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It’s nice to blame voters for parties failing to win elections. That absolves the party of responsibility - “we were right, it was voters who are wrong”.

But that won’t win an election. And that attitude will gift the mid terms and even 2028 to the republicans.

The DNC fucked up - it backed Biden despite clear signs he was not a good candidate for this election, the primary process who a fig leaf of democracy rather than putting forward the party’s best and brightest, it then fought concerns of Biden health and hid the truth, then when he finally stepped down late in the day it arranged a coronation for Harris. And then after behaving undemocratically repeatedly it had the gall to make the election about “saving democracy”.

Voters didn’t do these things, the DNC did.

Instead of demonising voters and non voters, it’s better to ask what should the party have done differently to win them over and what does it need to do to win them over in the mid terms.

This. I get people are angry but they need to step back and look at this for what to was. It was a bad Democrat campaign, from a party that is out of touch with voters. I don’t blame Harris for this, I think she was a decent candidate given an impossible task.

The Dems did not contest Biden running despite obvious health concerns, then let him hold on til the bitter end dismissing all concerns, then had a coronation for Harris. Not very democratic and yet they made this election about democracy. And then they focused on abortion, as the main issue.

Yet voters concerns in the exit polls were clear - the number one issue was the economy. The dems failed to sell their message on the economy, they let Trump control the topic.

This is the sort of attitude that gifts power to repulicans ever more.

Instead of blaming voters, blame the Democrat party. It needed to appeal to voters concerns and needs. It needs to ask why it failed to convince younger voters, and address what their priorities are.

The obvious answer at the moment is the Dems failed to campaign well on the economy. Harris defended the last 4 years as a success but for many lower income people of all ages it will not feel that way. Middle class voters who own their own homes were shielded more from inflation than renters whose housing costs due rent inflation sky rocketed as well as all other living costs - they were hit doubly hard.

The Dems decided to focus on women’s reproductive issues and a fear of democratic loss, and hoped women would come out and vote balancing our other groups. This failed. It’s clear Harris and the Democrats should have campaigned hard on economic change and offered a different vision to trump.

So don’t blame voters. Blame the Democrats for this and many other failings in this election (no real contest at their primary, Biden hanging on til late with patronising dismissal of concerns over his health by the Dem leadership, and then a coronation of Harris who also inherited Bidens team rather than had time to build her own campaign).

Looking at the overall vote count the Rep vote seems largely similar to 2020, or slightly up, but the democratic vote has fallen significantly. This is largely due to the Democrats failure rather than due to Republicans success.

This is nonsense sorry. Polls shows 50:50 split between Dems and Rep, but the reality is 1/3:1/3 with 1/3 of the electorate and disengaged. The voters aren’t the problem, it’s the fucked up 2 party system which has been massaged by both parties over many decades to prevent any competition.

Why should voters feel loyal to either of those parties? Don’t blame voters for not wanting to chose between two crap choices. To many, both the Dems and Reps are the enemy. Why expect them to care if one side or the other think there is an existential crisis in the shitty system they shaped?

Blame the Democratic party and Joe Biden. They didn’t put anyone serious up during the primaries against him, they held out from replacing Biden until the last minute and then they lumped Harris with his campaign and no time.

Biden should have stood aside last year (as many voices pushed for), and then the party’s best and brightest should have been given the chance to be the candidate. It might have been Harris, who knows, but whoever it was would then have had the whole of 2024 across the primaries to establish a profile and narrative and tackle Trump.

And maybe a fresh candidate could have broken through on the most important topic to voters: the economy.

I think this is an oversimplification and lets Democrats off the hook.

A large part of how he won is to do with how polarised US politics are. The Democrats and Republicans are polar opposites, to the point that no matter who the candidates are the core voters could never conscience voting for the other side. Some Republicans may hate Trump but they will still vote republican as they see the Democrats standing for things they just don’t agree with (whether that’s Immigration or abortion or conservative values or fiscal conservatism etc). It just takes one; things are so polarised that it’s inbuilt that it’s a binary decision. The Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans for carving up US democracy between the two of them. If you look at polls, they say 50:50 split but actually thats just “likely voters”; the underlying split is more like 1/3:1/3 with a whole 1/3 of the electorate disenfranchised and not bothering to vote. When they talk about undecideds, they’re talking about 2% of people likely to vote; not the whole 1/3 of the election who don’t vote at all. 3rd parties don’t get a look in, and even get blamed for taking votes from the anointed of the two big parties.

