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Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

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  • Sure, and where is your proof that Bill needs one, let alone uses one?

    And don't come with a list of actions the majority of people don't care about.

    Let me google that for you.

    It's like asking for proof there is sand in the desert

  • It is the perfect analogy, because you are a techy, not a survival hunter.

    You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

    Just like how the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don't want to learn the alternative like you.

    If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn't be selling so much.

    You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

    At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can't just decide to become survival hunters - we'd simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you're living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can't support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

    Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @subignition@fedia.io is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

    the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative [...] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

    I can't tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don't see how "people prefer convenience" is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don't think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

    Unless I'm mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn't tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn't produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

    Don't get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn't come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @subignition@fedia.io that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.

  • I said in another thread about this, he looks like an older Tom Scott.

    About that, Tom Scott is also old now.

  • Now powered by Copilot!

    CoClippy?

  • But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

    Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.

    I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn't understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It's why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

    Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

    For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

    Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.

  • Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.

    Bill Gates is a monopoly capitalist with zero scruples. He screwed over so many people, vacuumed up so much wealth from all other sectors of the world economy. He has zero qualms about doing this either: There's video of his depositions in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the whole fucking time he just argues semantics in response to the questions, and when pressed after five minutes of defining every fucking word in a sentence, almost always claims he doesn't know or recall. Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business. And he does that despite whatever the outcome of the case, he'd be richer than billions of humans collectively. What pathology is this?

    There's so much more shit, like the incessant lobbying for medical patents worldwide, or how, according to Melinda, Gates loved hanging out with Epstein.

    Now, why would anyone want to have their picture taken with that guy? Torvalds is such an unprincipled lib.

    Edit: Listened to some of the deposition in the background. Here Gates is being extremely annoying for example: The interviewer reads back an email from Gates saying something like "browser share is a very, very important goal for this company", and then asks what other companies he's comparing browser share with. Gates goes several minutes arguing he's not talking about any other companies, since literally there are no other companies mentioned in that very sentence, obviously pretending like he doesn't understand the question. If you listen to all the shit before, they have to go over whether "browser share" means "market share" (Gates says no), whether "very, very important" and "important" have different meanings (Gates says not necessarily, could be hyperbole), and that sort of stuff for minutes on end. Like seriously listen to this, I cannot even describe how stupid it is.

  • Giving away money? You sweet summer child.

    Research don't want "his" (the foundations) money, it comes with so many strings attached all your lives work now belongs to the B&M foundation.

    You sweet summer child.

    Alright dude, I don't know much about the foundation, sorry. 🤷♂

  • The point here is that in many jurisdictions doing charity exempts you from certain taxes, and it is possible to shuffle money around under the disguise of philanthropy while still getting all the financial benefits like an actual charity

    Well that's disgusting, ain't it. 🫤

  • Because they are tax avoidance mechanism first and charity seconds.

    Money is a brokering system of power, charitues being tax free makes these entities unaccountable to democratic institurions.

    That's how we ended up with this infection of corrupt megachurches.

    The "prosperity gospel" is billionaire-serving propaganda. It empowers their formation, growth and necessary abuses that come from such widespread exploitation.

    Gotcha. That sounds very bad indeed.

  • Torvalds wrote the kernel, not the operating system. It's a part of the GNU/Linux OS 😉

    ... or as I have taken recently to call it, GNU plus Linux.

  • Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have apparently never met in person before, despite their pseudo-rivalry.

    Round 1, FIGHT!

  • Bill Gates is a monopoly capitalist with zero scruples. He screwed over so many people, vacuumed up so much wealth from all other sectors of the world economy. He has zero qualms about doing this either: There's video of his depositions in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the whole fucking time he just argues semantics in response to the questions, and when pressed after five minutes of defining every fucking word in a sentence, almost always claims he doesn't know or recall. Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business. And he does that despite whatever the outcome of the case, he'd be richer than billions of humans collectively. What pathology is this?

    There's so much more shit, like the incessant lobbying for medical patents worldwide, or how, according to Melinda, Gates loved hanging out with Epstein.

