That's a bad comparison because the much more important factor is that housing is incredibly and disproportionately expensive right now, not becuase that's the 'natural' state of the economy, but because almost every major US city has made it expensive to build housing and impossible to build middle-density housing.
Or in other words, your 'cheapness' comparison is only against a self-inflicted artifical high point.
For the price of approximately three Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches I can make approximately 8 chicken sandwiches from WalMart with lesser quality ingredients and no labor/tax/insurance overhead. According to my drunken wish-i-had-a-napkin math.
MS Office Macros are too easy for untrained users (that think of themselves as power users) to create, and once they grow big enough, it's very hard to port them to other applications. They're the monkey paw of spreadsheets.
VBA and the ability to use Office files with embedded VBA are disabled in many corporations… Some malware in the past used VBA for their attacks and Microsoft never added a proper sandbox.
Why anyone uses anything from Microsoft is beyond me... It's always been clear that VSCode is a trojan horse for MS' EEE strategy. So just don't use MS stuff. Neovim is great, it has great C++ tools. What's the saying? Fool me once...
The LLM space was never going to be kind to those without deep pockets. And right now there's no point getting in it because it's hit a wall. So yeah, startups should steer clear of trying to make frontier LLM models.
On the other hand, there's a ton of hype and money looking for the next AI related thing. If someone creates the next transformer, or a different AI paradigm that pushes things forward, they'll get billions.
Yeah, am damn far left by US standards, keep up with actually-left sources like The Nation and Democracy Now! (I also listen to right wing nut job AM radio in the car, because I'm a masochist and a politics nerd in general—I'm "fair and balanced"!). Was involved in some left-of-Democrats political organizing in college.
I can't recall ever seeing holocaust denial from that side. I'm sure examples can be found, but I don't think it's a staple there like it is when you veer even a little off the (formerly...) best-trod paths on the right.
Typically this means someone who claims that Israel's policies towards the Palestinian population is causing a humanitarian crisis that is counterproductive to long term stability in the region is labeled as anti Jew and a Holocaust denier.
It's usually some mental gymnastics related to Israel, Gaza, etc... Because many Muslims deny the holocaust, much of the far-left has co-opted that rhetoric. It's super visible on TikTok, for example.
Edit - some comments below this seem to doubt. Just go on TikTok to politically charged posts about Palestine. This whole thread is about social media. Not holocaust denial on the mainstream left, specifically the far-left on social media
Sounds like sampling bias TBH. The 'far-left' and the 'twitter-left' (or the tik-tok left) are not all quite the same thing either. I don't think you can draw much conclusions about people outside of a platform based on either Twitter or TikTok.
I’ve seen a lot of anti-Israel stuff but I’ve never seen holocaust denial on the far left. What I have seen is an assertion that the holocaust is one of many horrendous genocides that continue to this day, and comparisons between early holocaust actions by nazi germany (ghettos, destruction of the ghettos, resettlement, etc) against the Jews and Israel in Gaza. Personally I think it’s all absurd. The holocaust is uniquely horrific, and every horrific thing doesn’t have to be comparable or have parallels to be horrible. In fact each genocide is its own unique horror, be it in Armenia, Cambodia, etc. Israel and Gaza is also its own situation and the relationships to the holocaust is irrelevant other than in the space of fallacy. The comparison helps no one - left, right, Jew, Palestinian. Every tragedy is its own tragedy and can and should be examined in itself for the lessons they teach, and anyone who uses violence at scale is wrong no matter what happened prior. Perpetuation of industrialized horrors should shame everyone as human beings. But, I was raised Quaker, and we’ve always been persecuted in some way for believing and standing up for the fact you shouldn’t hurt others.
In my many decades as a political observer I have never seen Holocaust denial on the left. I guess it's a pretty niche sub-movement. Where does one pick these nuts?
USSR practiced a milder form of Holocaust denial by downplaying the fact that victims were killed because they were Jews. A typical manifestation of that was various monuments to Holocaust victims, the signs of which referred to them strictly as "Soviet citizens" without any mention of their ethnicity.
I'd personally take Gnome Shell over both Windows and OSX. It's minimal, gets out of your way, has better touchpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts for navigating, and looks great. So I think Linux is there.
But this is kind of a personal thing. My wife likes Windows with a super cluttered desktop and I absolutely hate the idea of any desktop icons and I like everything hidden. I have a colleague who has OSX with again, a ton of desktop icons and like 20 things open at any given time, just looking at his screen gives me anxiety.
It’s not just the desktop, it is the app ecosystem too. There are a lot of really great UX and productivity hacks in the macOS sphere which dead simple to install and intuitive to use.
Install a modern distro. It does just work. I've literally done zero config to my laptop, nothing has broken or not worked. Literally everything works. Touchpad, touchscreen, webcam, fingerprint reader, stylus, suspend, audio, etc...
Always love how arrogant Linux users are: "You can't possibly experience something different from me"
I wanted to make a genuine effort to get into using Linux because it's the only OS I'm not super comfortable admin'ing. I bought a secondhand Lenovo t440 and installed Linux Mint on it. Everything seemed to work well, boot was nice and quick, no issues with WiFi chipset or sleep and battery life was at least okay.
