Trust me, I am all too familiar with losing hope in humanity as I get older and more cynical. That doesn’t mean I want to spend my time watching a show about torture and misery and sadness and hopelessness. I want something better out of fiction than I get out of real life. Otherwise, what’s even the point?
I’ve never watched Picard myself, but the the main thing I took away from watching the video was that the person who made it loved TNG for being a show that tried to take a realistic look at our problems and present a fun show about a world where we have found solutions for them, while inspiring people all over the world, including the person who made the video, to become scientists and engineers. Meanwhile Picard is a show that is miserable and hopeless and will never inspire anyone to do anything. Also it just wasn’t well written.
That’s just my personal main take away from a single video about a show I haven’t watched, so take that for what it’s worth.
Huh, yeah, you’re right. I missed that the first time, but it’s how the computers are networked, not the OS.
No. That’s not what I said. I said the manufacturers not testing their equipment on Linux made it so, and more users would change that. Actually, looking at it again that isn’t even true. This example has nothing to do with the operating system at all. It’s caused by connecting with a computer on a different subnet (or I guess more accurately the same subnet as the printer), which would have happened even if the OS were Windows.
Honestly, this is a pretty good example of why this isn’t an inherent Linux problem. It’s a problem of using any OS that isn’t popular enough to be supported by manufacturers. More people using Linux would cause problems like this to stop happening.
I realize that’s a distinction without a difference to a lot of people, and that’s totally okay. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but it matters to me that the benefits of Linux are specific to the OS, while most of the problems are not.
I tried out Gentoo for a while, and just using binaries for the web browser and office suite made the compile times a complete non-issue. The problem I had that made me give it up was that when there is software you want that isn’t in the official repos there are a thousand different ways of getting it, and all of them suck. Overlays are supposed to be the solution for that, but man that experience was just awful.
I tried all kinds of things, but in the end all the options basically boiled down to risking breakage, maintaining my own packages, or not using emerge at all, which just feels like it’s defeating the whole purpose of being on Gentoo in the first place.
Look, if you love declarative systems that’s cool. I’m genuinely happy for you that you have much better options now. That can only be good.
That being said, they only solve problems that I don’t have. I do not care even the tiniest amount about whether a system is declarative or not, and I’m definitely not going to go out of my way to seek them out. If you want to call that “out of touch” then so be it.
Uh, yeah, that was the point I was making.
Would you rather they had used AI?
Have you seen a map of population centers? That’s not what they look like.
Yes, my “only” point is that analog has less maintenance. If you want anything to last more than a decade, maintenance is the only thing that matters. How long will something last is the same question as how hard is it to maintain. They are the same thing.
You cannot possibly be this stupid. I refuse to believe it. If you stuff a vinyl record in a cabinet for a century, you’ll still have a mostly functional recording. If you stuff an SSD in a cabinet for a decade you’ll probably just have a paperweight at the end, and that’s comparing 70 year old analog storage technology to the current standard of digital storage. This is a consistent pattern throughout all of history. Analog storage is just far, far more robust to data loss. All the error-correction in the world doesn’t help if you aren’t actually running that error-correction constantly forever. That is the entire point I’ve been trying to make this whole time that everyone just keeps ignoring to spout non sequiturs about how digital data transmission works at me.
Okay, it’s not really the point I’m trying to make here, but since you bring it up, actually it does matter that we lose the ability to decipher the meaning of digital storage. That is a problem that has only gotten worse.
More importantly, there is meaning in handwriting. We can learn things from how different people wrote the same thing. And people do try to convey subtleties of meaning through drawing the same letter in different ways, and of course, most importantly, you completely ignored the actual point I was trying to make, that even if we ignore that and assume every B is always the same we aren’t talking about content. We are talking about storage media. Smearing ink on paper isn’t a digital process even if you’re literally just writing 1s and 0s. There have been digital ways of storing information for as long as there have been analog ones. Things like beads or knots in ropes. The reason you never hear about them isn’t because they didn’t exist. It’s because all the information they contain has decayed to nonsense. Digital is very binary that way. It’s perfectly retrievable until it’s perfectly gone. We have a lot of techniques now to help extend that useful life, but they still all require active maintenance, and most digital storage media has an average lifespan in single digit years. Even for digital information, the oldest stuff we still have around was stored in analog ways.
What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didn’t copy it to another one a checksum won’t help you.
Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that’s good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.
You know that vinyl is not the only way of recording analog information, right?
True. I wasn’t trying to argue that there are no advantages to digital, or even that we should go back to analog. Just that the argument in the post doesn’t make sense.
That is an actual fair criticism. Well, part of it. All of our current digital media technology actually degrades over time faster than analog ones, but they’re so easy to copy that it’s not really a problem for things that people like to make copies of. It is a problem for archiving though. I wasn’t trying to argue that digital has no advantages. Just that it’s not magically better in every way.
Is that really even true of emulators of old consoles? There’s not a lot of new features coming out for the original PlayStation. Either way, part of the reason that SwanStation is dead is that it’s not even the best libretro PS1 emulator anyway.