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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 16th, 2023

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  • It’s fine to feel that way. It’s also fine to have that discussion with folks who may not know what the current state of is. But the bottom line is people don’t enjoy being told what they’re familiar with isn’t good or useful, because to them, it is. If it fulfills their day to day needs and wants, there’s very little argument to be had.

    Microsoft’s business practices are scummy, and Apple’s closed ecosystem leads them to punish their customers. But not everyone uses their computer for more than what they absolutely require. Many do not have home computers, and may only interact with them for work. I’m a geek, nerd, whatever. I like to tinker, I like to customize, and I like that I have the freedom to do so. But most people just want something they’re familiar with, something that works as they expect it to. They don’t want to learn to use something at home that isn’t the same as work or school. And honestly I think that’s fair. There’s more going on in their lives, and these days almost everything they need to do is on the internet anyways.



  • It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they’ve pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that’s a fair argument still.

    Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone’s mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don’t blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.



  • I like CDs, but I guess I can’t really call myself a kid anynore though, being in my mid twenties. I typically use Spotify for discovery/casual listening but but an album on CD or digitally through Bandcamp when the option is presented to me. I went out of my way to buy a 25 disc CD changer.

    Vinyl have definitely become way more popular for physical music purchases, but I like the smaller footprint of a CD.

    I do think the vast majority of people use Youtube Music, Spotify or a similar service though. It’s inexpensive, has family plans and optical media players just aren’t common anymore.






  • Imo, plugins should have separate config files, with uniform, consistent formatting. Separating them ensures that plugins never modify primary configuration details, they can be updated independently, or deprecated without affecting future functionality. It also means you can take regular and reliable backups of each config.






  • Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn’t seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It’s just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn’t cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn’t been able to maintain this.

    So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.



  • It’s frustrating. There’s a lot of Windows 11 that I do actually like: Massively improved HDR support, far better DPI scaling features, tabbed file browsing, a unified control panel again (yes I know if you look hard enough you can find legacy panels), configurable snapping regions for Windows, gaming focused features with screen recording, intelligent capture, etc. On the power user side: the terminal, winget, built in ssh support and broader compatibility with Linux development toolchains, and if you’re the kind of person with a family or friends you do tech support for regularly the Quick Assist’s current iteration is a godsend.

    But then the tradeoff is ads, increased telemetry, AI integrations, inability to move the taskbar, a piss-poor local file search, increasingly restrictive desktop customizations via third party tools, shorter support periods for Windows feature updates, and generally a lack of overall feature control due to low level integration with core Windows services.

    I don’t think Windows 11 is a bad operating system in the sense that I believe it to be a marked improvement on a feature by feature comparison to Windows 10. But it feels like two development arms at Microsoft are consistently at war with eachother. Some want to implement really cool features and tools for end users, and the others are hellbent on locking the system down and forcing this Apple philosophy of “use it like we want you to”.