Because without privacy you can't be a proper human being. You need privacy in order to have the safe space to develop, to dare try, to explore without the constant judgement of others. If you can't be a proper human being, can you genuinely have democracy?

It's both a per-requisite for humanity and what the political system that is often considered as the most just.

That's why I care.

I'd clarify that the shear customizability of Linux is optional.

Take a SteamDeck with SteamOS versus a RPi with e.g Debian.

If you "just" play with the SteamDeck and you don't tinker, well, it "just works". In most, even though not all, normal situations, e.g plugging a screen, pairing a BT headphone, mouse, keyboard, etc it is solid. It has no problem even while using a compatibility layer like Proton for games themselves made for Windows. It even enable some tinkering thanks to its immutable OS and let the player switch to desktop mode. Not everything works but my personal experience since it's been out has been pretty much flawless.

Now, take a RPi, with just as stable hardware, with Debian, even stable, and put on it some IoT device, make some weird modifications for it, try a bunch of stuff, remove package, tinker more, chances are it will still work. Tinker more, make stranger modifications to the point it becomes unstable. Is it Linux itself? I'd argue it's not. I'd argue that instead because we CAN tinker we sometimes do then forget that it's not the same context as something expected to run without hiccup because it's been limited to basically the same verified usage.

So... IMHO Linux is even better than it is, we just shouldn't confuse weird (and important) tinkering with how it can be actually used day to day.

"e" stands for the Euro currency, thought EUR was a bit much and was too lazy to look for €. Apology for the confusion.

I didn't try one so I can't comment on it from first hand experience. At least on paper, including the claims that it is (which would make sense as France push for right to repair kind of laws) easy to repair, without a need for a specific Kilow "accredited" shop, makes is very tempting. If it's true and a random person can buy an affordable small EV and fix it easily, possibly even at home, I believe in terms of democratization it's going in the right direction. Eager to read reviews and see if it can become a trend.

Very entertaining and on point, thanks for sharing.

PS: for a bit of personal context, I also cycle regularly in Bretagne (France) and Brussels (Belgium) which are both infamously renown for... the rain. Yes, it's raining a lot there, and yet, with a helmet, jacket and optionally a pair of rain paints, you get wherever you need mostly dry. I'm not saying a complete right cover wouldn't be nice but if the trade off is a much larger vehicle to park, might not fit on cycling roads and is multiple times more expensive, I'm not convinced. Maybe I'm just stuck in my "old" ways.

30k EUR or more... why? Or rather, what for and for whom?

I mean I LOVE to see alternatives to cars but... a fancy electric bike is less than 5k EUR, a electric cargo bike (with a 400kg a payload, e.g Urban Arrow) is around 7k EUR, a tiny electric EV from France Bagnole (from https://kilow.com which did e-bikes until now) seems to be 10k EUR ... this is 3x or 5x (!) more for a much better top speed but also not a lot of actual space.

I understand the need for an electric bike (which I have) in cities but also in the countryside, going from a small town to a larger one where public transport exist but is very infrequent but ... this, I don't get. Who needs to reach 100km/h or more regularly and wouldn't go for an EV "proper". I briefly checked and a Nissan Leaf is in the same price range.

I'd be curious who is actually buying this and even more why they are preferring this over alternatives.

Apologies if I sound critical I'm just very surprised by the price and thus which market this is addressing.

Google

Out of curiosity, why? They have their own TPU which they claim to be quite efficient. Is it because they can't produce enough? Or because they have to resell NVIDIA for their own cloud, Google Cloud, to customers because they prefer to stick to CUDA? Or something else?

never really gotten into the whole “Internet of Things” thing.

Honestly... it's not worth it. It's fun, sometimes convenient, but nobody truly needs it except in some very specific situations. That being said it's also now relatively easy and cheap to setup, e.g RPi4 then add a Zigbee dongle (30e) with a Zigbee lightbulb (20e) or switch (15e) or sensor (e.g temperature for 15e), install HomeAssistant in an hour ... and voila, you have a setup you can play with and move from any home to any other in minutes. So it's not a "big" deal to start but again, what for. I personally do it because I love tinkering and want to feel that I can be at the "state of the art" of technology WITHOUT surveillance capitalism, so it's more an intellectual and more pursuit rather than a pragmatic approach. So I don't recommend it but I also had to clarify it's not that complex or expensive anymore.

If you don't have your files on another physical location you can show me, you don't have a backup, you don't own your files, you basically give your "digital life" to someone else.

Honestly I'd

• take any distribution that someone at or close to the library is comfortable with, e.g popular Ubuntu or Debian,
• setup a user profile that fits the need of the average library user, e.g Firefox with as a start page the library website
• make sure the library card system do work
• copy /home/thatuser directory somewhere, e.g /root/thatuserunmodified and insure permissions make it unmodifiable
• add a cron task so that every evening 1h after the library close any thatuser session is terminated, /home/thatuser gets deleted, copy the /root/thatuserunmodified to /home/thatuser and fixer permission
• assuming it's fast enough (I bet it's take 1min at most as /home/thatuser would be mostly empty) I'd do the process after each logout so that each new visitor gets a fresh session, no downloads from previous users, history, bookmarks, etc. Only what the library consider useful.

That's it. This way one can still let the OS do it's updates but the user experience is consistent.

Nice, I made a wokrshop about that earlier this year for RightsCon :

"Can you host the metaverse? How learned helplessness from Big Tech made you believe you can't

BigTech seems expensive, complex, secure, new and basically the only way to use any modern tool. This is a blatant lie, repeated daily and orchestrated to limit emerging technology to very few for-profit corporations. Being a repeated lie is a problem because instead of at least trying to challenge the status quo we, all of us, can assume it is true and give up on trying, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Before digging into the technical aspects it is important to first prove it by running a short experiment then, only after, question how lie made us collectively and individually impotent. Learned helplessness itself will be used to identify extremely difficult situations most of us did encounter and might still encounter in the present.

This session will invite participants to simply try what is the state of the art of BigTech marketing at the moment, namely "the metaverse", and show that behind the abstract concept there is a technical reality that is not that complex and definitely not unachievable, even for a independent person with a very limited budget.

The workshop itself will rely on self-hosted open-source tools in order to both communicate and capture lessons learned, demonstrating by its own execution that synchronization and exploration of such a topic is possible today. "

If people here are interested I can record it again in a presentation format.