I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

If right wing people were smart they wouldn’t be right wing. Of course they’re going to believe and share AI slop video. They’re emotional driven fools.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.

I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.

Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.

One of the guys at my old job submitted a PR with tests that basically just mocked everything, tested nothing. Like,

with patch("something.whatever", return_value=True):
  assert whatever(0) is True
  assert whatever(1) is True

Except for a few dozen lines, with names that made it look like they were doing useful.

He used AI to generate them, of course. Pretty useless.

Moved to Linux (popos on desktop, mint on ancient laptop). Been fine. Don’t miss windows. Play games and browse the web without issue.

Thiel is a dangerous piece of trash and I’m disappointed he hasn’t… let’s say… been beamed up like kirk.

When I was making money, I’d buy albums from bands I liked. Built up a nice library.

Some people buy albums

I don’t consider single player changes cheating. For something to be cheating, you need to break the rules agreed to by the players. If you’re the only player, you presumably can’t break the agreement you make with yourself.

Hypothesis: people who cheat in video games are scum bags in other aspects of life. I wonder if anyone’s done a study on that. I feel like the kind of person who has to cheat in video games is a broken sad sack.

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it’s just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don’t need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don’t want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it’s 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn’t fit in my pocket.

I don’t have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don’t find it much of a distraction.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

Have you tried explaining something to someone lately? A lot of people don’t care and don’t understand. About anything

You are breaking the internet with this non sense.

I think that’s their goal. Conservative types benefit when people have limited access to information

Switched to linux. No regrets so far.

Of the installs I’ve done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit “retry” and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn’t work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.

I’m not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone.[1][2][3] The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar.

Yeah, more protests that aren’t just like once a month. But I don’t know how to organize that, and most of the platforms that people communicate on are owned by the worst people.

Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?

I think that’s the nature of publicly traded for profit companies. The shareholders don’t care about the product. They just want their portfolio’s value to go up.

The leadership doesn’t care much about the product. Not in the long term. They get paid a big salary, and the higher-ups have equity they want to go up in value. So long as they cash out before the product dies, they’re golden.

The actual labor building the product might care. Some are just working for a paycheck. (I knew a guy who worked at spotify, actually. He didn’t personally care much about music. He was just a database guy). But the ones who do care don’t have any power.

So most of the forces that would push the company towards being long term good don’t have power. The forces that want more profits, now, do.