From the outside it seems that your progressive movements were a pretty good tool to spread thin the effort that could have gone someplace right, and also to weaken movements which were targeted at the real problems (for example, in the small world of FOSS it’s how FSF and GNU were slowly marginalized into something perceived as unreasonable and Stallman specifically pressed out, and no, his logically correct defense of some kinds of pedophilia and him being generally cringe were not the reason).

Also let’s please remember that everyone flocking to centralized platforms was welcomed by those progressive movements, their activists for whichever reason thought that the scale and the censorship will work in their favor and not those calling to fell the tall trees.

So - this is the logical outcome of what various movements have been doing. This part should make you optimist. And the feeling that you can’t certainly show at something at say that it will succeed should be liberating, not depressing.

O-OK, just so you knew, here in Russia ADHD is famous among clueless normies for being “that fake diagnosis invented by murrikan big pharma to put everyone on amphetamines”, and a lot of those clueless normies happen to be doctors. And that’s how it looks from the outside, I’ve never tried to get a diagnosis for ADHD. So - at least you can get real medicine. In theory.

Wow you are way off time wise, I spoke of the 70’s and 80’s. Everything you mention is AFTER that.

I meant the “peace with Russia” part by that, sorry.

The Foss idea is early 80’s and EFF was created in the mid 80’s, and as I mentioned, based on the ideology of the 70’s.

Meant that exactly, that (in my perception) there’s something similar in that ideology with science fiction of the same time, cinema, electronic music, industrial design and general techno-optimism. Some kind of universalism, like in Asimov’s Foundation.

Unfortunately Putin completely ruined that after he came to power in 1991, which is also around the time Linux started.

1999, 1991 is Yeltsin, but one is a logical continuation of the other (many Russian liberals disagree, love Yeltsin and hate Putin, don’t listen to them).

The turnaround was after Carter when Reagan was elected, not just in USA, but also in most of Europe.

Perhaps ; here I’m too ignorant.

I disagree with your idea of real world turbulence affecting it. Things were going the wrong way even in 2005. Dotcom bubble, Iraq war, those things - maybe.

I actually think that USSR’s breakup is what long-term caused how our world has become worse.

Say, in terms of computers and mass culture too, they sometimes treat the 90s as a result of that breakup, but that doesn’t quite make sense, despite a few armed conflicts, it was a gradual process, CIS as an organization was treated as almost a new union in making even in my childhood.

That breakup has released a lot of dirty money into the world, and through not the cleanest people in western countries, too.

And ideologically - the optimist version of the Cold War ending was some syncretic version of the “western” and the “eastern” promises for the space-faring united future. And much of the 90s was about, often dystopian, but fantasies in the context of such an utopia.

IRL both optimist promises were forgotten. Thus the current reality.

and installing new hardware often involved configuring motherboard DIP switches and trying to figure out what “IRQ” and “DMA” means.

That part is about IBM PC architecture more than it is about computers in general, including personal computers of that time.

EDIT: I wonder, why all the downvotes, this is just true, look at Macs of that time. I’m not saying interrupts themselves are or a concept of DMA itself is.

Sure, sure, old man. Everything was better when you were young.

I’m 28.

There never was a majority of people who were into computers. It was always a minority. And I’d argue that nowadays there’s more developers because there’s simply more people with access to computers.

I’ve literally said that the kind of access to computers matters. In my childhood it was Windows 2000 (98SE when I wasn’t intelligent or interested enough). In those greybeards’ childhoods - I guess a greybeard is someone who didn’t have a computer in their childhood, but with programmable calculators, or automatic devices (like sewing machines) manufactured then, it was easier to grasp the initial concepts.

Human brain is not a condom, it can’t just fit something as messy and big even to use as today’s desktop OS’es and general approaches and the Web. It will reject it and find other occupations. While in year 2005 the Web was more or less understandable, and desktop operating systems at least in UI\UX didn’t complicate matters too much.

Some of them won’t like them, some will be neutral and some will be “geeking around”.

But the proportion will change in just the way I’ve described.

And having seen some code from people both older and younger, the younger ones are better (note that it’s my anecdotal evidence). And you at least can train the younger ones, while the “experienced” will argue with you and take energy out of your day.

Maybe that’s because you are wrong and like people who bend under the pressure of your ignorance. Hypothetically, this is not an attack. Or maybe just those who don’t argue, that’s a social thing.

Also, of course, people whose experience has been formed in a different environment think differently, and their solutions might seem worse for someone preferring the current environment.

As you said, that’s anecdotal.

I’m so tired of the stupid “when I was young, everything was better”. You know what else was exactly the same? The previous generation telling you how everything was better when they were young. Congrats, you’re them now.

Well, this would mean you’re tired of your own mental masturbation because this is not what I said.

I’m talking more along the lines of everything coming to an end and this complexity growth being one of the mechanisms through which this industry will eventually crash. Analogous to, say, citizenship through service for Roman empire.

