You’re not the only user. Other people may benefit even if you personally don’t. Getting software you don’t want is a compromise for getting an easy out the box installation that comes with what you want already pre-installed.

If you want a more personalized approach there’s always forking a distro and customizing it so that it suits your needs (which is how Nobara came into being).

But I’m that case if Linux gets 1 new user and windows gets 10 then proportionally Linux usage would decrease despite the absolute number increasing.

I would argue the absolute number is meaningless because without context that number has no value. If I tell you there are 3.4 million Linux desktop users does that number actually tell you anything? Not really. You don’t even know if it’s a lot or not because you have no frame of reference. 4% already has that frame built in and gives you an indication how Linux stacks up to other desktop OSs.

Depends on how you define rich. If I make enough to have a decent home, food on the table and have a rainy day fund, does that make me rich? I don’t think so. But for many people (me included) that is the dream. I don’t want fancy cars or big mansions or expensive suits or anything “rich”, I just want what I consider a normal life.

But for some people I am rich, because I don’t need to live paycheck to paycheck. I think that’s stupid. I shouldn’t be considered privileged for having what I consider a normal life. I think everyone should be able to afford the life I have, that should be the baseline not the dream.

there is a clear health risk in all combat sports, but two big dudes are allowed to beat parkinson’s disease into one another as are two small dudes. whether to draw a line at all and where to draw the line are arbitrary, even if you like the decision.

In that case all societal lines are also arbitrary because it’s not like there’s some magical science that dictates with pure objectivity where the line is supposed to be. However there is still intent behind the weight classes, so I wouldn’t call it arbitrary in the sense that they’re drawn on a whim.

not only is marathon running divided by gender, but shrieking transphobes threw a fit about a trans woman “beating 14,000 real women” in the new york marathon when she actually came in at about the 6,000th place

I didn’t know that. I just know that my female friend can and has joined marathons that also have men running. As for the transphobe shrieking, fuck those guys.

chess is divided by gender. are you willing to defend the position that cis women can’t think? if so, how do you defend the stripping of titles from trans men that were earned when they competed as women?

I specifically left out chess because it doesn’t have anything to do with physical abilities. Chess is divided by gender because some men are too much of an asshole to act civil around women. That’s all. Also, I love how you try to put words in my mouth. Fuck you for that.

in the case of the dwarf olympics the difference is you’re banning a characteristic of an individual athlete that gives an advantage, not categorically banning all athletes who could potentially have that characteristic.

At no point did I say I’m against trans people competing. I just don’t think there’s enough empirical evidence to draw any conclusions and the whole process of transitioning has a lot of nuances that impact performance. I’m not saying anyone should get banned on a potential characteristic, but I will say that if for instance it becomes apparent that trans-women end up consistently out-competing biological women then there should be a line drawn unless women themselves are okay with this.

I’m not against people transitioning, I’m also not against them competing, but if they do start outperforming women (and to be clear, I am explicitly stating that there’s not enough empirical evidence to say if they will or not) then I’m against them. The whole idea of womens leagues is for women to have an compete without having to deal with an obvious disadvantage (or sexism as the case with Chess). If transwomen end up being statistically better than biological women, then that puts biological women at an obvious disadvantage. If transwomen don’t have any statistical edge then let them compete. So far it’s not clear and if women don’t have an issue with them competing then neither do I.

How are they arbitrary decisions? The reason boxing has weight restrictions is because the heavier weight guy might actually kill the lighter weight guy, there’s a clear health risk behind that decision. Same actually goes for a lot of fighting sports. And when it comes to sports like Tennis results have shown than men have a clear biological advantage over women, which is why women get separate tennis tournaments. And as a counter-example marathon running (at least to my knowledge) doesn’t have male and female marathons, because there’s no clear biological advantage for either sex.

Biological regulations tend to happen when there’s either a health risk or an systemic advantage. If Usain Bolt has some magical leg muscles that make him one of the greatest (if not the greatest) sprinter of all time then that does not need regulating because that’s just him, it’s his natural talent. But if everyone can juice their body to make such magical leg muscles, then that needs to be regulated because it would give an unfair advantage against other people who wouldn’t juice themselves.

And to take your Welsh vs Italians comparison to a more realistic example, world dwarf games exist and it contains basketball. There actually is a basketball tournament specifically for extremely short people. You thought the height thing would be silly, but it’s actually a thing.

How?

It’s not. Boxing has weight classes because a heavyweight would snap a featherweight in half and some people literally can’t reach heavyweight without going overweight.

Can we just use the nordic system where people are not fucking savages and bring their carts back? I hate people who don’t return their carts but I hate even more when I need coins to unlock the cart. I haven’t carried coins since 2014.

From a Marxist perspective socialism needs a state. Marx defines socialism as a transitional step to move from capitalism to communism. Marx left it open how communism would be achieved but he did believe that state is necessary for that transition. In his mind the state will be abolished once communism has been effectively achieved. This means the existence of a state is important to socialism, according to Marxism.

The biggest reason your not seeing much benefit is because a) the tech hasn’t matured to a point where rasterization techniques can’t produce the same effect and b) devs aren’t developing games with raytracing in mind.

Honestly, the most impressive examples of raytracing have been Nvidias tech demos, more specifically Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft RTX textures.

It’s gonna take time for raytracing to impress but when it does it’s going to blow your mind.

Robbing people can also pay bills. I’m sure there’s a common denominator that we can use as an exception to the rule.

So one girl, half a cup?

