Bill Gates is a monopoly capitalist with zero scruples. He screwed over so many people, vacuumed up so much wealth from all other sectors of the world economy. He has zero qualms about doing this either: There’s video of his depositions in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the whole fucking time he just argues semantics in response to the questions, and when pressed after five minutes of defining every fucking word in a sentence, almost always claims he doesn’t know or recall. Obviously a guy that thinks being as dishonest as it is possible to get away with is perfectly good business. And he does that despite whatever the outcome of the case, he’d be richer than billions of humans collectively. What pathology is this?

There’s so much more shit, like the incessant lobbying for medical patents worldwide, or how, according to Melinda, Gates loved hanging out with Epstein.

Now, why would anyone want to have their picture taken with that guy? Torvalds is such an unprincipled lib.

Edit: Listened to some of the deposition in the background. Here Gates is being extremely annoying for example: The interviewer reads back an email from Gates saying something like “browser share is a very, very important goal for this company”, and then asks what other companies he’s comparing browser share with. Gates goes several minutes arguing he’s not talking about any other companies, since literally there are no other companies mentioned in that very sentence, obviously pretending like he doesn’t understand the question. If you listen to all the shit before, they have to go over whether “browser share” means “market share” (Gates says no), whether “very, very important” and “important” have different meanings (Gates says not necessarily, could be hyperbole), and that sort of stuff for minutes on end. Like seriously listen to this, I cannot even describe how stupid it is.

About what?

Anyone who has never even used a computer before can go to one of these websites, follow the instructions on the screen in front of them, and get it done. Zero experience or skills required.

No they don’t. People who have never used a computer before have trouble even using the mouse. They don’t know what a file is, they don’t know what a filetype is, they don’t know that you can convert one type of file to another, they don’t know even to look for a file conversion website, they don’t know how to upload a file to a website, they don’t know how to find a file in the file dialogue, and on and on. Seriously what are you on about?

Overall fair enough I guess. I didn’t say it was simple though, i said it was not more complicated. Your experience using GUIs and web interfaces probably spans years. It’s not like you’re born with GUI skills.

Making a GUI is more work than making a CLI tool. GUIs are not cross-platform, a pure CLI is more portable. You can code a CLI with any programming language you like, while there are many restrictions on what kind of GUI is available on what programming languages and platforms.

The GUI code is tedious and boring to write. That code can become outdated and broken and might need fixing to run on newer platforms. The CLI has essentially no extra dependencies and the interface hasn’t changed much since like the 70s.

The sort of person who develops free software usually knows and likely prefers to use the CLI. They’re not doing it for users like you, first and foremost. They’re doing it themselves, or because they need it for their job. The CLI tool might be exactly what they want, because the file conversion is part of some backend stuff, something that’s run from a script, so you can automatically run it on all the files.

Anybody with basic web dev skills can then take these tools, slap together web fronted and try and make some quick bucks. They’re basically incentivized to not care about security, privacy or anything like that. Of course that space attracts scammers.

The incentives just aren’t there for it to be any other way. You can either learn the CLI commands, written by people who care about their reputations and professional pride and want to share their tools. Or you can trust anonymous internet randos wanting to make a quick buck. And while I sympathize not wanting to have to learn new shit, I swear using a shell isn’t actually more complicated than using a web browser, you’re just not used to it.

Oh yeah that’s where I was getting at, but I didn’t have time to write that out earlier. I agree that OP probably pulled out the usb stick before buffers were flushed. I imagine that direct I/O would mitigate this problem a lot because presumably whatever buffers still exist (there would some hardware buffers and I think Linux kernel I/O buffers) will be minimal compared to the potentially large amount of dirty pages one might accumulate using normal cached writes. So I imagine those buffers would be empty very shortly (less than one second maybe?) after dd finishes, whereas I’ve seen regular dd finish tens of seconds before my usb stick stopped blinking it’s LED. Still if you wait for that long the result will be the same.

I don’t think oflags=direct has any influence on the result. Apparently that’s about disabling the page cache in the kernel, which can avoid a situation in which the system slows down due to buildup yet-to-write pages.

trustworthy AI

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral

What

They’re not the good guys browser wise, they’re just slightly less shitty than Google, which was (still is probably?) their biggest customer.

Are you talking about the claim that he endangered CIA agents? That was just some bullshit they cooked up to get him on, and I don’t think anybody even claimed that somebody actually died.

Imagine thinking exposing the CIA should be a crime, because the poor small beans CIA agents need protection. Who wouldn’t want to protect imperial blackmailers, hit men, weapons smugglers and death squad commanders?

You are the traitor for siding with the oppressor.

NAFO is a Nazi propaganda op. Literally. The founder, Kamil Dyszewski (aka Kama Kamelia) is a Holocaust denier who adores Hitler. I call this the SS type genocide denier. That’s actually the most common type.

In case anyone thinks the rest of NAFO distanced themselves from this guy: Lol no, he was just on stage at the NAFO summit in Vilnius.