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rodneylives

@rodneylives@lemmy.world

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rodneylives ,

I used to work at a Dominos, and their side items have been ludicrously priced for a good while. There's usually a "coupon" in their app with a substantial discount on pizza, it's the only way I'd order from them.

rodneylives ,

I have questions about how useful the basic information Dominos gets from me from their app will be to anyone. Android doesn't let them just harvest roaming data any more.

rodneylives ,

It is true: Destiny 2 is rated by ProtonDB as "borked": https://www.protondb.com/app/1085660

But there are an awful lot of other games with high ratings there. The Steam Deck has done wonders for getting Windows games working under Linux.

rodneylives ,

Warning: this is secretly a Nethack thread!

So, the model was playing on average 2,000 points worse because the player was luckier? The things about werewolves and dogs is a factor but is statistically insignificant.

Nethack has a couple of other gotchas like this. They should be grateful they weren't playing on Friday the 13th....

Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good | Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)

Tack "&udm=14" on to the end of a normal search, and you'll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.

rodneylives ,

The operator for ensuring something appeared in a search used to be "+", but they stopped using that for some ?^?^?mYsTeRiOuS rEaSoN^?^??

rodneylives ,

My response to that is Flatpak. 16MB of software requiring 700MB to download and consuming 2.8GB of disk space. Linux absolutely can be bad, due to cultural issues.

(My example software above is Handbrake. I'm sure someone's going to "well actually" me about this, and I don't even care. I don't see how it can be justified, and I'm kind of curious to see if someone can do it.)

rodneylives ,

But it appears like we're in a situation where it's not used for specific situations, but for lots of different things. Just a few Flatpak programs starts to chew through a significant amount of disk space, and some programs are only being distributed as Flatpaks.

rodneylives ,

It just seems like it's a lot of papering over a fairly substantial problem. While the example I gave was Handbrake, which does seem like it should be a unique example, every other piece of software that I check Flatpak versions of also had ludicrously wasteful storage issues.

I'm aware of dependency hell, but it seems to me that most software doesn't have that as a problem, not if the libraries are sensibly maintained? After all, the fact that upgrading a library can improve all the software that uses it seems like it's usually a positive thing. And the ballooning storage requirements of Flatpak make it a tool that should be used occasionally, rather as a primary way to release software. Using a filesystem that can detect duplicates would help, but itself also seems like a special-case kind of solution, and not a great solution to turn to just to avoid what seems to me to be a significant issue.

rodneylives ,

What the heck is Dexerto?

Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites (www.theverge.com)

In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...

rodneylives ,

Ed Zitron has a scathing piece about that (in the podcast version he's seething) entitled "The Man Who Killed Google Search." Worth checking out, it contains some quality righteous anger.

rodneylives ,

Once, I was asked if I wanted a special offer on Microsoft Office on boot up.
Explorer freezes so often for me when I right-click a file and select Open With that it's made me twitchy.
Frequently image icons stop displaying.
For a long while, every time I've installed Windows on a computer, I've had to go through and disable all the awful misfeatures Windows tries to put in the taskbar.
I also always have to set OneDrive so it doesn't redirect folders like Desktop and Documents into its cloud storage area.
Now Windows 11 is threatening to put CoPilot on my desktop, and I'll have to disable it too.

I'm positively longing for Linux now.

rodneylives ,

This isn't the worst timeline. It was always destined to end up this way. Corporations consider themselves ethically mandated to squeeze as much profit out of customers as they can, to find the exactly monetary line where the number of customers they drive off is balanced by the money they can gain by the things that drove them off. They actually believe that, and that basically means any profit-seeking corporation is going to ruin their user experience in the long run.

rodneylives ,

It has. For the first time, it's risen to over 4% of market share of desktops: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/linux-continues-growing-market-share-reaches-4-of-desktops/

Of course this doesn't count Android or Chromebooks, both of which run Linux on some level.

rodneylives ,

Why is Microsoft even deciding what programs I can run on my computer in the first place? They're not malware, they shouldn't be doing this at all.

rodneylives ,

I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.

rodneylives ,

Note: article puts a rectangle in front of the article when you've read half of it.

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