- kkfx parentAs usual Gnome do it's best to alienate users and have some who restore good behaviors as the can. Meanwhile the fraction of power users who still use Gnome are less and less. In few years if they keep going they'll earn a share of Windows expatriate newbies and lost all power users, becoming then irrelevant like many who have choose the same path.
- Well... Until people will react protecting their own interests we will only go in a death spiral.
Only recently have we witnessed, particularly in the EU but also in the US and Canada, the blocking of personal bank accounts of individuals who were simply "inconvenient" to the ruling class, from Wikileaks to OnlyFans creators, Francesca Albanese, Frédéric Baldan, Jacques Baud, and various players in the crypto world, all without trial, without any crime committed, just unwelcome.
This makes it clear that for Democracy to exist, a balance of power is needed, including internal balance, which requires that the population remains outside the potential control of the State to preserve a significant degree of freedom. Privacy is one of these fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech, because the ideas circulating can be dangerous, but it is far more dangerous to have someone with the power to prevent ideas and news from circulating.
- In the past, for technological reasons, because it is technology that determines every civilisation, cities were rich places, because they had trade, nearby arts and crafts; knowledge and economy travelled in this way.
Today, for similar reasons, cities are chicken coops where the inmates are not much different from the human batteries in The Matrix; they live to work, generally without realising it, for masters who are no longer in the city. Technologically, they are failed places, because they cannot evolve without being rebuilt from scratch, and they cannot be rebuilt on such a scale, both due to the impact of the work and the quantity of raw materials required.
Most people never weigh the real cost of a modern city; they are so accustomed to owning nothing that they think what is there is natural, ignoring what they don't see, whether underground (like the cathedral with mega-pumping stations to mitigate flooding beneath Tokyo) or in the surrounding areas to bring water and food, because we all eat, but in the city no one produces.
The cities of the coming century are ghettos, polluted and devastated, where misery is concentrated like a compound, while wealth leaves the compound to reclaim life in nature.
- Like frigghome.ai I do not see much interest in these, but they could be an interesting way to bring a homeserver per home, potentially powering a public blockchain for digital identity, (smart)contracts hashed publicly, and a digital currency not owned by anyone in particular with also Liquid Feedback blockchain to construct a new society.
The road is very long, but technically feasible, obviously I expect ferocious push against...
- Hem... Geographical distance isn't a sensible parameter when computers are involved, because what matters is informational distance. Knowledge isn't transmitted through physical proximity but through the exchange of information.
The problem here is that most companies and workers lack the IT skills to operate as a virtual company or a learning organisation, so onboarding is complicated and gaining experience is difficult. Skilled workers are frustrated by the inefficiency of less competent colleagues and the organisation itself, while all the friction points are highly visible rather than hidden within in-person collaboration.
This can't be studied without comparing virtual companies/learning organisations to companies from the time of Taylor/Weber/Fayol.
- The blockchain is an excellent distributed storage system for anything that should be immutable, such as contract hashes like notarial deeds, vehicle sales, and digital identities, which are not controlled by any central authority (if the blockchain is truly distributed) and are verifiable and tamper-proof. NFTs are the toy experiment that demonstrates this path.
It is therefore also usable as a currency, with fungible tokens, where the transactions per second (TPS) are sufficiently high, not for Bitcoin, therefore, but for example, Solana is already adequate; its performance and economic model are sufficient to pay for your local café.
That, without widespread acceptance, they have limited use, initially for crime, then for speculation, is another matter, but it is not a technical issue. The technical issues are quite different: https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html
- Countries that continue with fiscal plunder will only see those who can afford it flee, and after some time, popular uprisings from people who are fed up with Agenda2030 and still haven't figured out how to say no democratically.
If some populations do this, as recently happened in Switzerland, they will likely avoid uprisings.
- This is the result of a society that has evolved to serve the commercial interests of a few rather than the technical needs of many; indeed, most people are Lebonian cattle (cf. Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Crowds), not homo oeconomicus.
Digital identity should be a physical smart card, as has been the case for decades with mobile phone SIM cards, bank cards, etc every ID document and each of these, where issued by the public sector, should form part of a federated system of public administration ID that provides authentication services to citizens.
