toddestan
@toddestan@lemm.ee
- Comment on If you are a young person you have no idea how bad everyone and everything smelled until at least the 1990s. 4 weeks ago:
That’s why I would say that cell phones are fine. It’s when they turned into smartphones where I would draw the line. I just get the feeling that we’d be a lot better off if mobile phone tech never advanced much further than the mid-2000’s flip phone.
- Comment on What websites still feel like the old internet? 3 months ago:
Along the same lines,
slackware.org today:
slackware.org in 2001:
- Comment on The 1900s 3 months ago:
I have a Jansport that’s about that old from the college days. It’s held up pretty well I must say. No idea about newer ones.
When I was in college, I would have thought it crazy to be using a backpack older than I was.
- Comment on If Biden wanted to could he have people kill Trump since he is in office and SCOTUS said it was ok? 3 months ago:
That’s assuming if Biden was to issue such an order as things stand right now.
If Biden really wanted to abuse his newfound powers of immunity, his very first official act would be making sure the supreme court won’t be standing in his way for any subsequent official acts.
- Comment on Jazz hands 3 months ago:
Right. If you were to attempt something like this, you’d be better off with something like a chunk of granite than plutonium.
- Comment on AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs 3 months ago:
What they are doing is comparing your answer and seeing if it is consistent with how it has been answered previously. They realize that not everyone is going to give the exact same answer, so as long as you answer it in a way that enough other people have answered it, it should let you in.
I’ll usually go with the minimum number of clicks that I think will get me through, since I’m lazy and it’ll also at times slow down how fast you can click which is annoying.
I’ll also answer them wrong if I think it’s a mistake that enough other people will make. “Yes… that RV over there is a bus…”
- Comment on NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules 3 months ago:
My favorite are some of the work systems that I need to access, but only infrequently, yet still have ridiculous password expiration rules. Nearly every time I log in, before I can access the system I have to change my password because of course it’s expired again. So I change the password, write it down because I’ll never remember it months from now when I need to use that password exactly once to login and change my password yet again.
- Comment on Secret calculator hack brings ChatGPT to the TI-84, enabling easy cheating 4 months ago:
That’s also what my upper level math courses were like in college. In high school and the first couple of years of college I got good use out of my graphing calculator, but after that I reached the point where all of it’s advanced features were no longer useful. I just ended up leaving it at home and brought my old TI-30 Solar for class for the occasional time I had to crunch some actual numbers.
- Comment on Burning Up 4 months ago:
Actually, it’s the other way around. 100 degrees F weather is really hot. Driving 100 MPH is really fast.
In metric we have 40 degrees C weather is really hot, and driving…uhhh… gets out a calculator 170 kph is really fast.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 4 months ago:
That may be how you see it, but that’s not how the law works.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 4 months ago:
The pirate is looking to save money with their copyright infringement.
These AI companies are looking to make money from it.
- Comment on The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates 4 months ago:
Your average pirate isn’t looking to profit from their copyright infringement.
In a similar way, someone getting busted for downloading a movie is a civil matter, but if they get busted for selling unauthorized DVDs then it can become a criminal matter.
- Comment on Microsoft begins cracking down on people dodging Windows 11's system requirements 5 months ago:
As far as I’m aware, they had to stop doing that some time ago.
- Comment on Microsoft begins cracking down on people dodging Windows 11's system requirements 5 months ago:
I personally find the my cognitive load with Linux is much lower now that I’ve switched over.
First of all, the Windows 11 UI is awful and ugly. The Windows 10 UI was never that great. I’d have to go to Windows 7 for something that’s decent. Admittedly the polish on a lot of Linux DEs and applications can leave a lot to be desired, but I have a choice between multiple DEs and many of those DEs are highly customizable. I’d have to go back to Windows 7 for something that’s better polished and works as good for me as XFCE does.
Then there’s being in control of my own computer. I control when it does its updates. My computer respects my settings and preferences and doesn’t randomly change or reset them. It doesn’t randomly install unwanted software on it’s own, or reinstall stuff I explicitly removed. It doesn’t place ads in my whisker menu or on my desktop or lock screen. There’s no telemetry being sent home to the mothership. With anything past Windows 8 I’ve never really felt like I’m in complete control and Microsoft can just do whatever the hell they want.
While there are the occasional issues as someone who is familiar with Linux it’s typically not too difficult to track it down and fix it. Though there are exceptions of course. At least if I have to edit some files in /etc they tend to stay that way as opposed to having to edit the registry with regedit.exe only to have Windows randomly undo what I did with the next update. And while PulseAudio is notorious for causing all sorts of havoc, it seems like it’s finally gotten to the point where it finally works and I haven’t had any issues with the volume control for a while now.