You’re forgetting that 22 is probably instant speed, which means ballista is dead before it can combo off. So white needs something else to win because strategically black is better with the extra rooks.

It’s worse, they’re “the good guys”.

There’s a difference between admiring Amazon’s success and attributing that success to Bezos. Amazon’s success from that elephant in the room that you pretty quickly glossed over, the employees. Did Bezos come up with AWS? No. Do you think he directly contributed to its success? No. But who takes credit and profits from that? Bezos and the board. This is what people mean when they say there’s no such thing as a “deserving billionaire”. The only reason Bezos is a billionaire is because he owns the company. His actual labor contributions definitely haven’t been even close to being worth a billion, but because of the work of others he has a worth of a hundred billion. If you took the entire worth of Bezos and distributed it evenly between all Amazon employees then every employee of Amazon would be a millionaire. And there’s an entire board just profiting from the actual work people in Amazon are doing. But what do those workers get for that work? Having to piss in bottles to not lose their job.

You can admire Amazon for what it was able to achieve, but let’s not act like Bezos or the board are the reason Amazon is successful. Bezos and the board are the reason Amazon is so shitty and the company would be better off without them.

While true I think, as long as you’re not some kind of an extremist, your political views don’t matter that much, unless you’re in America. Most people have their opinions vary on the political spectrum, some views are conservative while others are liberal. But in America it seems like you’re either 100% liberal or 100% conservative and anything inbetween is hated by both sides. So you have to know if they’re with you or against you.

I think it’s hard to estimate how much effort corporations put into getting us to do what they want. If you’ve ever looked at why the public transportation in the US is shit you’d know there’s something suspicious going on with it.

US used to have cities that are great for public transportation, the grid design of the 1920s is excellent or public transportation. Some cities like NY still have that but cities like Detroit spent decades destroying that to build a highway going straight through the city. Suburbs in America are being built in a way that only suits car travel. And not just that, people have been conditioned to think that only poor people would use public transportation. Not only have been people made to believe they don’t want public transportation, they couldn’t have it even if they wanted to because it would be horribly inefficient.

Who benefits from those decisions? Definitely not the people who are now dependent on owning cars. But I’m pretty sure car manufacturers and oil companies are pretty happy because they get to sell more cars and oil. Now I can’t point the finger at that those companies because there’s no evidence they influenced this, at least none that I know of. But it’s awfully convenient for them that when the car boom happened in the 50s the US government was happy to spend money literally rebuilding cities to make them more car dependent and keep at it, while the same thing was stopped in Europe pretty quickly.

I don’t mind giving off some conspiracy theorist vibe, but I don’t think it’s far fetched that corporations are entities that put money above everything else and if needless polluting let’s them make more money they will do it without hesitation. I wouldn’t put it past them to deliberately build the narrative that somehow the people are to blame for this polluting. After all EXXON started the “is it even real?” and “is it even man made?” arguments that regular people used for decades to derail the climate change discussions, all with the purpose of shifting attention away from them. It’s literally their MO.

It is kinda cynical, but it’s also exactly what you’re seeing on Reddit. Some subs stopped protesting the moment Reddit said they will start removing moderators. Not because the sub wanted to stop protesting, but because the mods of that sub decided so. /r/pcgaming for instance is one of those subs. Another sub I frequently visited, /r/europe, pulled an entire charade of having users vote whether they want to protest or not, when protest won they asked for suggestions on how to protest, the top suggestion was moving the community which got no response from the mod team, instead they had another vote on whether to stop protesting or continue, and when continuing to protest won they gave some bullshit response and opened the sub. I never said moderators don’t care about their subs, I simply stated that some of them value their moderation of the sub above what the sub might want to do.

As for fracturing the community, I’d argue what Reddit did already fractured communities into people who want to protest and people who don’t. Fracturing was always going to happen, it’s only a matter of making it apparent or acting like it didn’t happen. Because of that you’re not going to move the entire community anyway. The community is fractured, some people just don’t want to move. From the mod perspective it should come down to understanding who are the people that actually make up the community you’re moderating and then doing what they want.

I don’t have an issue with mods who had the community vote and then opened the sub (or didn’t even participate in the protest in the place) if the community voted that way. I have an issue with the mods who effectively make those decisions themselves. If you’ve already decided to protest without discussing it with the community then IMO you can’t just decide to back out later, unless the community wants it. But that’s what some of the mods did. Decided to protest and then decided to stop. Then it is already in your self-interest because you’ve technically already abused your power to protest without communicating it with the community. If you then stop protesting you should also resign because it’s a breach of trust and someone who the community cannot trust shouldn’t stay as a mod. But the mods don’t do that because “who else is going to moderate?”, meaning they would much rather moderate a community that has no reason to trust them than have someone else moderate the community. How is that not putting their own interest of moderating over the interest of the community?

Mods have an attachment to their community, but most of them have a bigger attachment to mod power. Plenty of mods were willing to protest, until their mod position was threatened. It’s also why most mods won’t even consider resigning or moving their community to the elsewhere, because that puts their mod position at risk.

Having a significant impact was never on the table.

You pretty much confirmed his point. His entire idea is that it doesn’t have to be Kbin that makes better features, Kbin was simply an example. It could be Meta that makes better features. Open source developers will never be able to compete feature-wise with a corporation that will deliberately pour money into making more features than the open source developers, and Meta definitely won’t make them open source. Hence, as per your wording “Meta deserved to win in that case”, which is exactly what we’d want to avoid.