Probably so, but another thing is much more severe today than it ever was back then: the ease and speed of distributing fascist and/or destabilizing propaganda. X, Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok are full of it, and guess where most people hang out on and get their "news" from.
Theoretically yes, but I think he has a unique "quality" in that he doesn't care and doesn't get distracted by any negative feedback because he's so stubborn and narcissist.
So he's a very useful tool to turn into reality every deranged change and effortlessly lie about anything, with confidence. Plus, he's old, so he doesn't need to care whether he gets into trouble for all this in the future.
So I think in a way Trump is not just the enabler of all the authoritarian changes, but also a great punching bag to get hit by any public blame while the people in the background (Project 2025 etc.) driving the changes aren't becoming too big of a target and getting away with it all.
... which is why he (respectively, his handlers in the background) will try to attack/manipulate/reverse election results in the near future.
He's turning the US towards a future which is like in Russia or other authoritarian regimes: president always mysteriously wins every election, any sort of competition gets jailed or killed, and rich oligarchs (among them big tech companies) who co-run the country are happy.
Ja, ich vermute aber es wird nicht passieren. Aus 2 Gründen:
1.) Die EU ist im digitalen Bereich quasi ein Vasall von den USA und jederzeit erpressbar ("hey BigTech-Konzerne, deaktiviert doch mal alle Accounts die von deutschen Usern verwendet werden für 1 Woche (AWS, Azure, M365, Google- & Apple-Clouddienste, Amazon, vielleicht sogar noch VISA, Mastercard und Paypal und andere US-Bezahldienste ...)") -- das würde Deutschland bspw. ziemlich hart treffen weil wir uns viel zu abhängig gemacht haben, und
2.) mit der massiven pro-rechts Propaganda im Umlauf, die im Inland von reichen Konzernen aus Profitmaximierungsgründen vorangetrieben wird (rechte Regierungen sind wirtschaftsfreundlicher und stellen weniger Regularien und Strafen auf) und gleichzeitig auch noch von Russland zur allgemeinen Destabilisierung der EU vorangetrieben wird, werden einzelne EU-Länder tendenziell mehr nationalistisch und weniger vereint (weil rechte Politik sowas nun mal verursacht). Das hilft Russland bei der Expansion nach Westen und es hilft mächtigen Konzernen bei der Profitmaximierung. Und 40%+ der Bevölkerung finden es dann auch nocht gut, weil sie Opfer der vielen rechten Propaganda geworden sind.
Gegen so einen perfekten Sturm kommt die EU wahrscheinlich nicht an, aber man muss trotzdem alles in seiner Macht stehende tun, um diesen Sturm so stark auszubremsen wie möglich.
Play on lichess.org, it's generally a nicer place than chess[.]com
(Maybe controversial but it's my opinion) De-prioritize learning openings at first. Maybe learn them later in more detail when you want to optimize details. As White, just learn your favorite opening and play that - you'll always be first anyway, so your opponent has to react to your opening. As Black, just learn how to counter the most popular White openings (which is also why most Black openings are called "xyz Defense", because they're reacting to what White does). There are also a few Black openings that can be played against anything White does, so maybe prioritize these so you have to think less about the opening (e.g. King's Indian Defense, Modern Defense). That's about it for starting out. Mid-game and end-game, positioning, tactics, converting winning positions into victories matters FAR more and you will make the most mistakes during mid- and end-game anyway. There is a lot of openings content on Youtube for example, which might suggest that openings are super important. But really, they're just easy-to-produce low-effort content for chess masters.
Watch videos of master-level games with good commentaries, explaining each move. Try to understand the reasoning behind the moves. Why a move is good or bad.
Play a lot of Rapid. I'd recommend Rapid because it's not as slow as Classical, so you can play tons of games (playing a lot is important for experience), but still not as ludicrously fast as Bullet or Blitz. I don't like the too fast time controls because this really just causes players of any skill level to make blunders they otherwise wouldn't have done.
After each game, do a computer analysis and see where your mistakes were (also if you've won!). This is also very important because otherwise you sometimes can't know where you made a mistake or where you played sub-optimally.
And NIUS, the newest "Not-Nazi-but-Nazi"-Propaganda medium on web, TV and radio. Powered by Julian Reichelt, ex-BILD chief "journalist", and Frank Gotthardt, someone wealthy who owns multiple right-wing populist media portals.
