I just want to say: I appreciate all these comments so much, I regret that I only have a single upvote to give each of them. You all give me hope that at least there will be fellow humans standing by my side through… wherever this goes.
I think I’ll just go to a local store and pay in cash instead. I’m starting to think the Amish have the right idea, anyone know where I can rent a horse and buggy?
They’re not wrong but they are inaccurate and unreliable. Clocks, on the other hand, are pretty accurate and reliable, and atomic clocks even moreso, and most digital clocks are now synchronized to the atomic clock standards in some form using the internet or wireless. The definition of time is quite accurately standardized to an extremely high level of precision and has been for a very long time. The human brain is not standardized like this and hopefully will never be because that’s a gross and scary idea.
The definition of a length of time has been maintained with levels of precision that have increased dramatically since ancient times, but at no point in the last, oh, say, at least 1000 years, has the measurement of time changed by anywhere close to 25%.
The antikythera mechanism is believed to be at least 2,000 years old and was able to calculate the passage of time and the motion of the planets far more accurately than Mississippis ever could hope to. The passage of time has not changed the accuracy of that device, only our understanding of the motion of the planets has, and again that’s a human brain problem not a time or motion of the planets problem.
I wouldn’t personally go as far as saying you should use it. Using it, and it deserving love (and support) are all related but fundamentally different questions. I agree that Mercurial deserves love, I’m not sure if it actually deserves support (but because it deserves love, I am willing to entertain the possibility, and support the idea of supporting it). I don’t think anyone should use it as a primary tool, but it might be worth using out of love, and if people still love it, maybe that’s worth some support. I don’t know, I’m not anybody’s boss, I’m not telling anybody what to do, I’m just making suggestions.
Mercurial is frankly a lot nicer and more comfortable to actually work with, it has much better UX overall that fits into a much cleaner mental model with fewer exposed sharp edges you can cut yourself on, and can work pretty much transparently with git and can even use git as a backend in almost all cases. The downside is that like VHS vs. Beta, it is such a distant second place in popularity and adoption that it really has no realistic path forward, no matter how much better designed one could argue it is. Like @Holla@feddit.org suggested, the only thing better than being the actual best option, is being standardized, and git is basically completely and universally standardized at this point. And there are genuine benefits to that standardization, and there are genuine benefits to git itself too.
If you want to paper over git with some nice UX, Mercurial might be worth a shot, you might not like it at all… or you might love it, and it does deserve some love. But realistically, in a world where git is the standard, that isn’t going to reduce your cognitive load, it’s only going to add another layer of cognitive load. You have to love it to want that. And maybe you would love it. But git is not going away, even for those of us who love Mercurial, I think we have mostly all come to terms with the fact that git won the DVCS wars and that’s just the reality we live in now. Even having accepted that, I can still cheerfully sing Mercurial’s praises and wear my rose colored glasses when I look at it, despite not even using it anymore myself.
I gave up and converted all my personal hg repos to git and gitea (now forgejo) a couple years ago. It’s fine. I’m fluent in git now, I have to be for work, I can do powerful (sometimes dangerous and exciting) things with git and I wouldn’t give that up. I realistically probably speak git better than I speak hg nowadays, but like anyone who learned English as a second language and now uses it primarily, it is always a delight and a comfort to have any opportunity to return to the old mother tongue, no matter how briefly or simplistically, and hg still represents that delightful experience for me. Even when I start to forget native words and have to mix git phrases in that I can’t think of an hg equivalent for.
Just like the Fediverse, it’s actually better and healthier if more people/groups/nations host their own (whether public or private). More diversity, less centralization.
The lack of clean and transparent federation between them is certainly inconvenient but is not a permanent roadblock, it is simply a known and well-understood technical problem that work is ongoing to solve. git itself already has very mature support for complete decentralization and decentralized workflows, it’s all of Github’s feature layers like user accounts, PR management, issue tracking, CI/CD and the various other workflow and project management layers that may need to be connected and federated across the different Forgejo-based platforms (and hopefully other platforms too in the future). Users and permissions and PRs and issue reporting are among the most critical parts, and I think they are looking at Fediverse’s ActivityPub as a method for enabling much of that.
