Feel like ads in cars should be illegal, but the US doesn’t have a government that believes in good things.

I’m pretty sure these scam calls are because the phone companies don’t care enough to build better systems. We just all accept a shitty world because Verizon can’t be bothered.

But if I’m on example.com/feed and I see posts [1,2,3] based on my user and whatever algorithm is there, and you’re on example.com/feed and you see posts [4,5,6], how would it know? Same url, completely different content.

I guess it would work on pages that have a fixed url, like news articles.

When I got in an accident and was on the ground with a broken bone, the EMT asked if I had a preference about which hospital to go to. Like I was going to check out reviews with one working arm, from the pavement.

The US is a dystopia

How would it work, technically, on a dynamic website? Any given url may load different content.

I’m reminded of the heinz dilemma (nothing to do with ketchup)

Yeah, you’re probably not wrong, sorry.

Plenty of rich people are shitting up the internet, though.

Whatever’s built into pycharm or vscode for looking at diffs. Command line for push pull squash etc

Not on its own. If someone’s using it a lot and giving other hate signals, I’ll suspect that they know what they’re doing.

Only recommendation: some wifi cards (with certain chips, I forget which) in my experience have required me to go hunt down a driver, so check reviews for any card you’re looking at to see if people report it working out of the box.

With Linux mint, with one machine, I had to explicitly open the driver manager and tell it to use the drivers for the wifi. It wasn’t obvious but I’d read it on some random forum and remembered. Once I knew that was a thing, it was easy. Opened the driver manager, plugged in the install media (USB stick) when it asked, and then told it to use the proprietary drivers.

I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels like the Internet was better when it was limited to enthusiasts and people in higher education.

Letting every idiot post every word that comes to mind for the whole world to see was probably a mistake.

My old desktop I went with Linux mint. I had some trouble with the installer that I didn’t solve, but switching to slightly older but still supported version of mint worked. Games worked out of the box with steam.

I was playing a MUD for a while (I’m old, but aardwolf is still going). They have a special client you can use. That worked just fine through WINE.

On my newer desktop, I tried mint. I foolishly didn’t test much on the live disk, and only after installing did I realize HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, didn’t work. Proton also crashed explosively. That was a bad time.

I then tried pop!_os and that has worked fine. I haven’t played much yet on it- just my usual guild wars 2 and binding of Isaac, but it’s been fine.

There was a weird issue with audio crackling in gw2, but I think I fixed that by changing a setting somewhere.

I also recently installed mint on a ~2014 MacBook Air. Not for gaming, but so it can get security updates and stuff. I needed to fuss with grub - something I never would have figured out on my own by someone on stack exchange had figured out - and now it works fine. Haven’t done any games on it, but I bet it could run really light stuff better than it could have as a Mac.

Generally, I’m a big fan of it not nagging me. It doesn’t ask me to use OneDrive. It doesn’t want me to make an account anywhere. Pretty much everything can be changed if you’re determined enough. I’m pretty easy to please though, so all I’ve done for customization is add a clock widget to the desktop and turn off edge tiling.

One thing that I expect might be a headache is mods. A lot of mod tooling I think makes assumptions about windows. There’s probably a way to run like vortex in the same environment as whenever proton puts the game, but I’m not sure how to do it. You can also probably find where the game files are easily and edit them. I’m hoping the community starts adopting Linux more so people write guides (and please write them on the public web instead of making 20 minute videos or burying them in discord)

Luckily Baldur’s gate 3 (which also runs fine) has its own mod manager, and that works fine.

Oh, I did have a weird thing once where the desktop environment had a keybind that was interfering with a game once. I think middle click, maybe? I forget exactly what it was, but I just unmapped the keybind in the desktop env and the game was then fine.

Google and Microsoft have competing services, but those companies also suck. I think they’re less popular, but I don’t know much about why.

I’m not aware of any smaller competitors, though some probably exist. It would be a big risk for a company to go with a new provider. There’s a lot of library support for the big players, for one thing. If you want your python application to talk to AWS, the boto library is just right there.

You could run your own hardware somewhere, but that has its own host of problems, if you’ll pardon the pun. I worked somewhere a long time ago that had its own servers in a data center. The place got flooded in a big storm and we were down for a couple days.

I’ve only used Google a couple of times, and by accident. The ebook reader I have seems hard coded to search Google when you ask it to search the web for a word in the book. I intensely dislike the AI slop. I do not want an AI summary of the Wikipedia article. Just take me to the wiki article you dunces!

Yeah some of my friends and coworkers are just staying home to play video games instead of going to the most basic, safe, protests. Doesnt look like they’re going to take real risks.

Conservatives famously have poor media literacy. They are worse than children.

Are you familiar with AWS? Amazon Web services. Many, many, websites use them and I don’t think there’s a way to tell as a user.

Like, you go to a website and their images are hosted on s3 (an aws service) and their database is on RDS (also AWS), and their whole backend application is using eks or ecs or whatever.

That’s extremely common. Companies don’t run their own hardware anymore very often.

Most CEOs ive worked with are largely driven by emotion. If the LLM is using data to drive its decisions, it will probably do better.

I don’t think giving that kind of arbitrary power to a small number of private entities is a great idea.

I remember once in college buying condoms when the cashier was my (woman) friend’s mom. I’m pretty sure she thought I was fucking her daughter, since we hung out a lot, but I wasn’t and had no interest. Still got a stink eye.