Yup. All my IoT devices are on a network that doesn’t have access to the internet. To control remotely, I use a VPN. Even though I don’t think it’s technically necessary, I take the precaution of blocking connections to the big company’s APIs/websites for all my IoT devices, just in case.

I wish this were easier for the layman to do. Some companies like Unifi make it pretty painless, but they are expensive and it’s really hard for the non-networking-savvy folks to know exactly which devices you need from them to have a working setup.

I agree with the fact that they aren’t a great company, but anyone who’s shopped around for skins/decals knows that dbrand is a cut above the rest in terms of quality. I’ve stopped buying from them due to how they run things, though.

This. Also, I’ve trained my dog to think that begging for food is done by laying down across the room, so when she is begging, it’s not annoying.

Are you kitten me right meow??

Yeah, I agree

While I agree, it’s a pretty lame thing to say “This doesn’t work for your use case? That’s because your use case is wrong” If the distro doesn’t support PIA, then that is an issue with the distro, not the user.

Only private tracker I use is MyAnonymouse, they’ve got all the books/audiobooks anyone could ever need, which I have had a really hard time finding on public trackers. Their rules are super lenient as well.

That is exactly the argument that was made

Depends on your definition of “damn near everywhere” I guess. I don’t see that as a declaration that “almost every single place in the US looks like this” I saw it more as “there are places all over the US that look like this”.

so definitionally not the whole US

I think it’s pretty silly to hear someone say something is everywhere and assume that someone meant that the entire US is covered by only this exact type of road.

a claim you have nothing on which to base it except that 1/4 of people in the country live in the big cities

Actually, that’s just near major roads. 80% of the US population live in cities or urban areas. Considering that these stroads are a standard feature of US urbanization, and can even be found near smaller towns, it would suggest that the vast majority of people in the US live near this type of road. I don’t have actual numbers because no one is collecting this data. But by presenting data that provides some level of tangential evidence, we can start to form a rough picture of the data we’re interested in.

Mate the argument isn’t that the entire US looks like this. I’ve been to all the US’s national parks, and a boatload of of state parks. I’ve lived in a small farming town with more cows than people. However, in terms of where the majority of people actually live in the US, this kind of road is very close by. I can’t find the numbers on what percentage live within a few miles of a freeway, but I’d guess it’s a majority. ~24% of people live within 500m of road that handles an average of 25,000 cars per day. Sure, in terms of space, the freeways are small, but people live near freeways. I’d argue that the sort of street in that picture is within 5-10 miles of pretty much everyone in the US.

I’ve road tripped through most of America. This is definitely in the majority of places near a freeway. Yeah, there’s a boatload of other stuff too, but if you were to pick a town right off a freeway, it’s very likely it’d look like this

They have a mode to turn off the creatures for exactly that reason. I haven’t tried it, but other than the spooky factor the creatures don’t add a ton to the game, so it probably wouldn’t lessen the experience. (There is a small thing, but it’d spoil some story elements if I were to say them here)

Sure, people can use the presets, but on a lower end machine, those aren’t perfect for getting the most out of your specific hardware. What I meant there was that consoles, and by extension the steam deck/steam machine, have the exact setting loadout for that hardware dialed in.

Sure, he could pay someone to upgrade it for him, but at that point it loses a lot of the benefits that come with being able to upgrade in the first place.

The Fractal Terra is actually larger than all modern consoles. The Fractal Terra is 11.4 liters. The PS5 is 7.2 liters. The Xbox series X is 6.9 liters. The steam machine is 3.8 liters, 3x smaller than the Fractal Terra. When it comes to dimensions, the Xbox series X is smaller in all dimensions, and while the PS5 is longer and wider, it’s height is half that of the Fractal Terra. The steam machine is pretty similar in two of the three dimensions, but the depth is less than half that of the Terra. The Fractal Terra is a really nice, small case, but it’s only small for a PC, not a console.

As for normalizing incompetence, I doubt you have as extensive a knowledge as you do for computers for every single thing you interact with every day. Knowing “how to use one” is different from knowing how to build and upgrade one.

You come across as someone who is smart, and yet doesn’t fully understand that half the population is below the 50th percentile. The generalizations you make for yourself and those you regularly interact with cannot be made for everyone.

