We haven’t, really. Our “complete neutrality” is infested with troll farms, where people are employed to make hundreds of accounts to spread propaganda.

I’m thinking the answer is to implement a huge barrier for troll farms, but a small speed bump for real people.

It could be oauth with Steam or your cell provider, where you can make an account if you’ve spent over $250 with them. Actual credit history would work. You can combine these and allow any of them, which might let one person make 3-4 accounts, maybe, but that’s still limited enough to make things difficult for troll farms.

There is an issue where billionaires that want to influence us have absolutely absurd resources, and maybe paying $1000 per account isn’t enough of a barrier for them. But at least it gives us a chance for the bans to stick significantly more than they do now.

It’s just a thing that needs repeated basically constantly for all of us.

People were playing text-based multiplayer, effectively mmos with PvP well before Tim-Berners Lee invented the Web Browser.

http://mud.arctic.org/ this one is still around.

But why? You don’t need telnet to transfer text.

I’ll always be able to play Balatro, Factorio, and he’ll, I’d go to text based MUDs first.

It’s always going to sound accurate. That’s what’s it’s built to do. It’s just that often the easiest way to sound accurate is to be accurate, but not always. Shortly after you forget that it’s going to fuck you.

Better not forget.

Like a wireless router?

Can your neighborhood communicate when the Internet goes down like Iran?

To be a bit less flippant, the analogy isn’t far off.

Reading terminal instructions that you can easily copy/paste is a hell of a lot easier than watching a video and clicking around menus.

The issues that you’re having wouldn’t be any easier if they showed in a GUI. Yeah, things with GUI can be more polished, but that’s a result of the effort in that product, and not a result.of the GUI.

I sympathize with what I believe is your main point, that Linux people often are condescending and refuse to make things user friendly, whether that’s in a GUI or in the terminal. But the terminal itself shouldn’t be too daunting.

You’re one of the people who would rather watch a 13 minute YouTube video than read a paragraph.

Now that’s real GDP.

Shouldn’t it be called Microsoft 250? There are 250 working days in a year. As soon as I’m home I’m using Thunderbird or Libreoffice, certainly not the product formerly known as Microsoft Office.

It’s already happening, in part because of this and in part because of the unstable, unpredictable US government.

Several European countries are looking towards investing in open source as a way to get away from American big tech because they’re suddenly considering US sanctions against them a real possibility, or at least a real threat.

On the other hand, you know the Fortran works and you can break it.

The vibe code is already broken.

I’m still pounding the Fortran button as hard as I can.

You can just have things be out of scope. It’s really okay!

Thanks for the work you’ve put into this.

Don’t get complacent. The EU countries are toying with the idea of collapsing with us. AfD doesn’t seem to be shrinking, and there will be a lot of money and propaganda dumped that way soon.

I hope you’re better at resisting it than we were, but seeing as how we’re all still on vulnerable social media…

The latest Libreoffice update has ribbon menus (optionally).

It works well when you use it for small (or repetitive) and explicit tasks. That you can easily check.

Which is probably a good thing. I appreciate projects like Thunderbird as well.

You can not push the button that says AI.

You can also hit the kill switch that completely removes that button.

That’s opt-in enough.

If it starts reading pages or doing things without you pushing a button, that’s an issue.