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rdyoung

@rdyoung@lemmy.world

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Advice on cleaning bloatware off of a new PC (www.bestbuy.com)

I helped my 77 year old mother purchase a new laptop, and I want to be sure to get all the bloatware off of it, and set her up with with some better privacy options. I am aMac guy at home so I haven't done this kind of thing for many years. (I use Windows at work, so I'm quite familiar and capable, but obviously I have to rely...

rdyoung ,

This is the answer. If she is more comfortable with windows there are stripped down versions of 7 and 10, maybe even 11 that will have even less of the crap that msft throws in.

rdyoung ,

They aren't actually that dangerous. You can always reinstall any thing you need. Plus you can create your own assuming OP is savvy enough.

rdyoung , (edited )

This is true across the web. Not only do some people not read through it all and not understand the nuance even if they did read all of it, they also tend to play follow the leader and downvote when others already have instead of taking a minute or two out of their day and deciding for themselves.

I really wish we could get away from the up/down votes. Despite knowing better and honestly not giving a flying fuck, I find myself obsessed with it at times and it's not healthy. As much as I dislike the emoticons that have taken over, I'd almost prefer that. Use hearts or smiley faces or something and show the actual ratio of up/down, ie 5 hearts and 5 frowny face or whatever.

rdyoung , (edited )

My issue with the downvotes is that it is regularly brigaded even if it's not an organized effort. Legit contributions get shouted down to being hidden while other non helpful or downright dangerous info is kept above it. On reddit with the smaller subs it doesn't matter especially when it's a post because it's still going to show in the sub. And while lemmy/fediverse is still small and growing, this will most definitely push plenty of people (likely me included) to not be as active because the majority of people don't seem to be capable of having a real conversation and instead just downvote and move on.

The one thing lemmy and the fediverse has going for it is not having karma attached to your account so you don't have people looking for upvotes for legitimacy and you don't have downvote troll farmers who see how far negative they can get.

I could also see keeping the up/down and total so long as it's hidden (but accessible to those that want to see it). I'd also be okay if downvoting enough of a specific accounts comments or posts automatically hid it from you (without blocking them completely).

And to make my point even clearer. Multiple someones have been going through my comment history and downvoting everything they can. The only ones they haven't are probably the ones that the post was deleted so while I can see my comment, I can't see any responses or the ones I responded to. And lemmy doesn't do that random bullshit that reddit does so I know they are real.

And even more on the nose here. I'm sure this addendum will sound like I am crying to a few or more of the drive by downvoters here and will bring in an onslaught of downvotes because as you already brought up, way too many people don't take the time to think about what they are reading and just react silently or by responding as if they are a 3rd grader bullying a toddler on the playground, likely because no one loves them enough (because they are hell to be around).

I'll get ahead of it. Bring on the downvotes mfers.

Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu' (www.pcgamer.com)

Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu'::Nintendo of America is suing the maker of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, saying it "unlawfully circumvents the technological measures" that prevent Switch games from being played on othe

rdyoung ,

And bookmarked.

A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to ‘Slackbot’ and stayed undetected for months (www.theverge.com)

A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to ‘Slackbot’ and stayed undetected for months::Former Gizmodo writer Tom McKay managed to stay in the company’s workplace Slack even after leaving. All he had to do was change his name to “Slackbot.”

rdyoung ,

Why not?

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    rdyoung ,

    Who is downvoting this. When you get up over a million or so in debt, it's really the banks problem because of the chances of actually recovering that money.

    rdyoung ,

    It's a saying but it applies here as well. When you are dealing with the likes of trump, any money he owes is actually the problem of the one holding the note and not the debtor.

    For Carroll he needs to bond that award with the court or else he can't appeal the ruling. If he doesn't have it to bond, he doesn't have it to pay her or anyone else he owes. That to me is the epitome of not really his problem anymore.

    Do I think we should just let him off the hook? Fuck no, he needs to be made to sell whatever properties he needs to even at firesale to pay his debts and then be made to work mcds until he pays off the rest or dies from having to actually do real work.

    rdyoung , (edited )

    You've been brainwashed if you think the economy is actually bad. Let me guess, you think we would be having a great economy under the orange mussolini?