There are also a lot of new-ish right-wing and AfD-supporting influencers on yt, tiktok, X and so on.
The Propaganda war to sway the German population to vote AfD into power is in full swing with lots of money behind it. Also being pushed by MAGA, Musk, etc.
There's also the very valid situation of a game you previously liked becoming noticeably worse after some update or addon, which might cause a previous recommendation and engagement to flip.
An over-fixation on "manliness" and "heroism" in the military is also standard fascism playbook. Everyone's made up to be a hero for their country, no matter if true or not. This sort of propaganda-fueled glorification of soldiers and war maybe helps recruitment of future soldiers for whatever future war the fascists are going to start. That's probably the only upside.
Don't see an issue here. The advantages of the Steam Machine is that it requires no assembly, looks nice and is optimized for standing in a living room. If you build it DIY you'll as usual have lower costs, more performance, but higher assembly time and probably also less good looks. People who value performance or price over the rest will do it DIY, otherwise they'll take the pre-built option.
Standard fascism playbook. Attach false labels to your opponents (if they already radicalized enough parts of their base, their base is going to go with it), then start oppressing them (or worse).
Trump also regularly attaches labels like "Radical Leftist X" or "communist activist judge Y" to people he doesn't like. It's to spread these false accusations, establish these falsehoods as a new reality in the public minds through constant repetition of such propaganda lies (see Goebbel's dictionary, he mentioned that large parts of the population can be made to believe any false claim if you just repeat it enough times), and then to radicalize their followers to start oppressing these people.
Law, order, truth, science, it all doesn't matter anymore. Fascism is all about creating its own warped reality in which everyone who is against the fascists is a ripe target for oppression (or worse).
It's also going to get worse as time goes by because they want to remain in power even when their terms are limited, i.e. they need to establish a dictatorship-like form of corrupt and criminal government which also fuses with ruthless mega corps and other ruthless, powerful billionaires on the other side (who benefit from corrupt, right-wing extremist governments).
And thanks to the internet and billionaire-controlled proprietary social media platforms and some other media companies, it doesn't stay local to the USA - the brown propaganda spreads to all western democratic countries, turning a significant portion of citizens into fascists who will then vote right-wing extremists into power.
Next to climate change, this is the biggest problem we have in the western world right now.
Remember, fascism goes hand-in-hand with late-stage capitalism. Valuing all human life costs money and so not caring about some human lives is an "acceptable business decision". Just as it is not an acceptable business decision to invest into climate neutrality. This all goes hand-in-hand with right-wing extremist governments which also never care about some lives and which are great enablers and amplifiers of fast, short-term profits. That is really what it has come down to. Everything is now a short-term business decision. And when governments are right-wing, there is no counterbalance anymore against obscenely rich and powerful businesses and individuals (there also wasn't much before, to be fair, but in this case it's basically zero). There's a reason why L. Ron Musk, for example, is influencing e.g. U.K. elections and wants the British people voting for right-wing extremist politicians. That reason is not because he cares about the British people. He doesn't even live there (he lives in the US). It's because it enables his companies, which also operate in U.K., more profit, less pesky regulations, and he doesn't care if a country eventually collapses under fascism, as long as he gets a bigger cut. It's also why he bought Twitter, turned it into a right-wing propaganda distribution platform called X, which probably eventually influenced enough US citizens to reach a voting majority for Trump. Which is also what he wanted. But of course he needs to sell it to the public like he cares about them. And, typically, people who are gullible enough to vote for right-wing extremists, are generally gullible enough to believe such lies. Just as fascists in the past were gullible enough to follow any powerful Führer personality.
Emacs is one of my primary tools. It's not just an editor, it has many use-cases and micro-applications within. But it's very hard and long-winded to get into. Not recommended for just checking it out. You need to be certain that that's a tool you want to use long-term.
pass is a simple but amazing CLI-based password manager. It requires a gpg key pair (because it uses gpg for en-/decryption), which is a tool that's notoriously hard to get into, but once you've got that, pass is amazing, especially when paired with the script passmenu + the tool wofi/dmenu, as you'll have insanely fast access to any stored password on hotkey press.
syncthing is a great way to sync files across devices (serverless, you just need a discovery host (self-hosted or public) for your devices to find each other over the internet). Easy to use.
