Portal and Portal 2 are my go to tests for if a machine qualifies as "an computer". Basically, if it can run those, it's probably good enough to be grandmas facebook machine. Might have to toss an ssd into it (exactly what I did with an old core2duo hp pavilion), but generally I find it to be a good rule of thumb.
Plus it gives me an excuse to play Portal when I test a machine :P
Just last week, I fired up Portal with RTX (on Windows, I’m ashamed to admit), and holy guacamole, I think it stresses my gpu more than any other game in my library!
Controllers in shoddily constructed deep sea rigs don’t kill people, billionaires piloting with controllers in shoddily constructed deep sea rigs kill people!
I've always said (jokingly since I'm an atheist) that Christians got it mixed up and thought Satan was God, so they've really been worshiping Satan all this time. They don't want to admit they're wrong about him being good, so they make up all kinds of excuses for all the horrible things he does. That's why they were totally conditioned and ready to do the same with trump.
the issue with God is that its presence equates power with morality
I can’t agree with this enough. My sister, a Christian, even agrees. Things are “good” and “bad” because god says they are, and for no other reason. And god is the highest good simply because he said that he is. The reason he gets to make those rules is that he’s the most powerful.
Just a gentle reminder that there are very many more Christians in the world that aren’t American and certainly don’t support Trump. Or even care that much about American politics.
And a reminder that the Crusades and Inquisition both happened before USA was a country or even colonies. And Protestantism started because some people thought the Catholic church was too lenient (while trying to avoid being put to death by the Catholic church for saying that publically).
Not to defend American Christianity, but I’m not buying that it’s fine outside of America.
Most ancient religions had gods that were both good and evil. They were flawed and just as bad as humans if not worse for their abuse of power. Christianity and Judaism is pretty different in that they claim god is super good, especially Christians, even though there are things in their own Bible that show their god being evil.
I always used to wonder why they worshipped such a shitty god, and if I, a mere human, have better morals and know right and wrong better than the Christian god, what good is he?
There’s simply no reason an all-powerful being needs anyone to be tortured to death to initiate a forgiveness. Torturing someone’s descendants because they fucked up is some cartel shit. If your religion has morals on par with a cartel you might be objectively incorrect.
I think it’s only donations to the development team. Summing up the donors across Liberapay, Open Collective and Patreon gives close to the number in the title.
The Lemmy project - yes. You want to check if your home instance is sustainably funded too. I think lemmy.world for example is well funded. So is lemmy.ca - my home instance.
I know for a fact that DB Zer0 could use some love, and their admin has created a lot of extra tools that have helped the Fediverse manage abusive instances. If your instance is well funded, but you would still like to donate somewhere to show your support, I highly suggest you check them out.
i refuse to pirate indie games. i will always buy games that are independently released or from small publishers because 1. they’re just trying to break even (unlike publishers like EA and Activision who have millions of fans lining up to buy their repetitive junk) and 2. they almost never have DRM. i’ll also buy my music for similar reasons; 99% of artists can barely make a living and i really do not want to contribute to that statistic
My dad really changed since joining TikTok. Now that’s all he talks about. Come look at this, come look at this,…
“But I am busy.”
“Oh, come on, it’s short.”
“Look. See? People love Putin.”
For fucks sake… Then he proceeds to loudly curse when he gets yet another account banned for posting some trash.
When I try to talk to him, I am met with “Wait, I just have to finish this video.” then later he complains I don’t talk with him. ¿?
I mean, it’s not just TikTok alone, he uses Facebook, TikTok and VKontakte, but I feel like that had the biggest influence.
100%. This actually works. Most boomers are not technologically late enough to track subscriptions and such.
There was a YouTube video not a documentary (similar to The Brainwashing of My Dad) where their father went down the rabbithole, but they started subscribing them to better news sources, and eventually to left-leaning news sources, and he did a whole 180°.
Fear is like a drug. It’s addictive, and rightwing media sources have cracked the formula on how to get people addicted to it, and it can happen to ANYONE. The uneducated to the well-educated. The only thing that makes you immune to it is critical thinking and empathy - which is why I feel that their next war is on education and masculinity. They are literally trying to perfect the addiction so you can never leave it.
