may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.
I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.
Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.
Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.
You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.
I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.
When I have to use discord, I use it in the browser. I don’t trust the app not to get up to no good.
Pop!_os worked fine for me out of the box. The UI is a little mac-like (dock on bottom, spotlight like search when you hit the super key) by default.
Steam just works. Heroic launcher just works. It’s simple.
I’ve also used mint, but had slightly less luck with its install working out of the box. All issues fixed eventually but there was some head scratching.
Linux nerds tend to have opinions and it’s easy to lose sight of what it’s like as a beginner.
But ultimately it’s pretty easy to switch distributions. They’re all free.
I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.
If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.
I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.
Still glad I made the switch.
Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.
I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.
It’s striking how little many people know about history and politics, but more concerning is how little they care. My old coworkers just don’t seem to care much. And they won’t even feel shame because their only priority seems to be protecting their ego.
Reminds me of Brent from The Good Place, honestly. “No. No. I’m a good person. I’m a good person!!”
I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.
Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.
That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.
You want a coal plant cool, BUT if it is spewing crap into the air that we breath, it violates NAP and not allowed to operate.
Most of the libertarians I’ve met don’t seem to believe that sort of thing. They might accept that punching someone is bad, but something complex like pollution they don’t accept.
“I should be free to dump my garbage on my property! It’s mine!”
“Yeah, but then you pollute the river and everyone down stream suffers”
“…it’s my property!”
If right wing people were smart they wouldn’t be right wing. Of course they’re going to believe and share AI slop video. They’re emotional driven fools.
My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.
It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.
I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.
Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.
One of the guys at my old job submitted a PR with tests that basically just mocked everything, tested nothing. Like,
with patch("something.whatever", return_value=True):
assert whatever(0) is True
assert whatever(1) is True
Except for a few dozen lines, with names that made it look like they were doing useful.
He used AI to generate them, of course. Pretty useless.
Is he showing any of his work, or is he just making stuff up? Seems like he’s just making stuff up.
Also, everyone should look at the “wealth to scale” webpage: https://dbkrupp.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ . Humans are not good at scale, and this helps visualize it.
Good version control hygiene is important. My most recent job we were pretty good about commit messages for the PR, and then squashing that into a single commit when putting it on main. As you say, avoid unrelated things going together. You don’t want to have to revert a whole major feature because your “I’ll just fix it here” broke something.
There’s a guy one of my old coworkers has been complaining about who never writes anything useful in his commit messages. It makes the git log useless and the code reviews harder.
As for abstraction and such, sometimes it feels like it’s just coupling unrelated things together. It can be annoying when it’s like “I want to change this…and it’s used in 17 places for some reason. Guess I’ll check if all of those can handle this change, or this will be the one weird place that’s different…”
I also worked with a guy that was a big fan of having two dozen one line functions. Monster functions are often bad, but a whole separate function like get_last_item(stuff): return stuff[-1] can be excessive.
Moved to Linux (popos on desktop, mint on ancient laptop). Been fine. Don’t miss windows. Play games and browse the web without issue.
Thiel is a dangerous piece of trash and I’m disappointed he hasn’t… let’s say… been beamed up like kirk.
I think it would be pretty funny if jesus did return and cast all these rich assholes into the lake of fire. Because they fucking deserve it.