4grams

I’ll second bazzite. I have it on an old laptop as the family machine, so it’s kid approved. I don’t personally love it, but I have nothing bad to say about it, I’m just a greybeard who prefers my boring LMDE.

So, it’s one of my go-to suggestions for a good, daily drive-able step into Linux. I like that the immutability makes it easier to recover, for when they inevitably call me for tech support (haven’t had to rely on it much yet, but that’s the theory anyway).

I actually replaced my suv with a full sized truck last year. Funny enough my average mileage went up from 17 to 28mpg. Hybrids rule.

(Yes, 28 is still shit, but much better and more useful shit than I had before).

Well said.

Ultimately it’s a capitalism problem, it makes the value proposition drift towards addiction in every single case.

I’m already kicking myself for buying into them in the first place. Fuck cameras, I’m going back to wired headphones. My $20 IEMs sound better than my AirPod pros, without all the fancy over processing.

I don’t know man, I’m a fairly old person and I’m constantly surrounded by people who seem unable to think without it.

What drives me up a fucking wall these days is how people will use AI to make a more “professional” message, then due to it’s verbosity it needs an AI to summarize on the receiving end.

Yet more evidence for my “never trust a self described libertarian” stance. Hasn’t failed me yet.

Because they have invested heavily into automation. A couple years ago the ford ceo went over there and came back terrified. He didn’t think it here was any way that american companies had a chance of competing.

I’m convinced this is deliberate. We are not facing a skynet situation, AI is not going rogue. This is shitty security during user initiated testing that they did not fully understand.

They want us to think that AGI is around the corner and so publicizing these hacks is doing that work in the uninformed public’s mind. I’ve had to explain to several people the reality of these attacks, but even now, watching the news, they are trying to scare us with made up stories of out of control AI.

So it’s working as intended. It’s always been the Hotel Cloudifonia.

I used to be a good tipper. I still am for genuine service, but the default “tip every transaction” has pissed me off enough that unless you personally handled my food, or performed a service for me, I instantly stab 0.

I was a a baseball game the other weekend, they had a self service kiosk for bottles of soda, a glorified vending machine. It had a default 18% tip added to the transaction that I had to drill into a menu to zero out. Fucking bonkers, not a human in sight, just a couple of sensors and a credit card terminal.

Tip culture has gotten way out of control since Covid, I’m refusing to participate anymore.

No, I think I can downgrade it, I need to find an older version of the firmware as they don’t have it available anymore. I think I need a 2024 version.

I do have auto updates turned off, I should just block it at the router.

I don’t know about brother anymore. I have one I bought because it would work with 3rd party ink. I updated the firmware and am now locked out from using anything but brother. I would up finding a hack to get it to stop checking the ink level, so I can at least print, but it’s a temporary fix (have had to do it a few times), and it makes it unable to tell me how much ink is left. No big deal, I just run the cartridges dry, but it’s less functional than when I bought it…

Nutshell, I used to trust bother, not anymore so an open option is a big desire of mine. If this is halfway decent, I’ll pick one up.

Same, I just figure if they want to use windows, then they need to accept all the work impacting problems and stoppages. Just like how they accept the security implications of an all windows network…

It’s so entrenched though, and the typical user doesn’t know any different these days so it’s all windows and cloud now. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for these things, but it doesn’t have to be the default all the time…

I don’t think it’s as hard to draw a line as you are portraying it. The hypothetical nurse and bread factory is a non-issue, we’re talking fractions of the bottom line of any of the involved parties. This mulvad thing is the majority of the financial backing of a party by one high level person, who’s made his money from this organization.

I’m quite comfortable putting them under the same umbrella, and quite comfortable ignoring the hypothetical.

But think there might be a philosophical question here, but I kinda think this is begging for one a bit.

Just had this thought, and realized all my backups had been through a flood. I wound up with several damaged disks, but was able to get all the content off of them, damage was to the outside edges, and most of them didn’t have much data written.

I have a Blu-ray burner, but I’ve never burned one (only a couple DVD’s). Probably never will.

This is really about training AI, isn’t it. They’ve tapped nearly all the sources of human text output already, so now they want to create as much more of it as possible, as quickly as possible. They will tap into conversations and use it as a new data source, mark my words.

Good thing we’re about to give them a half a trillion dollars. Goddamn the entire world sucks.

It’s something new anyway. I’ve dealt with bureaucracy my whole career, but mostly about shuffling numbers from one spreadsheet to another. This one is about helping shuffle people from one place to another. So, I’m used to slow, deliberate pace and hitting political walls. I’m hoping this time at least it’s doing something tangible.

I had nearly this exact conversation with my son on the way home tonight. Different details, but the same lesson. The world has abandoned practicality in favor of aesthetics and grift. I have quit several jobs because of the awful short term thinking, some of them good jobs that were the envy of my peers.

I start in the public sector next week, where I get to do things that have a direct impact on thousands of people in the state. I was hired specifically because of my practicality. I sincerely hope this is what I’ve been looking for.