As a lactose intolerant individual, I can assure you that once a quarter or so Mexican food beckons me and a willingly walk into that dark night. No regrets… at least not while I’m eating. Afterwards there are regrets.

So I recently switched to vim as my text editor. And started using vimwiki for notes. But I must know what insanity could one possibly do with a Text editor other than… Well text edit.

The history. Jesus fuck, it’s the history. I swear in the south we talk about things from the 1920s like that shit is ancient. Meanwhile in the UK you’re just casually staying at a hotel that was built in the 1600s.

It’s there for every time after the first. My first two I did manually. Excellent learning experience, very glad to do it. I’m old and lazy now.

If I remember right .world is hosted in Finland. Who likely doesn’t care about MS politics. They’d have to lobby the Finnish government, who, if they did capitulate would start an awful president. So they won’t as MS has 0 authority there. But, lets assume that they did, or that MS went to all of the ISPs and had them block .world. That’s thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours, lawyers, and paperwork. And the .world users in MS just download their config files and move to .de, .ca, or .uk. And now MS gets to repeat the entire process at three more countries who couldn’t care less about their laws. The would waste unfathomable dollars and hours chasing this mouse and get nowhere. So they just won’t. It’s posturing for the big tech companies. Same as with porn. The big 3 or 4 will just block the state and move on, and the rest and those hosted in other countries will continue like nothing happened. The conservatives will claim they won ‘for the children’, nothing will really change.

Immune, no, insanely hard to police? Hell yeah. The thing with these laws is that it’s pretty easy for MS to sue Reddit and force them to comply. They have one centralized location to complain to. You can’t just call John Lemmy and have him comply. Would it be impossible for a state government to contact every single instance owner? maybe? But they’re not going to do it. Even if they made an attempt the instances hosted in other countries couldn’t give less shits about some southern US state.

Nostr is a whole other beast… it’s currently littered with things illegal in just about every country on the planet but that shit’s still there so I can’t imagine MS could do anything there either.

TLDR: Immune, no. Neigh impossible to enforce, yes.

Here’s the thing. When I talk to friends interested in Linux, it’s always Debian or Fedora that I suggest. I think they draw a good line for what the average user wants and needs and they’re stable. In fact, I used Fedora for a long time, and all my homelab stuff runs Debian. It wasn’t until computers themselves became a hobby that I switched to Arch. And I think that’s likely the cutoff. If you’re a computer user, stable distros are great. If you’re more a hobbiest… Well, the Arch wiki can own your free time.

I want to switch to Nix… the idea of Nix is compelling. In practice every time I try and test it out I remember that I’m an idiot with a keyboard and I should stop.

No, you literally can see the code, that’s why it’s open source. YOU may not look at it, but people do. Random people, complete strangers, unpaid and un-vested in the project. The alternative is a company, who pays people to say “Yeah it’s totally safe”. That conflict of interest is problematic. Also, depending on what it’s written in, yes, I do sometimes take the time. Perhaps not for every single thing I run, but any time I run across niche projects, I read first. To claim that someone can’t understand is wild. That’s a stranger on the internet, you’re knowledge of their expertise is 0.

In practice, 1,000 random people with no reason to “trust you, bro” on the internet being able to audit every change you make to your code is far more trustworthy than a handful of people paid by the company they represent. What’s worse, is that if Microsoft were to have a breach, then like maybe 10 people on the planet know about it. 10 people with jobs, mortgages, and families tied to that knowledge. They won’t say shit, because they can’t lose that paycheck. Compare that to say the XZ backdoor where the source is available and gets announced so people know exactly who what and where to resolve the issue.