In a way I think that expectation should be normal. What really shouldn’t be normal is for everything to be an app, and not a website.

Windows Phone almost got this right - trying to focus more on HTML5 Manifest features and better browser/pinning integration, so that a company like Lyft can offer its full feature set through a website that works on all phones. Then, we could rely on the fact that we only need install a few apps that we trust.

Kind of like how we love watching old Tom and Jerry cartoons, but would generally prefer to lightly forget how those cartoons contained frequent racist caricatures towards indians, island natives, black people, etc.

i am sorry, our Nigerian kebab food truck does not deliver to united of kingdom

tbf, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild enforces those principles too.

I’m in a workplace that has tried not to be overbearing about AI, but has encouraged us to use them for coding.

I’ve tried to give mine some very simple tasks like writing a unit test just for the constructor of a class to verify current behavior, and it generates output that’s both wrong and doesn’t verify anything.

I’m aware it sometimes gets better with more intricate, specific instructions, and that I can offer it further corrections, but at that point it’s not even saving time. I would do this with a human in the hopes that they would continue to retain the knowledge, but I don’t even have hopes for AI to apply those lessons in new contexts. In a way, it’s been a sigh of relief to realize just like Dotcom, just like 3D TVs, just like home smart assistants, it is a bubble.

There is a collectible game sealed in a box together with a cat, and a radioactive isotope that will release a poisonous gas.

Please measure the amount of time before a choice-based visual novel nabs the box to use in extensive decisionmaking analogies.

I really want a better formalized framework for argument/discussion of a topic that either participant can feel safe in. Currently, we have courtrooms, our old schools have Debate Clubs, but I’d want something far easier to pick up on that allows for time to research/validate discussion points.

You can generally get Steam games very cheap, especially when using authorized key resellers. Switch games are sourced only from Nintendo and generally stay high in price. Their Switch 2 games are being advertised at $80, above even Sony’s $70 metric.

Don’t worry, the price will go up when you buy games to run on it.

More recently I’ve felt like there’s issues with being completely disconnected from any sort of critical mass. If I wanted to join a protest in my local city, I have doubts any of the fringe social networks could organize that. I can do my part to try to get more people on there.

It’s part of why I joined BlueSky over X. It’s more popular, and issues be what they are, that counts for a lot.

Yeah, but that’s not browsing; that’s targeting a specific account you want to view more of.

I mean, they were. I have personally heard from people that couldn’t be bothered to understand the Xbox SKUs for the possibility of buying one because of how horribly Microsoft names things.

Though I had a negative experience on my last go of it, and a “root”-based filesystem still confuses me, this was one of the big solid advantages last time I checked a few distros. I followed some advice of putting the system-level directories on one partition, and my user content on a different one. When I got fed up with one distribution, I cleaned and reinstalled things onto the system-level partition, leaving the user directory alone; I just had to inform it where those directory mappings would go.

Even though I was aware of it, this was one of my challenges. I was using Bazzite, which is obviously so niche that few tutorials would be specific. So, I tried to understand which distro was the base layer for it, and based my searches around that. Even then, a lot of things felt inapplicable, or needed to go through its containerized compatibility structure.

I’m very curious what they’ve done to prevent people accidentally forcefully removing it during gameplay. The sliding lock was annoying at first, but if you’ve ever gripped the controller hard at a pivotal moment it’s probably good that it didn’t rip away or even stress the parts.

Just edited to include my following experiences with Bazzite. It’s possible this will be the end of the road for me. I collected some of my annoyances/critiques of each distro in a notebook. I am guessing many of them will be sorted into “Yeah, we’re used to fiddling” but I still feel at least several of them would just qualify as poor QA and bad UI decisions.

Oh yeah, I definitely plan to install Heroic and Lutris, which simplified a lot of things. I’m trying to figure out which will be fastest if I happen to have a lot of indie, DRM-free games that follow the format of:

• Download zip file
• Unzip to folder
• Run exe in folder

Ideally a launcher could handle some of that relatively quickly for me without too much manual configuration. On Windows, it’s just unzip and then double-click, which of course will now change a little bit.

A VM is an interesting option - I vaguely recall interacting with very slow VMs a while back but supposedly they’ve gotten better. I don’t know if they’ve ever reached suitable gaming performance, or video editing performance though.

I wasn’t dedicated to Mint, but every thread on distro has had its arguments (eg “Whoa, no, I would NOT recommend xxx to a newbie” “yyy isn’t mature”), so it’s difficult to decide who to trust given the goal of Linux.

I had a bit of experience using Steam OS daily when a Deck was my only computer. I’ve heard of Bazzite, but wasn’t quite sure it was mature enough.

Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an “Acceptable ad standard”? Like, maybe even something within web specs?

A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We’ve had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn’t pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.

That is…perhaps a vain hope though. It’s just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.

Am I misremembering to think Genshin Impact was a cause of one of these major security disasters?

It wasn’t even people who installed Genshin that were victims - it was like, Microsoft signed a driver made by Mihoyo to scan for cheat apps. But mihoyo, being a game company with a rapid release cycle and imperfect security, had a vulnerability in the driver. So, malware authors could include that driver in their packages to elevate access on Windows installs even when no one had any idea what a Genshin is.

Not quite the same thing as Crowdstrike I guess though.