I knew someone who had multiple seasons of both Mr. Rogers and Reading Rainbow!

But I also probably know someone who has Thanos and Fast and Furious.

Nonalcoholic beer could very well be a healthier choice than cola.

Yep, Jeeves was really popular for a while. I was an Alta Vista fan for a while too. It was one of my favorite early searches.

What I really miss about early web searching is the cached pages where you could see all your highlighted search terms exactly where they appear on the page. Modern google dumps you at the front door to the corporate walled garden and you usually have to search again with some shitty embedded search tool. Old Google would link you to a .htm or .html page with the exact answer.

Cool article. I remember the good and the bad. When it comes to search, it has gotten worse over time. I’d love to use some early 2000s Google again. It wasn’t perfect, but the bones were there.

We’ll turn this into the worlds biggest racquetball facility before Elon ever makes it to mars.

It’s frustrating to see the tech industry take this path, because there were alternative paths that didn’t lead us here. We are in a selfish and shortsighted time.

Thanks for the insider info. Someone go put a bet on this guy not escaping climate change or arson gambling markets. /s

I imagine there are also some low level cops relieved to see them gone but don’t want to say so publicly. After all, AI is coming for their jobs too. Pretty soon buying a state patrolman a Honda Goldwing to patrol the highway will be an impossible sell when we could just strap a few more cameras to a pole or fly a drone. Everyone but the bootlickiest of the bootlickers will eventually hit their breaking point with this increasing public surveillance, just not until it goes poorly for them personally.

I like, “Die Ärtzte - Deine Schuld”. Translated the lyrics are “It’s not your fault that the world is how it is; it would only be your fault if it stayed that way.” It gives me a little hope that even if they don’t know what to do, other people feel similarly.

My suggestion to OP would be to collect a few friends and contact your congress people together, mow your elderly neighbors lawn, volunteer somewhere. We need to unite the working class. People who already struggle to eat, won’t ever be ready to discuss the philosophy of social/political change until we give them a hand up Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs. Mamdami is having success in New York by meeting people where they’re at and proving he can do shit by solving neighborhood issues and stuff that affect normal people. Now he has cred with those people.

I degoogled (mostly) a while ago, but home assistant has a pretty configurable local voice assistant. If you have remote access to your server, I imagine you could cobble together a good keyword based personal assistant that sets alarms, turns lights on and off, and reads you an RSS newsfeed while you drink your morning coffee.

We’re truly on the technological downslope now. First it was all about the user and making software accomplish a purpose, then it was all about the user as long as it was profitable, now it’s fuck the user - be profitable.

I will go without. I will drag a PC and a mobile router everywhere I go before I rent a phone. Can these asshole corporate bullshitters just go to mars already so we can be free of them?

Arrest their entire c-team.

Yeah, it’s been a few years since phones really changed that much, even for normies.

I know I’m not the average consumer, but I don’t want a new one either, especially an expensive one. There’s nothing they can offer me right now that makes the upgrade worth it. Short of a fully open source device fully under my control, there’s not much on my wish list. My phones have had oodles of free ram, at least 1080p displays and decent battery life for 5-10 years now. The app system is so scummy and degraded I don’t see a reason to upgrade to run anything new.

If anything, on the hardware side, I’d like them to:

• unround the corners of the display
• put back the headphone jack
• put back the removable batterys
• add the IR blaster back in
• give me an SD slot

But that’s not going to happen.

I’m curious how Van Halen would feel about the robosexual youth’s take on “Hot for Teacher”.

Others have mentioned Bazzite and Mint. I have used both. Bazzite is gaming focused, but, in my opinion, slightly harder to administrate due to the whole immutable/atomic thing. I went over to a buddy’s recently who is running Mint. It’s been a few years since I used Mint, but it was a great all around Linux system, doesn’t have any of the Bazzite weirdness, and it was exciting to see it used by someone out in the wild (not in my own home).

If you weren’t a gamer, I would almost certainly recommend Mint. In your case, I would say try them both out, break them, push them to the limit and throw weird scenarios at them, maybe shut the computer down incorrectly a few times. See if you feel more comfortable with one or the other, then do a reinstall of the one you liked best after breaking them both. It is more work up front, but it’s worth knowing you can maintain your system when it very occasionally breaks or has an issue. Above all, make sure you take regular backups. That way you can mess with stuff and not worry about whether or not you’ll break something.

On a practical note: we need to mock this to the point that anyone who actually does it will instantly be a social pariah. This needs to be so embarrassingly stupid that the companies who offer it literally blush, something non-human entities typically can’t do. Gamers Nexus had a good video about NZXT doing this and broke down the math for the numerically challenged.

Any other ideas for making this fail in a country where the consumer protection agencies are often worse than nobody paying attention at all?

Only because hyperscale AI Data Centers and the kind of data centers we already had got conflated. That was almost certainly intentional.

Private owners and small businesses still get to have principles or choose to do things the right way. For all its faults, Steam is often talked about in this way. Corporations on the other hand have to view every square of toilet paper through the lens of profit and loss on the timescale of a single fiscal year or even a single quarter. I often wonder if it is even ethical to invest because doing so profitably seems to inherently feed this system of economic cannibalism.

We are incentivising companies to find the maximum spread between their expenses and their revenue at any cost and we are arming them with the tools and data to ruthlessly pursue this goal. You WILL be monetized. A scam is the most lucrative business of all because it only takes into account the benefit of one party. No wonder almost every brand name now days carries the reputation of a used tissue. They’re just taking the whole pie because the middle class isn’t needed anymore. It served its purpose by distracting Americans from some of the “communist” ideas happening at home and elsewhere in the world in the 70’s. That’s not needed anymore because they’re projecting power through surveillance and social influencing instead.

I’d rather see everyone share and contribute to open-source code that moves all of humanity forward than private companies stealing other peoples work because they don’t want to share credit.

Germans call them “Flachspüler” (flat washer). I appreciate that the falling dookie doesn’t splash water onto your ass. A fine feat of engineering and VERY off-topic. 🤣

I was on Evernote in the distant past and remember their pricing strategy pushing everyone out. If companies want to fail that bad, don’t let us stop you. It was a loss though because, at the time, Ever note was one of the most functional mainstream connected note apps.