You can use an old version of Gnome and accept older software, or you can organize some fellow GNOME enthusiasts to maintain it, possibly with paid developers.

You can't legally get old versions of Windows or Photoshop, and you can't legally fix them if you find problems. GNOME gives you that freedom.

This isn't just a theoretical possibility: both MATE and Cinnamon are GNOME forks.

You can argue that maintaining and developing a desktop environment is an huge project and you can't expect someone to take that on - I completely agree, which is why I think we should be thankful of the developers instead of complaining about being "forced" to use new versions of their software.

Having technical discussions about the merits is fine, but in the end in the free/open source software model the people that make the technical decisions are the ones that make the technology possible. And if so many of those people are moving to Wayland, maybe there is a reason for that.

Unless security patches are still developed and released for older versions, I'd strongly discourage it.

You can legally get old versions of Windows, but it isn’t recommended.

The subsidies are also paid by vegans. Both the average meat consumption and average subsidy can be multiplied by the total population to get the total.

You can like the taste of meat but think it's unethical to kill animals for food. It's not necessarily a "problem", but it is something a reasonable person might want, and so there can be a market for it.

I pay for a (local, non-english) newspaper. The reporting certainly isn't perfect, but:

- They seem less sensationalist, I guess because they don't depend on clicks to survive - They tell a more complete, less dumbed down story than free sources - They are more boring than free sources

If you want to be informed, the "pay for journalists" model is much better than "hope that advertisers or billionaires pay for you" model.

You can argue that being informed is pointless, but I would argue that independent people working to get informed and then questioning issues is a vital point in a democracy. One model for this is journalists, even if you're not actually reading it.

Local news is different, because it’s more relevant, and moreover we rely on journalists to uncover hidden problems.

I don’t really need to hear about an event or problem happening across the globe, although it could have an important lesson, but I really don’t need to hear about it in a misleading, sensationalist way.

If enough people agree with you, should pay to get your news in a non-misleading, non-sensationalist way.

Sensationalist and misleading news is caused by newspapers that need to appeal to advertising and rich backers. Paying for news is the solution to these issues.

In my experience, paid news sources are better than free ones already in these aspects. Not perfect, but a lot better.

If we have DRM with some private key, then I guess your idea is I download the game files and some private key and that allows me to run the game.

If I can send you the private key and the game and it allows you to run the game with no further inputs, then the DRM is trivially broken (even without open source).

If it does some online check, then if the source is open we can easily make a version that bypasses the online check.

If there is some check on the local PC (e.g. the key only works if some hardware ID is set correctly), we can easily find out what it checks, capture that information, package it, and make a new version of the launcher that uses this packaged data instead of the real machine data.

If you use a private key to go online and retrieve more data, having it be open source makes it trivial to capture that data, package it, and write a new version of the launcher that uses that packaged data.

Basically, DRM requires that there is something that is not easy to copy, and it being open source makes it a lot easier to copy.

How would you define it if:

- the DRM/delivery software is open source

- the game payload is sent to you encrypted using the public key of a secure enclave on your computer

- while the game runs all its memory is symmetrically encrypted (by your own CPU) using a key private to that secure enclave. It is only decrypted in the CPU's cache lines, which are flushed when the core runs anything other than the game (even OS code)

- the secure enclave refuses to switch to the context in which the CPU is allowed to use the decryption key unless a convolution-only (not overwriteable with arbitrary values) register inside itself had the correct value

- the convolution-only register is written with the "wrong" value, by your own computer's firmware, if you use a bootloader that is not trusted by the DRM system to disallow faking the register (ie, you need secure boot and a trusted OS)

That doesn't seem to fit in any of your models. There's no online check, you can't send someone else the key because it's held in hostile-to-you hardware, you can't bypass the local-PC check because it's entirely opaque to you (even the contents of RAM are encrypted). You can crack into a CPU itself I guess?

I don't think the mechanism of the DRM being open source helps with the copying AT ALL in this design.

This design is, by the way, quite realistic: most modern CPUs support MK-TME (encrypted RAM mediated by a TPM) and all Windows 11 PCs have a TPM. Companies just haven't gotten there yet.

I don't know about how secure enclaves work, so this may be a solution I'm not aware of. Thank you for explaining!

So I guess the whole game software, or at least a significant part, is loaded encrypted and runs encrypted. It's on the users hardware but the user can't access it.

The only thing I can think of: You say the game payload is encrypted using the public key of a secure enclave. This means the open source game launcher has to pass the public key to the server doing the encryption. Could you not supply a fake public key that goes to a virtual secure enclave? I guess the public key could be signed by intel or something, is that something that happens on current TPMs?

Would it even be possible to do this if the program had to run under Proton/Wine? The original subject here is the launcher running on Linux.

I do wander about the use of an open source launcher at this point though. As someone who prefers open source software, the idea of encrypted software running on my PC makes me uncomfortable, more than just closed source software.

The public key is in fact signed by Intel and uniquely serialized to the TPM.

If the game manufacturer requires TPM register values that match Windows, it will not run under Proton/Wine (or a Windows VM). If they allow TPM register values for Linux it will run under Linux too.

Thanks for teaching me something!

Thank goodness!

