Moved to Linux (popos on desktop, mint on ancient laptop). Been fine. Don’t miss windows. Play games and browse the web without issue.

Thiel is a dangerous piece of trash and I’m disappointed he hasn’t… let’s say… been beamed up like kirk.

When I was making money, I’d buy albums from bands I liked. Built up a nice library.

Some people buy albums

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it’s just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don’t need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don’t want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it’s 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn’t fit in my pocket.

I don’t have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don’t find it much of a distraction.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

Have you tried explaining something to someone lately? A lot of people don’t care and don’t understand. About anything

You are breaking the internet with this non sense.

I think that’s their goal. Conservative types benefit when people have limited access to information

Switched to linux. No regrets so far.

Of the installs I’ve done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit “retry” and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn’t work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.

I’m not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone.[1][2][3] The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar.

Yeah, more protests that aren’t just like once a month. But I don’t know how to organize that, and most of the platforms that people communicate on are owned by the worst people.

Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?

I think that’s the nature of publicly traded for profit companies. The shareholders don’t care about the product. They just want their portfolio’s value to go up.

The leadership doesn’t care much about the product. Not in the long term. They get paid a big salary, and the higher-ups have equity they want to go up in value. So long as they cash out before the product dies, they’re golden.

The actual labor building the product might care. Some are just working for a paycheck. (I knew a guy who worked at spotify, actually. He didn’t personally care much about music. He was just a database guy). But the ones who do care don’t have any power.

So most of the forces that would push the company towards being long term good don’t have power. The forces that want more profits, now, do.

I don’t trust spotify not to fill those playlists with AI slop, now. I also personally prefer to go deeper on a band, rather than thoughtlessly drift through a bunch of stuff I’ll never hear again.

I do like bandcamp’s “people who bought this also bought this” recommendations, though.

I’ve been telling people for years to buy 1-2 albums a month, and then after a couple years you have a sizable library. Spotify is renting.

But spotify is easy and fast, and some people think they listen to way more music than they do. I wonder how many people are paying spotify $10/month to listen to the same 4 albums for years.

People gotta stop watching slop. But it seems impossible to get people to stop using tiktok, twitter, instagram, et al. They just don’t care enough.

Verbing weirds language, per calvin and hobbes

https://imgur.com/verbing-weirds-language-wHldxoy

I suppose. But have you tried to get people to care about things? It’s stupid hard. I can’t get most of my friends to stop using Twitter, which is a pretty low stakes change. Nevermind something like “eat less meat” or “walk instead of drive sometimes”

If you can make people care, you can solve a lot of problems

You can make that kind of thing illegal. I think “shrink wrap eulas” are dubious. Rule that fine print with a bunch of other stuff doesn’t count as explicit. Like there are rules now about cookie acceptance that has changed how the web works, and most sites don’t try to hide the cookie thing because that’s against the rules.

I think you’re under estimating what the law can do, probably because most of the time it’s used to bolster rich assholes.

You could probably make it illegal to alter people’s videos without their explicit consent. But also the Republicans have shown us that laws mean what the people in charge want