    Now, why would anyone want to have their picture taken with that guy? Torvalds is such an unprincipled lib.

    Edit: Listened to some of the deposition in the background. Here Gates is being extremely annoying for example: The interviewer reads back an email from Gates saying something like "browser share is a very, very important goal for this company", and then asks what other companies he's comparing browser share with. Gates goes several minutes arguing he's not talking about any other companies, since literally there are no other companies mentioned in that very sentence, obviously pretending like he doesn't understand the question. If you listen to all the shit before, they have to go over whether "browser share" means "market share" (Gates says no), whether "very, very important" and "important" have different meanings (Gates says not necessarily, could be hyperbole), and that sort of stuff for minutes on end. Like seriously listen to this, I cannot even describe how stupid it is.

    What else would you expect from the "dictator for life", that he would have the social skills NOT to attend "Conference at Redmond" ?

  • That's not how it works, it's not like "I do some good, now I can do some bad". It does not even out.

    Bad people doesn't become good because "some good things came out of it".

    If you do bad, then you are bad.

    ::: spoiler spoiler
    sdfsafsafsdaf
    :::

  • Every dictator did "some good work", are you thinking they are good people?

    IMO your moral compass need maintenance.

    ::: spoiler spoiler
    sdfsafsafsdaf
    :::

  • Bill Gates is a monopoly capitalist with zero scruples. He screwed over so many people, vacuumed up so much wealth from all other sectors of the world economy. He has zero qualms about doing this either: There's video of his depositions in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the whole fucking time he just argues semantics in response to the questions, and when pressed after five minutes of defining every fucking word in a sentence, almost always claims he doesn't know or recall. Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business. And he does that despite whatever the outcome of the case, he'd be richer than billions of humans collectively. What pathology is this?

    There's so much more shit, like the incessant lobbying for medical patents worldwide, or how, according to Melinda, Gates loved hanging out with Epstein.

    Now, why would anyone want to have their picture taken with that guy? Torvalds is such an unprincipled lib.

    Edit: Listened to some of the deposition in the background. Here Gates is being extremely annoying for example: The interviewer reads back an email from Gates saying something like "browser share is a very, very important goal for this company", and then asks what other companies he's comparing browser share with. Gates goes several minutes arguing he's not talking about any other companies, since literally there are no other companies mentioned in that very sentence, obviously pretending like he doesn't understand the question. If you listen to all the shit before, they have to go over whether "browser share" means "market share" (Gates says no), whether "very, very important" and "important" have different meanings (Gates says not necessarily, could be hyperbole), and that sort of stuff for minutes on end. Like seriously listen to this, I cannot even describe how stupid it is.

    The Conference at Redmond

    Well, they finally did it. Bill Gates, the Monopoly Warlord of Redmond, and Linus Torvalds, the caffeine-fueled architect of Linux rebellion, have shaken hands like two aging mob bosses who accidentally showed up to the same funeral. The image alone is enough to make a ThinkPad burst into flames. Gates, the man who once viewed free software the way a vampire views sunlight, now smiling alongside Torvalds, the supposed Patron Saint of Open Source, as if decades of digital trench warfare never happened. It’s like watching Che Guevara and Milton Friedman split a dessert sampler and talk cloud strategy.

    Mark Russinovich, playing the role of High Priest of Corporate Reconciliation, quipped “no major kernel decisions were made.” But let’s not kid ourselves, this wasn’t just dinner. This was a symbolic convergence, a ritual unification of cathedral and bazaar into a suburban steakhouse of existential despair. Somewhere in the void, the ghost of Richard Stallman is chain-smoking over a broken Emacs install, muttering, “I warned you bastards.” The only thing missing from that picture was a scroll of NDAs and a PowerPoint titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance Capitalism.”

