I believe that if you re-read that and correct a mild grammatical error the intent becomes clearer (correction highlighted):

But it doesn’t directly replace people. Even in the case of taking fast food orders, first that’s not the whole job, and second, it still needs supervision.

Some of my favourite ones from trying to learn this new system include:

• invalid argument

Uh… I just typed in a magic incantation that takes up two lines on this text thing.

Which. Fucking. One!?

• no such file or directory

The final three words above apply here too. I got this one because a file I downloaded that was supposed to do something had …insert long string of technobabble from SO that included the word shahbang, I swear! It took him over ten minutes to find whatever all the treknobabble he uttered meant and then half a second to fix.

So it’s not even fear that’s at issue. It’s blank incomprehension when the error message is about as useful as those dummy lights in '80s-era cars that just said “ENGINE”.

It’s more than that, too. Even when there are GUI things (like the network manager in my system now) the GUIs are badly designed (because it turns out that UX design is an actual, learnable, technical field!), and, further, inconsistent from one piece to another so there’s little in the way of shared learning. When you learn one of these little GUI utilities you’ve learned … that one … GUI … utility.

At that point you might as well be typing stuff like ls -laR ~/Documents | awk '{print $9}' | grep -v '^\.' | xargs -I{} file {} | grep -i 'ascii\|unicode\|utf' | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -I{} sh -c 'head -n 5 "{}" | nl -ba -s": " | sed "s/^/$(basename {}): /"' | less -N

(Fake command line supplied by long-suffering SO who got a kick out of making something incredibly stupid.)

This is the absolutely perfect way to describe what it’s like listening to Linux fans give advice to newcomers.

Well, “out of the box” I hit that Bluetooth speaker problem so I didn’t have it working flawlessly such. But that and the hibernation aside, a few of the problems I’m having are more “this is different; I have to learn”. Fortunately things I do most of my work in are programs I already use: Zen for the browser, LibreOffice for office suite, etc. so I’m only getting little bits of culture shock here and there.

I’m annoyed, however, that I have to plug my speakers into the computer by old-fashioned wires. They’re fugly and in the way of other things since the plugs are in the front of the computer, right above the USB port I stick my thumb dries, etc. into.

🤣

Ah. I have no idea then.

Exactly this here. All this purity posturing drives people away from movements.

I like to borrow a phrase from Stratagem Twenty-Two (Catch the Thief by Closing His Escape Route):

围师必阙，穷寇勿迫。

Roughly translated it means, “When you surround an army, you must leave an outlet; do not press a desperate enemy too hard.”

Translating this into social movements, I’d express it as, “Leave room for redemption; don’t shun the opposition forever”.

Because if people think there’s no path to redemption, they won’t try to redeem themselves. They’ll go further down the path that you don’t like.

Mint. No idea what a DE is.

Yes. Linux is dirt simple. Which is why 2025 is the Year of the Linux Desktop. For about the 30th year running.

Linux “just works” if you view the computer before you as a toy or a game or an end unto itself. If you view it as a tool that is supposed to let you do your real work while staying out of the way, it falls down flat on its face.

For example, I have a nice Bluetooth speaker that worked flawlessly under Windows. Still works flawlessly with my phone. My SO, despite hours of reading things and trying things out while, toward the end letting out a never-ending stream of quiet profanity, could not get it to work reliably. He can get it working. And then it will just randomly cut out and he has to do it all over again (albeit not for hours anymore).

This is not the only such problem. We can’t get it to hibernate either. I have to leave my computer running all the time so I don’t lose my place with my work. When I was running Windows it was “press the power button and walk away” after about three minutes of changing some settings when I first got it.

This is a never-ending stream that a techno-nerd would probably have no problems dealing with on a daily basis, but I’m not that, and I don’t want to be. (My SO is, but he has his own work; I don’t want to treat him like my personal IT department. I’d rather just have my computer work without these little, never-ending irritations.)

But … it’s still better than Windows 11. It will be what I use until the HarmonyOS PCs stabilize and breaks free into the wider ecosystem, after which my next phone and computer both will be using HarmonyOS.

So much for travel broadening horizons.

I’m not only refusing to downgrade to Windows 11, my home system got switched to Linux (with the support of my SO) despite me thinking Linux is probably the single least user-friendly system I’ve ever had the misfortune to use.

That’s how bad Windows 11 looks to me.

“Social experiment” is code, IIRC, for “I’m being an asshole, but it’s for research so that’s OK”.

Personally I don’t care how people convert to the right way of thinking. I care that they do it.

This purity test mentality is what kills movements.

… Kinda makes it hard for me to trust them.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: never trust tech that is sold. If it’s not utter shit now, it soon will be.

Want your content to be unusable by AIpretty much anybody, just use a different writing system.

Fixed that.

Yep and nope respectively. This is an act of desperation.

I know I’m absolutely shocked and it has absolutely nothing to do with the brainectomy I had five minutes before reading this.

Nah. Only what passes for civilization in the USA. Absolutely nobody else is going to let degenerative AI run their nuclear power plants. That degree of AI cultishness is pretty much American.

Ask the AI to forge a log of them using the AI to do their work so they can do their work the proper way and prove in a log they used AI?