Shorter term: less foreign investments in the speculative industry casino of AI in their country

Longer term: A less brainrotted workforce

Damn near every application I install through the terminal requires sudo.

The only time I haven’t had to invoke sudo was using the graphical flatpack installer included in Linux Mint.

Many of the people who I have had to support through my IT work would 1000% brick their system by following copy+paste commands using sudo instead of just installing a flatpack.

The choice isn’t supposed to be for us hobbyists. It’s meant for a “I would like to make my system protected from my ignorance, please”.

That’s definitely fair, but there is the argument that the largest source of change for major powers is through harming their economies.

Sort of like, I like the artistry from this person from X nation, but by giving them money, I am indirectly helping fuel the economy of X nation, therefore giving their goverment less incentive to change existing behavior.

The problem is that in order to achieve that collective impact, a whole lot of innocent parties who have no support for or active hostility for the existing regime are also badly impacted. Usually individuals will greatly suffer before the political or structural systems will ever change.

So it’s a bit of a bind. Support Russian media, comes with the side effect of supporting the Russian regime, at least indirectly from their income flowing into taxes. End of the day, it’s a choice to make.

Honestly I think self-hosted OSS for those models may be the only way to get genuinely useful results in the long term for several different subjects, since I’d imagine investors and advertisers would be unwilling to throw capital at an unrestricted platform.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the League of Nations largely the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, US president during WW1?

It was structurally different to the UN we know today, but it was still pushed forward by a US president.

I’m currently hosed by the fact that I am in the middle of completing my Electrical Engineeing degree (approx. 2 years left), and I don’t believe my credits would be transferable to an institution across the Atlantic (never mind the cost, shudder), so I can’t even think about escaping until at least 2027.

If there’s a better way forward so I can safely leave the nation and still achieve my degree, I’m all ears, but at least to me it seems my hands are a bit tied.

Hey, just put the word out for my work visa, please! XD

Honestly, as an American living in Silicon Valley, I would be overjoyed if Europe became the primary kickstarter for open source alternatives to the existing US corporate infrastructure, that bends to the knees of the Federal government. Even here at home, myself and some of my co-workers aren’t too keen on the existing status quo tools because there are too many caveats - from rent seeking subscriptions to the inability to verify if something is tampered with.

In the same way Valve saw how having all their eggs in the Windows basket led them to dive head first into linux development, I hope the EU’s realization of the risks in the US tech sector lead it to developing unified, well funded OSS alternatives. I would certainly install them.