I finally got to read this article and the situation is even better/dumber with more context. I didn't realize the layering at first.

This CEO used AI to avoid paying human lawyers to help him figure out how to avoid paying human game developers.

This asshole needs to get some kind of "Yo Dawg I heard you like AI" anti-award.

Back when the most hated thing about Windows was the forced updates, I likewise didn't have that problem because I would update my system often.

For me, as somebody who never had issues and never lost work from it, the update process of every Linux distro I have ever used is still 10x better than Windows ever was.

And honestly that's a microcosm of the overall Windows vs Linux comparison for me. Ask yourself who the stakeholders are in the design, and of them whose desires get priority. With Linux you generally have the users and the devs (who are themselves users), sprinkled with some commercial interests that contribute for various reasons. With Windows you have users and devs seemingly at the bottom, followed by numerous different priorities inside Microsoft that range from "make the company better" to "keep this department relevant for one more quarter", you have they who are on the most high -- the shareholders -- and I guess now you have a pretty strong presence of the US government.

So the purpose of the update process in Linux, whether command line or a friendly graphical interface, is to update the selected items. That's it. As always, do it quickly, efficiently, and with as little disruption as possible.

The purpose of the update process in Windows includes updating the selected items, sure. But it obviously also includes turning One Drive back on. And history suggests that Windows Update's true to-do list has waaaaay more than 2 items on it, lol.

I didn't really finish my thought there. Apologies.

It was starting to get at why we don't really see "the americans" protested like we might "the french." And our media doesn't help in how they report it. It enables the republican populace as well as the entire government to more easily ignore it. It's always "protests broke out in cities across america in response to X.

The physical separation is also part of it. it all helps feed into this "divide" where the republican voters can seemingly give no shits about human suffering or the rise of fascism because it's all happening to "other" people far away. It might as well be the middle east.

People without neighbors are also less clued into to how policy changes affect entire societies of people, rather than just the price of gas for their truck.

And like the other reply said, this is just one contributing factor.

Yeah, the average population density of the US is a lot lower than many people realize. Protests are seen as city-based things, both geographically and culturally.

And then you have eu-nation-sized red states that can hold many many trumpers who are unable to play nice with others because they don't have to have neighbors.

Middle aged American here, and when I was a kid the culture around me regarding france was basically "lol they surrender." And that whole stupid thing probably peaked in 2003 with Freedom Fries.

But now?

I honestly wonder if any other nation's population has their heads on straight as much as the French. The only place in Europe where I have spent much time though is up in Sweden, and the nords seem pretty good at life-ing too.

The last time I was hanging out on Lemmy eating a fresh LGBTQ+ and had some of that white gooey Q running from the corner of my mouth into my beard, I had like 3 little sysadmins follow me home. Then my wife gets all weird and comes outside to shoo them away with a broom, yelling about how we already use Linux. And I'm like girl don't be so hasty to run them off -- see if you can borrow some of those thigh-high stockings first!

It's not KDE, but I think Linux Mint Cinnamon is a no-brainer for somebody who really just wants to use ubuntu.

However, as a long time Mint fan I recently had reason to switch to Debian 13 w/ KDE Plasma and it is pretty great.

And even for those of us who might have the means or the marketable skills to get citizenship elsewhere, that only changes the tradeoff into creating new family by leaving all existing family.

It seems like a huge pervasive part of modern culture is that success and fortune equal never having to get your hands dirty, never worry about the details, and never learning to figure shit out because you can just pay somebody else to do it (or ask the "AI" to).

Obviously some amount of specialization and delegation is good. That's how you get a society.

But to just exist passively is something else. It's bad for us, and I don't mean that as a moral judgment. Nobody needs certain skills to justify their existence. I mean it in the clinical sense, like that you can be sedentary with more than just your physical body.

It legitimately feels like he is trying to outdo all the others in the administration in mustache-twirling-villain dark side points.

He's like some kind of extra-privileged extra-vain prep school Biff Tannen caricature.

Yeah it would be really nice if the media could distinguish a bit better between "actual expert at thing X that has done it for a long time and gives a shit" versus "people/corporations that started with tons on money and think they could end up with slightly more by misleading fans of X and building the infrastructure to efficiently enshittify it"

edit to add: I was supposed to quip at the end of my post that oh yeah, the media and journalism are "products" that are no different, and in fact worse. Look at who owns the big outlets. gross.

Yeah, it's a very broad umbrella term.

I'm an engineer on a team that designs new products and fixes old ones. I'm happy to joke about the advertising & sales departments being the dark side of marketing, but when it comes to creating a product that is useful for our end-users, other facets of marketing are absolutely essential. The ideal, after all, is to have whatever ticket I am working on be traceable back to a customer need.

Heck, the product is pretty niche so even when I am chatting with our service technician about whatever crazy stuff customers are seeing & doing in the field, you could justify calling that marketing. It's customer information making its way to future design decisions, even if that decision is actually being made by an engineer rather than the Product Manager.