As for games it obviously matters what games you like to play, but the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to play any game in my Stream library beyond enabling Proton so far is zero. Which has been a very pleasant surprise and honestly I’ve been pretty impressed with that.
- Comment on Microsoft begins cracking down on people dodging Windows 11's system requirements 5 months ago:
My guess is one of the upcoming major updates will either refuse to install, or will try to install and fail, if you try that route.
Something like that happened with a 2006-era laptop I have with Windows 10. It ran Windows 10 fine for several years, but finally one of the big updates decided it no longer liked some of the Vista-era drivers I was using. The update would try to install, fail, roll back. And since Windows doesn’t let you turn off or disable updates, a few days later it would try again only to fail in the exact same way.
- Comment on Microsoft begins cracking down on people dodging Windows 11's system requirements 5 months ago:
Any new computer sold that has a copy of Windows preinstalled means Microsoft is getting a cut.
- Comment on USA | Trump will speak from behind bulletproof glass at outdoor rallies 5 months ago:
For your typical loner right wing nutjob, guns are still way more accessible.
- Comment on There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent 5 months ago:
I’d argue there was a fourth serious failure, and that was Intel allowing the motherboard manufacturers to go nuts and run these chips way out of spec by default. Granted, ultimately it was the motherboard manufacturers that did it, but there’s really no excuse for what these motherboards were doing by default. Yes, I get the “K” chips are unlocked, but it should be up to the user to choose to overclock their CPU and how they want to go about it. To make matters worse, a lot of these motherboards didn’t even have an easy way to put things back into spec - it was up to you to go through all the settings one by one and set them correctly.
- Comment on 77% Of Employees Report AI Has Increased Workloads And Hampered Productivity, Study Finds 5 months ago:
Github Copilot is about the only AI tool I’ve used at work so far. I’d say it overall speeds things up, particularly with boilerplate type code that it can just bang out reducing a lot of the tedious but not particularly difficult coding. For more complicated things it can also be helpful, but I find it’s also pretty good at suggesting things that look correct at a glance, but are actually subtly wrong. Leading to either having to carefully double check what it suggests, or having fix bugs in code that I wrote but didn’t actually write.
- Comment on Intel denies RMA requests for its faulty 13th Gen, 14th Gen CPUs with instability issues 6 months ago:
I feel lucky too. I have a 14900k that’s stable. I did have some minor stability issues after I built it, but dialing back the motherboard’s idiotic default settings plus a few BIOS updates cleared that up. With that said, if I had to do over, I’d build an AMD system. One of the big reasons I built Intel is that historically my Intel builds have been much more stable and less problematic than my AMD builds.
- Comment on Real 6 months ago:
That’s the problem. A lot of those high-end, expensive appliances are built just as shitty as the low-end, basic models. The difference is just some bells and whistles and a higher price tag.
I have no problem paying extra for a higher quality, better built appliance. But the challenge is differentiating those from the low quality, built as cheaply as possible appliances that have just been marked up with a premium price tag.
At least when I buy the cheap, shitty model, I get what I paid for.
- Comment on Work from home 6 months ago:
That’s who you are to all the people who aren’t your boss but think they can tell you what to do anyway.
- Comment on Work from home 6 months ago:
They have the ability to turn off the web access naw. My company recently did just that - if I try to access office.com on a personal device, my log in is blocked. Works fine on a company controlled device.
I’m not sure how they tell the difference since it’s through the browser. But my guess would be something to do with the lack of all their security software they load onto company controlled computers that have hooks into everything.
- Comment on Work from home 6 months ago:
I would also never let corporate IT manage a device, e. g. a laptop connected to my private network at home.
That’s pretty standard for working from home. I’m expected to use the company provided, managed laptop with my internet connection.
I figured so long as I made sure of things like there weren’t any open file shares and things like routers and IP cameras were password protected there wasn’t a whole they could see.
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 9 months ago:
The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.
Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll
patch itsoak them for more money with DLC later. - Comment on Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates 1 year ago:
Safari is holding back the web with their old, quirky, outdated engine. However, as Safari’s engine is the only option for iOS, most web developers can’t afford to ignore Safari because they can’t ignore the iPhone. So it’s IE all over again - an old, outdated browser that everyone nevertheless has to support as a significant portion of the users are using it. In some ways it’s even worse, as iPhone users don’t have any choice due to Apple’s restrictions, but even in the darkest days of IE’s stranglehold on the web Microsoft never restricted what browser you could use on Windows.
- Comment on What do you think of framework and their methods? 1 year ago:
That it has e-SATA would put it in the Lenovo-era, possibly one of the models that still had the IBM badging.
The the humor-impaired, there were also ThinkPads with an IrDA port too.
- Comment on Nearly 500 smartphone brands have left the market since 2017 1 year ago:
Maybe they are counting all the times Microsoft launched a new brand of phone and then unceremoniously killed about 6 months later?