Me too, let’s touch circles

Eh, between the financial expense, the human reluctance to change and the still very real barrier of “We can’t migrate where there’s nowhere to go” with respect to the software landscape, I think we need to compare our definitions of could. It’s not just a business culture issue either. All change brings friction, but trying to replace the entire infrastructure of a company (and it has to be pretty much everything - one selling point of MS is how thoroughly integrated its products are) is basically ripping out most of the internal organs and replacing them with transplants, but also trying to keep the patient alive somehow… and you need to sell the people with the money on the idea.

Throwing away and starting over is costly, no matter the context. So no, I don’t think larger companies can even make that choice at this point.

Smaller companies without the same inertia, in industries where there are Linux-compatible tools? Yeah, they can, provided the software they need is there too.

I use Linux privately, and haven’t had a Windows OS on my PC in years except for a VM I needed for a university project. I’m all for hoping that specialised apps get developed for Linux too. I like mine and would probably enjoy using it for private purposes too, but it won’t work with wine and learning different tools is obviously an additional time investment in my free time compared to the one I get paid for learning.

But I’m both quick and happy to learn. Many people are not (and I see that daily with my users). The cost of switching and disruption in productivity would probably be disastrous enough to ruin the company even before considering the fact that “industry giant unable to fulfill contractual obligations because they have to rebuild half their infrastructure from nothing” would be a crippling blow to its professional reputation in an industry where IT is still considered second-class at best, the ideological gain of no longer depending on Microsoft would net them nothing and in an economic system where short-term profitability is more important than long-term independence.

And that’s not considering the difficulty of convincing company leadership that Windows really is that bad and Linux really is much better and that we only need to provide the financial incentive and invest the time and money to have someone port already expensive software to a different platform. FFS, we’re still struggling to get people to see IT as a service rather than an expense.

Finally, even if they were to switch out their entire IT infrastructure, they’d start asking whether it would be cheaper to outsource our internal IT to a company that already knows the new stuff than to retrain all of us. I’d very much like to keep my permanent position, even if it means using Windows.

Ours is. Last I heard, our Client Management team is already looking for different ways to disable it and make triple sure it stays off.

(inb4 “Switch to Linux”: several thousand users, specialised software and a technologically conservative company would already make that a non-starter)

The Pepe doesn’t quite have the same significance and weight yet. It’s not too late. Make leftist Pepes. Drown their identifiers in false positives until they become useless.

A signal is less useful the more “false” signals (i.e. noise) pollute the medium it’s transferred over.

If we can make it clear that “their” memes aren’t actually just theirs by “re-appropriating” them and abuse whatever secret identification dogwhistles they want to use, we can drown their signals in noise.

Posting Pepes for non-nazi purposes is an act of resistance.

I mean, the minimum you need is some authentication mechanism, a secure certificate, an authenticated endpoint to send a live data feed to, an endpoint to query a given live data feed from, maybe a website to serve the whole thing for people that don’t have their own tool for reading and playing back a live data feed…

…and the infrastructure to distribute that data feed from ingest to content delivery. Easy.

(Note: easy does not mean cheap. Even if a live data feed ingest and delivery was easy to implement (which I doubt it is), you’d skip buffering (to reduce memory demands) and only used a single server (to spare such stupid things as distributed networks, load balancing, redundancy or costs for scaling cloud solutions), you’d still have computational overhead of network operations and of course a massive data throughput.)

Ternary if?then:else

That community is… something. For every funny or good complaint there’s a dozen whine posts, mostly by the same person. Did someone piss in their coffee or are they the probably least lucrative M$ shill ever?

Actually, it would be OOP.suck(ddplf.getBalls())

I always use butterflies

A lot of data throughput and buffer just for ingesting and distributing the live streams themselves, technical and business administration to keep things running, moderation to ensure compliance with content laws and data protection regulation, and then there’s still all the other fancy features major platforms offer if you want to compete for users.

Multiple resolution options with server-side rescaling for users with slower connections? Graphics computing power.
Store past broadcasts? Massive amounts of data storage capacity.
Social features? Even more moderation.

And we haven’t even touched on the monetary issue of “How do you pay for all that?” and all its attached complexity. You could be running the nicest platform in the world, but without any funding, it won’t run very long.

taints in its history

Ooh, let’s play “find the dark history”! What better way to distract from today’s issues and avoid talking about solutions for tomorrow’s problem!

This is me agreeing with you, to be clear. The description “taints in its history” is so ubiquitous as to be useless. Yes, acknowledging the errors of the past is important to learn from them and improve, but the focus needs to be on that learning and improving.

The NATO has potential to be a force of security. In a modern world, conflict between peers is more destructive than ever and the returns on aggressive action are more strongly affected by the strength of the defense, such a union of forces can discourage attack by making it too unprofitable.

Of course, that requires the union to actually stand united and the potential aggressor to be reasonable and motivated by the state’s prosperity. Neither of those seem entirely guaranteed right now…

No, but the point is that posting “Stalin executes people” jokes in .ml-run communities would not go over well.

revolutionize how women get care

About fucking time for that

One time long ago, a guy on the train (whether tweaking or mental issues, I don’t know) sat down across from me, which was probably the most spacious spot in a fairly busy train. I didn’t register any unusual behaviour, nor was I - white male teen, at the time - particularly concerned.

He suddenly leaned in and asked me what I’d do if he killed me. Die, obviously. He then followed up telling me he could punch me in the face. He did neither of these things, eventually got off the train, and I never saw him again. The incident obviously left an impression, but I wouldn’t say I am or was traumatised by it.

I think this exemplifies that difficult grey zone. I don’t think it was motivated by hate, given I’m a fairly “safe” demographic. I also didn’t take him for the type of bully that does it for the power fantasy, or the type of macho needing to establish superiority.

Was it a threat or just a rather unhinged musing on social restraints? Was there actual intent to hurt me, kept in check by some lucky circumstances, or was it just a brief outburst of intrusive thoughts? I did feel threatened and intimidated, but is what I felt enough to judge his actions?

Regardless of the legal question, he probably needed help - medical or social - rather than punishment. I’m not qualified to assess that, but that question has bounced around my head ever since. What led to this outburst? What could be done to prevent that? What could be done to help him?

It’s not strictly relevant to the legal question - his actions are his own to account for, though his mental state may be a mitigating factor - but I figured I’d add it as context because I think it’s worth considering.

So if YouTube provided an RSS feed for its channels, all videos would be podcasts because they can be processed as audio-only and are distributed via RSS?

What exactly makes a podcast then?

Probably because there are no sanctions against them that his government is cracking down on? I don’t think he wants to get involved in politics so much as stay out of prison.

Yeah, you’re right. I got hit on a sore spot, responded impulsively and was a dick about it.