I hate focus stealing so I might set mine to strict, now that I know that’s an option.

It’s an absolute nightmare to be typing, some dialogue box pops up, and I accidentally accept it by hitting spacebar without even seeing what it was.

Yeah I noticed that, too. Not sure why. Using apt on the command line is probably an alternative, at least.

Also switched to Linux (popos) this month. It’s been fine. Games work. Browser works. No complaints, really.

She’s a very selfish person who doesn’t care about other people. She only cares about what benefits her. So when someone says “there’s no material benefit to me” they sound like that kind of asshole.

Also it was a critically acclaimed show, not some obscure media.

That doesn’t logically follow. No more than saying “Building more highways is bad for the environment, ergo the highway administrators benefit from having more cars on the road.” You’re looking at a problem of induced demand and concluding the problem is on the demand-side of the equation.

What? Yes it does. Facebook needs users to generate revenue. With no users, they can’t sell ads or user data. How else do you think they make money? Do you not think making money is a benefit for the owners of facebook?

It’s one node in a massive web. And it’s easy to say “Well, you have to do your part because <insert consumerist morality here>”. But mostly it’s just some random asshole on the internet telling me not to use my telephone because AT&T is run by a richer set of random assholes. There’s no material benefit to me and no collective coordinated action that I’m seriously participating in.

You’re reminding me of Eleanor from the good place. Do you also litter? Refuse to return shopping carts?

I haven’t seen any real evidence to that effect.

Do you accept that facebook is harmful to the world, or would I need to try to prove that? There’s the time they tried to see if they could make people sad by adjusting the feed. (They could)

If you accept that, it’s a small step to “They benefit from having more users on their platform”. More users means more engagement, which means more ads, and advertisers pay more money for those ads. No one’s going to pay big bucks to advertise their stuff to an empty platform. Facebook’s going to have a harder time selling user data and metadata if users aren’t on there.

Now, getting one family to stop using facebook is a drop in the bucket. But every family that leaves makes it easier for the next family to leave.

Those aren’t the only email providers, and using email is less harmful than using Facebook.

email exists and isn’t run by the worst people on earth

The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.

Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.

This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you’re saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

Sometimes I forget people watch YouTube on purpose. Other than music videos and the rare “how do I do this thing in this game?” I just don’t use it

I feel like an alien sometimes. Reading books like some sort of lost time traveler.

Update: installed mint. Seems work. Had a problem where it couldn’t see the HD. Had to change an option in grub

Pasting what I found online to fix it:

“”" thank you so much! what was the solution!

for anyone might read this in the future: in the bootmenu where u can select which version of linux u wanna boot u can press “e” and then u need to add intel_iommu=off at the end of the line of the “linux” row - i had some double dashes at the end for me it did the job when I add them before the double dashes.

Then I could see the harddrive and install mint mate on my old macbook air

also needed later on to set the parameter permantent by opening a terminal and used this command sudo nano /etc/default/grub

edited this line like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash intel_iommu=off” then save and exit nano and this command for updating the boot thingy

sudo update-grub “”"

So far most things have worked fine.

It’s a little annoying when steam wants to redo the vulkan compilation thing every time, but it seems to work fine if I skip that.

Modding I’m not sure how it’ll work yet. Some stuff probably just works, if it’s like “edit this file” or “replace that file” but I haven’t tried yet.

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

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.

Switched to linux (popos - so far so good) this month because fuck microsoft. yeah, some things aren’t perfect or require extra steps (modding, usually) but fuck microsoft. Fuck their AI shit, fuck their “recall” spyware, fuck their CEO that babbles about AI while laying off thousands of workers.

A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.

A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.

Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them “Business Idiots”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.

As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.

There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.

All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent

But i guess it’s always labor that pays the price

If you had been buying games you’d have a library 🤷