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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • Everything about this seems almost designed to murder small businesses.

    Those with enough capital backing, resources and funds can take the hit, maybe cut some expenses, shedding crocodile tears about how terrible the economic impact of this trade war has affected them while dispassionately watching scores of no-longer-employees pack their things and try to figure out how to tell their kids that the promised trip next month they’d been looking forward to all year is cancelled.

    Edit: This might have been ambiguous. I was trying to highlight how big corporations can survive by doing what big business does to protect the bottom line. Small businesses, obviously, can’t do that.






  • It’s not the goal itself that’s the issue. Protecting kids from harmful content until they’re ready to deal with it is absolutely a worthwhile endeavour.

    But the means to that end often pose a massive security and privacy issue.

    You’re supposed to give all your identifying details to some website and trust them, that they’ll use it only for the legal purpose of verifying that identity and promptly deleting them, rather than selling them to criminals who now have everything they need for identity theft. Hell, just storing them is a risk because we all know how many companies (and people) treat IT security as an afterthought at best and a breach compromising the identification of thousands of people would be a fucking nightmare.

    And what if your kid tries to circumvent it? Now their face is out there on some server, whether or not they succeed. Is that really better?

    The argument is that the onus should be on parents to protect their children and help them find their way safely, rather than compromising everyone else with poorly thought-out and invasive policies.










  • everyone who talks about linux seems to be a programmer /coder, and uses jargon that i don’t even understand

    I’ve been pointing that out for a while, but unfortunately there is a vocal subset of the community that thinks referring people to just read technical manuals is fine (if you can’t, just learn to read it, duh).

    Some things are concepts you’ll learn easily, don’t worry, and for the rest, you’ll always find someone willing to break it down if you manage to look past the snobs. If you want, shoot me a DM if you just want to understand a specific term without someone making you feel like an idiot.

    The problem is there are a billion versions of linux, idk what one to choose

    There are plenty of suggestions here. Ubuntu is what got me started and I still think it’s a good start*. Mint is from the same family, “Pop! OS” too (the name sounds silly to me, but it’s legit and popular for a reason). Just look at pictures and see what seems prettiest to you, then go with that. The usage won’t be too different.
    The grandpa of that family is Debian, but I’m not sure it’s quite as user-friendly out of the box. I’m mentioning it in case you come across the term.

    The other big families are Fedora and Arch. I personally use a Fedora-Child, but to keep things narrow, I recommend the three mentioned above as starters.

    * If you come across people hating Ubuntu - including myself - it’s usually for ideological reasons rather than usability ones. Don’t worry about that for now. Getting into the weeds of things is a skill you don’t have yet and that’s perfectly fine.

    if i can play my steam games on linux

    Steam, fortunately, is the one platform that works best with Linux. For their handheld, they decided to flip off MS and made their own Linux, along with a wrapper tool to make all the games run on it anyway.

    You may hear the terms “compatibility layer”, “Proton” and “wine”, which is exactly that: A tool to make Windows stuff run on Linux. Again, don’t worry about the specifics, just believe me: I’m playing almost all of my steam games just as I used to.

    If there is a specific game you care about, https://www.protondb.com/ has a large store of knowledge. Some things run out of the box, some may require a few extra settings that are usually easy to add, and if there ever is a thing you don’t understand, my offer stands.

    The whole idea of moving to linux is overwhelming.

    It’s a scary plunge, a leap of faith, but I assure you: There are people ready to catch you at the bottom. The reception wasn’t as warm when I jumped off of Win7, and the snobs are still around, but things have improved a lot over the past few years. Trust me, trust us: You won’t be left alone.




  • Well, you’d need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can’t force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they’ll lose out on precious markups.

    That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.

    The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you’d let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you’ve already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I’m sure it’s a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.

    I’m all for the idea, mind you. This isn’t me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what’s stopping us (and the answer is probably “rich people that don’t like sharing” as usual).