Some (usually rust-based) coreutils alternatives like exa (ls), bat (cat), fd (find), procs (ps) are nicer to use than the "originals"
ripgrep (rg) - MUCH faster than grep. Recommendation: use smart case (meaning that if you type your search term in lower case, it searches case-insensitively (which is usually what you want), but as soon as you include at least 1 cap, it searches case-sensitively, which is smart)
ripgrep-all (rga) - allows you to full-text-search through "everything" (including some binary formats like PDFs, Office documents, zips, ...). Insanely fast as well.
ledger - is a plain-text accounting software for tracking and introspecting your finances or expenses in plain-text form (also has a great Emacs package/integration from the same author)
fzf - can be combined with other tools or scripts to allow fuzzy-searching through various result lists. Here's a neat example from my bash aliases ("pi" stands for "package install", name it whatever) which you can use on an Arch-based distribution to have a fast fuzzy-search mini TUI package installer, it's just cool:
I was a bit disappointed with desktop Linux during the late 90s and early 00s because many applications within the typical ecosystem weren't great or mature yet (I still shudder when thinking about the amount of time I spent trying to get audio to work nicely across OSS, alsa, artsd, esound, ... this was before pulseaudio or pipewire, obviously), and then I temporarily switched back to Windows as a primary OS just because of gaming compatibility. But since the mid-10s or so, Linux grew to become very capable for at least casual gaming as well. So there was no need for Windows anymore and I just wiped it off of every device, leaving Linux as the only OS. This was also during a time where Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and later 11 showed up and this really showed to me that Windows was doomed to die a long-winded death. The last decent version of Windows was 7.
Debian (stable) is my vote for reliability. Always has been.
The only time Debian might not "just work" is when you have VERY new hardware (new on the market) and need the absolute newest kernel version to have the necessary drivers. In such cases, look at Fedora, Mint or Kubuntu.
It was funny (and untrue) when desktop Linux was constantly at ~1% market share. But now with desktop Linux slowly but constantly rising, it's actually true!
If "service manager" doesn't ring a bell, think of it as a "manager of background tasks/applications". Some applications which only run in the background as background processes are called "services" (sometimes also called "daemons" or simply "servers"), and systemd offers ways to create/start/stop/restart/manage/introspect those, as well as configure how and when they start, what permissions they have when starting, and things like that. It basically replaced very old tools like "inetd".
The other main part of systemd is that it's an init system, which means that it's meant to be started as the very first process (PID 1) by the kernel during startup, and it then launches all the other processes/services which need to run before you even get to log in. Compared to the old sysv-init system which systemd basically replaced, systemd is faster and much more featureful and modern.
systemd also has a lot of other more optional components (it's a big bundle of system tools, altogether). Whether these are used is up to the administrator or the distribution which might preconfigure them (or not).
As usual in the open source world, there are alternatives for everything. You don't technically need to use systemd, or you could just use some of systemd's components and not others, but its main components are the default for most distributions nowadays. Some more niche distros pride themselves in not using systemd at all. But systemd is great overall (there's a reason why most distros use it).
Probably so, but another thing is much more severe today than it ever was back then: the ease and speed of distributing fascist and/or destabilizing propaganda. X, Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok are full of it, and guess where most people hang out on and get their "news" from.
Yes, it's great if you like immersive horror style games with great atmosphere. And with beautiful graphics.
Theoretically yes, but I think he has a unique "quality" in that he doesn't care and doesn't get distracted by any negative feedback because he's so stubborn and narcissist.
So he's a very useful tool to turn into reality every deranged change and effortlessly lie about anything, with confidence. Plus, he's old, so he doesn't need to care whether he gets into trouble for all this in the future.
So I think in a way Trump is not just the enabler of all the authoritarian changes, but also a great punching bag to get hit by any public blame while the people in the background (Project 2025 etc.) driving the changes aren't becoming too big of a target and getting away with it all.
... which is why he (respectively, his handlers in the background) will try to attack/manipulate/reverse election results in the near future.
He's turning the US towards a future which is like in Russia or other authoritarian regimes: president always mysteriously wins every election, any sort of competition gets jailed or killed, and rich oligarchs (among them big tech companies) who co-run the country are happy.
I had that in mind when typing... :)
An animal as a leader would at least not make anything worse... so there's a real upside.
