This person ponies.

My impression is that wealth and income are becoming more and more unequal

Both are true, people are making more and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. So everyone is getting richer, with the rich are getting richer faster.

Ithink it’s keeping up with the Joneses. The sources I have listed above show the following:

• income is increasing
• personal savings is going down

Assuming inflation statistics are accurate, that means people are spending on different things than they did in the past.

Here’s an interesting source, and a table from that page:

Basically, people are reducing savings instead of switching to cheaper products, reducing consumption, or delaying purchases. It’s not a huge change, but it’s a steady trend.

So I’m guessing people are seeing less value in savings than they did previously.

The studies I’ve looked at aren’t super granular, and the changes in housing and medical care don’t seem to tell the whole story.

Since renting is more expensive than buying a home in the long run

That’s true if you just look at dollar amounts, but if you include the opportunity cost of the down payment, if that money is invested in stocks, the rent vs buy math works out to be more of a wash. This obviously varies by area with some being very renter friendly and others being very homeowner friendly, but on average it’s pretty close.

I would probably donate most of it to a worthy cause. I don’t need anywhere near that amount of money, anything over $5M gets donated.

Great post about mental health and therapy!

I just wanted to point out that I have a very different take on why UBI is worth considering.

the way it goes currently means sooner or later there will be more people without jobs than with jobs

I don’t think this is necessarily true. This type of FUD has come up with pretty much every major technological shift. This article goes over that, and here are some examples:

• Industrial Age - Luddites vs Looms - worried weaving machines would kill jobs
• Printing Press - ended scribes
• Ford’s assembly lines - kill craftsmanship

In each case, the fears were largely unfounded, but they seemed very prescient at the time.

I don’t recommend UBI because I’m worried AI or some other technological advance will kill jobs, I recommend UBI because I think it empowers workers, encourages entrepreneurship, and simplifies social safety nets (less work to get the benefits you need).

if we don’t want the guillotines to come up (we are well on the way to that, since it becomes more and more mainstream to openly talk about stuff like that)

Is it though? I mostly see it on forums like this one that heavily tilt to young people on one end of the political spectrum. I think it has more to do with influencers and echo chambers than an actual shift in public perception. By all metrics, the average person is doing better today than at any other time in history (real (inflation adjusted) median personal income is at an all time high). The problem, IMO, is perception. People think they’re worse off because of social media (people only post the highlights), influencers (survivorship bias), and comparing themselves to their parents (further along in their career).

The one area that’s troubling is average age of first-time home-owners, which has become about 40 (source):

I think the critical factor here isn’t necessarily home prices, but personal savings rates declining. People just aren’t saving as much any more, meaning they’re spending a greater share of their income, so it’ll take longer to make a down payment on a home. And with inflation-adjusted household incomes steadily increasing over time, I think the simple answer is that people are spending more of their money on short-term wants.

I don’t think guillotines will fix this issue, people need a better relationship w/ social media (which for many people, will be no relationship at all) and a greater focus on planning for the future. It all starts with building good habits while young, as in, when your income is so small that your savings doesn’t really matter in the long term.

I get it, life is hard and people want easy solutions. But most of the time, there are no easy solutions, and any solution proposed as easy is an outright lie. Instead of focusing on society-level “solutions,” instead focus on how to improve your own life as it is. That’s largely what therapists offer, they don’t wave a magic wand and make your problems disappear, they reframe your problems into things you can manage, and that is empowering.

This is something I think UBI could help with, at least a form that allows you to survive without working. Being able to quit without worrying how you’ll make rent is super empowering and is something therapy can’t provide.

This wouldn’t work for everyone, but I think there’s a good chance overall productivity would improve if people felt like that instead of terriified of losing a job. Maybe then people would stand up for problems they see instead of hiding it so it’s someone else’s problem.

No, it’s more that cheaters go for the easiest option. If that’s Linux, then they’ll use Linux.

The issue isn’t Linux users, but game devs/anticheat devs not putting in the effort to find a proper solution.

SKG doesn’t specify how companies need to solve the problem, only that games need to continue to function after the company stops supporting them.

For some games (e.g. Assassin’s Creed), that could be as simple as disabling the online aspect and having a graceful fallback. For others, that could mean letting people self-host it. Or they can provide documentation for the server API and let the community build their own server. Or they can move it to a P2P connection.

Game companies have options. All SKG says is that if I’ve purchased something, I should be able to keep using it after support ends.

Yes, and 2021 was a perfect storm of a bunch of stuff:

• Windows 11 would break compatibility with older processors
• Steam Deck announced preorders in July - wouldn’t release until 2022, but there was a lot of excitement about Linux gaming
• LTT made a video series (part 1 was Nov. 2021) where Linus used Linux exclusively for a month

So yeah, a lot of people were curious at the time, and while not all of it was directly related to Windows 11, that certainly was a factor.

Here’s a graphic showing that from this page:

I wish there was a graphic that showed English users with SteamOS separated from non-SteamOS users, because I think if we get 5% of non-SteamOS users, we should start to see devs pay a lot more attention. We’re starting to see devs make SteamOS-specific versions (e.g. THPS 1&2 offline mode), so the next step is getting Linux-specific adjustments for more games.

