Yes is the only valid answer. The reason is that there's nothing remarkable about Omarchy for it to deserve a fraction of the hype it gets.
Even calling Omarchy a distro seems to be a stretch. The best description I're read is that it is a Hyprland setup for Arch. As far as what a Linux distro can be, this is pretty mediocre. The sort of thing that would get an HN thread, see minor traction, and take the backseat.
But, quite a lot of people seem interested in hyping it. I suspect the reason is just because the dude behind it is not shy about being an ethnonationalist, "great replacement theory" asshole, etc.
Quite a few people here are very fond of those talking points. Thinking about brown people being ethnically cleansed makes them all tingly inside. So, they really want to talk about Omarchy as a proxy.
They ship a custom kernel, have their own packaging servers, ship their own installer, an installable ISO, and ship a bunch of custom UI. That's a distro, all right. Not a foundational one a la Debian or Arch, but that's never been a requirement seeing how things like Ubuntu, Cachy etc. exist and are called distros without issue.
Omarchy started as a pile of dotfiles a year ago. It isn't that anymore, and DHH's intended direction is towards a fully independent foundation distro.
I think that's the main reason why Omarchy gets talked about so much.
In large parts of the internet, open bigotry is thankfully still socially unacceptable. But when bigotry is wrapped up in a software project like this, it gives people posting/upvoting/sharing a level of plausible deniability.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
Here’s another, referring to the roughly ⅔ of London residents who aren’t white:
> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third.
the "different thoughts" in question are that certain groups of people are animals and should be imprisoned or ethnically cleansed, so yeah, that's firmly in nazi territory.
It seems like a useful distinction (that, yes, is very easy to hide behind if your real opinion is just "I hate people based on skin color", but I have no way of knowing what's in Cleese's heart).
Clear may be a racist or he may not be. His speaking out against cultural practices has no bearing on whether he is or isn't and neither you nor I are any the wiser on whether Cleese is a racist or not and it isn't even relevant in the context of his stance on cultural differences and preferences.
hn crowd has always been favorable to trump because at the end of the day they want lower taxes, but i think a few other ideas have been smuggled along with that
(because you always have to explain the joke on this site, everyone was warned about these fascists before and during their rise to power, and this site supports them because the obvious reason https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9)
The video referenced in the article contains nothing new; those things have existed for nearly two decades. People simply create similar videos to boost engagement and it seems they're quite successful at it.
It's actually quite the opposite. It became easier to create apps for Apple platforms, Apple also reduced the commission to 15% for small businesses.
Maybe I’m looking through rose-colored glasses, but while people need money, there was a time where there was more idealism from the founders and the employees. Steve Jobs could’ve quit business in 1985 after his failed coup; he was rich enough to never have to work again. Yet he started NeXT, and he was able to get people to join his company.
I feel we’re in a timeline in Silicon Valley where there’s little idealism. Employees seek money, and who can blame them when a two-bedroom apartment can easily rent for $4000/mo or more, and when a house is easily $2 million? Leaders seek not only money, but power, and their desires for power have been more blatant in the past year.
Where are the Steve Wozniak and Gary Kildall figures of Silicon Valley these days?
I'm a consumer in Germany, and I pay 250€ for 1.200 kWh (my yearly consumption). I don't know anyone who is paying those high prices mentioned in the articles. There are many electricity providers in Germany, and that creates competition; therefore, you get a lot of cash back by switching providers.
It's most likely due to a rebate or cash back when changing providers. You can save a lot of money by switching providers every 12 months and taking cash back into account. If you have dispatchable loads (i.e. flexible charging of an electric vehicle) and a suitable electricity meter, you can also save a lot of money be choosing a dynamic tariff that tracks market prices (plus taxes etc).
No they aren't, it looks like the prices doubled and the government significantly cut taxes to hide the increase. That's not to mention the 3 year price spike during 2021-2023. Who's paying for the lost revenue from the tax cuts?
That doesn't change the fact that the prices didn't change for the companies therefore OP's argument about this hurt the companies doesn't have any basis.
Yeah and the tax reduction will end in 2028.
What I said still stands: German electricity prices for the industry are and will be one of the highest in the world.
The tax reduction will almost certainly be extended and not be allowed to sunset. Industry electricity costs are more or less in line with other highly developed countries around the world and will remain so. Also, many larger industrial companies do not source their electricity from the common grid, but have dedicated power plants and increasingly their own investments in renewable energy production.
No company invests billions into industry projects with that kind of political uncertainty. You can see it in the numbers: BASF stopped basically all investments in Germany. You cannot bet your whole company on a tax cut that was recently introduced and is already scheduled to disappear.
Managers bet their companies on more stupid stuff all the time. Elon Musk just bet SpaceX and Twitter on datacenters in space …
In the political reality of Germany there is literally 0 chance that these tax cuts won’t be extended. Low investment by BASF has many reasons, but their inability to get politicians to extend that tax cut isn’t one of them.