Ja, ich vermute aber es wird nicht passieren. Aus 2 Gründen:
1.) Die EU ist im digitalen Bereich quasi ein Vasall von den USA und jederzeit erpressbar ("hey BigTech-Konzerne, deaktiviert doch mal alle Accounts die von deutschen Usern verwendet werden für 1 Woche (AWS, Azure, M365, Google- & Apple-Clouddienste, Amazon, vielleicht sogar noch VISA, Mastercard und Paypal und andere US-Bezahldienste ...)") -- das würde Deutschland bspw. ziemlich hart treffen weil wir uns viel zu abhängig gemacht haben, und
2.) mit der massiven pro-rechts Propaganda im Umlauf, die im Inland von reichen Konzernen aus Profitmaximierungsgründen vorangetrieben wird (rechte Regierungen sind wirtschaftsfreundlicher und stellen weniger Regularien und Strafen auf) und gleichzeitig auch noch von Russland zur allgemeinen Destabilisierung der EU vorangetrieben wird, werden einzelne EU-Länder tendenziell mehr nationalistisch und weniger vereint (weil rechte Politik sowas nun mal verursacht). Das hilft Russland bei der Expansion nach Westen und es hilft mächtigen Konzernen bei der Profitmaximierung. Und 40%+ der Bevölkerung finden es dann auch nocht gut, weil sie Opfer der vielen rechten Propaganda geworden sind.
Gegen so einen perfekten Sturm kommt die EU wahrscheinlich nicht an, aber man muss trotzdem alles in seiner Macht stehende tun, um diesen Sturm so stark auszubremsen wie möglich.
Play on lichess.org, it's generally a nicer place than chess[.]com
(Maybe controversial but it's my opinion) De-prioritize learning openings at first. Maybe learn them later in more detail when you want to optimize details. As White, just learn your favorite opening and play that - you'll always be first anyway, so your opponent has to react to your opening. As Black, just learn how to counter the most popular White openings (which is also why most Black openings are called "xyz Defense", because they're reacting to what White does). There are also a few Black openings that can be played against anything White does, so maybe prioritize these so you have to think less about the opening (e.g. King's Indian Defense, Modern Defense). That's about it for starting out. Mid-game and end-game, positioning, tactics, converting winning positions into victories matters FAR more and you will make the most mistakes during mid- and end-game anyway. There is a lot of openings content on Youtube for example, which might suggest that openings are super important. But really, they're just easy-to-produce low-effort content for chess masters.
Watch videos of master-level games with good commentaries, explaining each move. Try to understand the reasoning behind the moves. Why a move is good or bad.
Play a lot of Rapid. I'd recommend Rapid because it's not as slow as Classical, so you can play tons of games (playing a lot is important for experience), but still not as ludicrously fast as Bullet or Blitz. I don't like the too fast time controls because this really just causes players of any skill level to make blunders they otherwise wouldn't have done.
After each game, do a computer analysis and see where your mistakes were (also if you've won!). This is also very important because otherwise you sometimes can't know where you made a mistake or where you played sub-optimally.
And NIUS, the newest "Not-Nazi-but-Nazi"-Propaganda medium on web, TV and radio. Powered by Julian Reichelt, ex-BILD chief "journalist", and Frank Gotthardt, someone wealthy who owns multiple right-wing populist media portals.
There are also a lot of new-ish right-wing and AfD-supporting influencers on yt, tiktok, X and so on.
The Propaganda war to sway the German population to vote AfD into power is in full swing with lots of money behind it. Also being pushed by MAGA, Musk, etc.
There's also the very valid situation of a game you previously liked becoming noticeably worse after some update or addon, which might cause a previous recommendation and engagement to flip.
An over-fixation on "manliness" and "heroism" in the military is also standard fascism playbook. Everyone's made up to be a hero for their country, no matter if true or not. This sort of propaganda-fueled glorification of soldiers and war maybe helps recruitment of future soldiers for whatever future war the fascists are going to start. That's probably the only upside.
Don't see an issue here. The advantages of the Steam Machine is that it requires no assembly, looks nice and is optimized for standing in a living room. If you build it DIY you'll as usual have lower costs, more performance, but higher assembly time and probably also less good looks. People who value performance or price over the rest will do it DIY, otherwise they'll take the pre-built option.
Standard fascism playbook. Attach false labels to your opponents (if they already radicalized enough parts of their base, their base is going to go with it), then start oppressing them (or worse).
Trump also regularly attaches labels like "Radical Leftist X" or "communist activist judge Y" to people he doesn't like. It's to spread these false accusations, establish these falsehoods as a new reality in the public minds through constant repetition of such propaganda lies (see Goebbel's dictionary, he mentioned that large parts of the population can be made to believe any false claim if you just repeat it enough times), and then to radicalize their followers to start oppressing these people.
