Libra00

Fair enough. Personally my hardware isn’t that new; the GPU is 3-4 years old at this point, the rest of the PC is ~5 years old so you would think even the latest LTS which is only a year or two old would support it. shrug

But yeah I’m liking nobara’s rapid update cycle so far, though I haven’t tried to change GPU drivers with it yet, so I suppose I will reserve a tiny amount of judgement until I have to do that. ;)

Hm, yeah that is definitely a weird thing to do, I’m using nobara (fedora) and it has the app center for snap and flatpost for flatpaks plus dnf for the package manager.

Why is that? What’s the problem with ubuntu? I mean ubuntu-based distros seem to hate my bog-standard RTX3060 GPU for some reason, but besides that. I’m pretty happy with nobara tho, and wouldn’t switch back to ubuntu even if I knew it’d work with my GPU.

It was definitely a Ubuntu thing - Pop, 2 version of Ubuntu, and Mint all failed at various points when dealing with GPU drivers, but I’m using closed-source nvidia drivers on the same GPU in Nobara (Fedora) without issue. Though I guess I haven’t tried updating it yet, but all my hardware accelerated games work as they should.

The problem is that Microsoft is ending Win10 support so you won’t be able to get updates and such (especially security updates) for the OS anymore which will ultimately lead to things breaking or being vulnerable anyway, plus if that business-critical software ever gets updated to the point where it also doesn’t support win10 anymore (I’ve run into this in the past with XP/Vista) then you’re going to have to change anyway. But you don’t have to change to win11. Companies and governments all over Europe are switching their mission-critical systems to linux and FOSS, yeah it’s a pain, but it’s going to save you pain down the road.

I thought so too, largely on the basis of some very bad experiences with ubuntu-based distributions (they seem to hate my bog-standard RTX3060 GPU for whatever reason), but in frustration I tried one last time to install a linux distro and went with something based on fedora and it has 95% just worked, it’s been great. I haven’t booted up windows in almost 3 weeks, all my games work (battle.net was a bit of a pain to get working), the proprietary windows software I use for work runs great in wine, etc. I’m at the point now where I’m transferring all my files off of NTFS partitions and reformatting them to btrfs and integrating them into the linux filesystem, cause I’m done with windows forever to the greatest possible extent that I can be.

I’m 52, I remember when websites were little more than ‘Oh I guess we have to have an internet presence, so here’s a website that’s nothing more than an ad for our TV show, book, movie, etc.’

Or paywalling literally everything so there’s basically no easily-accessible content on the web anymore. But yeah I’ve been adding ‘reddit’ to most of my searches for years so I can get answers from actual people instead of full-page articles filled with AI-generated bullshit I don’t care about, so that’s a fair point.

So did I.

I took a concealed carry class about 10 years ago with ~30 other people and all 4 instructors made a point of complimenting me on my shooting accuracy, and the guy who ran the class said I was the best shot he’d seen. I used to go shooting with my buddy and his dad out in the back woods, they had an old swing-set frame set up with some bowling pins hung with twine that they would shoot. I got bored shooting the pins so I started shooting the string where it tied around the neck instead. After 8 or 10 of those they got tired of stringing them back up, but what really frustrated them is when I told them I couldn’t even see the string, I was just shooting where the it ought to be based on how the pin was hanging. And I was still dropping a pin with every shot.

The funny thing is I can’t shoot very well in video games at all, it’s just a different skillset and I never played much in the way of shooters (except early stuff like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, etc.)

Goldman Sachs wants everyone to use AI, just not against them. C’mon guys it’s no fair! :P

Couple things…

The nerd brigade is reporting for duty. They probably won’t win any push-up contests and might not be sharpshooters.

I’ve been a nerd since the 80s and I’ll have you know I’m a great shot even with my eyes being fucked. Fuck your stereotyping bullshit.

Bosworth said Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg supported his decision to join the Reserve. “There’s a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the Valley,” he said.

That’s not patriotism, that’s oligarchs who are utterly dependent upon deregulation to stay oligarchs eagerly kowtowing to the fascist regime in order to curry favor.

What do you imagine ‘destroying the web’ looks like if not killing off huge swaths of websites that relied on traffic/ads to sustain themselves? Do you imagine a man has to bleed all the way out before we can say he’s going to die, or is it sufficient to look at the severity of the wound to critical systems in his body and determine that he is probably going to die?

Yeah, I used ABP for a while and got occasional ads, didn’t discover uBO til later.

But the point is that significantly lower traffic will kill the business model of many websites, and thus kill many websites.

Oh no, China is stealing your data! Wait, America is also stealing your data and you don’t care? Hmm.

Yeah, it could be, but these guys aren’t looking to replace human workers with a robust, well-trained, and properly-deployed AI, they’re looking to slash and burn their labor costs with whatever they think will squeak by.

I’ve used Amazon’s AI live chat bots a fair bit over the years and I have to say they’re actually pretty good. 90% of the time they can resolve the issue themselves (at least in my experience) and faster than it would take to connect to a person. But most people don’t have Amazon’s budget or customer service-oriented business model.

Yeah, close to probably 10 years for me.

To be clear you don’t have to get that technical to read non-Amazon books on your kindle… I’ve owned 2 different kindles over the course of about 15 years and literally never bought an ebook from Amazon. Just gotta know where to get them (libgen) and how to use them (calibre.)

A cheap ereader would be nice, but I’ve kinda had to go the opposite direction; my eyes weren’t great to begin with and have only gotten worse with age, so I need a larger screen. I do very little reading (in general, not of books specifically) on my phone because it’s too small and I have to zoom in and pan around all the time, etc.

I’ve been using duck.ai recently myself and quite like it. My only complaint with it is that the chats have a length limit, so if you’re working on complex projects you can run into those limits pretty quick. I use it for worldbuilding for a novel I’m working on and I have to use chatgpt for thematic stuff because it has a better memory, but otherwise it’s great for quick/small things.

That, I’m afraid, is the nature of technology: it makes everything easier, even the stuff you really wish it didn’t.