This is part of the reason why education is so insanely important.
I feel that their next war is on education and masculinity.
The latest shots in the former march on by under the banner of ‘woke [literally any noun]’ is ruining our children these days, but that war has been raging since the 80s. ‘They’re’ winning by strangling the purse strings and efficiencies out of public education.
The latter? Masculinity? That one has been a total occupation for hundreds of years already.
Our sisters, mothers, and daughters have been warning us even before the side effects get to them. Of the emotional self-immolation a Patriarchic-controlled society demands of men by violence and shame until ‘Men don’t cry’ can be such poisonous words that many men end up kissing the barrel of a gun than using their lips to communicate their struggles to each other.
It took trauma and the effects of such turning sharpening empathy into a survival mechanism rather than the too often opposite for me to even have been able to introspect myself out of just the more common and pervasive aspects of ‘toxic masculinity’.
Make no mistakes; whatever you want to call ‘hearts and minds’, the twisted craven swine undermining the concept of basic humanity know very well to keep assaulting them. Education and empathy are the only things that can empower an actual successful removal of the Takers’ ability to do the same.
Their children’s eyes will grow closer and closer together from one generation to another until no one has depth perception past the front of their face. /s
No, that’s because she IS attractive and you are being weird, shitty and judgmental. Like you’re allowed to have whatever beauty preferences you want, but idk why you are going out of your way to call her unattractive.
Damn right. I bought myself a redmi note 12 last year and now I am back to using my 5 year old OnePlus 6 with lineage OS as it just runs better somehow.
What if my phone isn’t supported by any ROMs? Is there an easier alternative to building it for your device on your own, following the given instructions, for example?
I usually try to stay about 3–5 years behind whatever the newest one is. It’s good enough for what I need and helluvalot cheaper than current phone prices.
Going to respectfully disagree here. Outside of my glasses, my phone is the tool I use most often, many times daily. It’s worth getting a quality device, and if there’s an issue with the current one (battery, cracked screen etc) it’s worth replacing. But you’re right, it doesn’t need replacing just for the sake of newness.
Gonna respectfully disagree back at you. You don’t have to get a $100 crapsung, but most people whose work depends on a good phone still don’t need a $2000 top of the line phone.
An iPhone SE or Pixel ?a phone is more than sufficient for almost anyone anything more I’m probably going to call opulence.
Well the prompt was what are things you should cheap out on. I have a pixel 6, I think it was $600 or something like that? But to me cheaping out on a phone would be like a $100 device.
Because of how often I use it, it’s worth it to me to not have bloatware, to have a good camera, for the battery to last, resistant to water, etc.
But really what you should do is get a used mid or top tier phone that’s one or two generations behind. Depreciation on phones is so great that you get a lot of bang for your buck.
Think outside the box. Get a previous generation. Pixel 8 was about to be released. To move inventory, Google discounted the 7 series by like 30-40%. I got the 256GB 7 Pro for $600. Without the sale, $600 is the same price as the 128GB 7. I got a top of the range flagship phone for the cost of a midrange. My mom did something similar with a Samsung phone. She got an S20 when the S22 released. Huge discount when Verizon offered it for $449.
Yes and no. For apple you can use their phones for quite a long time securely. For Android that is a very different story. As far as I know only Google with their new pixel phones and Samsung have offered more than 2 years of updates. After that time your phone becomes a security risk. So make sure your devices receives updates or can be used with a custom ROM (though that can be insecure as well).
Sometimes. It depends on the manufacturer. Some do more some don’t promise anything. You have to know what you have. Also the support time starts usually at the start of sale not at the time of purchase. That means if you buy a new phone that was released a year ago on clearance or something you might have only half the time.
What a load of crap. My phone is 5 years old and the only security risk is me blindly installing questionable APKs off the Internet or clicking pop-up ads or something. It’s not like I’m walking around with a time bomb or anything when all I do is browse a few apps and text and call.