Law, order, truth, science, it all doesn't matter anymore. Fascism is all about creating its own warped reality in which everyone who is against the fascists is a ripe target for oppression (or worse).
It's also going to get worse as time goes by because they want to remain in power even when their terms are limited, i.e. they need to establish a dictatorship-like form of corrupt and criminal government which also fuses with ruthless mega corps and other ruthless, powerful billionaires on the other side (who benefit from corrupt, right-wing extremist governments). And thanks to the internet and billionaire-controlled proprietary social media platforms and some other media companies, it doesn't stay local to the USA - the brown propaganda spreads to all western democratic countries, turning a significant portion of citizens into fascists who will then vote right-wing extremists into power.
Next to climate change, this is the biggest problem we have in the western world right now.
Miller is 100% pure Nazi. De-nazification needs to happen soon.
Remember, fascism goes hand-in-hand with late-stage capitalism. Valuing all human life costs money and so not caring about some human lives is an "acceptable business decision". Just as it is not an acceptable business decision to invest into climate neutrality. This all goes hand-in-hand with right-wing extremist governments which also never care about some lives and which are great enablers and amplifiers of fast, short-term profits. That is really what it has come down to. Everything is now a short-term business decision. And when governments are right-wing, there is no counterbalance anymore against obscenely rich and powerful businesses and individuals (there also wasn't much before, to be fair, but in this case it's basically zero). There's a reason why L. Ron Musk, for example, is influencing e.g. U.K. elections and wants the British people voting for right-wing extremist politicians. That reason is not because he cares about the British people. He doesn't even live there (he lives in the US). It's because it enables his companies, which also operate in U.K., more profit, less pesky regulations, and he doesn't care if a country eventually collapses under fascism, as long as he gets a bigger cut. It's also why he bought Twitter, turned it into a right-wing propaganda distribution platform called X, which probably eventually influenced enough US citizens to reach a voting majority for Trump. Which is also what he wanted. But of course he needs to sell it to the public like he cares about them. And, typically, people who are gullible enough to vote for right-wing extremists, are generally gullible enough to believe such lies. Just as fascists in the past were gullible enough to follow any powerful Führer personality.
I was a bit disappointed with desktop Linux during the late 90s and early 00s because many applications within the typical ecosystem weren't great or mature yet (I still shudder when thinking about the amount of time I spent trying to get audio to work nicely across OSS, alsa, artsd, esound, ... this was before pulseaudio or pipewire, obviously), and then I temporarily switched back to Windows as a primary OS just because of gaming compatibility. But since the mid-10s or so, Linux grew to become very capable for at least casual gaming as well. So there was no need for Windows anymore and I just wiped it off of every device, leaving Linux as the only OS. This was also during a time where Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and later 11 showed up and this really showed to me that Windows was doomed to die a long-winded death. The last decent version of Windows was 7.
Debian (stable) is my vote for reliability. Always has been. The only time Debian might not "just work" is when you have VERY new hardware (new on the market) and need the absolute newest kernel version to have the necessary drivers. In such cases, look at Fedora, Mint or Kubuntu.
It was funny (and untrue) when desktop Linux was constantly at ~1% market share. But now with desktop Linux slowly but constantly rising, it's actually true!
If "service manager" doesn't ring a bell, think of it as a "manager of background tasks/applications". Some applications which only run in the background as background processes are called "services" (sometimes also called "daemons" or simply "servers"), and systemd offers ways to create/start/stop/restart/manage/introspect those, as well as configure how and when they start, what permissions they have when starting, and things like that. It basically replaced very old tools like "inetd".
The other main part of systemd is that it's an init system, which means that it's meant to be started as the very first process (PID 1) by the kernel during startup, and it then launches all the other processes/services which need to run before you even get to log in. Compared to the old sysv-init system which systemd basically replaced, systemd is faster and much more featureful and modern.
systemd also has a lot of other more optional components (it's a big bundle of system tools, altogether). Whether these are used is up to the administrator or the distribution which might preconfigure them (or not).
As usual in the open source world, there are alternatives for everything. You don't technically need to use systemd, or you could just use some of systemd's components and not others, but its main components are the default for most distributions nowadays. Some more niche distros pride themselves in not using systemd at all. But systemd is great overall (there's a reason why most distros use it).