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GregorGizeh

@GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip

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Microsoft has gone too far: including a Game Pass ad in the Settings app ushers in a whole new age of ridiculous over-advertising (www.techradar.com)

Windows 11 is getting out of hand with its push for advertisments, frankly - remember the recent full-screen pop-up to persuade users to install Edge or other Microsoft services? Then another advertisment was placed in the Start menu, and now Microsoft has finally worn my temper thin - with a new Game Pass ad coming to the...

GregorGizeh ,

Dont forget that the vast majority of users either doesnt know Linux, distrusts Linux, has heard rumors at any point in time about some feature or component not working as perfectly as under windows, is uninterested in computers beyond their daily usage function, or finds themselves in a social circle or job environment hostile to Linux.

What Linux needs to get widely adopted is settle for one central distro, iron out all bugs and compatibility issues and do a bunch of testing with windows users to determine what differences they are confused by. The goal must be to create total feature and compatibility parity with windows, and make the whole process so incredibly simple that even absolute morons with zero interest in computers can both use it instinctively and not miss anything their windows used to do. Then run a massive adoption campaign.

Now I know many aspects of this are directly opposed to the fos ethos, but if Linux ever wants to claim market share they need to spend big on it and pick up the users where they are; in a place of zero user ability and a lot of ignorance.

GregorGizeh ,

I'm not saying we should shutter all the others or make a Linux for profit corporation, just that if there is a sort of "base" Linux that can be used and referenced as universally as windows, with the same capability, stability and compatibility, catering to the same crowd of dumbest possible user, that would go a long way in my opinion in getting Linux more widely adopted.

GregorGizeh ,

Dont you worry, mint provides a detailed step by step tutorial on how to do things:

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

GregorGizeh ,

Why not?

GregorGizeh ,

For what?

GregorGizeh ,

Once you're older than 15 you will discover that a few things in life can have a massive impact on your general well being and health, and it absolutely makes sense to spend big on those. Good shoes are one of these things, a quality mattress appropriate for your body type is another.

GregorGizeh , (edited )

Yes, in fact that is the only kind of ai i would ever use and entrust my data to. Not the apple one, but an open source model that is running only on my device and answering only to me; using the data I provide only for my interests? That one I would use.

GregorGizeh ,

Honestly who gives a shit, we are talking about phone OSes. I dont have a strong enough opinion about any of this to care which of them does what first. Use what you like and move on mentally

GregorGizeh ,

Yes climate change all fine and well, but have you actually seen what they want us to do? Ride one of those gay bicycles to work and eat less beef. Next thing you know they want to put up renewable energy wind turbines in my neighborhood, that ruins the pretty landscape! No, I dont want to tighten ecological protections, why do you ask?

GregorGizeh ,

Doesnt seem unreasonable, we have people here on lemmy who post and comment more than 100 times each day, also over a whole year. And I dont mean bots

GregorGizeh ,

I haven't kept up on this controversy, but is this really all there is to it? People think the service is untrustworthy because the CEO tried a bit too hard to convince a critical blogger, according to the comments possibly due to neurodivergence?

GregorGizeh ,

Yeah it seems ridiculous this isnt the standard way to do online dating. Many people dont want a trans partner, and many people only want a trans partner. Not being clear and upfront about these things only causes future heartbreak and rejection issues.

GregorGizeh ,

I dont think suggesting transphobia when it comes to sexual preferences is appropriate, people can't choose those any more than they can choose to be black or white. There are also simple biological facts, perhaps a person wishes to have biological children with their partner. Or any other reason really, romantic preferences are entirely subjective and often not even a conscious preference.

That being said, i think a good compromise would be for people to be able to give these kinds of personal preferences to the dating site, similar to the age ranges they want to encounter. Then the system would automatically prevent incompatible preferences from getting matched, and nobody has to out themselves.

GregorGizeh ,

Your second paragraph is just the point I am trying to make no? People can't choose who they love or are attracted (or not attracted) to.

So I am uncomfortable with the suggestion that any cis person who doesnt want to date a trans person should set up a disclaimer on their profile, with the afterthought insinuating that they shouldn't have an issue with that unless they are secretly transphobic, or trans averse as you put it.

Personally I (as a straight cis dude) am very supportive of equal rights for non straight people, and think they are a beautiful facet of mankind. I would be fully supporting most of their causes, but that doesnt mean I am suddenly attracted to, broadly speaking, not cis women. I can't change that, or make an exception for someone, that's simply not how I was wired. Would you consider that trans averse? Honest question.