The more large organizations that choose to build their own viable, permanent and financially stable Forgejo platforms, the more attractive and necessary proper federation between them becomes, and the more assured it will become the first-class feature it needs to be.
We are not building a mere Github replacement that drops into its centralized place, wears its shoes and follows its same path to inevitable corporate capture and enshittification. We are building a decentralized standard to be the democratic foundation for future software development and collaboration that no one can, should, or will be able to exclusively control. It’s not done yet, but this the right way for it to start so that something like SourceForge (for those old enough to remember that trainwreck) or Github never becomes a problem again.
Absolutely agreed, my only point is that people treat it like it’s a victory and celebrate like they’ve won the superbowl, when it’s just death by a thousand cuts. People need to understand that strategic voting is not a victory even when it’s successful, it’s a “we haven’t lost yet”. The fighting doesn’t stop there. There is so much more work to do and the people you voted into office are not going to do it no matter what party they are. The corruption is on both sides of the aisle. The corruption doesn’t care what your personal politics are.
That’s nonsense, you need to keep your militant revolution shit to yourself. Protests and civil disobedience are extremely powerful motivators that can affect real change, yes, but they are not a militant revolution, and there are grassroots and progressive options for democratic change. No, the US may never lose the two-party system, but voting is not just something you do for a president, and it does not always mean simply walking into a voting booth, casting your vote and going home and shrugging if the result isn’t the one you voted for.
Desegregation and women’s suffrage were both accomplished with great effort by accepting neither party’s position on the issues and actively forcing a third option onto the table. This was not accomplished by simply “voting for the democratic party a bunch of times”.
And some are almost exactly the same but painted with two different colors of evil. Strategic voting forces you to choose one. If you think strategic voting is the answer, then that certainly is the hill you are going to die on because the false dichotomy of Kang and Kodos is absolutely going to kill you.
Good news, maybe this means people will finally stop trusting polls so those of us who still have some semblance of democracy can go vote for the things we actually want to see changed instead of having our choices prejudiced by polls that tell us we must “strategically vote” so we can’t have nice things.
Voting for the lesser evil is still evil.
If you could magically teleport oil from one side of the country to the other for free, you might as well just teleport it straight to its buyer and not bother with ships at all. And Iraq and Kuwait, which are major oil producers you might remember from past hits like Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2, don’t even have another side of the country to send it to.
It’s about time we start seriously thinking about how to escape Visa and Mastercard anyway.
Even if they had left out that condition, I’m sure there would be ways around it for gaming laptops and they wouldn’t necessarily even have to be stupid ways: I could imagine a stupid way of complying being a charging cable with USB-C for the first 100W and proprietary port for the other 200W+.
Just because a law might say that it’s got to be technically able to charge from USB-C probably doesn’t imply that has to be the only charging port and method, nor even the normal/recommended one. Even on a 200W+ gaming laptop it would be nice sometimes to be able to charge it from USB-C, without pulling out the full charger. If mine supported USB-C charging I could see using it like that when I travel, I might only be using it for half an hour or an hour a day, the 100W would significantly extend the battery runtime, the rest of the time it could be sleeping or off and charging happily back to full from USB-C, so I wouldn’t even need to bring the (literal) charging brick.
The frustrating part is that a significant amount of that might already be largely technologically and economically possible at this point, but not as long as some people are hoarding 99% of the world’s wealth, and brutally exploiting at least the poorest 80% of the world’s population in their endless quest for more.
It has to stop.
My greedy fingers are poised on ebay for the great datacenter clearance sale.
Waffling on moving to Codeberg because it’s not 100% perfect means supporting GitHub and drops the possibility of federated forges to 0%. Moving to Codeberg makes the future of federated forges go up to greater than 0%.
Fair, but there’s a third path that exists: spin up your own instance. Yeah, it’s more administration work, yeah it’s significantly more painful for contributors to contribute for now. But the more stand-alone, non-federated, community-operated forges are out there, the more appealing the federation glue needed to connect them all together becomes.