    What we witnessed was not diplomacy, it was absorption. The rebel king has been invited into the palace, offered wine, and handed a commemorative hoodie with the Microsoft logo stitched in ethically-sourced irony. Forget forks and pull requests; this is the final merge. Linux has breached the 4% desktop market share, and capitalism has responded the only way it knows how: by smiling, shaking hands, and quietly buying the table. Welcome to the Conference at Redmond. Weep for the dream. Or laugh maniacally, if you still know how.

  • Yeah, it's very obvious that some of the people responding here don't interact much with non-tech people, and they have DEFINITELY never worked IT.

    Most people aren't interested in learning the more intricate things. And if you try to force them, they're not going to get more interested as they learn, because they literally are not interested in tech. They want to accomplish a task, if that takes a bunch of learning just for one thing, they'll go a different route, or pay someone else to do it for them.

    Surely we should cater to those who prioritize convenience, especially at work.

    Most of the problem with regular people learning new tech, is that we (tech people, IT people, etc.) Are fucking awful at teaching people things. We throw out way too much way too quick, and the most key thing is that apparently tech people don't know how to listen or have a conversation.

    Regular people don't hate learning tech, they hate they peolle who teach them. Be better and stop judging people, you aren't as clever as you think.

  • Sure, but if you look at the top quality softwares, the majority of them are paid.

    Because money is a big encouragement to make them as flawless as possible. Something FOSS just doesn't have.

    They are used due to support not quality. Companies need to be able to purchase service and support agreements and very often FOSS has none of that.

  • The Conference at Redmond

    Well, they finally did it. Bill Gates, the Monopoly Warlord of Redmond, and Linus Torvalds, the caffeine-fueled architect of Linux rebellion, have shaken hands like two aging mob bosses who accidentally showed up to the same funeral. The image alone is enough to make a ThinkPad burst into flames. Gates, the man who once viewed free software the way a vampire views sunlight, now smiling alongside Torvalds, the supposed Patron Saint of Open Source, as if decades of digital trench warfare never happened. It’s like watching Che Guevara and Milton Friedman split a dessert sampler and talk cloud strategy.

    Mark Russinovich, playing the role of High Priest of Corporate Reconciliation, quipped “no major kernel decisions were made.” But let’s not kid ourselves, this wasn’t just dinner. This was a symbolic convergence, a ritual unification of cathedral and bazaar into a suburban steakhouse of existential despair. Somewhere in the void, the ghost of Richard Stallman is chain-smoking over a broken Emacs install, muttering, “I warned you bastards.” The only thing missing from that picture was a scroll of NDAs and a PowerPoint titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance Capitalism.”

    What we witnessed was not diplomacy, it was absorption. The rebel king has been invited into the palace, offered wine, and handed a commemorative hoodie with the Microsoft logo stitched in ethically-sourced irony. Forget forks and pull requests; this is the final merge. Linux has breached the 4% desktop market share, and capitalism has responded the only way it knows how: by smiling, shaking hands, and quietly buying the table. Welcome to the Conference at Redmond. Weep for the dream. Or laugh maniacally, if you still know how.

    I may frame this. Poetry.

  • ::: spoiler spoiler
    sdfsafsafsdaf
    :::

    I answered Honytawk 🤷🏼♀️?

    You seems to be up in arms defending a shitty billionaire and his shitty charity, repeating over and over again that they did "some good", what kind of argument even is that? Dictators do "some good" too you know.

  • Nah, I have worked in IT education and in helpdesk. Average user doesn't have a better time getting into Microsoft products, it's not easier for them than FOSS. The reason for Windows domination is Microsoft spending money and lobbying power to put it in front of every user.

    Maybe true today, but less true in earlier times (90s and early 2000s) when Microsoft was really gaining dominance.

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    I'll gladly give you a reason. I'm actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights. Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless: The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it's safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content) The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too) Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here's some examples: Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms. You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site. A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached. This isn't just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them: "When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier." Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don't just want to focus on the beginning: I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation. there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. The problem isn't necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It's easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won't be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with. There's no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people's access tokens and impersonating their ID) I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who's sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it's certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends. I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn't the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
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