Wtf even is substack anyways?

That second part is kinda annoying though. It doesn’t know the difference between a view because of curiosity and one because of actual interest.

It’s what ruined the YouTube suggestions for me. I liked being able to do completely unrelated and random dives. Now it’s just a collection of videos related to previous ones I’ve watched, even when I’m not logged in and have viewing history turned off. If I want to watch another chess video, I know how to use the search function. That’s how I found them the first time.

Though steam does also have a “stop showing me games like this” where it gives options about what you mean by “this”.

No, no, they don’t ignore them. They train with them so that chat gpt is fully capable of acting like it doesn’t want AI models to train on its output, if you ask it to.

Yeah, this has been my thought ever since the first time I saw javascript that disabled right click. There were workarounds, but I thought the browser shouldn’t even try to cooperate with something like that.

These days, it’s sites that disable scrolling. Sure, I can fuck with the css to enable it again, but it should be a menu option or just not something that can be disabled in css or via js.

Same for all of the other metrics that browsers send in the headers. Even though it’s nice to see stats on OS use and such, why does a server need to know which one I’m using? Even for screen resolution, while you could say that it affects how the page should be rendered, I’d prefer a standardized bug reporting mechanism for letting webmasters know when their page is broken for a certain resolution and otherwise letting the browser handle the rendering. And if it means the death of sites that cover their page in images to make a fancy layout, tbh good riddance.

The tech community came up with a technical solution to the ad problem. If the solution you’re looking for isn’t technical, why is your focus on the tech community?

Anyone can learn this shit. Use any search engine, type “how to block internet ads”, and you’ll see results with “firefox” and “ublock origin”, that can then be put into “how to get” follow up searches.

The current state of ads is being accepted by those who don’t block them. Everyone who does block them (or refuses to visit ad cancer sites) has cut off that source of revenue, but those who just choose to accept the default option enable them by not just seeing the ads but even sometimes clicking them and buying shit.

Ad blockers are the fight. Those users who can’t be bothered to learn a bit about the devices they spend so much time on aren’t owed anything.

What does “fighting the good fight” even look like to you in this context, anyways?

if (ai_price < min_price) price_quote = min_price; else price_quote = ai_price;

price_quote *= 1.5; // for some reason the ai underestimates what the user can afford so bump it up

From a programming pov, a definition of AI could be an algorithm or construct that can solve problems or perform tasks without the programmer specifically solving that problem or programming the steps of the task but rather building something that can figure it out on its own.

Though a lot of game AIs don’t fit that description.

Oh wow, if steam is still 32 bit, forget the offshoots, fedora itself won’t be worth using. I’m on fedora but if I can’t run steam, then I’m finding a new distro.

On the flip side, what’s the reason they want to drop 32-bit support, given steam depends on it, which they should understand means it’s integral to the size of their current userbase?

Is there a good resource that lists all games known to require a specific version rather than being fine with the latest? I don’t really have the patience to check each game these days, so a list to skim would be nice.

Yeah, when I made the switch, I checked a bunch of the games I played the most for steam deck compatibility and thought I had to give up on some of them, only to find that they were still fine because my desktop is much more powerful than the steam deck. Plus it has a keyboard; if a game requires a keyboard, it hurts the steam deck compatability score (how much depends on if it’s required for playing the game at all or just needed every now and then to enter some text).

So treat “steam deck supported” as “works on linux” and “steam deck unsupported” as “maybe works on linux”.

I think the better indicator of not supported at all on Linux is the “3rd party kernel anticheat” marker in the store, though I tend to avoid games with that anyways, so I can’t really say for sure.

Valve existed at that point, too.

Do you use an add-on to prevent that from wiping out all but one window’s worth of tabs when you close them? That’s what originally made me get a tab grouping addon, after losing a ton of tabs when I broke some out into their own window and then later closed the main tab window before the secondary one. Realized immediately what happened but it was already too late to save that entire generation of precious tabs. Who knows what articles I didn’t feel like reading at the time but was totally going to read later I lost forever.

Is that method different from using the hot keys to swap layouts? Like can I tell it to always use that mapping for that game or do I need to remember to run it each time I play the game and then set it back after I’m done (or automate that)?

Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.

Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).

But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.

And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.

I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?

I upgraded my gpu this weekend. Shut down, switched the psu off, swapped the old one out and new one in, booted into bios no issue (to check if I has left pcie on auto or needed to update it), then booted into the desktop (fedora cinnamon). Bam, after login only saw wallpaper, no mouse cursor or other UI.

Well, at least it’s kinda working. Time to figure out what’s going on. Terminal works. There’s some errors in the log but nothing to do with amdgpu or firmware failed to upload or anything. Software render just shows up as black screen. Reset my cinnamon session and boot back to the same thing. Fuck.

Then I try moving my mouse way over to the right and it shows up! Oh right. I have my TV plugged in for streaming to it sometimes and it ended up defaulted to the primary display, so my main desktop was only showing up there (and it was off). Right click, display properties, swap my monitor to primary, disable the TV until I turn it on.

This is about the magnitude of the average problem I need to deal with on Linux. Something isn’t working like I want it to, half the time it’s actually working but I misunderstood something or the default doesn’t match my intent and I need to adjust settings and then it’s perfect or close enough.

Or the other problem I had yesterday, tried monster hunter world for the first time and it wouldn’t launch. Played satisfactory for a bit instead (new gpu is noticeably smoother yay), then did a quick search, found that a specific version of proton works, switched to that version and it played. That’s the first game that has had such trouble for me.

Steam punk avatar!

It sounds like you might have some network places set up for windows to use but that are no longer reachable (or something along those lines) because that shouldn’t be taking so long so you might have things timing out in the background.

Or your internet is slow and it’s taking a long time to communicate with one drive or send its screenshots of your document to their creep department.

Or maybe a print driver that no longer exists still has an orphaned entry in the registry and it spends some time trying to locate it.

Or malware has set up hooks for any new window that pops up but the print to pdf dialog is set up in such a way that it churns very inefficiently on that window specifically.

I joke but any one of those might actually be what’s going on.

Whatever way you go with, if it pops up a “THIS MIGHT BRICK YOUR COMPUTER” kind of warning, maybe consider one of the other options instead of ignoring it and then complaining about how nothing in Linux works.

It’s a safety issue. You need to find a urinal buddy to help protect you from any perverts that might enter the bathroom while you’re pissing.