Digital signatures should be a key stored on the smart card, not a third-party guarantor using SMS OTP, scanned signatures, or other absurd analogues.
Yet this is not the case because most IT professionals know nothing and attempt to reconstruct with IT what they only understand through paper, thereby creating opportunities for a few to profit greatly from their ignorance, and nothing more.
- Yes, of course, when their teachers learn to use a FLOSS desktop for all tasks, starting with writing theses and papers in LaTeX... In other words, when they run courses for students to recover what they didn't learn in high schools.
Today, a desktop is the primary epistemological tool; only a FLOSS one is suitable for study, as it reveals what it does and is, or at least can be, shaped according to need. Most are simply IT illiterate, like professors from the 1950s unable to read and write fluently, except they still haven't realised it...
- Personally (not using GMail) I flag messages I do not want to delete, the others got deleted with a bit of step, some after an year, some after 5 years etc. It's not much anyway, but enough to avoid extreme growth.
Mails are PARTIALLY spread in a taxonomy via MailDrop but partially because keeping my filters is tedious...
- No, what I need is NixOS, a configuration with a language that's a bit hard to digest but effective, which I can build and read, allowing me to replicate my infrastructure, create custom ISOs etc, in an almost totally automatic and manageable way on domestic hardware at a domestic scale.
What's needed isn't a rambling YAML and immense resource consumption; it's IaC, built-in to the system, that can do what's necessary not for an IT giant that lives off others' services run in-house, but for me, a private citizen with just a few of my own services, little time to manage them, a need to quickly replicate the infrastructure because I don't have infinite data centers, so if the homeserver dies, I need to buy another cheap desktop and set it up, restoring it on the fly. So if I'm offline for a few hours, nothing happens, but hardware costs money, so I need to use it well, and so on.
The giants' solutions are not one-size-fits-all.
- No thanks. It's 2025, identity needs to be resilient, so having a national public blockchain that every public administration entity, every private who wants to participate, compensated for the IT resources they provide, whether a citizen or a business maintains well, that makes sense. The fingerprint of a key is shared, this key is on a smart-card, therefore offline, on well-known (bank cards, SIM cards) proven and reliable platforms, and signs what is needed with zk proofs where required.
Identity on mobile, proprietary platforms, whose level of complexity makes it humanly impossible to understand them even for governments themselves, notoriously closely monitored and yet with a long history of bugs and problems, is UNACCEPTABLE.
It's time to understand that IT is the nervous system of society and that public information must be public, for everyone, not for a specific actor and with no specific actor being "more equal" than others.
- Me personally I consider EVERY office suite legacy crap, no one should use.
Unfortunately, even if it's entirely possible to imagine an office world built like what we can have today in org-mode/Emacs, e.g. https://youtu.be/u44X_th6_oY rather than Positron (R Studio's successor) for most people it's still a taboo; there's a significant reactionary attitude even in IT.
- What's really missing is:
- a basic computer science course, teaching how to be at home in a FLOSS desktop system
- an intermediate course teaching how to properly automate this environment, from scripting to classic development
- a basic course in networking and system management to reach the level of being able to be a dummy sysadmin at home
all of these must be preparatory to CS because without them it's like studying literature before knowing the basics of the language in which it's written. So far, it's assumed that students do it themselves, but the facts prove that this is not the case.
- Honestly anyone do have outages, that's nothing extraordinary, what's wrong is the number of impacted services. We choose (at least almost choose) to ditch mainframes for clusters also for resilience. Now with cheap desktop iron labeled "stable enough to be a serious server" we have seen mainframes re-created sometimes with a cluster of VM on top of a single server, sometimes with cloud services.
Ladies and Gentleman's it's about time to learn reshoring in the IT world as well. Owning nothing, renting all means extreme fragility.
- Nowadays many like 100-1000× leverage, with no real stoploss strategy and with significant portion of their capitals.
The pump of ZCash also prove some like to clean their history (nowadays that Monero was attacked to crash Houthis international trades).
It's business as usual for those who know the business, many are newcomers.