Elon never intended to buy Twitter, he always intended to back out of the deal from the beginning, either as a headline-grabbing move or as some form of stock manipulation. His miscalculation is that he didn’t realize that the existing Twitter management was eager to sell due to the site treading water in terms of profitability, and were willing to take him to court to make the deal go through.

The boat-anchor around his ankle is that he had to borrow a lot of money to honor the purchase. Advertising revenue would’ve always been decimated by his enabling the right, but the enormous debt hanging over his head is why the site is visibly cracking at the seams so soon after his purchase. Of course, he did favors for his political allies, but that was a move made out of opportunism, not conspiracy.

If I’m making him sound like he’s playing 5D chess, he’s not. He made a dumb decision that blew up in his face. He’s screwed. He knows he’s totally screwed. So he’s doing what any CEO would be doing in his position - cutting costs, lying about why the site is having issues, and coming up with hare-brained ideas to try and generate revenue. It’s 100% performative CYA, because when the site is finally repossessed by his creditors, at least he can claim he tried something.

So it’s a matter of being relatively easy to scam people with it?

That is merely a side-effect of one of the original sins of programmable blockchains - the fact that there is a delegation of responsibility of data management from a database administrator to whoever happens to have control of that data, and the controller can only manage that data according to the underlying code of the NFT.

This only sounds appealing if you’ve never actually touched a database in your life. There are too many points of failure, and said mistakes are much harder to correct.

Essentially, the NFT is “proof of ownership” only insofar as what is put into the blockchain is correct and accurately reflects reality.

If you don’t vet what goes on the blockchain for accuracy, the blockchain is useless, and if you do validate, you don’t need a blockchain because the validator can just use a traditional database.

It is a solution in search of a problem.

If I buy a lot of baseball cards for 1 cent, at least they don’t suffer from the oracle paradox.

NFT’s were nakedly a solution in search of a problem that weren’t even a very good solution to the problem they were purporting to solve. That’s what pisses people off.

Is it not “serious” to work towards a better future because that’s more difficult to obtain? There is a future out there where more industries are dominated by software that respects user freedom.

I do not believe that distros ignoring the problem of binary software distribution is actually accomplishing anything productive on that front. All it does is put a gigantic KEEP OUT sign for most outside developers who might have briefly considered porting their software. Package maintainers are also incredibly overburdened, and are often slow to update their packages even on rolling release distros.

Worse, it also inconveniences their userbase, pushing them to solutions their that bypass the distro completely such as third-party repos, Steam, Wine, Flatpak, Docker, or even running Linux in WSL. All of them function as non-free escape hatches, but all of them are inferior to distros getting their act together and deciding that binary software distribution is a problem worth collaborating on and solving together.

More importantly, the reason why all of those apps don’t have Linux versions is not because of some anti-Linux conspiracy, but because Linux userspace has for most of its existence prioritized distro-packaged-and-provided software, at the expense and sometimes even exclusion of binary software distribution.

This is not just a technical limitation, but I’d also argue a cultural one, driven by folks who consider proprietary/nonfree software irrelevant and not worth supporting in a first-class way. Unfortunately, the companies who make both the software that entire industries are built around and the games that you play when you get off work disagree. Valve was probably the company in the best position to make native Linux games a trend, and the fact that they’re more focused on Proton these days is pretty telling.

The only developers in the Linux ecosystem who I feel are taking the problem seriously are the Flatpak developers. They do amazing work, with great tooling that builds against a chrooted runtime by default. But it needs more widespread usage and acceptance, as well as better outreach to developers from other ecosystems who might’ve had horrendous experience making Linux builds in the past.

There is a future out there with native Linux builds of industry-standard tooling and even games. But it’s a future the Linux community has to willing to actually work towards.

The reliability of third-party nitter instances has been hit or miss due to the churn, but the main nitter.net instance still works fine. They appear to be using automatically-obtained guest accounts.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983