This is how I feel more and more. I do IT stuff for non-technical folks on the side and they’re just squirming with these machines that can’t upgrade to Win11. I dump Linux Mint on there, and they run like a dream, even at 10 or 11 years old. In some cases, the RAM cannot be upgraded beyond the 4 or 8GB it shipped with, and even so, they can watch streaming video, they can video conference…you know, of course, they can do office work in LibreOffice. It’s a fucking joke that Microsoft is trying to lie to them—to all of us—and say their computers are no good any longer. And between the homelabbing I’ve been doing lately and all the machines I’ve been rehabbing for people, it just reminds me how much I enjoy using Linux. Even if it can be a pain in the ass. Even if it can be cryptic. It feels like honest-to-god computing in a way macOS hasn’t felt like for a long time, and Windows no longer even resembles.

I use a Mac laptop because I always have, and I appreciate the convenience of the ecosystem (AirPods snapping right to the machine, iMessage letting me text from a desktop app, and so forth) but just because macOS’s descent into enshittification is slower doesn’t mean it’s any less noticeable. I want a Framework laptop so damn bad, so I at least have the option to daily Linux. Dual-booting on an M-series Mac is just a little too inelegant. I want something with good support and flexibility, where the maintainers aren’t fighting an upward battle to make a black box transparent, you know?

Anyway, I really believe this is “the year of the Linux desktop” as they’ve been saying, and I have become that annoying part of my friend group who won’t stop recommending it. Seems like every week someone bitches about Windows 11, and every time, I dump three more articles or videos about how 90% of games work, and some even work better on Linux, or whatever, to try and tempt them out of their Windows-shaped box. We’ll see if it ever takes. But we know this much for sure: Windows is only getting worse.

Took him long enough.

You gotta throw some sick shaders on there fam 😎

It is absolutely something to meditate on, that’s for sure.

I think you know what I meant. Most people who need a truck need a truck like mine. Obviously most people don’t need a truck. I only have one because the last few years have required a lot of work on my house and yard. Whenever all that wraps up I’ll swap it back out for another car.

People toss out the “you just need a buddy with a truck” or “you just need to rent one” thing so much but those things require you to bend your life around, say, inconveniencing people to borrow / hoping their schedule accommodates, or, having to go collect, use, pay for, and return during a narrow window of time a rented truck, which, yes, is fine for one day, but if again, you’ve got years of unpredictable needs ahead of you, it’s not a sin to buy a cheap, well-used truck as a second or third vehicle so you’ve always got it when you need it. And in that case, those “most people” need a truck like mine_.

I have a midsize truck from a yester-decade that by now seems like a small truck. Even if it had a long bed and full cab it would be more practical, and I’d argue universally acceptable size and shape than full-sized trucks pulling even a crew cab + short bed combo. When you see a full size with a crew cab and a long or god help us extended bed, it just makes the blood boil. Because as we all know, on top of the “needs two parking spaces and probably takes 4-6 depending on the driver” situation, they have nothing in their beds practically all the time.

Trucks aren’t inherently a problem, and it’s okay if they’re unladen plenty of the time. But most people need a truck like mine; most people have a truck like the full-sized nonsense described above. That’s the problem.

Wasn’t government cross-pollinating with industry a relevant component in 20th century definitions of fascism?

Came during the initial revolt. Increased attention after getting banned from Reddit because I joked I’d like a guy with a bunch of guns to give me one cause he had too many. They tried to say I was soliciting for the purchase of firearms, and when I said there was no way any serious person could have thought I was asking to buy a gun, they told me the lifetime ban was in place and if I ever came around again they’d ban me for ban evasion.

Lul. That place is a total fucking hellscape.

Man, or, when I’m driving through the mountains, “Hey, Siri, play [some song I’ve owned 20 years and have downloaded locally to my device] in my Music app”; “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble getting a connection.” You useless fuck, you never needed a connection back when it was Voice Control; it was only after we moved to the awful Siri future some 15 years ago or whatever that this unbelievably basic, used-to-be-built-in-so-I-know-you-know-how-to-do-it function was replaced with something that has to call out to the Internet to do anything of value.

