I mean, client-side scanning would do shit all to help anyway because nothing prevents culprits from encrypting the messages in a different app they are using for sending. This is just entirely a net loss – right as fash are poised to take over too. What a mess.

Go fash, lose cash. 👍🏻

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Sorry, I should have been clearer: his party scored badly in the EU elections, so he lost credibility in France and is calling snap elections in France. I’ll edit my comment above to clarify.

Macron’s party got disastrous results and got trounced by the far right in the European elections.

He had been selling himself as the shield that protected France from the rise of the local far right party. With these results, he has lost his credibility, and therefore his government did as well.

Therefore he’s calling out-of-schedule French parliamentary elections that – I assume – he hopes will reelect his party and allies ahead of the far right. It might work: the far right party polls strong at around 30%, but has few allies, and may not be able to form a coalition government. If Macron himself can, that will strengthen his legitimacy.

Needless to say, this is a risky gamble.

Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.

If you are considering picking up Outer Wilds, by god, go in blind. It’s all about finding out.

Empirically: a pandemic. :(

Pern!

Although the person who picked the Culture is absolutely on to something.

Basic Ikea office chair plus ergonomic butt cushion. No need to spend a ton of money.

It’s a trade-off that works for many. Not much you and I can do about it, even if it’s frustrating.

Thank you! I know all these things. This still doesn’t help when the DAW support and VST compatibility aren’t there.

If you’re intent on doing music production on Linux, at least do yourself a favor and get a Reaper license, there are few enough pro DAWs that are Linux native. But be aware that many of the big industry VSTs are still not going to work. If you’re fine sticking to e.g. ZynAddSubFX or Pianoteq, though, knock yourself out.

But you can’t reasonably expect musicians to jump those hoops and abandon their fav VSTs when their Windows tooling is there, and works.

JACK is very cool and if you’re willing to tinker there’s some really awesome stuff that can be done with LADISH session management and e.g. native Linux VSTs.

It’s still a non-option for musicians who just want to do music, not tinkering.

Considering it’s a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I’m gonna go with yes.

Google has literally been reporting billions of net profit every quarter.

This is about appeasing shareholders. The capitalist class hates that tech employees have been able to command decent salaries and has been striving to push back for a while now.

Big missing piece there: cloud.

In the first half of the 2010s, there was a study from Gartner or another such company, that forecast that the cloud service market would amount to 1 trillion USD/year by 2030 or so, and since then the big players have been racing to try and carve as much as possible of the future juicy pie from Amazon’s hands.

Google completely missed the boat at first then pivoted hard. MS leveraged its deep enterprise presence as hard as it could to get existing customers into its cloud offering; that’s why your MS consumer products (Office, OneDrive, etc) are tied at the hip with cloud these days. Not for consumers, for the business market.

It’s business to business, however, so the generak public doesn’t hear about it a lot. It’s also largely non-sexy, and therefore not headline-worthy, with a few exceptions. The whole AI thing, for instance. But even there, consumers are not the target market. Cloud customers are.

In that sense Google, MS and Amazon absolutely already are the new IBM and Oracle.

Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Meta is still trying to execute on its mission to connect people while still headed by people who have no idea how people connect. Apple is Apple, keeps just making oodles of money off the kind of people who buy Apple products.

I had the same problem on my first try! I’d been trying to do everything and talk to everyone about everything and just drowned in words.

On my second try, though, I took a different approach: what if I am this guy, just want to get the job done, and only do stuff for the purpose of trying to progress the case? That worked great for me, and the game is structured so this still takes you through much of its contents – only, now, there is a purpose to it.

So, thanks, friend! I am indeed now enjoying this game, and I hope you are enjoying whatever you are playing also.

Finally getting into Disco Elysium after a false start last year. Great game, spectacular writing, though it does require a little bit of investment.

It’s journalist for, someone blabbed but doesn’t want to be named. Don’t sweat it.

No.

The French have started using new typographic conventions to turn nouns and adjectives neutral, or at least dual-gendered. French is a deeply gendered language by default, so for instance the word for author is “auteur” if the author is male and “autrice” if the author is female. If unknown, then… The author is assumed male.

This is of course not great, and so the French people have started using constructions like “auteur.ice” or somesuch in order to include both options in the word. This approach appears to have become reasonably popular.

The French right wing is EXTREMELY upset about this and is seeking to get it outright banned (they may already have succeeded actually).

As far as I understand this museum is the brainchild of the fascist party RN and is entirely about the French language as the right wing thinks it should be spoken, as opposed to how it actually is. So, just yet another instance of taxpayer-funded reactionary crap.