This is a direct outcrop of the winner-takes-all electoral district system which forces parties to merge to have a chance at winning. I personally find it an undemocratic, archaic and meritless system.
> This is a direct outcrop of the winner-takes-all electoral district system which forces parties to merge to have a chance at winning.
I'm not sure this is true. When the highest vote-getter wins, despite the lack of an absolute majority, that gives a better chance to third-party candidates in a multi-candidate election.
The reason third parties fare so poorly in the US is that the two major parties have a duopoly on campaign fundraising and free news coverage, which is a vicious circle. The media covers only candidates who are "electable", and they judge who's electable based on their ability to raise money, but you can't raise any money if nobody knows about you, and nobody will know about you if you don't get media coverage or don't have the money to spread your message.
This is why self-funded billionaire Ross Perot was the most successful third-party Presidential candidate in recent times.
> In political science, Duverger's law holds that in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, as in, for example, the United States and United Kingdom, only two powerful political parties tend to control power every election cycle. Citizens do not vote for small parties because they fear splitting votes away from the major party and allowing their opponents to win an election.
There are two parts here. Nobody disputes the first, empirical part, the dominance of the existing duopoly. The second part, however, is a questionable causal claim. It's astonishing to me that this entire article can fail to mention even once campaign fundraising or news media coverage.
Voter awareness of third parties and third party candidates is minimal, because nearly all of the paid political advertising and free news media coverage is about the duopolist parties. This fundamental plight, not the voting system, consigns third parties to the "spoiler" role. A third party candidate is not a spoiler if they have a legitimate chance to win, which in a first-past-the-post system doesn't even require 50% of the vote. They're only a spoiler if they have no legitimate chance to win. In a 3 candidate race, 34% wins over 33% and 33%. The more the vote is split between multiple candidates, the less it takes to win.
The article mentions Ross Perot, which supports my point. To me, the most interesting question is not the % of the popular vote or electoral college he received. Rather, the question is how did Perot break through and become the most successful third-party Presidential candidate in recent times? And the answer is his money, which he used to finance TV informercials and get his message out to the public. As a reward for spending money, Perot was invited to the news media debates along with the duopoly candidates.
Sadly, Perot kind of self-destructed, wilted under the scrutiny. At one point in 1992, Perot was actually leading the polls over both Bush and Clinton! That's not a spoiler. But Perot dropped out of the race and only later returned, which dampened enthusiasm for him.
The spoiler effect presumes that third party candidates can't win. I think it's crucial to ask why they can't win, how is the system prevents them from having a reasonable chance at winning.
> (i) small parties are disincentivized to form because they have great difficulty winning seats or representation
I would say that parties are disincentivized to form because they have great difficulty raising money and getting attention. This is why they're doomed to smallness and obscurity.
I feel that campaign fundraising and news media coverage, while significant, aren't the primary reason why there are two parties. When the Democratic and Republican parties first formed in America, they weren't nearly as well funded and connected are they are now. However, even in that time those two parties dominated the field. One single exception in Ross Perot does not disprove the rule of Duverger's law, and neither does the few victories of other fledgling third parties in America's history.
Do you think that if campaign advertising and new coverage was banned, there would suddenly be a third party that springs up? If so, I disagree. I believe there is both a strong incentive for candidates who would start a third party to join one of the two parties, and for voters to vote for one of the two major parties to avoid "throwing away their vote". Any argument that proposes that attention and funding are more significant factors than the psychological factors of FPTP needs to first take the psychological factors into account. On top of that, we have evidence that countries which do not use FPTP voting have more political parties on average.
> I would say that parties are disincentivized to form because they have great difficulty raising money and getting attention.
Raising money and getting attention is winning elections. You can't have one without the other. The question is why they can't. The reason is FPTP voting incentivizes a two party system. It's a bit of a circular effect. The two parties dominate because they dominate. Sure, adding a third candidate makes winning take fewer votes, but you know what else makes winning easier? Joining an established party.
It relates to the two-party system, not whether the U.S. is an oligarchy.
The article implies that the U.S. is not a democracy, but oligarchy and democracy aren't mutually exclusive. I'd say the U.S. (and most Western countries) is both and always has been. Voters certainly have influence in the U.S. but it's limited, just like everywhere else.
I remember reading an economics paper that showed you need at least four suppliers in any market to get real competition. I can't see why politics is any different.
In the us, political groups for coalitions before the election happens. This is in contrast to most European countries where they set up the coalitions afterwards. Groups occasionally migrate between the parties and the us is in one such realignment now.
While i agree in theory, in practice multi party systems still end up with only two sides where the biggest/most influential party on either side exerts its power over the others regardless.
Going away from parties to actual individual person voting on each topic/decision would be actual democracy but not like that has no drawbacks.
