da_chicken
Nah, if you're dropping the ball after you said you wouldn't and I trusted that, I'm going to get angry and loud when you drop the ball. That's just reality, and Ubuntu isn't some Johnny-come-lately volunteer organization. They're one of the most well-funded Linux organizations in the world.
I ended up on Mint because I consistently found that Debian was willing to compromise their philosophy for the live distro installer, but they would never warn you that you were about to reboot into an air gapped system.
So it comes back to not doing anything to make asking higher quality questions important. The site is designed to be an open field filled with land mines.
For me, I think I left for a few reasons. All of them are some flavor of "the design is user-hostile".
The first reason is the "traps" they put in the moderation review queue process. These always felt like shit, even if you were right. And for some reason they frequently picked questions where you could reasonably pick multiple reasons to close a question... and they'd yell at you for getting it wrong! Really, this needlessly punitive experience is the heart of why SO was so awful, because everything is like that across the whole site. Some of the network sites aren't like that, but it's rare. And there were just so many Meta questions where the upvoted response was "this would be hard to do right, so instead we're going to do it the way we all know is wrong but it's easy."
The second reason is just how awful the onboarding is. The site constantly had problems with people either not posting code or posting screenshots of code. I don't know why they didn't make a beginner form, similar to what you often see on GitHub issue trackers for large projects (i.e., always include this, always include this, include this if it's relevant, etc. and it's in the textarea box when you start a question). Instead they assume that you know how to ask a question, give you a completely blank form, and then aggressively policy anything where you didn't do it right. I think the one thing to come out of that site is that people do not inherently know how to ask questions. [Which, if anybody has been responsible for responding to IT tickets, oh, boy, do they not know how to ask questions or report problems. "I'm getting errors running my report in the Finance application. I need this report soon! Help!" No mention of which report. No mention of what the report parameters were. No mention of which error message. They don't know what the error message means so, obviously, it must not be useful to anybody.]
The third reason is the site finger-pointing. "This doesn't belong here so I'm locking and closing your question," is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever. Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.
But, I think the final nail in the coffin is just how aggressively awful rpg.stackexchange.com is, which seeks objective, hyperliteral answers to game questions that are, by design, subjective and intentionally meant to be played with interpretation and nuance. The result is a handful of highly active users will nit pick any answer or question they don't like. Really, I think it's the GameFAQs Forum clique problem, to a significant extent. Some people really have nothing better to do except quash the utility of a site they have a small amount of control over, and it largely ruins the whole experience for the majority of other people. And, unlike a subreddit, you can't just go make your own version on the same topic. It doesn't work like that.
People are tired of exploding costs, loss of privacy, intrusive technology, pervasive advertising, malignant anti-intellectualism, endless rent-seeking products, and fascist leadership. Adding economic crisis from job loss is a fast track to violence.
I use AI and see it's value and even I'm furious about how it's going.
So, now, it's not unusual to find software from as late as 2005 that is actually 32-bit software, but it's in a 16-bit installer.
Indeed, it might be the only 16-bit application I've wanted to run other than Castle of the Winds and Scorched Earth.
https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/pull/5062/commits/269661f71...
Security fixes for actively exploited vulnerabilities demand an emergency response. The risk of introducing new, unknown flaws is less than risk of having an active known exploited vulnerability.
However, absent the risk of a KEV, that changes the equation. Now the risks of code changes causing breaking changes plus the risk of supply chain attacks is greater than the risk of having to put some thought and time in to manage your software library versions.
It's not like AI created this distinction, either. Neither did CI/CD. This is standard systems administration -- literally ISO/IEC 20000 ITSM. It's exactly why, traditionally, new features are often limited to major versions. It's why binary compatibility was a huge issue with RHES 20 years ago, and why distros pin versions and backport security and selective bug fixes. A developer that doesn't know this is telling on themselves why they shouldn't have write access to production. Stability matters a lot because we like to get paychecks.
For example: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-50000
The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.
Indeed, I think you should look at the speech that SCOTUS ruled is protected in the landmark Brandenburg v Ohio[0] case to see how extremely narrow the "imminent lawless action" standard is. It's ridiculously hateful and inflammatory, and filled with several non-specific threats of violence against minority groups. This was labelled protected speech. Brandenburg was a private citizen here, and he prevailed over the state of Ohio.
I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.
And they absolutely have equivalents.
Audacious... eh. Setting aside the bad default interface, my experience with that is the same as with most media players. The developers decided how your music should be organized, and they're going to do that for you whether you like it or not.
Edit: Hmm. Looking into it more, I don't think Audacious was changing my media library. I've no idea what it was that was doing it now, I just remember fighting with something managing my library until I stopped using Audacious.
Everything wants to make a "universal media library manager". Jesus, doesn't anybody just want to name their MP3 correctly and then use file management, and then have an audio player that just plays audio?
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
But, I also see a lot of posts that have comments like, "How am I supposed to know what Gleam does when I don't know what a Tribble is? The blog doesn't explain anything! How can someone write an article and not explain these terms that they use so much?"
And the linked blog article is hosted in the Daily Tribble News section of www.tribbleworld.com.
I've seen plenty of product demos that work fine with test data, but once you introduce real world things like: 200+ concurrent users that need to do more than just navigate to the 3 most easily demonstrated screens; application is hosted at a data center in another state; making that hosted system be a shared tenant; introducing data of real-world complexity; making the client system be a system spec'ed for a basic office worker 5 years ago; installing web filtering and other applications and not only running your one application.
Suddenly, loading N,000 records into a dynamic gridview table on a page load becomes a real bad idea, and the occasional needing to view logs or audit trails that reach N,000,000 records to load into that same dynamic gridview table means the site just times out.
It's a similar reason why you can sometimes find that you have to scroll right and left on a site. Well, that's because the dev has multiple 32-inch monitors in 4k or 8k, and they're not designing the interface for the 1080p laptop screen that most of their userbase actually has.
Firstly, you've incentivized companies to prevent people from becoming informed. You can already see online that lies spread faster because they don't have the inconvenience of needing to be true. You have one truth, and it has to stand up to countless thousands of lies.
Secondly, nobody can be informed about everything. The whole reason we have experts is because they are the ones informed on their subject, and they devote their entire careers to it. You cannot possibly be well-read and up to speed about everything you buy while still being able to function as a human being.
Thirdly, what happens when the deceptive, shitty product completely out-competes the safer one because it's that much cheaper? Hey, guess what? You can't buy the safe or sustainable version of the product anymore because every business that did went out of business. It's no longer in the market.
At a time when the contemporary computer systems that used asynchronous, priority-scheduled multitasking operating systems were things like IBM OS/360 mainframes and DEC PDP-6/PDP-10 minicomputers.
It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.
Everything that the FTC investigates is strictly civil. Any criminal prosecution arising from their investigations is passed off to the DOJ.