I think that's just a symptom of the user base growing smaller. Decades ago articles had far more comments. There were always troll posts but there was a lot more discussion to make those seem more inconsequential. Even if posters disagreed politically (I'm sure 2000 election threads are just as bad as any of the recent ones) there was a shared for in Microsoft that everyone could unite behind. Since then open source has won in a lot of ways. It generally rules servers and mobile phones. Even if the Year of the Linux Desktop never really arrived, every year makes it less and less relevant. Without that, the user base will find something else to squabble over.

There's also the vicious cycle that's created where this sort of behavior drives away others and leaves a larger proportion of users that engage in that behavior. It's not so much different from a neighborhood that doesn't solve its crime problems or other issues facing it. The good people slowly leave for greener pastures, but the problem causers stick around or grow worse. If it goes on for long enough you get the dilapidated ghetto or gutted trailer park that no one wants to come to and who the bitter denizens are often resentful to have visit. It's somewhat worse with internet communities because one person can use bots or sock puppet accounts to have an oversized impact.

There's also a tendency for any internet community to become a hive mind. Slashdot, for example, was never going to become a forum where Microsoft was well regarded. Anyone who really liked Microsoft quit posting here shortly after joining to find something else other community that was more open. Any community that slants towards anything will tend to continue heading in that direction as it slowly drives away whatever outgroup is has identified. This can happen along political lines as well, with Reddit and Something Awful before it being examples of this. Slashdot seems more immune to this to some degree. It's not really designed to be as much of a social media site as most other internet communities and was built at a time when no one cared about trying to generate engagement so much as fostering discussion. I don't think that prevents the problem, but it does slow it down considerably.

The user base here is likely much, much older than the average internet community. I don't think previous generations were any better than the current or upcoming generations, but they are all different in their own ways. A lot of us grew up before the smartphones, the internet, or perhaps even ubiquitous personal computing. I think that does have some impact on how we engage with others socially. However it also means that we're a lot closer to the grave than other communities. I've often wondered about some posters who have disappeared over the years. Even people I might normally have disagreed with vehemently on some topics often had insightful or interesting things to say about other topics. Over the years many have dropped off and while it's always possible that they got fed up and got the hell out of town as it were, I think the more simple explanation is that they got old and died. The internet hasn't been around long enough yet for most communities to go through this process where the people who started it all pass away. Slashdot is old enough where that's starting to happen. Anyone who was in their mid-20s when the site was started will be approaching 60 by the end of the decade. A lot of the early users were older than that.

TLDR: Slashdot is dying. Netcraft confirms it!

Most people who have (not so) fond memories of the BSoD predate that era and experienced it on a daily basis. The problem was drastically reduced going from Windows 95 to 98 to 2000/XP, to the extent that it's impossible for hardware to be the primary culprit. Windows dominated the landscape, but they weren't the only OS around and nothing else was that unstable despite using the hardware of that era. Before NT, Windows was an absolute mess. I think the only reason most people put up with it was that they didn't know anything better was possible and since Windows was so widespread it was a misery everyone shared

It's not even that so much as it is making change for the sake of change as opposed for the sake of improvement. Every company is guilty of this to some degree, but everyone can name a few that keep shuffling things around for no good reason. A lot of the time it's worse from a productivity perspective, but I guess that at least it looks flashier.

I'd respect the field more if they told management that the current design is good and that it can stay that way for the next five years while they work out something that might be better and go through the process to verify that. Too often it's them doing stupid shit that screams of them trying to justify their own job position or so that marketing has something to talk about for the next product release.

For seasonal flus you're better off taking a preventative approach than trying to treat it after the fact. By the time the symptoms are showing up there's not much that can be done, at least not in terms of hastening the recovery, beyond getting additional rest and letting your body fight the infection. I just supplement extra vitamin C and zinc during cold season and try to make sure that I don't get generally rundown from lack of sleep or stress and that's been enough to keep me from getting really sick. In the last 10 years I've only had one really bad cold during flu season. The worst cold I had was when I was doing a lot of international travel and sitting in a flying Petri dish for long stretches and having my sleep scheduled ruined on a weekly basis for a little less than a month. By the end of that I think I was so run down that it took almost a month to completely get over that cold.

What's wrong with that? When Apple bought Intel's modem team some years ago the designs they had weren't up to snuff so the iPhone kept using Qualcomm modems instead of being forced to use the inferior in-house solution. They only recently started selling some products with their own modems now that they're close to what competitors offer.

It's no different from you buying something for personal use but deciding to sell it to someone else who would offer you more money than what you paid for it instead of using it yourself. Similarly you may be intent on buying something from some particular company, but change to another that's offering something better for the same price or the same goods for a lower price.

I'm curious if you'd be comfortable if the people who manage your investment portfolio or retirement accounts were to act that way. Everyone always complains about the other guy being greedy, but seems to overlook their own behavior or that kind of behavior when it's beneficial to them. No one would be happy if their bank forsook their fiduciary duties and lent money irresponsibly and lost their depositors money because they didn't want be seen as money chasers.