That’s rich, from a company that stops making or never makes enough its first-party accessories. Ask anyone interested in getting an Ethernet adapter for Switch, or a first-party Gamecube adapter more than like 8 months after those products launched. Get on Amazon and try to buy an official Switch dock from Nintendo; there is no official outlet for them there, so you’re either buying pre-owned, or a lookalike knockoff, or an explicit knockoff, or something that MIGHT be real but it’s from a weird seller, at a suspiciously low price, with some random text in the item name. Christ, get on Gamestop’s website! They only have refurbs and pre-owned ones. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember. Nintendo cannot be trusted to make their own shit and trying to stop third parties from doing what they won’t is peak anti-consumer behavior. A classic Nintendo Move™.

I’m only a casual coder (although I hope to get better in the coming years), but this is how I feel in the office when someone farts a half formed, semiliterate speech to text little dingleberry into ChatGPT, and then sends as a professional email the full bodied thing it whips up based on it. I’ve got a colleague who used to be in “LD” classes when they were young and they’ve come a long way to being a near 30-year business professional in this department, and they have always struggled with reading and writing and so tools like Grammarly and now ChatGPT help this person take a fully-formed email and give it the once-over before sending, and I don’t judge that and that isn’t what I’m describing; what I mean is my boss (for example), who can’t string more than five written words together, or read a sentence any longer, and certainly isn’t interested in learning how to, who now uses ChatGPT to send page-long emails or “cook up” long and supposedly philosophical LinkedIn posts about leadership.

I cannot conceive of how a person does that, and sends it with a straight face, totally shameless. Why should I even bother to respond to something like that? Who am I responding to? It certainly isn’t the supposed author. My college program mentor was doing the same thing near the end of my degree program and it was so fucking obvious. He went from never responding to me to suddenly sending these long and enthusiastic emails that recited back to me every point I had made as though they were all worth reiterating (they weren’t), the way one might show one was actively listening (which itself only adds to the irony). And it is such a deep insult to receive one of these emails because it says at once that you both 1) don’t respect me enough to put your own thoughts in writing for me, or to have enough thoughts to write down to begin with and 2) that you think I’m a complete fucking idiot who either won’t notice your ruse, or am also a vapid creature, too vapid to care because “aren’t we all just doing it this way now?”

The philosophical argument against vibe coding seems pretty self evident although the most compelling “argument” I’ve seen against it, I saw on Lemmy, maybe a repost from BlueSky where someone pointed out that it’s the tech bros trying to take this one last manual tool from the hands and minds of users and turn it into a subscription for which our skills (like writing and composition) will inevitably atrophy to the point we cannot do it without the subscription service anymore. Pure evil.

This is wild. I mean, it isn’t surprising conceptually, but like…I got my first ever Amazon recall notice about this, and it is for something I surely bought between 2016 and 2018. Thing’s just sitting in my basement wishing it was getting charged and used. I guess I’ll need to run it to the dump.

Because* it lacks oversight

I mean, the ad services plugged into every website have already cross referenced each other and know who you are even if you use a service like DDG that supposedly doesn’t track. Incidentally, Kagi supposedly doesn’t track either, (which they’d better not since you’re paying them), so while it doesn’t mitigate the above issue of your being traceable by pure virtue of browsing the web, it certainly isn’t “tying your porn results to credit cards and search results.”

Switch to Kagi. It’s worth the money.

Boy, have we got the community for you !antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world

I mean. Yeah. When Goldeneye came out for the N64 it was like $90 and that was in nintiesbux. We got real used to standardized pricing when discs came around but it’s true that you can’t have it both ways. Now, there’s a reasonable argument to be had over whether Mario Kart World and GTA6 are both gonna be worth >$80. I bought Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey for whatever they retailed for. Was that $70? I can’t remember. But I had more fun and put more hours that year into Hollow Knight, which cost me $15 and kept dumping free DLC for like a year or so afterward. The price was great. The DLC was free. But it also didn’t cost like $2bln or whatever dumbass cost they’re saying GTA6 cost to make.

I didn’t ask them to make it that stupid big and expensive. But some fans did. They’re in that Smash Bros situation where they aren’t allowed not to top the previous entry in terms of scope. So it is what it is.

Should all games be $80-90? Of course not. Should games that cost a billion or more to develop and promise hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay cost $80-90? I think it’s embarrassing and immature to suggest otherwise. Even if you just go back to 2006 and the $60 standard, and adjust that for inflation, you end up at $95. So this isn’t really an argument any serious person should be having when we talk about whether the most expensive game ever made should cost functionally less than its Xbox 360 forerunner.

Does it count if I did it to myself?

Absolutely wonderful album. Managed to grab on vinyl at my local record store a couple years ago.

What about those of us who clicked the link but got turned away due to content blockers :p