Also the new pixel 8 supposedly is supposed to come with 7 years of updates. It’s entirely possible Google abandons that plan though, given their track record.
yeah, are y’all just rawdogging the Internet? i like Blokada (the free one) + Hypatia for my adblocker/antivirus combo, and it works just fine. i practice good Internet “hygiene” and have never had a problem. idk how all that works with Apple stuff, though.
Your phone is rawdogging all it’s connections. It can receive SMS and Phone calls without your intervention. There have been several zero-click bugs in the past that allowed injecting malicious code into your phone without any interaction.
There have been a few bugs in the past years that let you take over a phone without user interaction. There was one where you only need to receive an SMS (it was invisible even) and your phone is infected. Another one was a vulnerability in wifi calling and voice over lte.
A phone is not a passive device that only gets something when you request it. You take also it with you to public places, use it in open wifi networks and you get calls. All that while being used for security critical stuff like 2FA, banking and payment.
You shouldn’t use a phone without current security updates for much more than calling. It is a time bomb. If you want to educate yourself further you should look at “zero click vulnerabilities”.
There’s a reason my phone has no trouble with the Roku, works immediately when I use microHDMI, and gets updates for games on time and my roommate’s does not. Hardly a day passes where I’m not convinced he’s relegated to a worse quality of life because his phone just isn’t allowed to do things right. His phone doesn’t even run the transit app properly.
Now I’m not saying but a new phone every year for the incremental improvement, but don’t get something from a crap factory pushing high volume for small margins. Get something good.
I always get a refurbished phone which are last years model that someone traded in when they got the newest and greatest thing. If people stopped doing this I might have to actually shell out for a new phone!
The beauty of iTunes (and the ONLY good thing about iTunes) is that I can make an encrypted incremental backup image of exactly what’s on my phone with one click.
Those pics have always been backed up.
The oldest pics are from my previous iPhone, so maybe eight years ago?
When I get a new phone (maybe soon, now that USB-C) I just plug into my computer and now my new phone is the same exact phone and layout as this phone, with all pictures and texts and files and everything.
It is the one device most people use literally all day everyday. Having a great one is worth the money. But it does not need replaced every year. Mine is 4 years old and still works like new (one battery replacement). I will likely replace it next year.
I’m on my phone 8 hours a day. Quality counts. Slow is bad. Lacking features is bad. Crappy cameras are bad. Get a good phone. Use it until one of the following happens:
It no longer gets security updates
There is a new built-in hardware feature that will actually improve the quality of your life because you’ve been wanting it forever
You break it or the battery performance starts to suck too much.
Just for my personal understanding. How often have you heard about security issues from missing updates in older phones? In real life, I mean, not in some blog or video? I’m having a hard time finding any information about real cases. There are hundreds of articles from tech-sites and security companies.
To me it feels like selling pick-proof locks, a market without actual use-cases. You can pick them all anyway, but nobody actually does it.
I used to do phone security for a living. I’ve seen a handful of cases in person. The bigger issue is that most of the time you don’t know it was the phone that caused your problems. One day your bank is drained and you don’t know why.
There have been several zero days that gave anyone that wanted to the ability to own your phone with a text that you never even saw because the phone doesn’t show you command texts.
Unlike the good ol’ malwares that let you know that you’re infected by deleting your files or messing up your system, modern malware authors are profit-oriented and will do everything they can to make you unaware that your devices are infected. Then they’ll exfiltrate your data and sell them on various underground marketplace such as this one.
That is generally not good and shouldn’t be common. I’d argue folks should consider whether a nice phone will lead to overuse, and if so, buying a cheaper phone.
Before I had a phone I was on a computer for all that time. And before that I was reading in bed for all that time. And before that I was watching TV for all of that time. This is so much healthier than anything else I’ve done in 5 decades.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to be critical of you. I know some people can’t actually reduce their screen time due to their job or way of life. I’m curious though, could you elaborate on what you mean by this being healthier for you?