GregorGizeh , (edited )

Honestly I am dismayed we have this dumb ass reddit culture take hold. Not everything you disagree with must be bannned from the sub defederated immediately, your instance doesnt owe you a feed that's exactly how you like it. Defederation should be the last resort, since it entirely breaks communication and interaction between the instance's users.

Instead, use the client side blocking features to clean up your feed. Personally I have blocked over 80 communities and users because they are centered around topics or beliefs I dont want on my feed, I blocked two instances as well, but I can still read their user's comments and interact with their users outside the instances.

Defederating is just splintering the fediverse. Unless at all avoidable it shouldn't be done, in fact I chose my instance specifically because it defederates nobody but meta and illegal content such as gore and csam.

GregorGizeh ,

Check out bazzite.gg

It is a very beginner friendly, gaming focused distro that essentially aims to be steamOS on PC. It even has rollback functionality if you accidentally break something.

GregorGizeh ,

While I dont use Firefox itself any more I am using librewolf on my PC, which sadly doesnt exist for phones yet. Also, GOS comes with its own privacy oriented chromium fork called vanadium, so I'm using that in the mean time.

GregorGizeh ,

The numbers may be indicative of the general trend, but every single privacy oriented browser and so forth is spoofing the user agent, pretending to be the most widespread and popular os and browser.

Which is why privacy checks on my Linux+librewolf PC return win10 with chrome.

GregorGizeh ,

Iirc the browser is older than their search engine. If anything that is their og product

GregorGizeh ,

XOS

PayPal Is Planning an Ad Business Using Data on Its Millions of Shoppers (www.wsj.com)

Wall Street Journal (paywalled) The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app....

GregorGizeh ,

Interested myself. So far I had only good experiences as a customer, though i hear they are pretty rough towards vendors. It is also widely accepted where I live (EU), which makes it very convenient.

But i am always eager to stop using a corporate product or service.

GregorGizeh ,

I'm glad they went with sjo, at least she is alive and can fight back. Imagine they ruined all TNG trek by taking the omnipresent and beloved computer voice and made it a corporate sockpuppet we hear everywhere now, crudely regurgitating platitudes of consumption.

GregorGizeh ,

To be fair, that is entirely accurate. It is the last windows I will ever need because I switched to linux.

GregorGizeh ,

While I dislike corporate ai as much as the next guy I am quite interested in open source, local models. If i can run it on my machine, with the absolute certainty that it is my llm, working for my benefit, that's pretty cool. And not feeding every miniscule detail about me to corporate.

GregorGizeh ,

Sums up my thoughts nicely. I am by no means able to make sense of the inner workings of an llm anyway, even if I can look at its code. At best i would be able to learn how to tweak its results to my needs or maybe provide it with additional datasets over time.

I simply trust that an open source model that is able to run offline, and doesnt call home somewhere with telemetry, has been vetted for trustworthiness by far more qualified people than me.

GregorGizeh ,

Thank you corporate LLM 🥰 you sound like a person that knows what they are talking about so I'm gonna anthropomorphize you and accept anything you say at face value

GregorGizeh ,

In Germany we have the wahl-o-mat, translates roughly into elect-o-mat.

This is a website loaded with all available parties and their political demands. You then answer a few dozen questions to identify your own opinions on the different subjects and then runs a comparison. You then end up with a tiered list of political parties you align with the most.

Perhaps a similar tool exists for other languages and countries as well

GregorGizeh ,

The contradictory goals for privacy displayed here are caused by corporations and intelligence agencies lobbying behind closed doors to get that data. And with the think of the children / anti pedophilia rhetoric people blindly agree. Because who wants to be against something that helps to protect kids right?

GregorGizeh ,

Wasn't the open ai fucktard planning on raising a trillion for ai hardware?

GregorGizeh ,

https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/8e03cf4f-7cb6-4731-b605-fc1293b75092.webp

GregorGizeh , (edited )

This kind of reminds me, what ever happened to metrosexuals? There was a weird time where hetero men with fuckboi aesthetics were called that/called themselves that

GregorGizeh , (edited )

I wouldn't mind that as an optional function, having a single global search field that brings up whatever you are looking for seems really convenient on paper.

Of course not the way msoft does it, where you never get the thing you want unless you are being really precise (like searching for appdata only yielding web results until you specifically type %APPDATA%).

GregorGizeh ,

Definitely this. I have been eyeballing Linux for years, always intimidated by the CLI and the notion that everything you try to do on Linux requires user research and work first.

Now I finally made the switch a couple days ago, and while it took a bit of tinkering and googling here and there I am amazed how simple, even way simpler than on windows, the experience for a an average user is, particularly with the very beginner friendly distro I went with (bazzite/gnome).

