Ahhh, collaboration via Visio. Those were the days!

Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.

Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.

It actually does or at least did, until at least a few years ago. When you opened the audio mixer (alsamixer or pulse audio control?) on XFCE, you could still see MS Teams labeled as Skype there. Not sure how it would be now, because I only ever use MS Teams isolated in a separate Ungoogled Chromium browser now, and have given up on the client for GNU/Linux.

Lync is still there, lurking. With Communicator blocking every contact with the outside world. But eventually some message will pass through!

Dead Internet theory, meet Dead Earth theory. There are actually only 87 people in the world, and they’ve made up the rest as part of a welfare scam.

The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.

I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.

Fixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries.

US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.

I've been successfully holding off on updating from iOS 18 by declining the prompt each time. Any tips for pinning the version more robustly? Because I feel the random upgrade prompts are going to catch me out eventually.

My iPhone has so little free space (thanks to the ever increasing “system data”) that it can’t update to iOS 26. Point updates for iOS 18 are usually much smaller and can still be installed.

I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but… you could install a bunch of apps to get your phone storage to <10GB free, which should block it being able to update to iOS 26.

This was a trick to block Windows updates at one point, but then they started force reserving 7GB or something with a later update. It meant that some devices with small disks that supported Windows 10 no longer met the system requirements.

i switched to the ios 18 public beta channel, which currently has no beta available to dl and that stopped the damn update annoyances

Abandon hope.

I just treat ~ as a system-owned configuration area, and put my actual files (documents, photos, etc.) in a completely different hierarchy under /.

"/home/${USER}" for whatever junk programs are going to stick there, "/home/${USER}/home" for my "real" home directory.

I have been doing this for decades. My files are in a sub-directory of $HOME. It also makes it very obvious when a piece of software does not treat your $HOME with respect.

The “but” this time is that we are talking about electricity demand, not total energy demand. Electrification of heating is the next big milestone.

It’s still a great trend.

That does track with those who are most stridently Good and Moral and Kind and Right having some glaring blind spots when it comes to understanding the consequences of their actions.

There is likely no single or simple answer. It’s just one example of the general issue of humanity living beyond its means, filling the deficit by drawing down on resources that will not be renewed. Debt and bankruptcy is a good analogy.

In a way, this is quintessential human behavior. Animals faced with shortages tend to die off until their population size matches the available resources. Humans have invented ways to postpone this fate, manipulating our environment in order to sustain a growing population.

So it’s not “just” infrastructure mismanagement. Unsustainable living is practically ingrained into human nature.

The challenge will be whether we can voluntarily reduce our population size or consumption to match the available resources, or whether we’ll have that reduction forced upon us.

Perhaps the housing market is manipulated exactly for the purpose of reducing USA population size.

That’s a claim that would require real evidence, like someone admitting it or a very tight circumstantial case.

Otherwise it’s like saying electricity prices are being driven up to shut down indoor hydroponic pot growers, to make up a random example. High electricity prices might do that but…

Agent Smith called, he wants his speech back.

Only about 2 orders of orders of magnitude - not bad for string theory.