It’s an improvement but I hate that we’re trading one centralized singlepoint of failure to another. It’s fine for people to be fleeing there temporarily as refugees from github, but I’m afraid that if it becomes “the one and only destination” it’s going to end up getting way too comfortable really fast. What we really need is a federated architecture, where it doesn’t matter who’s actually hosting the repository as long as they support the proper standards and protocols as part of the same federated universe where your own user or self-hosted instance exists, you can still be granted access to other people’s repos, report issues, send PRs to it, without needing dozens of accounts on dozens of self-hosted Forgejos for each individual project. They’re working on those features with Forgejo, and that’s awesome. But if everyone just moves straight to Codeberg, the incentive for that largely goes away, and even if they do end up implementing it, the incentive to improve and maintain it goes away, and there’s no reason we can’t end up with Codeberg being the new Github people are trying to escape from in 5, 10, 20 years.
Also note how all the AI companies are either tech companies funded by advertising themselves, or funded by other tech companies who are funded by advertising. The goal of advertising is to convince you of things. They literally made a product designed to convince you of things, they made it really convincing, and then they convinced everyone AI is some world-changing, job-destroying, civilization-revolutionizing, future-defining hyperscale meta-technology that everybody has to have because it will simultaneously pit the entire world against each other and unify it into a post-scarcity tech utopia. And people are only now starting to do a double-take and actually start to look closer to see that it’s just a cardboard cutout of artificial intelligence distilled from real people, with no actual intelligence behind it and quite possibly no real future.
nobody is making any sales revenue off somebody like me.
I think this shows the fundamental misunderstanding here. It’s not about money coming out of your bank account. While that might be the goal, at the end of the day they are not chasing you personally, they are chasing statistics. But it’s more than just market statistics. It is about sales revenue, but not about you personally. A few points need to be made here:
#1: GOOGLE is making sales revenue off somebody like you. You are not necessarily the individual target of the direct revenue extraction, the advertisers are. You are the product that Google is selling to advertisers. Are you a shitty, unusable, defective-by-design product? Maybe. Is Google scamming advertisers by selling you to them? Maybe. The point is, that doesn’t matter, except perhaps in a philosophical sense. The advertisers are willingly paying for you. They know the statistics, and they are still willing to pay a lot for you and your group, because statistically, they are convinced it benefits them. Google is getting money from the advertisers to provide whatever access to you and the rest of your group that they can.
#2: Somebody is making sales revenue off you directly. I don’t know who that is, and maybe Google doesn’t either, but to survive in this world as “A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches” your money has to be going somewhere, and trying to find out and adjust where is an addictive and profitable passtime for Google, advertisers, and all other data brokers involved in this trade. Whether they actually succeed or not, they’re going to have a hell of a time trying, and they’re going to convince other people it’s worthwhile for them to continue to try and they’re going to get paid to do it no matter how fruitless it might seem. Again, it’s not necessarily about you individually, it’s about what they can sell you as.
#3: At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter whether the individual you actually buys anything. Even if you truly are totally DIY, off-grid and self-sufficient and dumping all your money into a pit under your mattress. If you do end up simply being an outlier in your particular demographic group, even if you’re in a large category of outliers in that group, what matters is that the group buys stuff, and you’re part of it, they don’t know if you’re the good part of the group or the bad part of the group, they want the whole group and they’ll let it sort itself out. The other members of that group will more than make up for your lack of revenue stream. It’s possible just one single member of that group will make up for literally every other wasted target in that group. These so-called “whales” are like the gold sifted out of thousands of tons of gravel and dirt. You don’t care about how much gravel and dirt you went through, getting a higher percentage with much less effort out of a much smaller claim doesn’t make you any richer, what matters is how much gold you ended up with. Would they like to narrow that group to remove outliers like you to get an even higher return on investment with even less effort? They would probably consider that an ideal. Does it really matter to their bottom line? Evidently not. This works for them and the people who pay them. It’s why they’re one of the richest companies in the world.
It’s a safety feature. You’re actually safer once the wheels fall off, because it can no longer go anywhere.