On top of that, the Democrats really fucked up. The party leadership supported Biden running, and no serious candidates stood in the primary race even though he was already clearly a weakened candidate due to age. Then when he was finally persuaded to go at near the last minute, it was too late. They again didn’t have a primary, they had a coronation, and then a short run to establish her. I like Harris but she inherited his team, his set up and was unable and unwilling to paint herself as a change candidate as she wouldn’t criticise the perceived mistakes of her own incumbent white house. She focused on abortion, and could seemingly not address the economy in a meaningful way to appeal to voters.

I don’t think it’s because Americans are easily fooled. I think it’s because both parties have created an extremely polarised political landscape which they have both used to their advantage to suppress 3rd parties and other views across the 50 states. In addition, the Democrat party tried to claim it was an election about “preserving democracy” and yet chose to do that by not enabling democracy in their own party.

Hopefully the Democrats will take a long hard look at themselves. And the good news, a slither of good news, is that in 2028 there will not be any Clintons or Bidens hanging around whose “turn” it is to run. The party can actually have an open primary and the best candidates can stand instead of feeling they shouldn’t run. Would we be in this position if there had been a full primary and the candidate had been someone like Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsome, Josh Shapiro or even just a truly independent run by Harris?

So America has decided and it looks like it won’t even be close. The republicans will control Congress and the presidency. And looking at the numbers this won’t be about turnout. In michigan for example, young voters went for Trump. He looks even on track to win the popular vote.

America has actively chosen Trump. They can’t blame turnout and it looks like they can’t even blame their crappy electoral system.

There will be a lot of recriminations in the Democrat party, and there is a lot of responsibility on their side. They were undemocratic, snuffing out their primary process, lumbering the party with a dud until the last moment and then rushing to pick Harris. I like Harris but they should have had an open primary even in July, and of course Biden should have stepped out of the election a year ago and let others compete and have a good run at the white house.

But also they are responsible along with the republicans for the 2 party system with its corruption, gerrymandering and shut down of options for any body who doesn’t agree with either party. We can only hope this will stimulate the Democrat party to embrace actual democracy. It didn’t last time.

But ultimately American voters have gone for Trump, they want him, they deserve him. The rest of the world will just have to deal with him.

It’s a thought experiment, not an observation. The idea is that if you have infinity and it’s truly random than eventually all possibilities emerge somewhere within that.

The idea of infinite monkeys typing randomly on infinite typewriters is that eventually one of them would accidentally type out all the works of Shakespeare. Many more would type out parts of the works of Shakespeare. And many many many more would type random garbage.

If we then take that forwadd imagine for a moment the multiverse is also infinite and random, then every possible universe would exist somewhere in that multiverse.

It can be taken in other directions too. It’s a way of cocneptualising the implications of infinity and true randomness.

Meanwhile actual Shakespeare had intelligence and wrote and created his works. Him being a monkey writing Shakespeare is just a sly humerous observation, but it has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the thought experiment and the idea it is trying to convey.

I think from a third party point of view that makes no sense. It’s not for her to prop up the broken electoral system. Harris is essentially the lesser evil in this argument, but the real problem is the electoral system.

Arguably the “better” outcome for third parties is for Harris to win the popular vote and lose the election because of the stupid electoral college system. That may actually get Democrats more serious about electoral reform which would benefit everyone. They’ve already lost twice despite winning the popular vote (Gore and H Clinton). Yet they continue to support broken electoral systems across the country at national and state level as all they care about is Dem vs Rep. Not actual democracy.

The Democrats didn’t even have a proper primary contest in this election, they value democracy so little. They tried to forced Biden on the party and voters and it blew up spectacularly. The party needs a shake up and frankly losing may be better for them than Harris saving them from the party’s own disastrous mismanagement.

I’m no fan of trump, but Americas problems run far deeper and are far more systemic than one election.

Trash “research” and trash journalism covering it. First they find that monkeys would write Shakespeare, it would just take on average longer than the entire existence of the universe. They then try to infer that how long it takes is relevant. It is not. The calculation is vaguely interesting as a curio but the shoehorned “discussion” and interpretation to get attention is crap and another example of bad science misleading people.