You really do, and you not thinking so is telling of how skewed your view of what common knowledge really is. Where does someone start when building a computer if they don’t know what goes into a computer? How do they pick parts if they don’t know what changes will make their computer better or worse? I love PC part picker, but let’s be real, it’s for people who already know what they are looking for. PC part picker makes things so easy for you and I, but drop any tech-illiterate person into PC part picker, and they won’t actually get anywhere. Plus, I’ve had it get the dimensions of a GPU wrong before, and without verifying through a different website, I would have bought a card that didn’t fit in the case I was using. Even the gold standard sources of information make mistakes.

As for the pre-built argument, to someone like my brother who knows nothing about computers, but regularly games on his PS5, the steam machine and a prebuilt are essentially the same. He wouldn’t know how to fix the computer without sending it off to the company, which is how he’d fix the steam machine as well. He also wouldn’t see the PC as something that could be upgraded. If a game wasn’t running well, he certainly wouldn’t know what part would need upgrading in his machine to make his experience better. In that sense, the pre-built is effectly non-upgradable. He might know to adjust the in-game settings, but wouldn’t know what settings to change. On a prebuilt, this would be an issue. On a device that millions of people use, all with the exact same specs, this information is readily available. Think of the steam deck, you could look up “<game name> steam deck settings” and get the best loadout for your exact hardware. Hell, a bunch of modern games have a “Steam Deck” settings loadout built in. With a prebuilt, that’s not possible. And finally, the steam machine is considerably smaller than any mini itx prebuilt I’ve seen on the market. Hell, a mini it’s motherboard couldn’t even fit in the steam machine’s case. To a lot of people, not having a big box in their living room matters. I’ve had a hard time convincing my partner to let me have a PC in a Fractal Design Terra case in the living room, and that’s a case that is small and clean looking.

Not trying to attack you or anything because you did say that you don’t see the appeal for your own case, but that’s because this product isn’t for you. If you see building a PC and putting it in your living room as an alternative, it’s not meant for you. This is for everyone else who doesn’t see those things as easy. Being someone who has been building/upgrading my own gaming PCs since I was a preteen, I understand how simple it seems to you. But not everyone has that perspective. What seems like simple step-by-step instructions to you is actually really complicated. Part compatiblity alone is difficult, and even the best sources of info can get it wrong, and that’s really demoralizing for someone who doesn’t even know what RAM is. Step-by-step guides seem easy, but there are many predatory ones out there, which suggest using a free trial of paid software to do the things FOSS software can do. You and I know how to avoid it, but if someone doesn’t even understand the concept of an .iso file, how would they know that better alternatives exist? Also, an extremely common case when following tutorials online is that they are out of date, or an unexpected error happens when following them. You and I can quickly RCA these issues and get back on track, but when you don’t even understand what the steps you are taking are actually doing, these minor hiccups leave you dead in the water.

What you are actually suggesting here is people do like, a year of introductory computer classes. It doesn’t feel like that to you because you’ve been figuring all this crap out as you go along, but having walked people through the most basic of IT problems, you are overestimating what a normal person finds intimidating when dealing with a computer.

This is a well-known comic artist who is drawing in his usual style, I can’t imagine he switched to using AI

I’ve priced it out for myself, and I couldn’t get a build that’s as good at that price, not on new hardware at least. Not sure how they worked out their numbers

My neighbors planted blackberries on their side of the property line. It takes a good few days each year for me to cut them back off my side. Please, if you want blackberries, plant them in their own little zone, and be mindful of how they can spread

Hey now, artificial neural networks aren’t always the bad kind of AI, they’ve been around a long time and I really enjoyed playing with them back during my time at University

You are also missing the huge advances they’ve made in their contributions to FOSS, like proton, FEX, arch, etc. Steam has done an insane amount of legwork to get Linux gaming off the ground. They are the one company that made migrating off of Windows and onto Linux a valid option for me, and a bunch of other folks. Linux was ~0.89% of their userbase in 2020, and since their contributions to these FOSS projects, it has gone up to 3.05%. That’s crazy, considering it had been at or below that 0.89% since 2016.

It’s common in big tech companies to have a small internal team that has the full-time job of contributing to the FOSS software they use. That is how this should have been handled. Google wants a new feature/bug squished? You’ve got your team that can make the change, that’s literally the whole point of FOSS.