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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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For the general population, I am with @Rov_Scam here: who cares? In the future kids will probably just store their stuff in some Microsoft cloud and ask some LLM to get them whatever they need (unless it was flagged for copyright violation in the meantime).

On the other hand, not having a concept of a file system will severely limit what you could have done with a computer so far. How do you run your hello world Python script without passing the file name to your interpreter? I mean, there are probably cloud based solutions a la Overleaf which will just run your code in a browser, but being at the mercy of some SaaS platform seems like a sad existence for any programmer indeed.

I care, because my mobile OS is built with people who don't know how a filesystem works in mind, and is therefore trying to obfuscate from me the difference between a local folder with pictures and an album I uploaded to Picasa in 2010. The images from old scouting trips are pushed to the front, and the folders I want are hidden behind multiple screen transitions. I probably wiped some photos from 2023 because of a dialog asking me if I want to "fix" a problem with the memory card, conveniently omitting that said fix involves formatting it. A system for adults would tell me what is actually happening, but hey, no difference between cloud a local so who cares, right?

And that's not even getting into the weeds of a cloud provider running an analysis on every photo and piece of text uploaded, so that the social wrongthink score can be calculated.