They do have categories, via the menu at the top:

https://openalternative.co/categories

The person I was responding to suggested that ridiculing the AfD was preferable to banning it. In the USA people ridiculed but did not ban the Republican Party, and now it is stronger than ever. I was saying that this indicates you have to be careful how you ridicule them. If people feel you’re on their side and making fun of idiot fascists, that’s good. If people think you look like a snob and the fascists are the ones on their side, it backfires.

You have to do it with care. If it comes over as believing that your non-bigoted, non-idiotic culture is superior to the fascists’ culture of bigotry and idiocy, they’ll dig in and rail against snobbish “elites” (that is, people who can string a sentence together and recognize a lie when they hear one). In the USA this sentiment strengthened the fascists and led to Trump winning the presidency twice.

(I know I’m not exactly following my own advice but I’m feeling impatient with these people right now.)

Your taxes, straight into the pockets of Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Large chunks of the EU are hurtling rightwards too, unfortunately.

RFK Jr. is going to be in charge of US health policy. They won’t survive long.

As a Canadian I urge the same for Canada.

Bird flu is coming and likely to be far worse than COVID, while antivax fools control US health policy. But Trump’s supporters will always blame someone else.

How does that force him? He demands unreasonable things. He’s an unreasonable man. Pointing this out won’t make any difference.

That’s a good way of thinking about it. Even experienced developers appreciate being able to put the bones of an application together as quickly as possible so they can focus on the bits that make it unique.

True. Not everyone needs to chase the latest stuff, apart from security patches.

Recently I’ve used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, PopOS! and Ubuntu, as well as Mint, and all of these have comparable graphical software managers. Which ones are you thinking of that don’t?

I dunno. I’ve been programming on and off since the 1980s and professionally since the early 2000s. It still always takes me forever to build anything worthwhile and even longer to maintain it. Most software these days is complicated enough that it requires many people to build and maintain. I’m not sure that “everyone should be equipped to program what they need” was realistic even back in the 1980s, let alone with today’s complexity.

Most users don’t want to be sucked down a bottomless time hole just getting their computer to do a thing it won’t do, and understandably prefer to have someone else suffer this for them, then use what was built.

So I don’t know about the goal of everyone being able to program. I still think it’s a worthwhile goal that people should have full control over their machines so that they can install and uninstall what they want, configure devices to work the best way for them, and turn off the features that don’t serve the user at all. And I think open source software is great for bringing technically inclined people together to collaborate on what’s actually useful to people.

Mint is not really for tinkerers. It’s a distro designed to work out of the box without the need to tweak anything, and it does that well. The downsides are that it’s not always the most up to date, and it bundles a lot so it’s not a slim distro.

There has been an update:

Israel has received names of the hostages set to to be released on the first day of the ceasefire agreement, Israel’s channel 12 station is reporting.

It has locked me out for attaching a USB device once or twice. Seems a bit extreme.

I have stopped encrypting my drives, because if anything goes wrong and the system won’t boot it makes recovery more difficult. It’s a dual boot machine with Windows 11, and I had a lot of awkwardness with Bitlocker that led to me deciding to abandon encryption in both OSs. I save sensitive files to encrypted volumes in VeraCrypt.

The therapy costs about £100,000 upfront and then as much as £200,000 a year.

Is that per patient? Sounds awfully expensive for extracting a bit of blood.

The USA is just clarifying what the rules always were.

I’m used to ORM layers where you can write SQL queries but you’re basically converting the results to objects before you use them. These kinds of things tend to handle bits OK, and bit parameters can usually be set as booleans directly. I haven’t used SQL Server in a while though so maybe it isn’t as convenient as that.