Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

There’s a cool computer game that makes this point as part of the story line… I’d recommend it, but I can’t recommend it in this context without it being a spoiler!

If we are separated from our parents shortly after birth, and grow up in isolation from other humans - then we would not learn to talk anyway. Note that that’s what happens with most pets that humans keep. Maybe we get to walk past some other humans in the park a couple of times a week, but that’s it.

I do.

I’ve got a piece of black tape over the power line on my computer, because it is too bright. And I have masking tape over the caps/num/scroll-lock lights on my keyboard; because they are also too bright. (The light is much gentler through the masking tape.)

Over the years, Microsoft has been quietly taking away control from the users.

There’s been a transition from normal settings that you can do whatever you want with, to “yes / remind me later” settings that Microsoft uses to badger you until you submit, to finally just no setting at all - just quiet compulsory data collection and surveillance; with various bits of mysterious software that you can’t uninstall or disable or halt - because you’re not the admin - Microsoft is.

It wasn’t always this way.

Yeah, it’s a minor annoyance… another minor annoyance on top of all the others. And another personal data leak (or siphon) to go with all the others.

This on its own is not worth switching OSs for - but as a piece of a larger picture it’s yet another reason to consider it. And for some people this may be what tips the scales in their evaluation.

I’m sure its different now from when I started - because coding is very popular, and the internet is a thing… But I can tell you, that it took a long time before I knew what a programming language was, or ‘coding’… these words were just not familiar to me.

I learnt stuff by just opening random executable files in notepad to see what they look like… mostly it was just garbage that no one can understand - but some of them were readable, and I replicated and learnt from them. (they were .bat files.) I became a bit of an expert in making very fancy batch files. I made customisable menus, and a little adventure game. Then my parents helped me out by buying me a programming book. It was about programming in Visual C++. I was pretty excited - until I quickly worked out that Visual C++ was something you had to buy before you could use it.

Anyway, my point is that it is easy to see what you need from the point of view of an expert; but from the point of view of a novice, you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know which words are important, or what anything is called. The first steps are not hard except that you don’t know which direction you are meant to be stepping in, or where the starting point should be.

My strategy is to just type git push and get some kind of error message about upstream not being set or something. That’s a signal for me to take a second to think about what I’m actually doing and type the correct command.

I first tried Linux around two decades ago, and it felt clunky to me - so I didn’t stick with it. I tried again around one decade ago; and it was a lot better, but I still didn’t quite have enough reason to keep using it yet. … But now, finally, I tried again several months ago - and I’m definitely sticking with it. I’m currently using Mint.

There are still some thing that I think are worse in Mint compared to Windows. But there is a lot of stuff that’s much better. It’s more than enough that I don’t expect to ever switch back to Windows again. The main thing is avoiding all the anti-features of Windows, such as the constant nagging to switch to Edge or activate their search bar; and the ads & other cruft in the start menu; and the constant little popups and ‘reminders’ about new stuff; and the lack of control in when updates are installed; and the ubiquitous harvesting of personal information, including ‘telemetry’ of which apps you run and when.

For me, one of the last straws was when I clicked on a help link from Windows settings, and it automatically opened in Edge, and Edge then automatically imported my browsing history and bookmarks from Firefox and automatically uploaded it to my Microsoft account. I was horrified that it would do something like that without any interaction whatsoever. I didn’t even think Edge had access to my Microsoft account until then, because I deliberately avoid using one to sign in, or for any other reason - the only reason it exists is because I used OneNote. I wanted the account to be isolated to just the app I used it for; not to automatically be grabbed by the whole OS and then used to collect my browsing history.

So yeah. I’d spent years of maintaining an ever-growing list of little system tweaks that I used to keep as junk off Windows as possible. But I’ve had enough. It’s too much. It’s not even close to being worth it. Linux has some minor problems, and some things take a bit of getting use to. But at least it isn’t systematically hostile.

Building on this, I also want to warn against the attitude that ‘ads don’t work on me’. A lot of people seem to think that they have some kind of mental filtering system such that they are immune to manipulation. They sometimes talk about how they deliberately make a point of not buying from some company who advertised in a way they didn’t like, or whatever.

I’ll just say this: you don’t have a special power. The ads do work. Maybe not every ad has the effect that you think they are aiming for, and not ever ad is targeting you. But if you are exposed to advertising, then it will affect how you think - and some of the people making these ads are serious experts with lot of research to help them manipulate your habits and behaviour. It’s a type of social technology that has advanced over time. It’s better to avoid it rather than assume you are immune.

Corporations are also practiced at using advertising campaigns to sway the general public against policies that would weaken the company’s power.

So to change this, some brave politicians would need to act not only against the financial interest of themselves and their political party, but also possibly against a large chunk of the general public pushing back against the changes (most likely led by ‘mainstream media’). Politicians willing to do this kind of thing exist… but unfortunately not enough of them.

I think the high popularity of Trump is very damaging for all of the USA.

I just focus on not making it worse myself.

Are we not discussing the choice to defederate? As in most choices, some options are better than others. Sometimes it isn’t obvious what the best option is. People discuss and share ideas to make their decision.

We as a community are faced with the choice of whether or not to support threads[.]net. We can think about it individually, or on an instance-by-instance basis - but we can also discuss it collectively. That’s whats happening here.

I think this is the biggest reason. A huge amount of content on reddit is astroturfing / brand manipulation; both in posts and in the comments. And in addition to that, a there’s a huge amount of ‘karma farming’, where heaps of popular but low-effort content is recycled over and over again to gain points and create a sense of credibility for accounts that will later be used for marketing / manipulation.

Fairly often.

I tend to fork open-source stuff when I want to make my own adjustments, often the adjustments I make are not wanted upstream. So I’m doomed to having merge conflicts for all eternity.

Often what happens though is that I fix some bug, and then a few months later the upstream fixes it in some other way - so the conflict resolution is to basically just throw away my own (clearly superior but now obsolete*) changes, to avoid more conflicts later on.

(* I’m joking. But it does feel bad to throw away good work.)