it’s a pointless statement to say if everyone did anything

I was agreeing with this part, except that I think OP statement was ‘hyperbolic’ not ‘pointless’; an exageration for rhetorical effect.

What I think is pointless is taking hyperbole (and most rhetoric) at face value and arguing about it. It is better to try to determine the underlying point being made (there probably is one if you look hard enough or enquire about it) and think about some more realistic scenarios.

I don’t think the original point was about <hyperbole> the vulnerability of the economy of mauritius due to overconcentration of the dodo industry </hyperbole>; or, the sustainability of a street entirely owned by landlords. Maybe someone wants to <hyperbole> make some Ronald Coase type speculation about how property rights could have saved the dodo </hyperbole>.

ok, nice and realistic. No hyperbole here.

Are you’re saying that if an economy has an increse the concentration of farming activity then economic ouput will deteriorate as fast as if it were to have instead had the same increase the concentration of parasitic activity? Very interesting idea.

Maybe I’m dense but the only way I can see that working is if the parasites become super-effective livestock and can be turned into food that is either more nutrious or has a longer shelflife than the feedstock.

And those from the fucking UK apparently.

Very similar though - just waiting for them to elect farage to gut UK public services.

That’s a problem and I remember talking about it in the 2000s when everything started to become user friendlieness. plug and play, just works and so-on, worst part is stuff being locked down and harder to jailbreak.

It’ll be fine though, I’m sure AI will install their OS for them, I won’t have a clue how it did it, but it’ll probably be better than I could do.

You’ll just add “without backdoors” to the prompt and it’ll be secure too.

I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.

:) thunderbird 2 is go. . .ing grocery shopping.

Some buses are also smaller than some US cars.

Cool! I wish there were, and hope there will be, more like you.

I cannot wait to cut off the testicles of a 3.000lb raging bull as it tries to kick my head in.

I just dont get why you have to assume that though?

Maybe I’m a pessimist, but I’ve met and worked with enough humans that I think the best assumtion is that they’re all full of shit until they prove otherwise.

It’s fine to rely on experts for some things, but if those experts aren’t subject to independent scrutiny or directly independent of the claim or sunjecy under test, or can’t give clear testable /replicable evidence, I’d just not put much weight on their testimony as a source of evidence.

SQL is not web-scale

I hope the screenshot dude is also going to stop this unquestioning belief in the things people say or claim without evidence.

Those first two paragraphs look like a tendency to prefer hero-worship to critical thought; that seems to be a fairly widespread problem in humans from long before this latest batch of demagogues.

There’s also a hint of “I’m not an ‘expert’ in it so I can’t (be bothered) to understand anything about it” also a very depressingly common attitude.

Yes, I think mostly it was farmers who deforested the planet; and are still doing it.

It might be if all the humans not hunting their meat starved to death - orwere never born. I think it really depends on what counterfactual you want to dream up.

You could argue that modern farming techniques created the agricultural surplus and enbled population growth and urbanisation and maybe helped the human population to grow to a level that hunter gatherers woud not be likely to have reached.

I think it is the scale of human population that is challenges sustainability of any tech, either method would be sustainable at some scale. I’m not convinced that modern farming practices are very sustainable for 10+bn people , for all that long. But I guess we’ll see.

Over the long term i think hunter gathering humans were around a lot longer than farmers have been, and a much much longer than modern intnsive monocultural/ pesticide / fertilizer based methods. So you’d have to wait a few thousand years to know how sustainable modern farming is.

Not really, it generally worked in the end - so in fact it’s pretty great actually at getting you out of a hole.

It was just a load of extra steps - and usually a last resort after failing with whatever came on the installation disks. So morale had taken a few hits before you even started with it.

Everything is easier when you can connect to the network immediately.

Fair play to ubuntu (and i guess kernel improvements in early 2ks) - that was such a major step in ease of installation.

Bring back the good old days of ndiswrapper.

Can I get the icon in cornflower blue? https://youtu.be/4NomQYQK1bE

pandas is obviously chinese spyware.

It depends what packages you need, and what they have to interact with.

If it’s all standalone then no problem until the hardware degrades.

For example I had laptop (DOS/Win98 ) with a pcmcia network adapter with BNC 50 ohm coax network dongle, 9/25 pin serial/parallell ports, maybe p/s2 port, floppy drive and so on.

I can’t think what I’d connect that to I might have a parallell port on my PC, but on that laptop I think I only had laplink so I’d need a linux app to interact with that. I do still hve a floppy drive somewhere, but how to connect that to my motherboard?

So I’d probably be limited to keyboard and trackball input, and audio + (monochrome) video output.

lemmings on black and white, blurry, slow refresh rate would still “work” unless the hdd got corrupted.

Within a lifetime current gen wifi, usb, ethernet etc may all be as rare as 9 pin serial is today - it’s still around of course, but you cant rely on it.