This.

There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it’s really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.

For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn’t be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn’t fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there’s hardly a point).

So when looking at the technology in an early state, it’s really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.

GNOME is horrible. Looks pretty, but it’s opinionated approach means that nothing works as expected and you have to relearn how to use a stupid window manager.

I prefer Ook! Ook! over Ooga.

Are you using Arch btw?

True, but it only works if there will actually be a rebellion started by some higher-up.

Working from home has been the default for the last few millenia. Who would have thought that it could make people happier?

That makes everything pretty difficult.

What generally triggers military coups is that one of these higher-ups rebels when or after they are removed.

But yeah, there’s a time window for that and it’s closing rapidly.

There won’t be a rebellion by the people. There hardly can be one, without a rebellion by the military.

I’m not sure either of these events can even be counted as an attack. Pearl Harbour is roughly 3800km from the mainland. It’s basically an overseas territory. An attack there is like saying the Falkland War was an attack on the UK.

And 9/11 was a terrorist attack, not a war. While it was a big attack, it was still only carried out by a handful of non-state-actors. That’s quite a different thing than an actual military attack by a country.

Afaik, the last war on US soil was the civil war.

This is why such a revolution doesn’t start from the masses, but from someone higher up who gives the command and then people follow them.

If a lowly soldier disobeys, he’s removed. And grass-roots doesn’t work for that kind of stuff.

So you are also against printed paper in general, because writing letters by hand is an art form and you prefer skill over automation?

This.

There are very many shades of “I can’t leave”.

• I can’t leave because I would lose money/friends/job
• I can’t leave because I’d have to rebuild everything.
• I can’t leave because I can’t afford to bring all my stuff.
• I can’t leave because I physically don’t have the money for a plane ticket, a passport and the immigration process and I’d have to take out a loan
• I can’t leave because I don’t have the money for the plane ticket, a passport and the immigration process and I cannot take out a loan

Depending on how urgently you want to leave, some of these reasons are “can’t leave” or turn into “I’ll leave anyway”.

It’s not all quite as rosy.

Yes, Linux is much more capable now than it was 10 years ago and it’s much more capable of being used as a main system. I myself have been using Linux as my main system for a few years now.

But it’s also a fact that a lot of stuff might not work (even if it works for someone else) and that some things are still more difficult than they should be.

For example, on my laptop cannot wake from sleep since kernel 6.11. I have manually sourced a 6.10 from an older version of my distro and keep holding it back, so that I can use my laptop as a laptop. For someone without technical skill, this would mean that their laptop just can’t sleep any more. Hibernate also doesn’t work.

Another example is that LibreOffice still makes a lot of formatting mistakes when it has to open word documents. And sure, everyone could just switch to odf, but it’s not quite as easy to make everyone else switch to odf. It makes it really hard to use LibreOffice in any kind of professional environment. Wouldn’t want to make a powerpoint presentation that then looks like shit when it’s played on a different PC.

Lastly, Nvidia sucks, but it’s also close to the only option for laptops with dGPUs. When I look for laptops with dGPUs available in my area on a price comparison platform, I find 760 laptops with Nvidia GPUs and only 3 with AMD, all of which are priced at least €500 more than comparable Nvidia devices. So if you want to go for a gaming laptop, Nvidia is pretty much the only option, and under Linux it really sucks. Steam games generally work ok for me, but trying to use Heroic Launcher to play anything from my gigantic library of free Epic/Amazon/GoG games, about 10% of the games I tried actually work. And even with those that work, my laptop sometimes just decides that a slide show with 3 FPS is good enough. That stays even after reboots and resets, and after a few days it returns to normal. Only to go back to slideshow mode a few days later.

If you just use your laptop to run a browser, I can recommend Linux 100%.

If you want to do anything else and don’t have any technical skills and/or don’t want to spend hours fixing things that should just work, I can’t fully recommend it.

It’s a wildly different thing, though.

Married vs. unmarried means you have a companion, but you still got the same demands on your life as before. You might have to arrange schedules, but that’s about it. Your day has just as much free time as before, you can stay out just as long as before and your social opportunities aren’t restricted due to the fact that you are married.

In fact, there’s no difference at all between married vs. unmarried and in a relationship vs single. Getting married changes nothing in that regard.

