and people like me are why Linux has even gotten to where it’s at today.

Not true. There are tons of nice developers out there. And I for one wouldn’t want to work in a team where an attitude like yours is prevalent.

You know, downcasting and/or insulting people just because they don’t live up to your personal standards is a pretty shitty thing to do.

To answer the question in the title: my money’s on an old white man with homophobic and misogynistic tendencies.

Apologies for butting in here, but this brings up an IMHO very important point:

The general public HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that the Fediverse exists.

If I may be so bold as to add: …and they like it that way.

When it comes to online stuff, most people are lazy, very very ignorant and anywhere inbetween politely indifferent and openly hostile towards any attempt to educate them. They want to look at cat videos and pr0n, collect likes for their food pics and chat with their grandkids. The technology behind all that is a nuisance, not a tool.
By and large, I think those people can’t be helped, because they’re happy with the status quo. If anything, you’re the enemy for wanting to take away their beloved Tiktok and WhatsApp.

That means our largest efforts - self-hosting, the Fediverse, … will probably always be a bit of a parallel universe to the Internet at large.
This is sad for humanity in general, but it makes enshittification of those services both technically more difficult and (due to its small size and enshittification-resistant populace) less commercially viable.
And small doesn’t equal insignificant.

So what I’m saying is, we shouldn’t see the Fediverse etc. as a replacement for everything, but as a safe space for refugees. And that’s what it excels at.

I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.

I honestly have no idea. The one time I tried asking it a question, it asked me to log into my X account, which is about as far as I got.

I’ll say. I’d have expected him to be using Grok, not ChatGPT.

Home ACs are just wasteful.

I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.

Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.

Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.

I don’t know if you’ve already heard of them or if they’re even available where you live, but if it’s the cold air that bugs you, there are water-cooled ceiling plates that work just as well as a conventional A/C. An office I used to work at had them and they were lovely. They cost quite a bit more though.

As an alternative if you just want to avoid feeding surplus energy into the grid, what about a battery of 5-20kWh? It could store more energy than the A/C uses during the day, probably costs about the same or less, and you can use that energy at night.

I’m not sure “cooling degree days” are a good way to measure environmental impact. They neither represent the amount of heat pumped into the atmosphere (as the energy per degree depends on several factors such as mass and heat capacity of the cooled stuff) nor the amount of electricity used (as different A/C’s have wildly different degrees of efficiency) nor the amount of CO2 released (as that depends on how the electricity has been produced).

The power hunger of AI has already been mentioned, so I’m not going to repeat that point, though IMHO it’s by far the bigger issue than residential cooling.

Having said that, if you’re worried about the enviromental impact of your home, the power consumption of a reasonably efficient A/C can easily be offset by just a couple of medium-sized solar panels. Of course both the solar panels and the efficient A/C cost money that not everybody can afford to (or cares to) spend, so you’d have to take cheap and inefficient A/C’s off the market, thus effectively making chilled air a privilege that only the rich can afford. That’d probably lead to lots of heat strokes and other health problems amongst low-income families, so you’d have to weigh the environmental impact of inefficient A/C’s against another rich/poor gap.

It depends on what you’re looking for.

File storage - plenty of solutions, though make sure you don’t pick one that rents their storage space from AWS or Azure.
Personally I use Tresorit at it is end-to-end encrypted, easy to use and has a native client for almost every system I use (except for FreeBSD) in addition to the web interface. On your PC you get a network drive but can also include folders located elsewhere. It’s by no means the cheapest solutio though.

For pictures there’s Ente. It works very well, is cross-platform, and you can even set up your own server if you’re so inclined.

Sadly there’s no real alternative to Microsoft’s 365 offers - maybe a combination of lifetime MS Office licences or LibreOffice plus some cloud storage provider comes close.

To replace Teams you could use a secure messenger such as Threema Work (this version comes with user management and a versatile inbuilt MDM) and your own Jitsi videochat server. We’ve replaced Teams with this combo years ago and never looked back.

Hosted Exchange can be rented from many service providers, running on either genuine MS Exchange or a compatible third-party system such as KerioConnect.

There are also other places such as Proton that offer several services at once.

Or are you looking for something completely different?

All cynicism aside, so would I, probably. What good is immense wealth if you don’t use it as a means to gain happiness?
As much as it pains me to say this as a decades-long passionate M$ hater, Bill Gates is doing something right there.

But you’re right about one thing of course …

These are not normal people. It’s never enough for them.

If it’s Adobe it can be made DRM-free relatively easy. It’s the first thing I do with every purchase (and legal where I live). Try Calibre (free/libre) or Epubor (paid but more versatile and works better for me).

Amazon has just introduced a policy change that probably makes it much harder (or impossible) to de-DRM stuff bought there, so I’m going to do without the books exclusive to them for the time being.

I don’t know. I were filthy rich, I for one probably wouldn’t mind a small (and quite likely temporary) hit on my net worth if it means I get to buy promising upstarts and some of my competitors for small change because they’re now grossly underfunded/undervalued thanks to the crash.

But then again, I’m a cynic, and probably just projecting here.

That’s why I’m driving a 1994 Geo Metro.

FWIW, Android offers a one-handed mode to shrink the available screen estate so you can reach the top of the screen with your thumb. It needs to be enabled in settings once and can then be toggled by double-tapping the home button or a swiping gesture at the bottom of the screen.
In my experience (6.1" Samsung Galaxy S2x user with slightly above-average hands) this is a good compromise between occasionally wanting to do things one-handed on the shrunken screen, and still being able to hit the right keys on the on-screen keyboard most of the time on the regular-size screen.

Bing DuckDuckGo says the iPhone has a similar feature, though I haven’t touched one in years so can’t say anything about it.

Almost everyone is happy

Hey, two out of three ain’t bad 😁

If The Onion or another satirical fake news outlet had run this story, the tankies and Putin-lovers would have launched a shit storm of epic proportions. This just adds to the feeling that satire has long been overtaken by reality.

Yes, and what’s even cooler, they’ve recently made it so the Swiss air force can now even operate outside of office hours! (A small oversight that only lasted a few decades)

Now we only need to figure out the logistics of keeping at least a few planes fully operational at all times.

Yes, I’m aware of that. I just hope Vladimir is, too. At any rate he cannot be allowed to hold the whole world* hostage by playing chicken with unsubstantiated threats. The sooner he is stopped the better.

(* Except for China and his other buddies he’s scared of, of course. Which is somewhat ironic, considering how young Communist China used to be such a fan of the USSR, which in turn treated its poor and underdeveloped neighbour with so thinly veiled contempt. How the tables have turned…)