Usually it’s corruption, but in this case I think it’s even more sinister than that… it’s the result of a total and basically irreversible digital dependency which the EU maneuvered itself into, despite warnings of numerous technical experts not to give away full control of your important digital infrastructure to some other country. But they didn’t listen because they were constantly scammed by marketing, lobbyists and short-lived tech trends to think that it’s surely the best option and there’s surely never going to be a problem if you let US-based companies control everything you need in daily personal or business life.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this comes after the US removed/disabled all US company based accounts (E-mail, Paypal, Creditcard, international banking, …) of one EU judge whose ruling heavily disfavored US big tech companies. (See: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitally-cut-off-by-the-USA-11087561.html) I think this was the main trigger for the EU why this “digital omnibus” now exists - to appease the US-based companies and, by extension, the current US regime. Because otherwise quite a lot of EU businesses and individuals could and would be teleported back to the digital '90s, simply because they chose to give away all of their digital sovereignty - because it seemed cool to do so, and because most others did so too.

The US has demonstrated the world who’s the boss in the digital realm, and everyone who doesn’t fall in line will be threatened with the deactivation or removal of all “important” US-based accounts. This maybe couldn’t have happened before due to friendlier administrations and the rule of law and contracts, but now with the current regime which doesn’t have to care anymore about past alliances or laws or regulations or contracts, there’s really not much that would stop them from doing whatever they (or the US companies) want. And while everyone is watching the US slide into a fascist authoritarianism, what people forget about is how dependent their own lives and also businesses still are on US-based companies. This will be, or is already, a weapon against whole countries to bully them into compliance with US wishes. And I think the EU is still absolutely the equivalent of a digital colony of the US - and that is fully self-inflicted. Far too many popular mistakes have been made in the past, and now those mistakes are actually having their biggest cumulative effect. Just like with the climate desaster. Which is waiting just in line after we get over this. Buckle up.

In order of priority:

1. Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
2. Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
3. Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven’t used it myself yet)
4. Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
5. Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.

Just like you wouldn’t do a trip to North Korea or some war-torn country, you shouldn’t do a trip to USA in 2025. The country is currently in deep crisis with a rogue regime consisting of neo-nazi zealots & grifters and a big chunk of the population brainwashed by regime-supported propaganda on national TV (Fox News) and other random bullsh!t on proprietary social media, also radicalizing parts of the population. Plus they can all own guns legally. It’s neither a safe nor sane country currently. Sorry for the decent Americans out there but your situation is really bad and I don’t think you can turn this around non-violently anymore.

The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It’s a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.

Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it’s cheaper, then you’ll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don’t matter much. But that’s about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.

AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it… it’s never going to be truly great. And it’s also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There’s most likely a saturation curve, and we’re most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won’t really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they’ll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don’t even need to fulfill any more promises.

Why this is happening: right-wing extremist propaganda on popular proprietary social media, and random people believing it and radicalizing themselves. Of course it’s going to spawn more radicalized right-wing extremists, everywhere the propaganda machine turns its head towards (they managed to ruin USA, now they’re trying to ruin Europe). Normal people will become more radicalized in the process. It’s like a global cult and its propaganda distribution mechanism is the internet. Not everyone will have enough education or media literacy to resist this. China and Russia are the big benefactors of a divided and in-fighting West.

Collapse will definitely come. Our way of living on this planet is not sustainable, especially now where everyone who would have the power/influence to change things does literally and openly the opposite (e.g. USA turning their back on climate friendly research/technologies for example). So I think it’s kind of over, I’m kind of an optimist but time is simply running out, we had the Paris agreement and all that jazz like 10 years ago and almost nothing really changed (the only time something changed for the positive was during 2020/2021 but that was involuntarily!), in fact it’s now probably worse than it was back then, so it’s kind of over. Sure you can and should individually continue fighting for it because every small improvement will at least delay the collapse a bit which is useful, but I’m not going to naively believe that we will be able to counteract this anymore. It’s too little, too late. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility of a WW3. And rich/powerful people probably know this as well that the geological and political situations become increasingly unstable which is why they are building luxury bunkers. I would build one too, if I had the spare change.

Translation help from Fascist English to US English:

• “activist” = a non-politician whose free speech we don’t like
• “allow all voices to be heard” / “free speech” = extremist/unconstitutional/propaganda speech which serves the interests of the current fascist regime must be allowed, while every other speech will be labelled as being activist/communist/un-American/…
• “defend […] all Americans” = at least the part of Americans which we tolerate or haven’t jailed yet (subject to change)

Generally yes but it’s not nearly always so clear cut that one is 100% the offender and the other one 0%. Which is why attention to details, context, sophistication, listening to both sides before coming to a conclusion, etc. Is so important. But guess what kind of things get lost when taking part in such a one-sided blame game on the semi-anonymous internet.