It's your money though. Use it how you will. Just don't complain if it doesn't work out the way you wished it would have. The only sort of charity that ought to exist is personal charity. Even that is not immune to scammers and those who would try to take advantage of others, but it limits the damage that can be done.

Eventually the AI bubble will burst and suddenly they will find themselves with a lot of DIMMs and a lack of customers to buy them. The same was true of GPUs in the wake of mining booms that went bust. Hopefully those will come down in price as well because the AI boom took off just as the last mining boom was winding down and the prices are still stupidly high compared to historical prices. At least APUs are getting good enough where they're a viable substitute for people who were fine buying lowend cards in the past.

Even if replacing it with a free alternative is possible, there's still the issue of testing that everything still works. Imagine a nice laid out document of some sort where time and effort has been made so that content breaks across pages nicely, captions fit appropriately, etc. such that it's a pleasing document to read. Now change the font and see if that document is still of the same quality. It may still be readable, but subtle shifts and changes will make some aspects of it worse.

A UI might be badly broken if text flows off screen or becomes obscured by some other component. All of that needs to be tested in order to make sure it doesn't cause problems or to fix those problems where they occur. The man hours required to do that will quickly wind up costing as much or more as the higher fees.

What will happen is that existing users will fork over the extra money while moving away from those fonts going forward. Replacement solutions will spring up to fill the gap.

Why were you considering buying a Dell in the first place?

He may not have been aware that the keys were compromised until they were misused. It's not like the keys are a physical object where a person can notice that they've been taken. Most of the people who are performing targeted attacks to gain this kind of access don't go around doing stupid things to alert someone that their machine has been compromised. I even recall an article from a few years ago where it was discovered that a malware program was also acting as an anti-virus to keep other things from infecting the machines and tipping off the users. This isn't the 90's or early 00's where people would immediately deface a website or pull some other crude prank upon gaining access.

They also have a much lower rate of the population with degrees and their universities ruthlessly weed out first year students. Despite having one of the highest standards of living and among the highest wages in Europe, Germany has far fewer college graduates than most of the country. They realize that a lot of degrees aren't worth anything or are completely unnecessary so they won't let people waste their time and the taxpayers' money.

The U.S. absolutely does have too many people going to college or getting degrees that won't help them. If this weren't the case there wouldn't be a massive student debt crisis because the degrees would be paying for themselves. Most degrees still do, at least engineering or technology degrees. The multitude of people getting art history degrees and trying to get one of a very small number of positions in those fields, not so much. Unless you're at the top of the class or well connected (or probably both) then the odds of that degree doing anything other than saddling you with debt is a dubious prospect. But instead of telling anyone the reality of that the colleges will gladly let you drown yourself in debt.

The idea that college is a magic wand that can waved to solve all of society's ills is naive. It won't even necessarily make people happier. I've known several people (mostly Indian) who were essentially forced to get an engineering degree (or a medical degree) who have good jobs, but aren't happy. It's easy to understand why their parents who often grew up exceptionally poor made those decisions, but even if you decided to limit admissions or shift what's funded to align with what's actually beneficial to society, not everyone is going to make the shift. The people who really do want to study art history, philosophy, theater, etc. aren't suddenly going to want to change to mechanical engineers or programmers.

Who would opt in to this? No matter how well the company tries to police this, there will be AI generated slop of artists singing terrible lyrics that they would never do in real life. Does is matter that the company can issue take down request after the fact when your new hit single "Adolf's Solution" featuring your likeness adorned with a silly mustache has already gone viral? Maybe that's on the nose enough for an LLM to shut down, but there are plenty of other terrible things that can be made with this and 4chan will try to make them all.

There aren't that many billionaires. The Wikipedia article on them says that there are only a bit above 900 in the U.S. and a little over 3,000 in the entire world. They have a lot of money, but only because other people voluntarily gave it to them because they valued what they were selling. Maybe this isn't the case worldwide and I'm sure there's a warlord or two that managed to export enough wealth from the people to be considered a billionaire, but most of them got there because they built something valuable, perhaps a few because their father did.

I don't entirely blame the problems of the present on previous generations either. They certainly could make life better for the current or next generation, but why should they. Many of them worked hard to get where they were. Many more worked hard and got nowhere. Why should they give up what they earned to spoil someone who lacks the context to even understand how appreciative they should be. They'll be dead in time and their assets will be passed along regardless of whether they hoard them right now.

If you want to blame someone for the world not turning out the way you wanted it to, look no further than the mirror. Why don't you amass the wealth or power to shape the world as you wanted it to look? Why would you expect anyone else to do it for you?

No, those are government jobs. No one in the private sector employs anyone (unskilled or otherwise) any longer than they have to. Unless they're in management of course. I think most managers are hired to waste the time of other managers that are also time vampires so that some engineers and developers can actually get things done.

Notice they said absolutely nothing about using it to target keyword ads at you, build profiles about you to target you with ads, and whatever else they're doing with the data to push more bullshit ads on you. The only smart feature is to disable the account and use something else that respects your privacy.