Fun facts time! There are actually two versions of Ozymandias, one written by Shelley and the other by his friend Horace Smith. They had a competition to both write a poem with the same title and subject matter, which I think it’s fair to say Shelley won. But anyway, here is Smith’s version:
I just have mine set up as an alias in zsh (I assume this would work in bash too):
alias yt=‘yt-dlp -f “bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4”’
Then just yt [url of video] from the command line should automatically grab the best quality video as an .mp4. And of course that can be tweaked to whatever you like (adding subs etc.)
I also like them just for the sake of tidiness. Some apps like Steam tend to make a big mess of dependencies all over the place, so it’s nice to have that all contained in one place. It does take up more space but I have a reasonably big hard drive so it’s kind of negligible for me.
Canonical is just weird like that, it seems. They tend to pick something and fixate on it really hard (Eg. Unity desktop, Mir, that convergent phone thing, now Snaps) and work on it until it’s almost really good, then they get fixated on the next shiny thing and dump whatever they were doing to go chase that instead.
Aside from EEE as someone else posted, for me it’s also about companies like Meta just polluting the general space with their nonsense. They already turned traditional social media into a toxic ad-filled hellhole, which is why I abandoned it and came somewhere more chill. They apparently can’t be content with dominating that space and allowing an alternative to exist, so now they want to start turning the fediverse into Facebook as well.
Some of us just want to chatter about nerd crap without being used as an audience for influencers and marketers, which is undoubtedly what Meta would bring with it.
Moving “Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud” is identified as a long-term opportunity in Microsoft’s “Modern Life” consumer space, including using “the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people’s digital experience.”
Intel and Microsoft have even hinted at Windows 12 in recent months, and Windows chief Panos Panay claimed at CES earlier this year that “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.” All of this is part of Microsoft’s broad Windows ambition, detailed in its internal presentation, “to enable improved AI-powered services” in Windows.
Words cannot express how much I do not want to participate in this version of the future.
I’m using Arch (btw) but I’m running NixOS in a VM to play around & learn it. It’s kind of wild, it’s not like any way I’m used to thinking about an OS at all, so I’m still wrapping my head around it. Super interesting though!
I’m kind of with a lot of the other people here it seems, but for me:
10-15 years max, that should be more than enough to make plenty of money from whatever you create, then it belongs to the world. I’ve heard people argue against this with: what about when the artist gets older and has to retire? Or, what about leaving something to their kids? Well, save and budget properly and learn how to live on your pension, just like everybody else.
Copyright belongs to the person who made the thing. A legal entity like a corporation can lease the right to use the thing, but it can’t own the thing.
If the copyright holder dies before the copyright term is up, it goes to the public domain. Someone tried to argue with me once that this would lead to artists being killed so people could get out of paying them, but I’d counter that the instances now of artists being killed so someone else can inherit their copyright is basically zero so I don’t really see why it would go any differently the other way.
Some of that probably needs dome fine-tuning, but it has to be better than the current system whereby you end up with mega-corporations endlessly milking shitty derivative works out of someone’s creative efforts a century after they’re dead, or people who’s full-time job is to cash-in on something their grandfather wrote, the copyright now having become multi-generational.
Yeah that’s my feeling on it too. I think an immutable OS would be great for something like an office, where you can have everyone on the exact same setup that’s way harder for non-techie people to break, and presumably if something does go wrong then the fix will work for everyone.
But yeah I’m too much of a tinkerer to use one on my personal machine.