For honesty, recent example from me:

I bought about a dozen epub comics. They were formatted with a hardcoded 600x450 width or so, maybe expecting a particular device. Having recently worked with epubs to format my own (word) book, I knew the format, and basically wanted to use Python standard library tools to unzip them, rip out some useless sizing/styling code (from hundreds of XHTML files), and zip them back up.

I hadn’t used Python professionally in a few years, so this was an annoying back and forth to work out the process and remind myself of syntax, especially considering this was something I was just doing for a few of my own books. Instead, taking every important piece of this puzzle/process I’d researched, I instead described the problem to ChatGPT, specifically pointing it to the Python standard libraries I wanted to use. It gave me a one-page program that was mostly complete and I only needed to change in a few areas.

I don’t think I’d ever pay money to AIs for a variety of reasons. I take that assistance as it comes, and could live without it.

Most of my Discord usage is text-based or sharing images, and I tend to have casual presence in many of them at once, due to varying interest groups. As far back as I’ve known, those servers haven’t focused much on that.

It seems like they were the main replacement recommendation in many cases, and their servers may have overloaded thanks to the Discord enshittification news.

This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.

Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.

I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.

It maybe used to be more true, but these days even when someone posts a decent guide on de-bloating Windows, it can A) Miss something critical, leaving spyware telemetry running, or B) Become out of date one month later when a Windows Update manually re-enables all the things you turned off.

I would’ve appreciated it when I was on Windows, but now? I’m kind of just happy not to be constantly fighting my OS on things, even if I do get compatibility annoyances.

I mean by that logic, stop using Steam. It’s (marginally) possible for a company to get big, and not do terrible things. Just keep an eye on them and don’t become fully reliant on them.

It’s sad to say while it was the default choice for a while, it seems like a lot of people are avoiding Ubuntu now.

Gaming is awesome on CachyOS; it’s very possible much of the better capabilities there can be installed on Ubuntu, but I don’t know how hard that is. I imagine most games would perform similarly by default.

If I understand right, the usefulness of basic questions like “Hey ChatGPT, how long do I boil pasta” is offset by the vast resources needed to answer that question. We just see it as simple and convenient as it tries to invest in its “build up interest” phase and runs at a loss. If the effort to sell the product that way fails, it’s going to fund itself by harvesting data.

For anyone looking for new alternatives, I’m sure most Lemmy users can suggest more open-source pubfed options, but for anyone trying to generate a bit more presence (not that there’s much) I did find a YouTube video highlighting some “indie social media” sites, mostly focusing on nostalgia of simpler versions of the historically popular ones.

Having the whole world operate off of publically-owned shared systems is probably an ideal, but having them at least in tight competition, with easy destinations to abandon off to, is still quite a bit better.

I guess this isn’t really even “news” to Linux gamers now, but once in a while it’s nice to make an article about what constant progress has happened in a certain sphere. Certainly many people staying on Windows out of inertia blinked and missed it.

My fervent hope is that, someday in the future, people can build a gaming PC and just forego Windows to save $100.

I’m not really qualified to answer, we might need a deep-sublayer geologist.

The one I’m on has a very functional “search and install” app, but I still find myself habitually opening up terminal for installation out of “fastness”. Maybe it’s a poor impulse I should correct.

Probably the biggest thing driving terminal use is opening and configuring system files. You can do that with the file explorer and an elevated text editor, but a lot of guides aiming for conciseness will give you some command to wget a long file online, then insert content into a text file by path in one line.

I kinda get there’s some common meme about Nvidia being Linux’s kryptonite, but everything’s been okay for me on CachyOS. This after some issues earlier in the year on Mint and even Bazzite.

I’m a little half and half on it. A lot of people like myself are fed up with the obsessive way AI is pushed into everything, but I can see it having uses.

For instance, sifting through 20,000 “This user didn’t accept my argument evidence” reports to find some that have merit; that can be worthwhile, even if all it does is alert a human to take a look and make a full judgment. Besides, the bar for quality moderators on sites like Reddit is low.

The police are hundreds of years old. They still need warrants.

Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.

I recently had a long opinion post I made get downvoted. What upset me wasn’t that someone disagreed with me, it was that they didn’t take the time to explain their own contradicting position, because I wanted to figure out if I had something to learn there.

Some key details from the phone footage.

1. It was a handheld phone cam, not a body cam. ICE has thousands of dollars in equipment, but is choosing not to equip body cams; which could have kept his hands free to protect himself. Handheld allows the footage to be far shakier, so he can emphasize the idea he was “struck”.
2. The footage doesn’t contain all of the gunshots. In high likelihood, it had to have been edited before posting, for this to be the case.

Worst part is, it’s not a new thing. It’s a topic of concern for a character in a book I’m writing - where a powerful figure knows she’s wrong on some occasions, but the political atmosphere rewards her more for boasting her righteousness on those issues.

Oaf a cough.