I know I shouldn't react this way, but this view that Mastodon can only be successful if it's the largest platform out there always gets under my skin. There are about a million active users of the fediverse, and I know plenty of us find it nice right now.

Active users are measured in different ways by different platforms, so if we compare registered users, fedi has 12.5M compared to 42M for Bluesky. So it's approximately 25% of the size.

It's not the best place to go if you want to get a large following, and it's not Serious Business, but as a user that's not what I want from a social platform. I have plenty of people to follow who are talking about things that interest me.

You're welcome to come have a look if you want, but otherwise no worries. We're doing fine. Maybe you'll check it out sometime when some drama happens at Bluesky. The fediverse is not going away any time soon.

It's probably user error on my part. But as a somewhat technical user, I've been locked out of Mastodon account for months for no discernible reason. I had my standard first name and last name and I'm on one of the biggest Mastodon servers (mastodon.social).

I suppose I could just create a brand new account or move to another server but it hasn't seemed worth the effort so far

It is a more complex system than having a single central organization. Not every interest is well represented, so there may not be a lot of content for everyone.

I've never had a mastodon.social account, but I can understand the frustration of having technical issues. If you really wanted to join, like you said, you can just try joining on a different server or even software - with other social networks you generally don't get that choice.

But it looks like you gave it a try and made the rational choice that, for you, it's not worth that effort.

But just because it's not your thing, and it's not the biggest one out there, doesn't mean it failed or missed it's shot. Personally I think it's pretty amazing that an open source project, with no VC money or marketing department or big corporate tie in, has about a million active users, and has for a long time now.

You've repeated the part that the parent poster claimed to understand ("I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability"), but skipped over the part they didn't understand ("wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance?") with the statement that insurance is a parasite.

Can you explain more why insurance is a parasite? Maybe a state-run insurance would be better?

Subsidies (AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong) typically either get paid when farming supplies (tractors, seeds, fertilizer, land etc.) are bought or when the final product is sold. So they are paid when things go well for the farmer, but not (or less so) when the farmer has a bad year.

I feel like the risk of bad years would be better managed by paying farmers when bad years happen. You know, like insurance.

Fair! My comment was probably more dramatic than it needed to be, but I was trying to paint a picture as it kinda irks me when a lot people act like farmers are 'welfare queens' just taking money and living the good life. Not that OP did that, but it makes subsidies a 'dirty word.'

Subsidies is a hugely loaded term that would take more than a few comments to even begin to cover, but yes, they do cover those things that you mentioned, but a lot more than that. Heck they even sometimes pay farmers not to grow things at all - we used to get a check not to grow tobacco. I was a child then, I don't remember all the details.

Importantly, subsidies already include a federal crop insurance program that the government pays most of. That would cover most reasons for loss of crops. But there's also payments when say, you had a great year, but prices crashed through no fault of your own. And separate payments for say, farm animals catching disease and dying, or natural disasters. And separate payments for things like the messy situation COVID created. And a lot, lot more.

My comment was mainly with the lens of 'get rid of subsidies and buy your own insurance', and well, we see how well that works with health insurance. "Oh sorry Mr Smith, those cicadas were underground when you bought the farm, pre-existing condition, denied."

I see your point a bit better. I definitely agree that insurance can be terrible. I will say that with US health insurance you've pretty much picked the worst possible insurance to compare it to.

Farmers typically have more knowledge and more budget for good advisors than consumer health insurance buyers. There are all kinds of business insurance, and I think these are not usually considered as horrible as health insurance. Also, with good insurance you've got a partner who is very invested in understanding the risks you're taking and letting you know (in the form of how much you have to pay).

Some subsidies are probably a good idea, especially where you want to encourage behaviors that would not naturally be encouraged by the market (e.g. getting farmers to not grow crops that you don't want them to grow, or do things that are good for the environment but not legally required).

Sometimes it's probably neutral, where the food is cheaper in the supermarket but taxes are higher and in the end it's just the consumer paying anyway. My guess is that this usually isn't the most efficient way to get money from consumers to farmers.

And sometimes subsidies are actively harmful, like when they encourage growing crops beyond what the market requires.

In my experience most people have at least one other chat app installed. Signal, Telegram, Facebook (I think there's a built in messenger), discord, and snapchat are all common. It's just that practically everyone has Whatsapp, so that's the common denominator.

Not only does Facebook have Messenger, but it's actually a (pretty) good privacy option. It went full on default end-to-end encrypted a couple years ago. Telegram doesn't do that, you have to jump through some hoops. Signal does but it's honestly pretty niche. Everyone from your grandma to your kids has Facebook though and somehow Zuckerberg decided his data-Hoover shouldn't extend to everyone's conversations. It's surprisingly good.

> That person died in a car accident and they were wearing a seatbelt! But in any story not about this car accident people generally cast them as the useless.

This story isn't evidence that IRBs are always useless, but also it's not an example of them being useful. The thing this story shows is they are sometimes useless.

Yeah, that's reasonable.

I don't know what this particular author has against LLMs, but a lot of people are bothered by the very intense, robots.txt ignorming, scraping of their sites.

The website being blocked by the scrapers would be a positive outcome.