    All metrics agree that we are doing fairly well economically speaking. The tech layoffs have nothing to do with the economy, it's 100% corporate greed and the games they play. They staffed up with cheap loans when interest rates were stupid low and paid themselves insane bonuses and now that interest rates are high again it's time to cut back on expenses.

    For the record. The metrics I'm talking about DO NOT INCLUDE the stock market. While tech is seeing major layoffs, the rest of the economy is hiring like crazy. My wife's company for one is planning on doubling her team over the next year and just hired 2 more people, 1 to replace someone moving internally and a new position.

    rdyoung ,

    I really hope you are being facetious here.

    The economy is booming. Your slow at work because it's winter/spring when everything slows down. I drive for a living and can tell you that from what I see, people definitely look like they feel more flush and everywhere is hiring. Not all companies have upped their starting pay to bring in the real talent but some have and those are the companies who will flourish longer term.

    I'll bet you also think that global warming isn't real because you saw snow and felt cold this winter.

    rdyoung ,

    Oh wow, you really told me.

    The fact that you attacked first tells me that you are actually a trump supporter or possibly worse, you think that Bobby Kennedy or Cornell West would be better in the big chair than Biden.

    I'm never not amazed at the lack of understanding of things like the economy. If all you do is listen to fox and others say how bad the economy is and you don't stop to analyze it yourself, you only have you to blame for your ignorance.

    Have a nice day now.

    rdyoung ,

    I didn't say what my source was. The fact that you think it was "the fed" or the head of any bank tells me that you have no idea how any of this actually works.

    I'm talking about real numbers and what I see day to day.

    You have a nice day now.

    rdyoung ,

    Sync by resilio. I use it between my computers and nas and between my computer and my vps and my nas and my vps, I also use it between my work and personal phone.

    rdyoung ,

    I've never had an issue but then again I don't use it for much more than movies and TV. If sync thing supports qnap I might check it out but I've been using sync since it was launched (if not soon after).

    rdyoung ,

    As is tradition.

    rdyoung ,

    You can also feel good about supporting Proton. They are literally bootstrapped as a service and only rely on what we pay them. They never took any money from vc or other sources.

    If you have more than one person who should/would/could move over to Proton, they have a family plan and every so often they bring back their visionary plan which is a better version of the family.

    rdyoung ,

    This is why I run my own router. I'm sure my cable modem has a way in but then you'd have to get past my router.

    rdyoung ,

    Now I want that image of the dog framed and hanging in my house.

    AMC to Pay $8 Million for Alleged Violation of Video Privacy Law Through Use of Tracking Technologies, Including Meta Pixel, X Tracking Pixel, and Google Tracking Technology (arstechnica.com)

    According to subscribers suing, AMC allegedly installed tracking technologies—including the Meta Pixel, the X Tracking Pixel, and Google Tracking Technology—on its website, allowing their personally identifying information to be connected with their viewing history....

    rdyoung ,

    Problem is that even those that have never setup an account with Facebook still have a profile that Facebook built on their behalf. If you are in any photos that friends/family/coworkers uploaded and if even one person named you in the photo, you are now known by fb and anyone who uses that data.

    rdyoung ,

    I've been using Proton for a few years now. I'm slowly moving everything over to them and when they offered the visionary plan again last year I jumped on it despite right now it only being my wife and I using it with a 3rd account as a family email.

    rdyoung ,

    That isn't a life time subscription. It's a better version of the family plan. If you read the article/blog post you would have seen that they only offer lifetime plans for charity.

    https://proton.me/support/proton-plans#proton-visionary

    rdyoung ,

    Do you know the wonder that is konboot? It works on every version of windows with old school offline accounts, it even works/worked on Linux and it leaves no trace.

    rdyoung ,

    You can do the same with the windows install/repair or any other bootable os. I kept konboot around for when I was working on someones pc and they forgot to tell me the password or they forgot it.

    rdyoung , (edited )

    How much did you dig around that site?

