That seems unusual. I have a HD LG so ancient it has 3D and it has a microphone. It has always been disabled in software which isn’t really disabled at all. A microphone free modern tv is a unicorn.

deleted by creator

There are very harsh fines for driving with a phone elsewhere. And smaller vehicles and better infra for pedestrians.

Windows isn’t scary. It’s weird and kind of pathetic. Always has been.

The worst thing about vulture capital targeting young manipulable tech bros for their get rich schemes is that has created a self perpetuating mono culture of spoiled rich grifters with stunted emotional maturity that never progressed beyond teenage boy. The have been allowed to dominate everything and are shaping the rage baited, meme ridden, dumbarse, ignorant dystopia. Lets just pull the plug on them and stop giving them money. Then they will all fuck off back to their mum’s basement to play video games and jerk off to their ai.

I love tech. My brain loves soaking up new things. Currently writing my first ever game engine in my 50s in c with my kid based on books and include files. Better late than never.

The technology was never the problem. It’s the money people. Always was. The Marxists got that bit right. Some of the tech bros are from a tech background but their culture and motivations aren’t like mine.

The money person these days follows the drug pusher/pimp model. They want to control you and have you on a hook. Everything has gaming machine mechanisms built in to keep you coming back. You can’t walk away. They have all your data, all your connections. You are helpless. A victim, but you walked right into it. Final victory for them is to lobotomise all your higher order thinking skills. Your just a body to lie there and be fucked.

Technology Connections is a gem of a channel. I had no real idea how hybrids worked and fundamentally misunderstood and dismissed them. Living in rural australia and having to do long trips (passengers, no towing etc) and very little charging infrastructure that is a far more attractive technology than I had imagined. Also mini vans rule. So much space. Big comfy seats. Love stowing the seats and filling them up with tools, tents, mowers, bikes, boxes from ikea, all out of the elements. Most SUV drivers are posers.

In the 90s I compiled all my kernels at home from source with just the drivers I needed. Only installed the packages I needed. Only enabled the services I needed. The Unix way. When the kernel added modules I was still only compiling a subset and generally loading them manually.

Obviously that doesn’t work for most users and distros sensibly started shipping with modules compiled for practically every need. Usually when I view distro security alerts they are for packages I don’t install. But I have all these damn kernel modules just waiting to automatically load. I know I can blacklist them individually but I wonder if there is a way to profile the modules I use and use a deny all/whitelist approach instead?

I would take the old ones back from for profits, put them in the hands of a non-profit and keep them at a sensible price. All this land speculation is bullshit and contributes no value to domain users - its all a get rich scheme for a small number of insiders.

The sad thing is they aren’t really equipped to live in any world but the one being created for them. All the education indicators are trending down. They can’t do much without an internet connection and apps

Family member spends all day every day recording and editing videos for youtube. Never finds an audience. Never gets promoted. The service is too busy pushing AI slop. All that video storage for the long tail of content with almost no views must cost a fortune. Meanwhile big quality youtubers seem to not be growing for some time like they have hit a ceiling. I think Youtube has been in decline for some time. Instead of fix it, which would require investment and ideas, I think they pull the usual bad US MBA style management practice and attempt to maximise revenues on the way down until they finally kill it.

Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.

Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.

A lot of open source software is kind of ridiculous to many people. Why would you want to reverse engineer some proprietary device? Just choose one that is more open. It isn’t just about the challenge. It is also about extending freedom to do stuff as many places as possible. I might not want age verification in my operating system as its just another way to fingerprint me by big tech. And I probably won’t have it enabled or exposed. But having the option allows people to participate in the shitty, spying. predatory, manipulative, commercial hellscape version of the Internet which is increasingly facing regulation around the world. That is a freedom. Not a freedom I want but a freedom someone wants. It means they are not legally forced to use Microsoft or Apple to give all their data to the NSA and big predatory businesses.

I can see the pragmatic appeal. Maintaining a lot of code for an open source project is thankless. Go is designed for idiots like me so it makes sense that an llm should be able to emit code that mostly works. There are classes of errors that are less likely in Go and the compiler and linting will prevent some foot guns and then it would have been tested.

Ethically I hate anything to do with the llm industry and all it represents. I hate the environmental impacts. The social impacts. The disregard for intellectual property. The devaluing of human effort. The scam economics. I won’t use anything touched by it on principle and if that means walking away from a dead Internet so be it. There is enough pre-2020s books, audiobooks, movies, music and code to keep me interested for the rest of my life.

My kids have used Linux from birth. One of them is voting age now. A Chromebook is Linux. They mostly just open steam.

Never liked the look of KDE. It is nothing to do with the tech or features. I think qt is a very solid foundation and my current desktop is built on Qt/QML. KDE just feels Windows-ish somehow and that’s probably part of what makes it great for a lot of people. That is a huge win for Linux adoption. Just not for me.

I always liked Gnome. It was simple and felt fresh even though I hate gtk/gobject etc. And I still keep Gnome as a backup but it think development is being held back by being built on layers of shit.

After a long time going back and forth I think I am all in on Niri now. Regular tilers never worked for me but somehow scrollers do. It is weird how much of a difference it makes for me. It is possible to build a complete desktop now with Quickshell and a bit of a backend for some services which makes the Gnome desktop and Plasma look crazy over engineered and I don’t know why the Cosmic people even bothered. I don’t see how Gnome can keep up as its is such a horrible system to program. DankMaterialShell is reasonably usable for starters but I might even start working on something. It looks like fun.

Every company does that. The difference is the AI companies will be broke soon and laying off all their staff so people are getting out before the collapse.

I think we have been taught from birth that we can and should have it all. The most expensive car, the biggest house, the most powerful phone. It is a lie and its becoming increasingly unattainable for more people. It is pure consumerism and doesn’t make anyone happier. In truth people are lucky to have any sort of home which is a fucking travesty and an indictment on our society and politics. A 3 year old phone is still a phone. In a city you often don’t need a car at all, certainly you don’t need a lease for a massive truck that consumes all your income.

Windows has more and better software available than Linux (most free and open source software also runs on Windows). Most people don’t need it. Downscale your life and be happy.

All these craptastic US tech companies originally started on internationally developed free and open source software. They hoover up capital and talent then abuse their market power. Fuck them all.

They all run on Linux - Torvalds is a Swedish speaking Finn. Greg KH who maintains stable is German. So many libraries and core system contributions by Germans like Drepper and Poettering. Youtube ran on mysql for years from Finnish Widenius. Google built a lot of stuff with Python - from Dutch Guido van Rossum and c++ from Danish Stroustrup. All of the video and audio sites rely heavily on ffmpeg, orginally from French Fabrice Bellard. Lots of them also using virtualisation stuff which includes qemu, also from Bellard. So much comp sci research from Europe and UK. Chrome and Safari originated with KDE (German) code. Europe did all the heavy lifting while the US took all the profits. I’m not even European but every country has the same experience. They have no idea how they are viewed.

Massive opportunity cost. People will say that could have been spent on social programs and I agree but realistically that can’t happen until voters stop being manipulated sheeple and wake the fuck up. Which in the USA is never. Brainwashed and neutered.

Until then that capital could have been invested in other industries, creating sustainable jobs and long term economic growth. But it is tied up in a bubble and a huge amount of wealth will be destroyed, invested in rapidly depreciating equipment and data centres that have no prospect of returning their investment.

If you thought it was hard to source computer parts at reasonable prices, imagine what the capital market must be like for anyone but the AI con artists. So when AI tanks, everything else is in limp mode, so the economy will be doubly fucked.