The year of the Linux desktop I'm thinking of was like 2008. That was then it became perfectly usable on the desktop and I haven't had to switch back since.

I don't understand why anyone care's what Linux's "market share" is. It's open source, no one makes money when someone installs Linux.

Of course bitcoin is a scam. It's a "currency" you can't spend anywhere. It's only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.

I was the opposite, I accepted going bald early on and went full-shave for a few years. When it grew back a bit everyone said it looks way better, and I regret spending most of my 30s with a shaved head.

Yeah I always cringe when I see the "hair transplants are gender affirming care" meme. It's so embarrassing when someone on your side of the argument says something so dumb. Going bald isn't feminine?

I dunno, I hate Trump as much as the next guy but it seems to me he meant "I'm going to fix all the country's problems in one term so you won't need to vote for me again", not "I'm going to abolish voting".

My first sound file was a supercut of Keiko O'Brien giving birth on Star Trek: The Next Generation, edited to make it sound like an orgasm 😆

Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like "tech bros ruined the internet". No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn't care about the downsides. There's an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren't cool enough.

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't mean this, even a tiny little bit. Even if it did it's silly to make decisions based on the hypothetical implications of an unfalsifiable interpretation.

£100k per year is not middle class, it's the top 3% of the country.

I grew up middle class, my family are lawyers, high level civil servants, software engineers. I don't know anyone who earns £100k.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren't art, but that doesn't mean someone working in photography as a medium can't be an artist.

In my experience it's only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they're comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don't physically make the marks yourself and it's the concept and composition that's important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like "oh, that's interesting". They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn't art depends on the intention not the process.

Hexbear is better on this than most places to be honest. Surprising coming from a community that formed around Chapo, whose favourite insults are autistic and smooth brained.

If your ethnic group only survived because they adapted to cannibalising their young during famines, would you eat babies

This is why I can't do online left wing spaces any more. They talk the talk about ableism, but then its "why can't you boycott the only food you can eat, just eat something else", "you could talk to service workers if you wanted to, you just think you're better than them".

Then sharing a video of people with their fingers in their ears at a black music festival with a caption calling them racists, when they're clearly autistic people enjoying the festival but having sensory problems.

I blame the popular understanding/misunderstanding of neurodiversity. People think autism is just a personality type.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

The reason they're not able to pay for home ownership is because people buy homes to rent for profit. If poor people only had to compete on price with other poor people instead of with investors, house prices would go back to 20th century levels where you could buy one for 3x your salary.

Does anyone else not really like talking about their special interests?

I can see how bored people are the second I start, like their eye contact suddenly breaks and they look around the room, and only say "mmhmm" instead of replying. So I shut up after one sentence.

But if the other person also likes the subject, I don't like talking to them either, because there's nothing to say. If we disagree I don't want to be rude and argue so I awkwardly pretend to agree. If we agree then all you can do is tell each other things you both already know and agree that they're good.

I wish my internal monologue would shut the fuck up. It's almost always rehearsing arguments. Like for a whole day all I'll think about is why someone I spoke to in a forum 20 years ago was wrong. I listen to podcasts or loud music to get a break from hearing my thoughts.

Also they shouldn't do it unless they're going to apply it to all politicians, like when Biden lied about seeing photos of beheaded babies in Israel.

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it's all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn't actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.

Yeah I hate Musk but this stuff is stupid, including that photo of him "with" Ghislaine Maxwell where he isn't posing or smiling and has his back fully turned to her. They were obviously having separate photos taken when Maxwell's photographer shouted his name.