    It took me like 2 minutes to find this

    https://events.democrats.org/

    It's on the faq page.

    Yes, it should be on the main page or even at the top of the work with us page for those who aren't looking for a paid job with the campaign.

    rdyoung , (edited )

    This has been a problem for years. They are still campaigning like it's the 80s. Hillary would have trounced trump if they had let someone younger than 30 run their campaign.

    We need a grassroots movement of a 3rd party to get some younger leaders in play starting with town councils, county seats, state, etc until we have enough support to get someone in the big chair.

    rdyoung ,

    There is a local'ish politician that recently made it to the house. He (really his team) post videos of him across my states subs on reddit and likely on toctik, insta, etc. This is what the old guard needs to learn from. This is how you reach the younger voters and get them engaged as well as educate them on how things work.

    Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy?

    Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong...

    rdyoung ,

    The bigger operations already are using so called green energy. There are large operations in the north west where hydro is abundant and cheap.

    This might be a few years off but I am considering setting up a farm where I am. We are planning on a very large solar installation at some point in the near future and we will probably have way more supply than we can use. I wouldn't mine btc but running some other algo hardware and throwing it at nicehash or other smart pools would probably be a good use of that power assuming I can get the hardware cheap enough.

    No one with any working braincells is running larger than at home operations on standard power costs in most of the country. My state has some of the lowest cost power in the US and it's still not profitable to mine most coins and it doesn't get much better with commercial rates. I'd also bet that the larger AI farms will also do what they can to run on solar, wind, etc so that they pay as little as possible for power.

    rdyoung ,

    I've been watching flipper since it was announced. I should probably buy one and play with it.

    All this is going to do is increase sales of the thing and probably increase the number of "kids" trying to break into cars. Streisand effect ftw.

    rdyoung ,

    I had not heard of that one. Was it the "internet is full of tubes" guy?

    rdyoung ,

    I really should get one. I should also grab the latest version of kali (if that's still around), I haven't played with that in a long time.

    Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption (www.tomshardware.com)

    Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption::The U.S Energy Information Administration is now requiring large-scale cryptomining operations to report their energy consumption. Inevitably this will bring about new regulations that will restrict...

    rdyoung , (edited )

    Seriously. This is so much bullshit. The bigger operations are out in the north west where hydro power is abundant and cheap. I'm sure plenty of others have made moves to run on solar or wind as well. Power costs make or break profitability for a crypto mine.

    Everyone downvoting this has no idea what it takes to mine crypto. If I cared enough about the peanut gallery here I would find one of my spreadsheets from years ago where I calculated the cost of mining versus buying directly. Most of the time for individuals and those wanting to hold it, buying was the best option. The only way these big operations make any money is getting kwh as cheap as possible and taking a fee from those paying them to mine for them.

    Even with commercial rates, you'd have to be a trump size moron to setup shop in and around any city or town full of people.

    rdyoung , (edited )

    That doesn't apply to mining crypto and the fact that you think it does tells me that you have no idea what is going on here.

    rdyoung ,

    Someone with some brains. I think I like you.

    rdyoung ,

    Tell me you've never mined any crypto without telling me that you've never mined any crypto.

    I could attempt to explain it but I get the feeling that you wouldn't understand it.

    rdyoung ,

    Once again you highlight the fact that you have no idea what you are talking about.

    In generalities, yes, it applies to everything. But with crypto in particular, especially POW coins, it doesn't apply the way you think it does and the fact that you think as much tells me how little you actually understand about the costs to acquire and run POW equipment as well as the risks of spending money to mine coins that end up worthless. It also highlights just how little you understand about crypto algos as a whole.

    I can't really sum it up here and to explain it in a way that most of the plebs on here would understand would take several paragraphs and I'm not sure I can dumb it down enough.

    If you are capable of doing the math and extrapolations I would suggest that you look into what the hardware for algos behind coins like btc, ltc dash, eth, etc cost and exactly what you would have mined in the early days and just how much you would have sold off just to pay the electricity bills.