Apps like this but also social media more generally allow for one-sided public naming and shaming of Individuals who probably don’t even know about it. It’s problematic because it can be deeply unfair.

I get that there is also value in women protecting themselves against predators but more than likely most content within the app/service is probably one-sided public blaming and gossiping.

And as we all know from right-wing propaganda, being the first to make a bold claim public and generate headlines with it is very powerful and spreads the message far and wide, whether true or false, and many will just believe it’s true without further investigation.

While this is “nice”, I guess, I also can’t fathom how naive this generally seems.

X is a proprietary black box and X or L.Ron Musk can change the algorithm literally at will, what they show which persons and when and when not. There is NO time ever where users have have any control over it, and to perform a statistical analysis on an online service blackbox is also kind of pointless because the blackbox can change randomly, at any point in time, possibly right after the analysis has concluded, or right before. I mean it’s not like the blackbox is in your hands so that you can actually study inputs/outputs and get consistent results. Every time you visit any X URL, there’s potentially a fresh blackbox version deployed to you (you don’t know and you can’t know). That makes it rather pointless IMHO. And it’s just as pointless to believe what X claims about these issues. Of course they’ll always claim that they don’t manipulate. And you can never prove or disprove it, because of a complete lack of control over it from the user’s end. So they can do what they want, as long as they do it sneakily enough that no one notices.

For example if this study comes to the conclusion that there was no manipulation during the time of the study, that’s meaningless because it could have happened before and it could happen afterwards. If it comes to the conclusion that there was manipulation at a certain time, then X can always claim that they’ve already “fixed” the issue and then it’s again a new black box and no one knows when the next manipulation is being activated.

The ONLY solution to this is to ONLY use open source platforms where not a single company or host is able to do what they want with the complete service. Or in other words, the only solution is to avoid X and other proprietary social media platforms like the plague that they are. Because communication should not be controlled by any big company.

Maybe it works as an excuse when you claim you just wanted to train your own AI model with all those pirated books and videos. But who am I kidding. The reality is that copyright violation, as well as quite a few other things, is only really a crime if you’re poor. This current “endgame capitalism” era we’re in is becoming extra-legal quite fast. Maybe we should start making interactive law books where you can view whether a particular law actually applies to your person or your company, or not. Just to keep up with the times.

There are really only 2 options I think: a) either Dump is a Russian asset, in which case he’s lying, or b) he’s not a Russian asset but simply doesn’t care about the war in Europe and wants the US not spending any money there, and to achieve that he’s also lying. Both cases kind of result in the same, so it doesn’t even matter whether a) or b) is true. He will in both cases just say whatever makes him look the least bad but so that he can still achieve his goal of not supporting Ukraine or Europa in its war against Putin. I’ve never seen such obvious lying, deflection and (in other contexts) corruption from any other administration. Sure, many politicians lie and are corrupt, but here it’s orders of magnitude more extreme.

A pigeon is strictly better than Trump because they don’t destroy the environment, societal and scientific progress, or other people. Now that I’ve thought about it 1 second more, it’s not even a fair comparison. Because Trump existing means active harm and destruction in many areas.

Yes. Unfortunately, these systems are also a great gift for any upcoming fascist regime (like the Trump junta currently) which will not only happily continue using the existing infrastructure but also extend it like mad.

Maybe humanity’s greatest weaknesses overall: the lack of foresight and the lack of wisdom learned from historic precedents (e.g. Nazi Germany? Forgotten by now). Everything’s always about short-term goals, ignoring any long-term disadvantages. See also: climate disaster.

In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it’s newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. But only in some countries! It’s pathetic.

Yes, but that somehow doesn’t change anything ever. They do horrible thing A, world is shocked about A, then they do horrible thing B, world is shocked about A+B, then they do horrible thing C, world is shocked about B+C (A has already been forgotten by that point). And so on. We don’t really have proper checks & balances in place against malicious politicians with too much power and too many loyalists in key positions. So they can do whatever and get away with a ton. I mean I thought there should be checks and balances working to correct this in any modern democracy but then again checks & balances also fail regularly in other areas, e.g. in anti-corruption or in pro data protection. Everything’s conveniently broken in some way and can be exploited. The key people from the Trump administration and/or Heritage Foundation should already be behind bars for lifetime.

“AI” is good for pattern matching, generating boiler plate / template code and text, and generating images. Maybe also translation. That’s about it. And it’s of course often flawed/inaccurate so it needs human oversight. Everything else is like a sales scam. A very profitable one.