they seem to miss the point that social media manipulation is a massive threat to democracy and has already affected many elections the draconian measures being used now are because we have poor tools to tell if social media is authentic or not

I used Arch for about 7 years. I still have it installed on an old PC but I haven’t used it recently. Every time I told pacman to update everything it felt like an adventure. Never knew if I was going to reboot to a working desktop or to a console printing cryptic error messages that take a while to Google on my phone before I get things back up and running. I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy’s grandma! The only times I got this kind of problems where when I didn't read some announcement or for some reason some packages (the kernel) were way too old, normally never had it on a normal update. But as I said, you have a point, even if in the end I would point out that a grandma would never be able to solve any problem caused by an update, irregardless of the distro or the OS. It all comes down to the maintainers of Arch putting all of the responsibility for breakage (especially due to old configuration files) 100% on the user. That’s not a system any normal person should use, that’s a system for Linux hobbyists. Only partially. Normally Arch put the new configuration file as a [something].pacnew and it is the user that should then do something, but as long as the software that use the new file could undertand that it is using an older file and it is able to handle the eventually missing new keys or removed ones there will be no problem. On my desktop I have a bunch of [some_program].conf.pacnew and everything works. Is it optimal ? Maybe not but it is not broke. It’s fine if you want to assume all responsibility for updating grandma’s system and fixing breakage every time. I don’t have any interest in doing that. Honestly, a grandma would just need Firefox with a couple of extension (uBlock Origin and really few others) and a network with all inbound ports blocked (so no one can connect from outside) and few outbound ports open (very few, just the common ones to use a browser). Maybe she need Openoffice, probably a DE (but a window manager could be enough) but she don't need a lot of software we all install on out machine. It is true that Arch could be a problem when updating but I think we are talking of a very small set of packages that need to be constantly updated and in my years of Arch usage, basic packages rarely break something while updating.

True, they will always play the victim even as they're hurting and exploiting people they see as less than. Don't allow them to have any evidence of credibility. I think his idea of hell would probably be having to lower himself to the standard of living most people would consider normal and comfortable. Having to learn to actually survive day to day if he were to find himself suddenly without a cent of the money he was born into and all future wages and earnings garnished to pay the people he has harmed, would probably be a fate worse than any hell he could imagine. I know there's no justice and there is pretty much no chance of him ever facing any sort of proportional punishment or consequence for his actions. But, if I could make it happen, having to suddenly learn to survive with the rest of us mortals in the society he has helped create, in his late fifties, wondering how he will even afford something as basic as healthcare while his body rapidly ages from stress and gradually falls apart, after a lifetime of unimaginable privilege, unable to go anywhere or do anything he enjoys without being recognized and having people curse his name. That would be the fate I would wish on somebody like him.

Sounds like some deliberately obscure concentrations of power. The fear bit is really problematic though as scared people are not ideal decision makers.

I’m sure publishers are all ears /s

Zuck can't be too excited to be suddenly and harshly cut out of the Oval Office Data Pipeline...

Tech execs when the shortage hits: I just had a brilliant idea! Let's just give untrained junior vibe-coding engineers the power of senior engineers, and even more AI tools. Problem solved forever, bonus please!

Can you replace politicians I feel like that would actually be an improvement. Hell it'd probably be an improvement if the current system's replaced politicians. To be honest though I've never seen any evidence that AGI is inevitable, it's perpetually 6 months away except in 6 months it'll still be 6 months away.