It’s pointless and stupid - the thought experiment itself is that infinite monkeys typing would eventually type the whole of Shakespeare. Not how long it would take. The whole point of it is that in a truly random system all known patterns should eventually emerge somewhere within it. The length of time it takes for the pattern to emerge is irrelevant as the idea is based in infinity. So for example if there is a truly random infinite multiverse then in theory all imaginable possibilities would exist somewhere within it at some point.

I bet it’s deliberate. Like a power play knowing his story is clearly bullshit but the morons he’s appealing to are believing it making him feel even more superior.

The metaverse a resounding failure, Facebook has latched on to the AI hype train in hopes of making the company relevant. They’re basically put of ideas on how to feed the beast of “forever growth” the markets demand.

I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.

You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.

As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.

There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?

Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.

However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).

Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?

Quick FYI - Exa is no longer fully maintained; there is a fork called Eza which is maintained. They couldn’t take over the original Exa repo as the original creator is unreachable. Eza is in many distros; I’ve installed it on OpenSuSe Tumbleweed with ease from the factory-oss.

https://github.com/eza-community/eza

For the Flatpak apt upgrade how about “flapt”.

That’s rather simplifying history and not the main reason Netscape failed.

Netscape lost because Microsoft used it’s dominant monopoly position to bundle Internet Explorer with windows. By 1999 the writing was already on the wall - IE had already overtaken Netscape market share and was growing rapidly.

The Mozilla project and code base change was a gamble to try and fix the problems. When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn’t bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.

So while the code base change was arguably mishandled, at worst it accelerated the decline. Instead the whole story is a poster child for how monopoloes can be used to destroy competition. The anti trust actions in the US and EU came too late for Netscape.

Ironically Microsoft was the receiving end of the same treatment when Google started pushing Chrome via it’s own monopoly in search. They made a better product than the incumbent but they pushed it hard via their website that everyone uses.

Genuinely, nothing so far.

I’ve tinkered with it but I basically don’t trust it. For example I don’t trust it to summarise documents or articles accurately, every time I don’t trust it to perform a full and comprehensive search and I don’t trust it not to provide me false or inaccurate information.

LLMs have potential to be useful tools, but what’s been released is half baked and rushed to market as part of the current bubble.

Why would I use tools that inherently “hallucinate” - I. E. are error strewn? I don’t want to fact check the output of an LLM.

This is in many ways the same as not relying on Wikipedia for information. It’s a good quick summary but you have to take everything with a pinch of salt and go to primary sources. I’ve seen Wikipedia be wildly inaccurate about topics I know in depth, and I’ve seen AI do the same.

So pass until the quality goes up. I don’t see that happening in the near future as the focus seems to be monetisation, not fixing the broken products. Sure, I’ll tinker occasionally and see how it’s getting on but this stuff is basically not fit for purpose yet.

As the saying goes, all that glitters is not gold. AI is superficially impressive but once you scratch the surface and have to actually rely on it then it’s just not fit for purpose beyond a curio for me.

Flatpak is supposed to be a sandbox, so if there is a vulnerable dependency then in theory any attack would be limited to the sandbox.

However, it depends on the software - some Flatpak need quite low level access to use, and in that case an attack or mlaware could get into the main system. And unfortunately Flatpak itself has vulnerabilities which cna negate the whole idea of a sandbox.

Flatpaks should be using up to date secure dependencies, but the reality is many do not. I would not rely on Flatpak for security. Even fully up to date Flatpaks can be insecure, and Flatpak itself have vulnerabilities that have needed fixing. And for many Flatpaks it’s not even clear who is maintaining them.

Flatpaks are useful for deploying software that’s just not available in your distros repos. But when deploying any software outside your repos - including App Image, build from source or 3rd party repos - you are opening your system up to security vulnerabilities. That’s the nature of installing 3rd party software. Flatpak offers some reassurance compared to some methods but it’s far from perfect.

If security is your prime concern, then Virtual Machines may be more secure route to sandboxing software (if done properly). Building from source would be the other option, as it means you take ont he responsibility for security by using the latest code including for dependencies. But there is no perfect option, it’s always about balancing risk vs convenience.

It’s also worth noting that software repos are also not perfect. But good distros invest a lot of time and effort in keeping them as up to date and secure as possible, usually via the hard work of volunteers.