I used to sit, or lay, for all those hours. Now I’m up moving around. Talking to my geese, trimming trees, painting rooms, figuring out what some idiot electrician did 60 years ago that’s causing me a problem today (stupid loopbacks and hot neutrals, aluminum wiring optional), going someplace to hike and get the physical therapy I need after breaking my back falling off a ladder, etc. Living life while managing my ADHD and still consuming massive info dumps while also having one of the 200 podcasts I listen to play in my ear at 2.5x speed.
What phones would you consider worthwhile in terms of price, i.e. those you can cheap out on, but not suffer the consequences of it being slow even in the simplest tasks?
One Android phone I had, Nokia 5.1, had to be replaced in less than 5 years because it often froze and lagged when I had to make or receive a phone call, open a single tab in some light-weight browser, etc.
I’m not a big fan of the smartphone industry and especially the reviewers because they seem to have a very twisted idea of a budget device. Or maybe I’m a cheapskate.
To combat this generally, you can buy one with more RAM. Also, right now there is a bit of a “race to the top” for longest phone support with Google announcing 7 years of support in November. Repairability is coming around too, which is great for replacing old batteries and broken charging ports.
I’ve adopted a policy of buying the latest iPhone every 5 years, which is about how long they tend to last in my experience. So far it’s worked out well.
All the decaf coffee I’ve tried has less flavor than normal. The soaking process to decaffeinate it presumably also removes some of the flavorful compounds. If I use 3 shots decaf it ends up tasting close to as flavorful as using 2 shots of normal.
Decaf coffee (or tea) will still have more than zero caffeine. Allowable amounts vary between US and EU, but multiple repetitions of the process are needed to achieve either 97% or 99.9% caffeine free respectively.
A single pass through a decaffeination process can result in leaving up to 20% of the original caffeine content.
A good exercise is to read your essay from the bottom up. Start at the last complete sentence and when you’re done read the one above. You’ll catch more things that way because your mind has to change the perspective.
I change the font and size, it snaps my brain out of “I already know this text has no errors, I’ve been looking at it while writing it” mode and allows it to more easily read it anew
It seems so strange to me that everyone buys the bullshit that personal data is worth very little.
The data brokerage industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yet, there are only ~8 billion people in the world, many of whom don’t have internet access or have very little data being traded. Thus it’s reasonably safe to assume that an average regular internet user’s data is worth somewhere in the region of $1,000 per year.
These companies don’t do anything with the data. We create the data, they collect it and sell it, then whoever buys it is the one that actually makes something from it. If we allow the brokers a very generous profit margin, they are still stealing $500-700 from every one of us, every year.
If you’re online. You need to assume that your data is being used without your permission whether you like it or not. Nothing is going to change. Look at the hordes of brain dead idiots who use tiktok
That’s the wrong attitude to have. It can change, and arguably it will change once a critical mass of people realise the value being stolen from them.
You can’t build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. The people who make nuts and bolts don’t know how to build a car, but they’re still paid a fair value based on the fact their product can be used in cars.
We don’t know how to do anything with our data, but we should be paid based on the value derived from it by those that do.
This problem affects everyone, including the people who make laws. It is entirely feasible that we can get enough people on side to change things and make it more fair. Incumbent businesses won’t like that, because it will reduce their profits (100% down to 30%), but what they’re doing now is absolutely wrong. They’d still be taking the piss at 30%, but at least that’s more in line with other industries.
I don’t want their money. I just want them to leave me alone. Now, the politicians? They would love their money. And I’m sure big tech lobbyists are already giving them some
That would be nice, I agree. However, like you say, the data is already being used, and it’s much harder to put the cat back in the bag. Rather than trying to do so and ban all data collection, it’s much more practicable to embrace it but ensure that people are at least fairly compensated.
But that’s the thing, that isn’t what’s happening. The website is provided free of charge.
Then, the website tries to shoehorn in another, separate transaction and hide it in the fine print, where you give up your data free of charge.
There is a huge amount of deception involved. The whole point of my comment here is to try and dispel that deception, by putting hard numbers to it to show that there is significant value being taken.
