OwO

You are not a Disney princess

Hey, that hurts!

The microchips attach inside your stomach and control your behavior

Well, since intelligence is artificial, why not demand?

Even with Windows

Having both options available would be pretty nice

Afaik, you can set it up not to have any image, or have any other one.

We’re unlikely to see the grand price fall in the coming year. Can get a bit cheaper, though.

The “political” aspect of communism stems directly from the desire to radically alter the economic system. It is not tied, however, to the particular political order.

Coming from the same very Wikipedia article you cite on communism:

Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a libertarian socialist approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers’ self-management, and an authoritarian socialist, vanguardist, or party-driven approach to establish a socialist state, which is expected to wither away.

So, communism, just as capitalism and socialism, can be combined with all sorts of governance types. It can be authoritarian (and so can be capitalism - look at fascism to see an example), and it can be democratic (early Soviets) or even libertarian (anarcho-communism). You can build a totalitarian communist hellhole, and a totalitarian capitalist one; same in reverse.

Now, an argument can actually be made that capitalism is inherently undemocratic. As your ability to exercise rights is heavily tied to your wealth (think of regular worker suing a billionaire, or all the lobbying, or corruption scandals involving the wealthiest and the way they slip out of them like nothing ever happened), people can be and commonly are silenced. Moreover, if you have money, nothing stops you from financing the media to translate your message. This way, important political messages are drowned in favor of what the rich want to translate, and certain (rather corrupt) voices are heavily amplified over others.

By extension, liberalism, even in the most ideal of its forms, is deeply flawed when it comes to a true democracy.

Finally, most communists (including Marx, since you mention him) realize that the communist society is at least very far off from the current state of affairs. This is why socialism exists as a transitory state, an economic system that grants a lot of benefits of communism (worker’s rights, a social state, socially owned industry) while keeping the monetary incentives in the economy. The absolute majority of communists support this transition and welcome a socialist state.

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It is! But the extent to which it is used is limited by the efficiency losses that come with electrolysis, logistics, and reverse conversion.

I assume it could still be useful in applications that require long hauls, as dragging a heavy and expensive battery around can negate efficiency benefits over the long runs.

The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring:

• Bigger drives
• Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to)
• Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy)
• Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps)
• Etc.

Now, for the streaming alternative:

• Netflix Standard: $18/mo
• Spotify: $12/mo
• Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.

My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.

Self-hosting allows you to have all your files on all your devices, like many have used to with the streaming services. Also, some smart TVs specifically require to connect to some server to grab movies from.

If you don’t need any of that, regular hard drive will suit you best.

People don’t crave the system, they rather come to places that are advertised to them.

What they crave is:

• Easy onboarding without figuring out what is an “instance” (a concept entirely unknown to them), and which instances are good vs bad for them;
• A trusted place that won’t become unavailable or buggy because an admin is performing an update or screwed something up or decided they don’t want to do this anymore;
• Some sort of algorithm to filter out crap out of their feed (not having any algorithm is often not good);
• Having their favorite creators and friends on the platform (which, again, boils out to advertising for a large part);

etc.

Fediverse as a whole and Mastodon in particular is yet to answer to a lot of these challenges.

It already happens

On the other hand, maybe it will prop up PeerTube for once…

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It essentially is multiple OSes, one host and plethora of separate virtual machines that only communicate what they were designed to communicate.

This way pretty much nothing can get access to userspace.

When I first tried it out in a VM, it was just a pinch of curiosity. Some people argue for Linux, so, maybe there’s some merit to that? And, unlike MacOS, you can install it anywhere without all the hackery.

When I actually tried it (my first one was Manjaro KDE, and that’s what I stuck with for my first 1,5 years later when I decided to go for a real install), I was amazed at how smooth and frictionless everything is.

The system is blazing fast, even on a limited VM, there’s no bloat anywhere, no ads, no design choices to trick you into doing something you don’t want to. The interface is way more ergonomic and out of the way at the same time. Seriously, Microsoft, do learn from KDE, pretty please.

So, when I moved to a new home, I decided that my virtual home needs an upgrade as well. I installed Linux alongside Windows (on two different physical drives), and ran it as dual-boot ever since. Not that I address Windows that much (normally about once in two to three months), but it’s handy to keep around.

Later, I went into some distro-hopping and also got a laptop, which has become my testing grounds. After trying various options, namely Mint, Arch/EndeavourOS, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, I gravitated towards the latter, and I use it as my regular daily driver on both my desktop (Tumbleweed) and laptop (Slowroll). I love how it manages to keep the system both up-to-date and extremely stable, and has everything set up just right (except KDE defaults, what the hell is wrong with SUSE folks on that end? Luckily, it takes 5 minutes to change). So, there it is!

Got hacked?