It’s not going to get there. The idea it’s going to turn smart and capable at some undisclosed point in the future as long as we keep giving them billions in investments IS marketing.

Ad hominem aside… There’s a reason we want these things to fall into one of these categories. Presumably it’s so that we can actually recycle reuse or compost end of life products.

So, either we want that sump pump disassembled into component level disposal categories so that we can achieve this goal, or we make peace with a disposal plan that involves chucking this in the trash as a fully assembled good that will almost certainly be cost and time prohibitive to dispose of in any other way than tossing it into a landfill.

I’m saying this is a problem and you’re saying it’s not. You’re not identifying a solution to that problem you just name calling… And I’m the troll?

So we don’t want to achieve the recycling, repair, and re-use, we just want to know it’s theoretically possible?

We banned them here too. I always forget my reusable bags and toss a loose assortment of goods in my trunk to tumble around.

Companies largely respond to what their consumers expect.

Snap on makes high quality buy it for life products with an excellent warranty because they have a consumer base that values these things and will pay for it.

Red Wing makes decent boots you can buy for cheap or buy it for Life boots if you’re willing to spend the money. Because they have both of those consumers.

TCL makes disposable televisions with a 2-year life for consumers who are singularly concerned with the display size to dollar ratio.

I think most people agree with this idea. There are two basic problems preventing it.

1. There is a giant gap between what people believe they should be doing and what they’ll actually do voluntarily when faced with the slightest inconvenience.

Basically you have to make people do inconvenience things. You can’t ask.

For example single-use shopping bags. Everyone understands why they are a problem. Every store sells a reusable alternative. Recyclable paper bags have always been an option. But unless it’s regulated, people continue using disposable single use plastic shopping bags.

2. The problem isn’t just what can be recycled it’s what WILL be recycled.

Imagine going through construction debris trying to separate plaster, wood-lathing wire-lathing, screws, and insulation into separate piles for disposal.

Picture the average grandma disassembling a sump pump to make sure plastic rubber Teflon and metal materials all end up in separate recyclable piles.

I had a lot of problems when I’ve used Ubuntu in the past. To be fair that was 2009 - 2012 and it was a much less mature product. But whether it’s snaps, unity, or Ubuntu One integrations, they always seem to be doing their own thing in a way that’s not particularly helpful.

I’ve had a much more “just works” experience with Fedora and Mint.

I’m sure that’s at least part of the idea but I’m yet to see any evidence that it won’t also be dog shit at that. It doesn’t have the context window or foresight to conceive of a decent plot twist in a piece of fiction despite having access to every piece of fiction ever written. I’m not buying that it would be able to build a psychological model and contextualize 40 plus years of lived experience in a way that could get me to buy a $20 Dubai chocolate bar or drive a Chevy.

I’m mostly annoyed that I have to keep explaining to people that 95% of what they hear about AI is marketing. In the years since we bet the whole US economy on AI and were told it’s absolutely the future of all things, it’s yet to produce a really great work of fiction (as far as we know), a groundbreaking piece of software of it’s own production or design, or a blockbuster product that I’m aware of.

We’re betting our whole future on a concept of a product that has yet to reliably profit any of its users or the public as a whole.

I’ve made several good faith efforts at getting it to produce something valuable or helpful to me. I’ve done the legwork on making sure I know how to ask it for what I want, and how I can better communicate with it.

But AI “art” requires an actual artist to clean it up. AI fiction requires a writer to steer it or fix it. AI non-fiction requires a fact cheker. AI code requires a coder. At what point does the public catch on that the emperor has no clothes?

We don’t need Russian disinformation or funding. The Secretary of Health and the worlds biggest podcaster will happily disinform the public on spotify’s dime and entirely of their own accord.

There is no such thing as a qualified US presidential candidate. There’s no job, or training, or comparable experience that can ready a person for that role. Anyone who honestly thinks they are the most capable person in the world to assume control of the largest military and the largest economy that has ever existed should immediately be disqualified from the role. You’d have to be a madman to think that. But that’s all we ever get.

There’s no indication that a senator, governor, or vice president makes a better president than someone with no political experience (of which there have been 6). In fact, coming through that system seems to teach people to make peace with corruption, bribery, complacence, and protecting the status quo at it’s worst.

As much as I hate Donald Trump’s policy, and flagrant disregard for the law, it would be hard to argue that his experience as a narcissistic game show host hasn’t proven more effective at the day to day politics of implementing his policy than almost any other president of the last 40 years. It’s hard to keep up with how fast he’s getting disastrous shit (that we voted for) done.

And he’s only in office today because 50 years of “qualified” stuffed shirts have wrung all the money, opportunity, and hope out of the middle class. Then the “qualified” people told America to vote for a clearly senile “qualified” candidate.

Which is all well and good except for now it’s just a baseless paranoid fantasy. And if that was laid out up front I would have no notes.

Over here in reality, if Canonical deployed a closed source, paid, spyware laden version of it’s OS it might take a little while for some of the server business to disappear, but they’d loose almost all their market share overnight. They’d be a cautionary tale in the FOSS community and the software industry.

I’m struggling to connect the dots between “X person used to work in electronic surveillance” and an immediate risk to the open source software being developed by a different employer. Is there some reason to think this person is still working for their old employer? Or is the speculation that they are a idologue out to destroy Linux from the inside?

If there’s something unsafe in the code, especially a rust rewrite of the coreutils I’d expect it’s going to be found immediately. People are going to go over that code with a fine toothed comb.

If the central idea of the article is “I don’t think there’s a place in the FOSS community for people with different ideas/beliefs/history than me” then the author should come out and say that (many have in the past). Claiming we’re at risk because of some wild speculation about a nefarious plot between the military and Microsoft to attack Linux and privacy… it really does require something more firm than this.

I think the gap between what the average Linux user thinks is ease of use and what the average non Linux user thinks is ease of use is probably much larger and many devs seem to understand.

I think it would be beneficial to have a completely idiot proof installer that doesn’t ask you about partitions or formatting or basically anything just point it towards a drive and it will set up a default installation.

More GUI based means of doing basic stuff. A casual who wants to access some photos from his laptop does not want to figure out how to manually configure samba shares by editing config files in their terminal based text editor.

I think codecs are a much bigger pain in the ass than is ideal. As I understand that there are legal reasons for this but the first time some casual goes to play a video and gets an error message their first thought may not be “let me search Google and figure out what this error message means” their first thought maybe “Linux sucks and can’t play videos”.

The permission structure that makes Linux so secure makes it a little annoying for casuals. For example, you actively and intentionally go to the default software store, navigate to the updates tab, update a package you’ve already installed and clearly want, and do so from the official OS repository… This requires that you enter your password to protect you from what exactly? It’s not a big deal it takes one second to type my password, but how would you explain this to a casual in a way that makes sense? Your OS is protecting you from potentially rogue acts of official patches to your default text editor.

I think the folder structures are pretty big challenge for converts. On Windows you can find most of the files associated with any given program in your program files folder. On Mac there’s an applications folder. On Linux… it’s somewhere, don’t worry about it. That’s not really a fixable one it just is what it is.

What linux does and does not protect the user from is endlessly hilarious to me.

Hey linux, I want to install a file you downloaded.

Linux: Sounds risky man

I’d like my file explorer to have super user privleges.

Linux: Are you out of your god damned mind?

Hey linux, I want to delete the kernel that I’m actively using right now.

Linux: Hell yeah. I’ll go to the looney bin with you.