Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? is a really good graphic novel about a kid’s relationship with his dad through the lens of retrofuturism, as it gradually tarnishes, starting with the 1939 World’s Fair.

I’ll probably go to Expo 2025 in Osaka this year, since I’ll happen to be there, but it’ll be hard to maintain any real optimism.

I see what you’re saying, but it sounds a little like “no true Scotsman”, too. I guess Occupy probably did this better, but I’m not sure it helped enough.

This is really part of it, but it’s not included explicitly in that article like it should be.

Other activists, faith-based leaders and consumers already are organizing boycotts to protest companies that have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and to oppose President Donald Trump’s moves to abolish all federal DEI programs and policies.

Lots of naysayers trying to convince everyone not to participate, or to fragment efforts with competing ideas.

So much of our consumer culture is buying shit we don’t need like impulse buys and stupid movies and fast food. That’s profitable stuff, and skipping that for one day doesn’t mean you’ll just buy it the next day.

Maybe make a trivial amount of effort to find those details yourself.

It’s a response to the active class warfare happening, including the anti-DEI efforts.

Targeted boycotts aren’t enough anymore. Too many major corporations, often without adequate competition, are working against us.

Nope to what?

Many algorithms aren’t even doing that in good faith, instead substituting in their low-cost contract cover bands as often as they can.

😬 https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/google-removes-pledge-to-not-use-ai-for-weapons-from-website/

I was mostly being facetious. I haven’t tried it in decades, but I’m pretty happy with Cosmos.

KDE: With too much power comes too much responsibility. 😉

Bruce Schneier has been saying for something like 25 years that technological advances always favor attackers over defenders.

I really like the tiling window support in Pop_OS!'s Cosmos desktop.

It’s the same argument I’ve heard about the “complexity” of Mastodon: too many choices, which is I guess why people largely stopped going to websites outside the major social networks. Monopoly over competition, it’s like everyone is pining for a monarchy.

As I’ve said elsewhere: I wonder what controls Mozilla has in place to prevent gradual takeover of their board by those with an interest in removing Firefox as a competitor. We’ve watched the sleeper cell in the Supreme Court transform that body into an illegitimate partisan puppet. Mozilla’s actions over the last few years would make much more sense if it were being manipulated into self destruction.

19½ months. That’s how long Mozilla was prepared to listen to a small, unfiltered subset of their users, for a laughably meager maintenance cost.

Yep, which further highlights the problem: @[email protected] 🔗 https://mozilla.social/users/mozilla/statuses/113153943609185249

We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024. Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17. Before that date, you can download your data here (https://mozilla.social/settings/export), and migrate your account to another instance following these instructions (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-social-faq).

This was also my recent experience on PopOs!

There’s a little historical baggage, but look at Windows: multiple letters for drives, and all of the paths can be modified, so you have to ask Windows where any important directory is physically mapped (like SystemRoot or Documents or Temp or Roaming AppData or many others), because it doesn’t have this nice consistent structure like Linux. Linux presents a logical layer and manages the physical location automatically. Windows makes you do the logical lookup yourself, but doesn’t enforce it, so inexperienced programmers make assumptions and put stuff where the path usually is.

That’s part of why logging in to Windows over a slow connection can take forever if you have a bunch of Electron apps installed: they’ve mismapped their temp/cache directory under the Roaming AppData, so it gets synched at every login, often GiB of data, and they refuse to fix it.

Windows 10 keeps turning that stupid news feed back on on my taskbar, too.

I work in finance, and the only time I use office is when my coworkers infrequently send me something locked in an Office document. Plenty of non-technical coworkers are addicted to it, but there’s no need, because it’s awful.

The Office programs are an ancient, bloated mess with an impossibly convoluted UI that to one uses more than a small share of.

The styles in Word and PowerPoint are never consistent: the bullets in lists never really match, fonts change randomly without reason, &c. These are intelligent people who have used this garbage for actual decades, and the WYSIWYG lie just results in a sloppy mess.

Even Microsoft wants everyone to stop using the desktop versions, and rent it from the cloud, which can be done from any OS.

For years, there was progress in moving governments away from implicitly endorsing Microsoft, and toward the simpler (but often still overcomplicated) OpenOffice/LibreOffice formats, and Microsoft engaged in some pretty shady behavior to stop it.

Markdown is better for documents, or maybe HTML, or LaTeX via LyX or something. Databases and legitimate file formats are better for data, with scripts for formulas. There are many simple alternatives around, but the addiction is so automatic and insidious, I can’t tell you how often over twenty years I’ve gotten screenshots pasted into an empty Word document rather than just sending the image.