"KDE Plasma" can be interpreted as "The KDE organization's Plasma" and probably saves on some article title consistency while avoiding the need to disambiguate the main Plasma article title with (Desktop Environment) or the like. Likely more trouble to try to change than it helps anything as a result.
It's really only calling it "KDE" in isolation that is a bit off. On the GNOME side, such a reference makes sense because the desktop environment is named GNOME and it's run by the GNOME Project/GNOME Foundation. I.e. a bit reversed which word in the order refers to the org's vs DE's name.
Most of the time people will probably figure it out at the end of the day via context either way though.
The others are mostly focusing on wholesale differences between individuals but, for me at least, it more depends on how it's used as well. E.g. Diet Coke tastes disgusting to me compared to normal Coke (Zero somewhere in the middle) while Dr Pepper Zero tastes great, better than the normal version by quite a lot (in my opinion) even. Both use Aspartame.
They can spell/pronounce things differently than we do and it's all cool either way. It's very common for animals to have different spellings, pronunciations, or even completely different names between languages. If you add time and regional axes, the same variances can be true even when keeping with the same language!
I'm just explaining why it's written 'x' and pronounced [ʃ]. If it pleases people to knowingly mispronounce Nahuatl loan words, they can do so, but it seems rather silly given that [ʃ] is also in the phonemic inventory of English. What next? Are you going say 'fowks pass' for faux pas?
Where I disagree is the premise it's supposed to be mispronunciation to say/spell a word differently than where it came from, doubly so when we change the spellings/pronunciations of our own words!
I think the disconnect here is that I actually wasn't aware that 'axolotl' existed as an established word in English. If you're looking at it just as a Nahuatl word written using Nahuatl orthographic conventions, then it's weird for someone to suggest that it should be written with a 'sh' because that's how it's pronounced.
What I meant is that it would be weird for an English speaker to have views on how Nahuatl words should be written using Nahuatl orthography, since different languages obviously have different orthographic conventions and associate different symbols with different sounds.
Oh, got ya - I thought they were talking about how English writes/pronounces its version of the word rather than how Nahuatl should do so! I agree fully in that case, it wouldn't make any sense at all for how foreign languages do something to dictate how another does - or to even expect them to be the same.
Not everyone is reporting and the number of users is not consistent. On the former the noisiest will always be those that experience an issue while on the latter there are more people than ever using Claude Code regularly.
Combining these things in the strongest interpretation instead of an easy to attack one and it's very reasonable to posit a critical mass has been reached where enough people will report about issues causing others to try their own investigations while the negative outliers get the most online attention.
I'm not convinced this is the story (or, at least the biggest part of it) myself but I'm not ready to declare it illogical either.
When XP was new people said 2000 looked like the peak. When Vista/7 was new people said XP looked like the peak. When 10 was new people said 7 looked like the peak. Now that 11 is still the latest, guess what the prediction is?
At some point one group will be right and feel extremely justified in achieving broken clock status of telling the future. Well, the folks who still argue ~2000 was peak and it has been a decline since are at least consistent... even if I agree in some ways and disagree in more in the other ways.
I'd say so. Zig is aiming to be a bit smarter than C while staying at roughly the same level. C++ more sought/seeks to support C but offer higher level things with it.
How often is the storage in cloud providers even local vs how often are laptops doing anything other than raw access to a single local disk with a basic FS?
I remember my worked laptop's IOPS beating a single VM on the first SSD based SAN I deployed as well. Of course, the SAN scaled well beyond it with 1,000 VMs.
> AI and LLMs are rooted in theft, exploitation, dishonesty and are over-promoted with ill-intentions for workers. Instead of running towards AI, we’re focusing on what’s actually important: content that helps people to succeed that is never produced by AI tools.
The style is definitely the over hyped and well expanded tone that AI is trained to mimic for sure though.
The same way you may require something like cmake as a build dependency but not have it be part of the resulting binary - separate build time and run time dependencies so you only distribute the relevant ones.
Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking as much as technical users. Even further, most seem to want to enable more tracking to [protect the children or whatever the reason is] pretty regularly (at least in opinion polls about various legislation). ToR users are not at all like that + could be harmed in a very different way... so I think it's fair to frame them differently even if I'd personally say people should be wanting to treat both as similar offenses because neither should be seen as okay in my eyes.
> Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking
I don't think this is true.
Most people don't understand that they're being tracked. The ones that do generally don't understand to what extent.
You tend to get one of two responses: surprise or apathy. When people say "what are you going to do?" They don't mean "I don't care" they mean "I feel powerless to do anything about it, so I'll convince myself to not care or think about it". Honestly, the interpretation is fairly similar for when people say "but my data isn't useful" or "so what, they sell me ads (I use an ad blocker)". Those responses are mental defenses to reduce cognitive overload.
If you don't buy my belief then reframe the question to make things more apparent. Instead asking people how they feel about Google or Meta tracking them, ask how they feel about the government or some random person. "Would you be okay if I hired a PI to follow you around all day? They'll record who you talk to, when, how long, where you go, what you do, what you say, when you sleep, and everything down to what you ate for breakfast." The number of people that are going to be okay with that will plummet. As soon as you change it from "Meta" to "some guy named Mark". You'll still get nervous jokes of "you're wasting money, I'm boring" but you think they wouldn't get upset if you actually hired a PI to do that?
The problem is people don't actually understand what's being recorded and what can be done with that information. If they did they'd be outraged because we're well beyond what 1984 proposed. In 1984 the government wasn't always watching. The premise was more about a country wide Panopticon. The government could be watching at any time. We're well past that. Not only can the government and corporations do that but they can look up historical records and some data is always being recorded.
So the reason I don't buy the argument is because 1984 is so well known. If people didn't care, no one would know about that book. The problem is people still think we're headed towards 1984 and don't realize we're 20 years into that world
> As soon as you change it from "Meta" to "some guy named Mark".
There is a huge difference between those.
If someone hires a PI to follow me, they are spending like $10000/week on that. Which means that their expected value is more than that, or that PI will never pay for itself. Where will this value come from? Likely from me, after all it's me they are tracking. So I am really worried, as I am about to lose a huge amount of money (or something else valuable).
On the other hand, if a store installs a whole bunch of cameras so I am tracked anytime I am in there, then it probably costs them only a few cents to track me. So I really don't care much about how losing anything valuable.
> Which means that their expected value is more than that
But this definitely doesn't follow. Your assumption about "value" is misplaced here. You're strictly thinking monetary value. But if we want to think about monetary value, well Google currently has a market cap of 4.1T, Meta is 1.7T, and even companies like OpenAI are aiming for a 1T IPO. Companies which depend on exactly that data. If you ask me, that data is pretty fucking valuable. Trillions of dollars worth, to be precise...
> ... if a store installs a whole bunch of cameras ... then it probably costs them only a few cents to track me.
Which is a great counterpoint to the argument you were making.
The camera not only works for you, but also everybody else in the store. The cost savings is through scale. So consider the situation where "Mark" is hired to not only follow you but a lot of other people. More specifically, people who interact with one another. That data can be collected in parallel, dramatically cheapening the cost per person being tailed.
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But your point is off-base regardless. The point of my comment was about the data being collected. A physical person being the data collector doesn't scale very well and if we're being honest "Mark" doesn't collect nearly as much as the digital tracking systems.
The point is that it is awareness of being tracked. The average person isn't aware that they're being tracked nor aware of what is being tracked.
Let's put it this way. If I hire some guy named "Mark" to follow you and you never find out he was following you, then you'll never be upset. But suppose I later tell you. Do you then become upset?
Most people will say "yes". So the issue wasn't "how much money" it cost. Nor was it actually "I was aware I was being followed". The issue is that you were /being followed/.
Not knowing you were being followed doesn't suddenly make it okay. But realistically that's the situation we're in. People do not know they are being followed. People that do know they're being followed don't know how much is being recorded. People that do know feel powerless to take steps against it. People that feel powerless just try to move on with their lives and not think about it because it is better to think about things you can change instead of getting depressed.
> If you don't buy my belief then reframe the question to make things more apparent. Instead asking people how they feel about Google or Meta tracking them, ask how they feel about the government or some random person.
This is exactly what I was saying - if you look at the polls, people actually tend to support things like the UK's Online Safety Act. Explaining it more does not usually result in a change of that. The difference with a PI is you're asking about them individually instead of everyone - of course they trust themselves, they just want everyone surveilled for that same feeling of confidence.
