Yeah that's definitely what it was. I'm no westerner, so I know what this looks like and what local fascists interpret it as. Tell your stories to someone else.
Also, quoting your link:
"According to the Alma-Ata police, on the morning of January 6, dozens of rioters were killed during the storming of administrative buildings in the city and its environs."
"Our belief in the power of personalities and ideas may blind us to fundamental truths: after all, every year, another penniless revolutionary pens a new version of Das Kapital or a new version of Mein Kampf."
I won't bother with the bullshit of anybody who compares Das Kapital and Mein Kampf like this, grow a fucking brain. And conscience.
The replies to this are so funny :D "It's illegal! Immoral! Assassination! Theft! Murder! Felony! To the gallows!"
Yeah, no.
So it's legal, moral, and acceptable that software and websites are made, by you folk reading this here website no less, to consume orders of magnitude more resources than they need to, just so that web companies---you folk, remember---can make some stats go up and turn them into money. It's okay to make the web less accessible to poor people, disabled people, people in places with bad internet connection, perfectly functional devices which have only become unusable because of this whole bullshit &c, it's okay to mine shitcoins in people's browsers, to sell their life for profits, it's okay to literally get into their private life and play loud videos in there if they don't know how to make that stop, but it's immoral, illegal, unacceptable to retaliate? Immoral and triggering for you lot for folk to just jokingly entertain such idea?
This whole business is basically turning wasted money and energy into dollars, not really different than blockchain bullshit essentially.
Imagine the resources wasted to produce and consume this nonsense went to making computers user friendly, programmable and accessible. Like, why should my browser occupy ~6G of memory for ~50 pages which could all be just pure HTML and a couple PDFs? Why should I need 6G of memory when 1 or 2GB must do? Why tf a computer with 1GHz or 666MHz CPU can't handle the web, ie a bunch of text documents? This whole bubble is creating immense amount of waste, and it's nonsensical to just limit your thinking to "oh, some annoying websites, just run uBlock". IMHO comes from the same place with "if car-dominated cities bother you and you feel unsafe, just get a car, or better, an SUV". What about fixing the city? What about climate and pollution?.
Reading the comments on this topic, I can't but feel validated for having quit my programming career right as it started.
You lot sound so absorbed into your privilege that you can't even begin to think about the human side of the story, and it really shows that your "oh I can't begin to imageine how hard this is but..." is performative. It shows that you never really had to deal with this sort of stuff, be the person responsible to assist a loved one thru their hard and/or terminal times. You really can't but show how far removed from human suffering you are. A hive of young able-bodied economically privileged people.
But, programmers are increasing in number. You're becoming cheaper to hire, replace. Enjoy that privilege while it lasts, because it won't last for that long.
If companies shouldn't be responsible for taking care of their employees in their hard times, they shouldn't try and replace the state as the apparatus of care for the disprivileged, they shouldn't capture and commodify access to livelihood and wellbeing, they shouldn't attempt to bust unions, support "small" government nonsense, and they should pay their taxes in full or even in extra. If a company won't be liable for when the employee has no chance to be productive, then that person is entitled to something to fall back on.
But of course that's not a thing because with the system that's in place, our livelihoods is a carrot-on-the-stick in front of us used to extract labour from us, and when we're spent we're sent to the recycling bin. And you folk are those who so far have been on the winning side of this shitty deal, either as employees or as employers, temporarily for most of you, but having pulled thyselves up, you can't but kick down, and look down upon the rest.
This whole thing is really toxic and boring and uncool and honestly a pile of shit. Your corporate shilling here is pure unadulterated boot licking, and I throw up in my mouth reading it. But I like reading it. It validates my decision from many years ago. For however much of an economic improvement a tech career would have been for yours truly, I'd much rather eat my shoes than spend a moment of my day with the likes of you.
There's Linux Mint Debian Edition, basically Linux Mint you know but based on Debian, with some tiny quirks. It's maintained by Linux Mint folk themselves, who are the makers of Cinnamon itself.
In my use case as a grad student in phonology and a linguist interested inter alia also in sociophonetics, de-anonymised data could get me in big, career ending trouble. Imagine me studying some minority's language use, even if the revealed data does not put them at a huge risk, I'll get in trouble with the ethics committee. And it might be possible to de-anonymise participants using e.g. file name, location through IP, etc. and get the participants themselves in trouble. Essentially this merging means Audacity for me is categorised as "can't be used in research", as one of the main reasons the rely on FOSS in research is that this shit don't happen. Luckily it's not like this is a web browser where I can't record if this one obscure standard is met, I just record in Praat or Ardour maybe and call it a day.
That's apart from the many other moral issues, of course, like this whole grabbing the work of FOSS community with money thing is pretty disturbing, which inevitably leads me towards using ethical source licences in any programming I might do such that this sort of stuff doesn't happen.
Also the elephant in the room of course is this is opt-in ___for now___. Recall the days Firefox wasn't plagued with privacy blunders and studies and Google money? There's no reason to believe that Audacity won't end up going the way of Mozilla too.
Can you get your own mailing lists on public-inbox, or would you have to self host? I'd love to self host git and a mailing list but setting up mailman/sympa/etc. seems to be too big a task. I was thinking setting up a wiki as a replacement for my small personal projects...
No "good" NNTP clients, maybe besides Gnus and slrn, which are rather obscure.
Gmane was relatively popular, and it was great but went down for a long time, which probably further obscured NNTP. IDK if everyone who used to use it is aware that it's up again, now at http://gmane.io/
