They’re not thinking that far ahead. They’re thinking “how can I make the lines go up this quarter?”

No doubt many of them understand that you need people with enough money to buy products or the economy stagnates. But they don’t see it as their problem right now. Their problem right now is to make the line go up by any means they can. It’s similar to how the owners must understand that climate change will fuck everyone if left unchecked, but they don’t see it as their own problem right now, so none of them take any steps to avoid disaster. Capitalism doesn’t contain mechanisms for coordinating actions towards the greater good. Instead it creates many “tragedy of the commons” type situations.

Dropbox is better value and faster, in my experience, than these others. And when it backs up photos, it doesn’t hold them hostage on its servers so you have to keep paying or you lose access to them, unlike Google at least. Nor does it try to trick you into saving files to it when you don’t want to, so you fill up your quotas and end up paying more, like OneDrive. I still think Dropbox is the best of the bunch. It will be a shame to see it go to shit.

The car was pushing the fast asleep (at the wheel) agenda.

I had to read the article just to be able to parse the headline.

the development/testing is done on Windows under VMs rather than a sample of real world hardware

And yet there’s a recent update that keeps killing my Windows VMs. They’ll run for a while then one day they install the update and won’t boot again. It really feels like MS have lost control of Windows testing these days.

Fascism can only function with the help of amoral profiteering corporations. Unfortunately there’s never any shortage of those under capitalism.

I think the point is that some capitalists, both in business and in politics, encourage us to put our faith in future carbon capture so they can keep profiting off their polluting activities for now without having to invest in carbon emissions reduction. This is unrealistic and just an excuse not to tackle the difficult task of reducing emissions. We can’t afford to let the problem become that much worse before we attempt to mitigate it by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, if there’s ever a technology that can do that effectively (which right now doesn’t look likely). We need to focus most of our efforts on reducing emissions.

It’s probably not very funny to all the people in the Netherlands who are not right-wing idiots. Sounds like the Netherlands are experiencing something like Florida: when the problems get really urgent and bad, half the population fights hard to prevent action and preserve their delusion that everything’s fine.

Microsoft profits off genocide and intends to keep doing so.

And to those who say “well, the Earth will bounce back”: we’re much closer to the end of Earth’s ability to support life than to the beginning. Earth doesn’t have endless time to evolve new kinds of creatures. We could be doing damage from which Earth’s biodiversity never recovers.

One difficulty with that is that the way we organize economies currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population. When you have far fewer workers than retired people you start having problems. I don’t know what the answer to that is, but it’s another instance of how any plan to seriously address climate change tends to require deep changes to how we run society. The current systems can’t simply be tweaked to make the problem go away.

You can’t really get addicted to fedi

Hmm… anxiously eyeing my Lemmy post history…

Sounds pathologically self-centered, and a recipe for a sad life.

Companies fight back to make subscription services easy to cancel

Maybe I’m misreading, but that seems backwards in the title. Companies are fighting to make subscriptions harder to cancel.

If I were buying an e-reader these days I’d look at something like the Boox devices that run Android. You could install the Kindle and Kobo apps and a good third-party reader app (I like ReadEra), and have pretty convenient access to ebooks from any source. They are overpriced though.

I was on a Boeing plane the other day that was delayed while we watched a guy with a wrench and a rag trying to stop fuel leaking out of the wing. It wasn’t hugely reassuring.

The author asks many questions, but never the most important one: “Why don’t people like Windows 11?”

They complain about unprofessional communications then fill this article with whining like this:

Weeks elapsed with little to no activity, because they were super busy pretending to be doing something else out in the abyss of phantom world.

And they never seem to consider that maybe their own code wasn’t as great as they thought:

He finally built the coreboot ROM with our code, flashed it, and tried to boot the laptop, which displayed an FSP message. Max said he was surprised it made it that far. Why? We told them our code just needed debugging, but they didn’t want to believe it.

Why does the author expect it not to have problems? I know from experience that you can hand over your best, most thoroughly tested code to someone else and they’ll immediately find a problem you have never seen. How professional are these people if that surprises them? “But it just needs debugging!” is not the response of someone who knows what they’re doing and just needs a second pair of eyes on the code.

In the end this blog post backfires. They paint themselves as an arrogant and problematic client to deal with.

Edit: After reading the links in another comment on this thread (sorry for the instance-specific link, will fix if someone can advise me on a better syntax), and in this reddit thread this is evidently only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Malibal’s behaviour. Definitely a company to avoid.

Pirating it is a bad idea if you’re downloading it from a non-Microsoft source, since malware would be a big risk. That would defeat the purpose of installing a supported OS in the first place. If you download it from Microsoft and use a pirated key maybe that would work, but would you get the security updates?

Chrome excites arbitrary code from google.com (this wasn’t something widely known until recently and appears to effect all the chromium downstream browsers).

I hadn’t heard about that. Can you link me to some info about it?