> If you don't buy my belief then reframe the question to make things more apparent. Instead asking people how they feel about Google or Meta tracking them, ask how they feel about the government or some random person. "Would you be okay if I hired a PI to follow you around all day? They'll record who you talk to, when, how long, where you go, what you do, what you say, when you sleep, and everything down to what you ate for breakfast."
Yes and no, because people still will think that when it's done at scale it's different from some stalker following YOU explicitly, and not just following everybody. Also, the mental model is "they just want to sell me something, but I can just ignore and don't buy if I'm not really interested". And especially going down this second rabbit-hole opens a whole world about consumerism that not many people are comfortable with.
At the same time there are people that are totally against consumerism that should be more informed and care more about tracking and privacy; with those people it's probably easier to have that conversation.
Some good counterpoints. But you're suggesting more people would be okay with 'PI following them' hypothetical than GP suggests—simply with the knowledge that others are subject to the same degree of surveillance?
I'm not so sure that counterpoint in particular holds. I think to say the "number of people that are going to be okay with that will [still] plummet" is an understatement. I'd go so far as to say no one, at least no rational person, would be okay with a "record [of] who you talk to, when, how long, where you go, what you do, what you say, when you sleep", etc., just because of the scale.
Let me focus it from a slightly different side: my believe - from observing the world around me - is that physical privacy violation is perceived differently from a software one because of the side-effects: you gaze out of your window and see the same car with some guy in it parked there, you see the same car following you when you are going to the mall etc. There is some similar side-effect with online tracking, which is the typical "ad in my Instagram feed for something I searched for last week in Google", and there are people that are "scared" by this. But since it's just about buying things, well hey I might actually tap on that Instagram ad!
I see some success by telling people "what if was our government doing the same thing to us, even by extorting private companies? what if that same government, or the next one, just hates you for whatever reason?"
I take your point about the 'abstract' nature of online privacy. But another angle might be suggesting to those that are ambivalent on the issue that the pervasive (and for all intents and purposes, permanent) recordkeeping nature of 'software surveillance' should be much scarier than some guy sitting outside. I mean, at the very least, even with some guy sitting outside, you'd still have privacy inside.
But again, I hear you. Most people unfortunately have come to view the issue as being just about targeted advertising (which some go so far as to espose as a good thing).
This is a lot of text to say that people don't recognize digital tracking as a threat, even when it is explained to them. Which is basically exactly what parent post you replied to said.
My read of the comment is that it's almost never actually fully explained to them. And that they would almost certainly care if they actually understood what was happening. That's my experience. Once you explain that it's more information than a private investigator tailing you all day, stealing your phone could gather people usually wise up to the fact that they actually don't like it.
In my experience those users express a mix of surprise and irritation when they get ads about something they did minutes or hours before, but they accept that's the way things are.
I joke that I'm a no-app person, because I install very few apps and I use anti tracking tech on my phone that's even hard to explain or recommend to non technical friends. I use Firefox with uMatrix and uBlock Origin and Blockada. uMatrix is effective but breaks so many sites unless one invests time in playing with the matrix. Blockada breaks many important apps (banking) less one understands whitelisting.
> Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking as much as technical users.
Part of the problem is the misconception that the data being collected is only being used to determine which ads to show them. Companies love to frame it that way because ultimately people don't actually care that much about which ads they get shown. The more people get educated on the real world/offline uses of the data they're handing over the more they'll start to care about the tracking being done.
This is definitely a point that should be emphasized more in this discussion. Even still, where it ultimately falls flat (currently) is the lack of hard proof to show people that it's truly happening.
Also, the degree to which some are more comfortable with the personal privacy/'feeling of personal safety' tradeoff notwithstanding, the examples that do get media traction are predictably extremes that the average person doesn't feel applies to them.
It's really only calling it "KDE" in isolation that is a bit off. On the GNOME side, such a reference makes sense because the desktop environment is named GNOME and it's run by the GNOME Project/GNOME Foundation. I.e. a bit reversed which word in the order refers to the org's vs DE's name.
Most of the time people will probably figure it out at the end of the day via context either way though.
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