Dave.

I’m not sure, but if cake is being served, count me in.

Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system

A solid 90 percent of home users just need a browser, email, and access to some kind of app store or repository where they can click on the big colourful icon and get a program they want.

Any modern distro can provide that, it doesn’t have to be the particular one that you’ve got an obsession about.

I take umbrage at item 4, but I don’t have the time for the correct kind of reply.

If you could go to chatgpt and put in this prompt for me and then read the result, that’d be great.

“Please make a long, meandering reply to the assertion that Nic Cage should not be in movies, stating that Nic Cage is perfect for those movies that need that Nic Cage energy.”

Lithium ion batteries have a sweet spot of around 60 to 80 percent charge where very little wear takes place to charge or discharge. If you could keep it to just that 20-30 percent usage in that range it would pretty much last ten thousand cycles.

Charging to 100 or discharging below 50-60 percent accelerates the wear on the battery, but it is still much better than the wear rate on lead acid batteries that are cycled in a similar manner.

I’m sure we did a cycle of network booting thin clients and windows terminal services about 10 or 15 years ago. 🤔

There’s slack time in people’s daily work hours. You work an 8 hour day, possibly you’re only actually productive for 4 to 6 hours.

Take that into account and suddenly that thing that claims it can cut an hour or two here and there gets a lot more interesting.

“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… MASS HYSTERIA!”

Ha, If you’re alluding to my post being similar to generated output, you obviously haven’t experienced the pure blandness of LLMs trying to write engaging content.

It’s statistical blandness writ large.

The stack of single-sentence paragraphs after the introduction paragraph trying so hard to have an impact.

The tendency to put “not X, not Y, just Z” everywhere.

The perfect conclusion written at the end of each piece , summarising three bland paragraphs with yet another bland paragraph.

Statistically regurgitated bullshit, all of it

If you can’t control yourself, you can always get the state to control everybody

“I can handle crack just fine! I don’t know why it’s outlawed!”

State control applies to a lot of addictive substances that cause material harm to society in general.

Stares hard at social media

because it is far from a secure number.

It is only the American obsession with using it as a unique identifier for everything in their lives that has caused this issue.

You mean “shuffle” like when you shuffle a deck of cards and have exactly the same cards still but in a different order with no single card repeating because you started out with a deck of cards and why would there suddenly be an extra card or 5 of the same face value in the deck because that’s just crazy talk? That kind of shuffle?

Yeah sorry, Spotify doesn’t do that.

You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls

Copper wiring is protected from the elements (that is: oxygen) by its insulation. The gauge of the copper wiring is a far greater factor in audio quality than the voodoo science behind OFC.

You don’t have to worry about corrosion in your speaker wiring unless your speaker installation is literally in the ocean.

All I want to know is just how many veils has that soundstage got‽ Here I am, just having a soundstage like a sucker, and they’ve got veils they can lift!

But what’s the point of having your newly-purchased $3000 wooden volume knob and polyatomic copper ring bus lift yet another veil from the soundstage if you’re blindfolded?

Love me a good <MARQUEE>!

Is the ✨sparkly emoji✨ the <BLINK> of the 21st century? Discuss.

But it’s definitely not perfect and tends to add unnecessary changes, I constantly have to review and add new rules.

This is the bit that bugs me. I spend a bit of time to create a relatively simple application in C# with it, and it’s constantly tacking on new features and four extra command line arguments and it’s frothing at the mouth to add Cool Feature X, “just say the word and I’ll do it”.

Just do what I asked. No more. That’s enough. There’s enough mangled code and logic errors lurking in there already, I don’t need any more “features” clouding the water.

There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.

I wonder how it goes with AI-generated receipts.