It was fine for browsing the web with Firefox for my normal web browsing, and made a great netflix machine.
Then I kept trying to do other things. I was playing with Blender at the time and despite the laptop being old at the time, it Mint installed a broken intel graphics driver. It couldn't render anything without artifacts and was unusable. The fixed driver was older than the release of Mint I was using. Why didn't Mint install an up to date driver?
I wanted use my steam controller to control mouse and keyboard input exactly like you can on any windows machine. In Linux, it required you to hand edit some config files to allow Steam to even communicate with it's own controller. Like what the fuck? Why?
I wanted to dual boot Windows to play more steam games (this was before proton) but if you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, you have to install windows FIRST. Otherwise you have to be an expert in x86-64 boot semantics to do the configuration required. So this was impossible without reinstalling everything.
So fine, I decided to just install Windows on it. Windows pulled the license details out of the BIOS from the previous owner (whoops) and auto-registered itself, and had the fixed intel graphics driver from the get go. I installed steam and the steam controller worked as expected. Battery life was SIGNIFICANTLY better.
Not going to lie, Mint is a buggy POS and the fact anyone recommends it at all is a travesty. It's so bad it makes me think it's sponsored by Microsoft to sabotage new users.
Mint basically takes a years old Ubuntu, then an even older fork of a DE, uses an abandoned protocol then rolls it together and adds even more bugs to it. It's honestly one of the worst distros that exists.
Ubuntu, Fedora and (open)Suse are the only ones worth using if you want a smooth experience (ie. the corporate ones).
Edit - also needing to install Windows first to dual boot is a result of Windows installation wiping existing bootloaders.
Funny you should say that. I just tried to install some recent Linux distro on my Thinkpad two days ago. Fedora 42 wouldn't even install because apparently the installer doesn't support boot partition located past the 2Tb boundary, and that laptop has a 4Tb SSD with the first 2Tb used up by Windows. The error was completely incomprehensible, though.
Mint, OTOH, installed just fine and is working great.
Between Google Sheets, Gnumeric (Python "macros" are so much better than VBA), R Studio, I definitely don't miss Excel an iota.
Google Sheets is a better choice for average Joe spreadsheet user, make a spreadsheet, some nice graphics, share it. Gnumeric has better scripting and better maths functions. R Studio is better for data analysis. I have a degree in economics and didn't touch Excel for any of it (Stata, R, Python got me through).
In fact, I could go further and write an entire dissertation about how Excel as a program is cursed and a net negative to society. The amount of times I've seen broken spreadsheets lead to real business problems is way, way higher than it should be. So much of what people do in Excel should just be handled by a Python script or something. Whoever thought it was a good idea to couple data and functions and then to put that in the hands of Jane from accounting did a massive disservice to all of society.
I've been using Linux exclusively for 15 years. Went through my entire university degree using only Linux.
The biggest issue people face when switching is the desire for it to be the same as their previous OS. It's not. It never will be. It's different (and IMO better).
Like GNOME Shell, so many people hate it. No dock, no way to minimize Windows, etc... Until you actually try to learn it a little. Launching apps is super quick with the search, you can bring up overview with 3 finger swipe up on the touchpad, scroll virtual desktops with 3 finger sideways swipe, arrange your windows with meta + arrow keys, etc... Its nearly as keyboard driven and quick to use as a tiling window manager yet my wife can use it as well (she's very much not technical).
As for apps, there's an app for everything normal people need to do. For developers, it's easily the best OS. Games, it's got most of them. I guess if you're an accountant forced to use Excel don't bother (and if you're not forced to use Excel, Gnumeric is better anyway).
> the desire for it to be the same as their previous OS
I think most FOSS developers completely miss this point, assuming their goal is to get more people to use their software.
Sure GNOME can be usable if you learn a different way, but you can't force everyone to do that. Not even most people. So I think if they really cared about doing what's necessary to get a lot more users, they're going to have to make their product more like what the potential new users expect, whether the developers like it or not.
Apple literally built a 3 trillion dollar business on "Think Different". Now they're the slow, lumbering behemoth, but copying cheapens your brand. Copies only reinforce the idea that the original thing is valuable.
Nothing and nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. Everything is a copy of something else, the only difference is how much is actually copied, and how obvious it is. Copying is how we learn. We can't introduce anything new until we're fluent in the language of our domain, and we do that through emulation.
Why do you think it's rare? Unless it's a personal project not meant for others, why would they not want more people to use it and get more popular?
To me this is like people getting upset when their favorite indie band "sells out", even though their increased popularity is always seen as a much bigger positive than any potential downsides of the "sellout".
My impression is that people are motivated by solving problems and filling gaps in the existing landscape. Popularity is not a goal, usually. Why would it be?
More contributors, community building, more competition/innovation, I could think of many reasons... but not wanting something to become more popular is quite perplexing to me.
Restaurants are currently incredibly cheap.
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