Not sure whether you're serious or joking, but in the realm of economics, I think that duopolies are actually worse than monopolies, because everyone recognizes that a monopoly needs to be strictly regulated and/or broken up, whereas when there's a duopoly, that's supposedly "competition" and thus the duopolies largely escape regulation or breakup, even if they implicitly or explicitly cooperate and coordinate to crush any other competition.
In the same way, the obvious solution to a one-party system is to overthrow the government, whereas with a two-party system, you're supposed to fight within the system... and mostly accomplish nothing, because those in power have overlapping interests.
I said, comparing a political monopoly to an economic monopoly, "In the same way, the obvious solution to a one-party system is to overthrow the government"
The "external entity" is the people in revolution against the government. This was how the US itself was founded, in revolution against the existing monarchy.
Interesting take: arguing whether the U.S. democratic system is a democracy when, as the paper points out, economic elites and organized groups representing business interests are the elephant (no pun intended) in the room.
Airtable has got too expensive for all the weird limitations you end up either writing tons of weird hacks around or paying another sass product to fix for you because airtable don't want to engineer a solution.
Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.
>This goes for almost all software. 'entshittification' in software
It's really every category of commercial activity. Restaurants food quality, cable tv channels, movie sequels, home appliances, airline travel, theme parks, etc.
For years, I had a particular local HVAC company do my twice-a-year maintenance on my air conditioner and furnace. I liked the owner and he had a crew of older experienced guys that knew what they were doing. He then sold the business to another owner and he completely changed out the crew to kids that barely look 18 years old. The young inexperienced techs didn't have the skills to diagnose anything on their own. They always had to phone the home office and use their smartphones to send video/photos of what they're looking at to the more knowledgeable technician at the office. That way, the senior guy sitting at the desk can walk them through what to do next. That's when I realized the financial game the new owner was playing: hire new kids that just completed their 3-month HVAC tech certificate for cheap wages but still charge the same high prices that the old owner was charging for experienced techs. And only pay for one expensive senior tech back at the office to be a "shared resource" for all the clueless techs out in the field. That type of "enshittification" didn't require venture capital, or private equity, or ads. The common pattern of degrading a product or service has the same thing in common ... humans.
The vast majority of enshittification is not caused by private equity or ads.
> It's really every category of commercial activity.
I'm not going to defend capital's ability to ruin things, but this is framing is not helpful. Enshittification as it was described by Cory Doctorow, who invented the term, requires two additional things:
1. A platform that tries to attract both producers and consumers. Amazon is the canonical example. The platform does what it can to attract enough consumers that producers have to use the platform to reach them. Then it squeezes out the value to the producers (e.g., hiking acquisition fees, etc.; competing with them and underselling them with cheaper alternatives). The final step is to destroy the value to the consumer, by degrading quality and increasing price. By this time, neither producers nor consumers have many levers to fight back.
2. Non-physical pricing levers. Enshittification requires the ability to observe consumer behavior and jigger pricing at great speed. We see this in Amazon again; ridesharing apps introduced surge pricing; ads are priced according to what platforms know about you. In a physical store, the logistical cost of changing the price of goods is nontrivial, so we don't see the same sort of gaming there.
Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into some vague "things got worse" meaning.
>Enshittification is a novel and illuminating concept, so we need to be careful not to let it turn into
The gp I replied to already used "enshittification" in a more general way to describe "almost all software". Most software out there is not the platforms that have the 2 factors you listed. I was just going going along with the conversation.
As far as policing the usage of "enshittification", you've got an uphill battle because people like the way it sounds and tend to use it as a spicy word to talk about anything getting worse. They're not going to research what Cory Doctorow was talking about and doublecheck to see if matches exactly what he was trying to describe. E.g. See it used to complain about "public libraries", "policing", "tech jobs", etc: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshittification
Private equity firms are buying profitable local businesses all over the US, including HVAC, plumbing, auto techs, storage, etc. So it’s possible that this case of enshittification actually WAS caused private equity in your example.
It's also a byproduct of the most successful user acquisition model to be honest.
Getting users is hard, especially on the Internet where your audience is global, and competition is fierce. Word of mouth or user advocacy has always been the best cost-to-value marketing tool.
So starting out by offering things for free or at a loss has been the go-to strategy forever.
But (as we all know) that's not sustainable, so there's pretty much nowhere to go but down, from a value-to-user perspective.
They also constantly criticise Germany and its nuclear power plant closures, linking almost every negative news story about the country to this issue. It seems they’re completely unaware of the potential consequences of operating a nuclear power plant.
A lot of energy crisis in Germany is due to the closure of their power plants. Just like any other infrastructure, nuclear power plants needs to be modernised over the time and Hungary didn’t do that. It’s not the fault of nuclear technology, but lack of management in Hungary’s case
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