Because the replacement comes from non-graybeards in FOSS, and their replacement from without-beards in FOSS, and they come from youths in FOSS, and they from teens geeking around with computers, and oops - teens are not geeking around with computers, they are watching reels and scrolling recommendations and doing other bullshit. If they have a PC, it’s an unloved work tool for them, with crappy bloated Windows, crappy bloated software for work and studies, not always crappy, but bloated games, you get the idea.

Because there was a generation very fertile on geeks. It’s going away. There are demographic pits and there are demographic, what they call them, hills? The point is, we are seeing the effects of the latter.

RFK is one of those assholes who was depressed, changed his diet and worked out, and that was enough. And he thinks that solution works for everyone. And now he has power.

Can’t say about enough, but for me too antidepressants were not very effective (and also with some emotional downsides, I eagerly believe stats about ADs and suicide rates), and physical exercise plus simpler and healthier food (basically minimize sugar) did help me more. However, there might be a reversal here - maybe changes in weather and life events caused slight improvement in my mood first, and then came exercise and healthier food.

In any case this is considered very light depression.

You mean it’s like this in the USA? I’ll admit I thought it’s some heaven for ADHD people over the ocean with everyone getting amphetamines

That’s fine, people with dignity don’t have “leaders”. That’s about JD too.

And there are feedbacks in human societies, meaning that AfD and such would have much less popularity if, first, they had a less stinky alternative as “counter-system” parties, second, were not given publicity as a scarecrow, third, were not given media pressure.

It’s natural that in some conditions people run from the political mainstream and want something not associated with that swamp. It’s also natural that “black PR” is still PR, it puts AfD (or someone else) on a list of associations in one’s mind as being against that mainstream (no matter how fascist or populist). And it’s also natural that when you see media pressure, you want to push back.

People making decisions love to think in directions, but in fact thinking in categories and weights between them is better. Like with diversifying investments. If you invest a lot in the left-vs-right dynamic, no matter which side, the results are unpredictable, but you affect their possible magnitude, the more you invest, the more it is. So if someone puts a lot of pressure “to fight fascism”, they might cause a rebirth of fascism that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

For the same reason I’m still not sure Trump is worse for Ukraine than someone else. You have to end the war at some point. If there’s no military way to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty over all of its territory, that may realistically be attempted, then that won’t happen anyway. They are not suggesting Ukraine to recognize annexation, but even if they were, the old world order is dying, and formal sovereignty in the UN might do little good in future. Some things they say suggest they may do for Ukraine a lot of what Ukrainians love to dream about in terms of restoration and armaments. Just - also controlling Russia by allowing it to sell its resources again. Probably with a deal worse for Russia than before, and the resulting prices might be less competitive than before.

Ah. OK. Not immediately recognizable, but clear now.

Doesn’t seem avoidable.

There’s a double entendre there if you’re familiar with the Russian language

As a Russian speaker, I don’t understand this. Could you elaborate?

So you are telling me Musk has been touching techy things since about 1995 till now, and thinks there’s an organization without any SQL at least someplace? I wouldn’t dare suggest that about ISIS.

Any website - OK, web is inefficient and shouldn’t be used. But their operations planning just wouldn’t work so well without proper business analytics infrastructure.

emulating some fucking redstone calculator they wrote in Minecraft

Let’s stop right here for a bit. With redstone in Minecraft you can make the same logical constructs that in real world lead from a bipolar transistor to a machine capable of decoding your porn in real time. And people, including kids, do design those.

Please show some respect.

Those who make calculators in Minecraft are not the dumb kind.

Literally no other dimenstions of values to add, shit I would be fucking surprised if a single one of the people writing the goddamn have ever heard of OLAP.

But yes, weird to expect almost college kids to have the experience needed. I can imagine some of them having the necessary education, but for a data analyst the mathematical basis is simple and the rest is experience.

XP was hated when it came out, but it wasn’t that bad. Then Vista and 7 happened. Then it got worse.

XP was like 2K, but with fancy plastic appearance and some unneeded things.

I have fond memories of reading Star Wars books in Notepad, in plain text (or RTF containing only text), in some font like Fixedsys, I think, black on white, at night. Ironically my eyesight didn’t get much worse then.

XP was nice enough.

That, and either getting Linux versions of industry standard software (Microsoft 365, Adobe CS, 3DS Max, etc) or decent support through Wine/Proton.

You won’t. Industry doesn’t want to waste money to port such enormous legacy codebases to Linux, when most people still run Windows.

Windows has to become a minority OS first.

And anti-cheat - I don’t like it, but it seems there will be working kernel-level anticheats for Linux.

You forgot hardware support, nice that it seems not an issue for some people today, but Linux hardware support is still not there. Drivers for Windows are made by manufacturers, drivers for Linux are often made by Linux developers.

No, I don’t think it’s any particular election. I also don’t think those companies were somehow more liberal when Democrats were in power. But it’s a really bad tendency that they gradually lick the boot more and more. It means they are big enough to be controlled and threatened, and it means governmental overreach is strong enough.

Well, that would at least somewhat resonate with what a palantir is.

With the wrong part, the kind that Denethor thought he could use and that Sauron and Saruman used, and I really like more the implication of that from Frodo’s dream where he stands at one of the towers in the north looking far away.