It just works right out the box for 90% of whatever I want to do, configuring it is simply flipping some switches in the software and extension apps. Feels more like setting up a new smartphone than a PC. I didn't even have to mess with the CLI all that much, perhaps half a dozen times so far, and each time i followed specific steps in a guide or tutorial, or tried out some basic things like file search.

GregorGizeh ,

I do think people should get users to try less Windows like experiences on Linux. Because a Windows like UI will just make them miss Windows.

That is actually the exact reason I went with gnome instead of KDE myself; I find it much easier to learn a new system than to adjust habits that have formed for years. I will probably eventually switch to KDE when i feel fully comfortable, because it is supposedly slightly better in performance and far more customizable.

GregorGizeh ,

I remember that, pretty sure it was in win7 or early win10, before they crammed cortana in there and you had to start jumping through hoops to disable all the garbage they added.

As for the search results, I'm not saying the user shouldn't be able to distinguish them; in fact the way I imagine it is that the results are grouped by category and in a user determined order of priority.

For the loading times I have nothing, that isnt really avoidable with my idea.

Perhaps with some visual trickery that fades or slides the results in over a second or two, ending on the web results. It would give the web search part time to run behind the scenes, seemingly appearing as quickly as the others.

After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

GregorGizeh ,

100% where we are headed with this backwards capitalist approach to ai. Make bots churn out art, films, music, anything creative really, so the proles have more time for mindless manual labor

GregorGizeh ,

Not sure if that is an option for you too, but I have a scanwatch light myself. It is a hybrid smartwatch, being a classic analog watch with a small black and white display in the background.

The scanwatch products are health focused, allowing the user to track a variety of health stats like heartrate, activities and sleep analysis. It is very energy efficient, requring a a recharge about once a month in my case.

It is noteworthy that the hybrid concept makes some cuts to the smartness of the watch, for example replying to messages from the watch is not possible, only reading them as they come in. It doesn't have touch functionality either, instead you control it with the bezel.

You can configure in the smartphone app which apps are allowed to relay notifications to the watch, giving you the option to filter out most noise that is not relevant to your mom. You can also set up activity plans to track and/or remind her to engage in some moderate activities like taking a walk.

Do note though that the watch asks for a subscription for some premium functions, like workout plans and more in depth health analysis. I don't have that myself either though, being able to generally monitor my activities is enough for me. The watch also relies on the paired smartphone for its gps functionality, without the phone it would essentially be reduced to a classic wristwatch.

GregorGizeh ,

Yeah i only heard it called that ironically or as an in joke

GregorGizeh ,

Commercial musicians caring about their sales. Why is that surprising? It is time We stop thinking of every celebrity as a good person, they are completely average for the most part. Including casual indifference to things that are not their problems.

GregorGizeh ,

Streaming went to shit when everyone made their own. It was good and worth the money when it was one portal with everything available.

Now i am back navigating the stormy high seas, to avoid the treacherous shores of bankruptcy

GregorGizeh ,

Well, yeah, that's why we're here. Streaming went to shit

While I agree that the monopoly netflix once had doesn't belong in private hands, a public funded central media archive where all studios release their content would be preferable.

But still, for the user those were golden times. Whatever you wanted to watch, chances were Netflix had it in good quality and any language you wanted on any device with internet.

GregorGizeh ,

I dont even work in corporate and reading this makes me yearn for the sweet, merciful embrace of death

GregorGizeh ,

Big vuvuzela iphone energy

GregorGizeh ,

You dont have those things not happen any more because of the stock market, you dont have to endure those things any more because regulations prevent it.

I can guarantee you 100% that if corporations could use child labor again, or dump rats in a meat grinder and sell it, they would in a heartbeat.

GregorGizeh ,

Ah fair enough, that makes more sense then. Read it as an argument for the free market

GregorGizeh ,

They really aren't that heavy. When I was little, maybe 5 or 6, me and my best friend went to a construction site (excavators and cranes, so cool), snuck around on there during off hours (probably super dangerous, but here I am) and took some metal hooks, made from that metal grid stuff they use often in construction.

We then went and opened the actual manhole covers in my backyard with them, and even climbed down there (not that interesting, basically a few meters deep, with a small open sewage line running at the bottom).

Long story short, two pre school boys could open them by themselves in the 90s

GregorGizeh ,

Eugenics wars and ww3 next 🫠 I dont like this timeline

GregorGizeh ,

To be fair, a Fagott is the German/European name for this instrument:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassoon

Though I'd say it is pretty obvious why they named themselves that, and its probably not because they can play that thing.

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