here we go again

is also: @experbia@kbin.social
was: /u/experbia

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  • 25 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 20th, 2023

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  • I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you’re underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the “family tech guy”. the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone’s new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.

    setting up granny’s laptop? I’ll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most “1000th visitor!” banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that’s all she knows the internet as. she doesn’t know of care about the browser options so it’s up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I’m not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.











  • probably. this doesn’t surprise me one bit.

    If you have a smart TV, it probably runs an ARM-architecture Linux or Android (which amounts to a bunch of extra stuff piled onto Linux) to drive the logic and ui to support connecting to the internet and downloading and updating streaming apps and other smart TV crap.

    most of the time they’ll run some minimal stripped-down version of these operating systems to support only features needed for the TV and it’s functions. buildroot is an open source project that specializes in producing hyper slim Linux OS installation images for devices like these.

    if I had to guess, they had a USB full of shows plugged in and the smart tv’s solution was to just boot up the linux version of VLC in a bare x session when the user hits play on “totally_not_pirated_smallville_s01e03.mkv” on their thumbdrive. not a terrible solution, honestly: VLC just plays anything.

    The old kernel is because a lot of low level hardware has available drivers written for it that are intended to be loaded into old versions of the Linux kernel (at time of release perhaps) and are then just never updated lol, at least not for ARM. sometimes there are breaking changes with kernel apis and stuff as the kernel version increases over time, so the easier solution for someone trying to make a TV, over begging and/or paying the hardware developers to update their drivers, is to just run an old kernel version.

    everything is a hack. nearly all these smart devices are just general-purpose computers with ancient (predictable, cheap) software and inescapable interfaces taped over the front, and a whole lot of digital duct tape on the back.




  • Retirement funds have millions of people’s retirement

    and they exist within a continuum of risk profiles. there are safer (and less potentially profitable) options, and there are riskier (and more potentially profitable) options. they have made this decision.

    you cannot pick the riskiest options for your retirement fund and then get mad there was more risk than the safest options and that you lost some of it. you cannot pick the safest options and then get mad it’s not performing as well as the riskiest. if you cannot afford to lose your retirement money, do not put it into any fund or mechanism that will gamble with it beyond what you are comfortable with. it is YOUR responsibility. alone.

    as a result of your mentality, we will see less and less innovation. people who can improve the world see you and your opinions and decide, well, it’s not worth it. what intelligent person would ever work with organizations that you claim are justifiably ethically bound to stab them in the back and reward them the bare minimum possible?

    and why, because grandpa ticked the “minimum risk” button in his sofi 401k and is mad he’s not getting explosive vc-tech-company-tier returns? or because your uncle ticked the “maximum risk” button and is mad he lost some money? you’re catering to the lowest common denominator of uninformed, entitled gamblers and are poisoning the well and breaking the whole system down as a result.

    let me guess, you have an MBA?


  • that spent their retirement money to purchase shares

    don’t invest (or gamble) what you can’t afford to lose.

    using some people’s poor money management skills as an excuse to justify exploitation of the source of your windfall is exceptionally stupid.

    a receding tide beaches all boats. every time something like this happens, another genius with another big idea sees it and decides it’s not worth it if they’re just going to get the result stripped away from them by parasitic suits.


  • I have done this. it can be quite messy but it will definitely import the albums of all the music you have either liked or followed or in playlist in Spotify.

    I’m not 100% that it will actually organize it as it was originally on Spotify, though, just that it adds the list’s contents as “wanted tracks”. I assume there’s some way to do this but I haven’t looked into it enough yet.

    It’s still on my list, along with figuring out how to get Critical Role working with my Sonarr so I can be done with YouTube frontends…