No one is using alcohol or mercury except in outdoor thermometers. Electronic thermometers are a solved problem.

You are arguing the equivalent of the merits of lead additives in gasoline in a world that is looking for fuel alternatives.

At least the GNU copy pasta is alive and well.

My apologies, a phonological transcription error.

lol, that’s just fake.

Look, of you’re going to quote Wikipedia on Chomsky, at least do some of the required reading:

• Chomsky publicly reviled Bolchevism, yet actively advocated for a “social revolution” using the exact same mechanisms. When questioned in a recorded interview on this point in 1974, he got up and left.
• Speaking of old-world, anticapitalist “social renegade” behaviour, he famously endorsed Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro as aspirational figures. Many of the 60s left were led astray by these figures, but Chomsky was one of the stubborn few who refused to recant their support, even after it became apparent that both had been revealed to be as power-hungry as the establishments they claimed to fight.

“When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history.”

Chomsky also continued to crow about the stellar merits of USSR agricultural output, and when presented with the discovery that they had forged the numbers in an effort to appear more productive, he did not change this support.

• Chomsky defended and rationalized violence as a legitimate means to social change, and by extension, praised authoritarian leaders on their methods and policies.
• He also wasn’t shy about rubbing elbows with the “elite”, so it should come as no big surprise that he had ties to Epstein. The fact that his wife knew of the association and only addressed it once public should tingle your Spidey sense.
• Chomsky’s “Universal Grammar” theory has been largely debunked as armchair psychology.
• Modern times are proving Chompsky was full of shit: https://www.toolify.ai/gpts/the-revolution-in-language-models-debunking-chomskys-theory-143628
• similarly, Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus” theory of language development has also been proven to be garbage.

Anecdotally, I studied linguistics in the late 90s and we were specifically prohibited from quoting Chomsky in my syntax, phonology, and semantics courses. That’s how much respect he commanded in the actual academic community. Thirty years ago.

He had some interesting ideas about language development in the 70s which have mostly been debunked since (by people who actually knew what they were talking about).

Noam Chomspky has always been a blowhard.

it I didn’t make me feel compelled to go harm some Windows users or anything like that, but your mileage may vary

I’m happy to let the conversation take its course, but I take exception to this. You damn well know that’s not what I meant.

Except electric cars are hell expensive and linux is free.

That was literally my point. Some people bought electric cars because the could, not because they wanted to effect any social change.

But other FOSS software (like the ActivityPub protocol) can for sure make a very sizeable dent in the amount of doomscrolling in one’s life.

Is activity pub only used on Linux desktop apps? Can’t a Mac or windows user participate in mastodon? Fediverse use and Linux are separate issues.

This false equivalence between Linux itself and the path of our collective salvation from social media, corporate manipulation, etc, etc is a big problem for Linux, because Linux is just a tool.

btrfs is widely praised… and also a product of Facebook. Google has poured Fons of money into FOSS development. Should we shun these tools?

Especially now, with a sizable influx of users to Linux, articles like the one Op posted create a completely false us v them narrative that just isn’t there.

You want to fight the evil social media? Drop them.

Look, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you are treading into virtue signalling territory and your article has the superior tone of those who bought electric cars in the late 2010s to lord it over the rest of us.

Using Linux is not going to stop your doom-scrolling, nor is using Linux by itself telling the big corpos anything at all. Stop conflating using Linux with “sticking it to Facebook”.

Linux is a tool, and it is a tool that allows freedom of its use. That’s it.

This is the nature of modern, post ww2 foreign policy.

If you see only absolute adherence to your country’s values as good and non-adherence as bad, you will end up in the terrible position of absolutist states like north Korea and Turkmenistan. In these places, leaders enjoy a good life and the average citizen has very few options beyond just existing miserably.

The world is not black and white and there is no such thing as a perfect trading partner.

Whoah, what the fuck. Do you live in a Joseph Conrad novel??

Not a ham radio operator

agile frequency hopping with a random key

No kidding.

The US directly made China as economically powerful as it currently is.

Not really. We have had access to ml for a while and google used ml to blur license plates in streetview for a long time now. It’s just pattern recognition with reinforcement.

Neural learning has been around since 2004-ish.

I know. You can’t make this shit up.

I’m glad my poor old dad isn’t alive to see this.

Edit: I mean, I wish he weren’t dead, but this would upset him greatly.

We are certain.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-nigeria-airstrike-christmas-day-9.7028229

Well, I felt you were drawing relevance away from the initial intent of the quoted maxim. Regardless, looks like I might have overreacted. Let’s just chalk this up to internet comments.

Oh, my apologies.

I didn’t realize you were being intractable.

Is it, though? Has the system been keeping us down, or are the ppl in charge just stupid and greedy? Assigning intent makes the unfairness sting less.

I read the article… I’m not picking up what you’re implying here? What’s the link to trump?

Is it the rhetoric of “foreign ppl shouldn’t be having babies here?”

Your argument might have some weight if Roblox had been included in the ban. You know, Roblox, the well-known haven of groomers and pedos.