That’s really too bad. I’ve heard great things about Bazzite, and it’s what I recommend when someone wants SteamOS.

That said, that’s a bit different from what I’m talking about. I’m suggesting OEMs ship a pre-installed Linux desktop, and users are presented an option on setup about which DE to use. So all that would change is enabling one and not the others, but they’d always be present. After install, you could switch between them if desired without messing with the package manager.

I personally use openSUSE (leap on server, tumbleweed on desktop, Aeon Desktop on laptop), and their installer is solid, but I haven’t tried it on a 4k monitor (worked fine on 1440p). Unfortunately, I don’t recommend my distro of choice because it’s not popular enough to have a good newb support network, whereas that’s basically Bazzite’s core demographic.

That’s a really poor analogy here though. Here’s one that I think is better:

• instance = country
• community = bar
• federation = visa agreements

Communities can block individual users that are undesirable without the instance getting involved. That’s the Nazi bar example, and it’s totally reasonable for communities to have strict moderation for who they let in.

Instances should only get involved if admins from another instance refuse to take action against their users who cause issues. And an instance can block another with minimal drama, it’s like border security not accepting visas from that country any more. Until we have evidence that an instance isn’t capable of enforcing rules on its users, there’s no reason to ban them.

They don’t need to, just give them 3 screenshots and ask which they want. Show KDE, GNOME, and whatever the distro wants as the third. Maybe include some bullet points below each explaining what they are (pick one from the last two):

• KDE - familiar, extensible
• GNOME - modern, minimalist
• Cinnamon/Budgie/MATE - something in the middle
• XFCE/LXQT - super lightweight for older systems

Maybe select one by default that the OEM likes, but showing the option helps nudge them toward the idea that this is a flexible system.

Why is it that only the larger cloud providers are acceptable? What’s wrong with one of the smaller providers like Linode/Akamai? There are a lot of crappy options, but also plenty of decent ones. If you build your infrastructure over a few different providers, you’ll pay more upfront in engineering time, but you’ll get a lot more flexibility.

For something like Signal, it should be pretty easy to build this type of redundancy since data storage is minimal and sending messages probably doesn’t need to use that data storage.

Exactly!

FUTO is a force for good IMO, even though I disagree with their approach. I use:

• Grayjay - way nicer than NewPipe and works with a bunch of services
• FUTO Keyboard - best keyboard alternative for swipe typing IMO
• Polycentric - I’ve posted a bit through Grayjay and want it to catch on

I wish their software was FOSS, but at least it’s source available and I think they fixed it to allow noncommercial redistribution of modifications. It’s not perfect, but it’s a force for a good.

Then you get sympathy and a story to tell at parties. I see no downside.

It isn’t even unique to AI, human operators get things wrong all the time. Any time you put something involving natural language between the user/customer and completing a task, there’s a significant risk of it going wrong.

The only time I want hands-free anything is when driving, and I’d rather pull over than deal with voice activation unless it’s an emergency and I can’t stop driving.

I don’t get this fascination with voice activation. If you asked me to describe my dream home if money was no object and tech was perfect, voice activation would not be on the list. When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency. I can type almost as fast as I can speak, and I can make scripts or macros to do things far faster than I can describe them to a computer. Shortcuts are far more efficient than describing the operation.

If a product turns to voice activation, that tells me they’ve given up on the UX.

We need two things:

1. much shorter copyright and patent durations, like 14 and 5 years respectively (14 comes from OG copyright duration)
2. stronger enforcement of copyright to protect creators from AI stealing their work

They should happen in that order, and ideally copyright would only be awarded to individuals (or perhaps specifically named lists of individuals, with some reasonable cap), not corporations. The current system is absolutely bonkers.

I hate it when management comes asking something like, “how are we planning to use AI?” instead of “what tools would help you be more productive?” The first puts me on the defensive, and my answer is “we’re already using various forms of AI, from machine learning to features our tools have,” and that isn’t a productive conversation. The second question is more useful, since I’ll mention things the asker could actually help with, like feedback from other parts of the company, more budget to hire and promote, etc.

AI might be the right solution, and it might not, but you won’t get that answer if you ask the wrong question.

That’s the dictionary definition, sure, but that doesn’t cover common use, or connotation. When most people use “propaganda,” they typically mean government-affiliated messaging that hides the truth and pushes a narrative to get people to fall in line.

And as the saying goes if 9 people sit at a table and a paedophile sits down and none of them say anything, there are 10 paedophiles at the table.

I really don’t like this argument. There’s a big difference between not reporting something and being complicit in that something.

For example, my neighbor smokes pot, and likely does so illegally. If I don’t report them, does that make me a pot smoker? No, that’s absurd! I personally don’t agree w/ the drug law despite having no desire to use marijuana, so there’s absolutely no reason for me to report them.

That said, if my neighbor was a pedophile, I would report them. Why? Because I want to protect kids, and getting the police involved is the best way to do that. So if there are 9 people at a table and a pedophile sits down and none says anything, there’s still one pedophile, but also 9 pedophile enablers. I don’t think those people should be guilty by association, but I do believe they are shirking their moral responsibility.