The efficacy of advertising is sold primarily by advertisers. It’s possibly worth a vanishing fraction of what these ghouls say it’s worth. But so long as buying it and acting like a greedy invasive bastard is more profitable than ignoring it, even by a tiny margin, corporate giants will keep doing it, since the cost to them is a rounding error.
The industry enabling this is large because they get to sell the same garbage to so many bastards.
I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.
A unified, bug-free, performant and featureful display stack to ensure people can use things like Variable refresh rate, which, iirc, is an impossibility on X11.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it’s not a great experience with legacy apps. You can’t completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
Just last time it was free:ac; I had to change to system scaling because it would be unreadable otherwise, and that in turn fucked up Steam that I had managed to configure properly before.
This won’t be the year of the Wayland desktop for me unless I can afford to replace my Nvidia card this year. I’ll never buy one again, but I’ve still gotta suffer with the one I have a bit longer.
By the time you’re ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They’ve already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don’t know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.
Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.
I’m not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I’ve been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it’s definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.
Oh yeah, I’m also keeping a eye on that. Every time I see nvidia pop up in my updates, I try logging into Wayland and doing my usual tasks. If it starts working, that’ll just let me extend the life of this card. I’ll probably still strongly consider switching flavors with my next card.
nobody would say that one year ago far as my memory goes, and it’s reasonable thing to say now. Personally I expected some break-throughs that have happened in 2023 to take much longer.
We have been hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop” for 20 years I think and Linux has less than 5% share.
In contrast, I do not remember hearing “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” until recently. I have been hearing “Wayland is the future” forever but it has been correct the whole time.
By the time we enter 2025, I am not sure there will be a major desktop environment that does not support Wayland and many distros and DEs will be Wayland by default or even Wayland only. That is already happening. Valve may have ditched X by then and it feels like that is where most new Linux users are going to come from. It seems quite unlikely that Wayland market share on the Linux Desktop will be less than 75%.
I am not saying this is “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” but I would feel foolish publicly betting against it.
I don’t understand this fetish. Every day I read about problems people have with Wayland, while I’ve been using X for the past 15 years without any issues.
Wayland is better at segmenting each app. On X any app could potentially see/record what happen on the entire screen while on Wayland that requires you do manually grant the rights. Similar to how macOS is requesting you to give each app the possibility to record your screen or not.
That’s an improvement. But risk = impact * probability. Realistically, the probability of installing such an app from repos is virtually non-existent. My point is that Wayland comes with some improvements, but I’ve been seeing comments like the one I replied to for almost 15 years, as if Wayland will revolutionize Linux desktop. It won’t. Probably most users won’t see any difference, except for bugs caused by the migration.
The probability of abuse is much higher with closed-source applications though. Almost all popular games are closed-source, and many are riddled with ads and spyware.
If that was true, we would be on Wayland for years. But in reality, it proves minor improvements versus heavy investments to migrate from X. And that’s why it’s still a fetish and not a standard.
Canada is in North America the continent, which the US (sometimes referred to as America) is also in - saying Canada is America is like saying Great Britain is Europe
Yes, but I don't think the person I was replying to was referring to America the landmass given the context and wording - plus even in the context given, it would still be more accurate to say North America, as Southern/Latin America doesn't share the same cultural identity with North America
I debated whether I should say NA or American, but I figured I don’t know what Canadians use, so there we go. Anyway, nice to see that debate is still alive and healthy. I gave up on it ~20 or so years ago. Writing unitedstatesman was exhausting after a while :)
I think I have seen Central America referred to as a sub continent, but that doesn’t really make sense other than to create a formal differentiation between them and USA/Canada.
Yeah, soccer is actually an English term that they created to refer to association football, as opposed to rugby football or the hundreds of other forms of football.
If an Englishman uses ‘soccer’ he’s almost certainly from the upper class.
As “soccer” was played by the elite (such as the Oxford lad who is said to have coined “soccer”), it soon spread to the working classes, and became “football”.
If you really want to throw them off, call it the proper name rather than the nick name. Association football. Most adult non-american english speakers are at least tangentially aware that the name soccer derived from that. But it certainly won’t make you sound American.
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