Having kids, on the other hand, changes everything. Now your social activities are limited by your responsibilities towards the child(ren). Can’t stay out until 2am if you know the kids will be awake at 7am and will wake you up 3 times in between. Can’t take a random day off and do a day trip if the kid needs to be at school that day. Can’t visit friends after work together with your partner if the kid needs to be in bed at 7pm. It’s a massive limiter on social opportunities.

At the same time, spending time with the kids is pretty great in its own right, and that’s what the article touches upon. If you are married but don’t have kids, you might get your fill with your partner after work. If you have 5h or so every day with your partner from getting back from work until going to bed, that’s a ton of quality time.

But if you return from work at 5pm and the kids go to bed at 7pm, then pretty much all the interaction you get is eating and preparing the kids for bed.

As a father, working from home means I can see my kids grow up, especially in their earlier years. It means I was there when they took their first steps. I’m there when they start talking. I can actually spend time with them, get close to them, be part of them growing up. I’m there when they cry, when they say the funniest stuff. You know, be with them when it matters.

With my wife, on the other hand, as much as I love her, I’m not going to miss a ton of really important things if I’m not around her 24/7. On the contrary, she’s happy for any bit of actual alone time she gets.

The act of drawing an image to a piece of canvas is also part of the art.

Same as the act of drawing an image on the PC and letting automation move it from the virtual realm into the physical.

Even if you copy the Mona Lisa down to the subatomic level, the original would still be seen as a one of a kind thing and would be vastly more valuable than the copy.

Because it’s not about the physical object.

It’s about the hope that it can be, one day, sold for more money than it was bought for. The same thing happens every day with all sorts of things where the price vastly outpaces the utility of the thing.

If you buy milk, you buy it to drink/eat/use it. So you pay for its utility. A litre of milk is worth its nutritional value. There’s no speculation or anything like that going on, and thus, the price is pretty low and pretty stable.

If you buy valueables (art, diamonds, stock, crypto, NFTs, …) the object itself is usually not useful or at least not nearly as useful as its price. Yes, there are some technical applications where you need gold or diamonds, but if that was the only thing they are used for, they’d be much, much cheaper. Art, stock, crypto, NFTs, stamps, and many similar things, on the other hand, have little to no direct utility. Nobody would buy the Mona Lisa because they have an empty bit of wall in their living room that would benefit from a bit of art as decoration.

These things, which are inherently worthless (if they were priced by their utility). The only reason for them to be “worth” a lot is the expectation that someone else will pay more for it in the future, for the sole purpose of finding someone else who’ll do the same.

It’s just a morensocially accepted form of gambling, nothing else.

And for that, it doesn’t matter if the thing being sold is a link to some picture of a bored monkey, a piece of paper with some paint on it, a banana ducttaped to a wall, or some shiny rock.

This is it. Yes, a registration/ID system can make the tasks of a tyrannical government slightly easier, but not having one didn’t exactly stop ICE raids. On the contrary, having such a system would make it much easier for legal immigrants to prove that they are legal and it could help them against illegal deportation due to misidentification.

And in any case the problem is the tyrannical government, not the ID system.

It’s the same with anything that had a value that goes beyond pure utility.

It’s not hard to make a functionally identical copy of the Mona Lisa, indistinguishable by anyone apart from the most highly skilled forgery experts.

And yet the Mona Lisa is still incredibly valuable and considered a one-of-a-kind, same as diamonds in the OP.

All of that value is based on the greater fool theory: the theory that if I pay a lot of money for it, I think I will find a greater fool later on who will pay even more for it. And that fool believes the same thing until the charade eventually collapses.

and I also prefer to keep art in the realm of Humans

Advocatus diaboli: 2D printers didn’t take art out of the realm of humans either, even though they allow for non-hand-painted images.

Yeah, a tattoo printer would have to be at least a 5 axis robot. Technically, that’s not a huge issue, and even pressure sensing or using machine vision to adjust the print aren’t that difficult to do.

But even if it becomes a mass produced device, manufacturing costs for the robot part alone would be at least 3k-5k and then you will need a skilled operator to control that thing.

So you are replacing a minimum wage tattoo artist with an expensive robot and an even more expensive robot operator.

Doesn’t really make sense.

The same thing holds true, btw, for pretty much all “humanoid robot applications”. Minimum wage wokers are incredibly cheap, maintenance and setup costs (aka healthcare and education) are paid for by the employee, there’s no vendor lock in and if you don’t need them anymore you can just fire them whenever you want.

That’s incredibly hard to compete against for a generalized robot.