements and motivation. I am not primarily a C programmer, and I’ve been happy to use Rust myself when the opportunity arises. I have no personal stake in this particular fight.

Turns out there is a name for that. I had to look it up. Never seen such a striking example before.