    Long story short. Buying into new crypto or mining new coins with existing hardware is taking advantage of opportunities but buying new hardware and expecting to make money off it long term on even commercial rates is going to be more profitable when you wait for the hardware and the coin to mature a bit.

    For POS coins, yes, take a risk and buy in or mine other coins with existing hardware and then swap for the new one when it hits exchanges.

    In closing. You clearly have no idea what the difficulty trend looked like for btc in the early days. If you did you would know that as soon as btc started taking off even the earliest miners were on a losing treadmill to keep up and keep making a profit.

    rdyoung ,

    Can we get Samaritan? I'd love to join the fight against it.

    Damn, now it's time for a re-watch.

    rdyoung ,

    So they are easier to get off when it's covered in paint, without getting paint everywhere.

    rdyoung ,

    It's typically called a smock and people have been using it for paint and other messy jobs for a very long time.

    rdyoung , (edited )

    In addition, Googles search results have gone to shit. You used to be able to find what you needed (without drilling down with specific keywords) near the top of the first page. Now you usually have to go through a few pages to find anything close to what you want. You can thank the seo bullshit for this. So many shit filled articles now mostly written by "AI" clutter up the search results.

    Basically these people apparently weren't doing a good job as it is.

    rdyoung ,

    Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

    What do you do with a drunken sailor?

    rdyoung ,

    This was my problem with hulu back in the day. Short episodes like Futurama would have a commercial shoved in at like 3 minutes and then again at 10 or whatever, it was obnoxious and shittily implemented.

    rdyoung ,

    They aren't looking to host a website. They are looking for domain registrars

    rdyoung ,

    I would stick with namecheap (for now) and pony up for a multi year registration. If in 5 or 10 years they are jacking the price up then you can use another registrars cheap port option to get a discount. I did this recently between godaddy and namecheap. I had one domain left with godaddy that I have owned for over probably a couple of decades at this point and they were seriously jacking the rate up on me, I ported it to namecheap for a massive discount.

    rdyoung ,

    Oh I wholly agree. The point of that was to illustrate what you have to do to enforce it properly. It's the same as trying to force porn sites to ID their users.

    As for Amazon, I have not heard anything about this and I recently did a couple of returns with no request for my license. Also, you may not be aware but stores like home depot already require ID to return items and they (with the help of a 3rd party) keep a credit file of sorts on you and uses that determine who has been abusing the return process.

    rdyoung ,

    I'm not sure you follow. I'm postulating whether or not say facebook would have to lock someones account and force them to upload ID because they happened to have browsed it while inside the state. This would not be looked upon kindly by other states.

    rdyoung ,

    None of that is how this works. Forcing companies like fb that I wouldn't trust with a recipe to store (even temporarily) copies of peoples ID or other documents is not the same as having a store eyeball an ID or in the case of some places swipe or scan the ID card to verify that's its legit.

    I don't disagree about certain versions of social media coupled with the angst and issues with being a kid not being healthy and I've kept my use to a min even going so far as deleting my fb years ago. That said, these type of laws do nothing but the opposite of their intentions.

    What we need is all kids sitting through a class about the good and bad about social media and teaching them how to be safe and smart when interacting online.

    I'd suggest you think through what can and will happen when random support people have access to peoples IDs. Hint, they won't be sending them cookies.

    Seriously. This kind of thing doesn't work online unless you go the China route and if you want that, you can kindly move to a country already doing it and let's keep some semblance of common sense here.

    rdyoung ,

    Please read my comment again. Unless someone is sharing their GPS, all they have to go on is the ip address. This is why a lot of people vpn into other countries to watch things on Netflix that aren't available where they are.

    This also brings up another point. For reasons unknown, sometimes my cell phone ip address comes back as a Florida ip. If I happened to access it via an ip that geolocates to Florida they would have force me to verify my ID to keep using it. That opens them up to potentially having way more verifications to process and a much larger attack surface for identity theft not to mention the millions of people and their representatives that will be extremely pissed off.

    rdyoung , (edited )

    That's more than simple geo location. That's a whole other ball of wax and it only magnifies how ridiculous this shit is.

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