@MudMan@kbin.social
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MudMan

@MudMan@kbin.social

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MudMan,
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I want the record to show I didn't even go with the top 5 most absurd Met gala outfits that came up when I googled, I was trying to keep it fair here.

MudMan,
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Admittedly, if you were on some isolated area and this came off a boat you'd think you're being invaded by aliens, too.

MudMan,
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FWIW, our universal health coverage here will cover medical dental care, but not cosmetic. They'll patch up or remove your bad tooth, but I think it'd be harder to get an implant or a crown without paying for it. Weirdly, dentists are still one of the two or three basic services where people here are still willing to pay for uncovered medical attention, the others being eyecare and pediatrics.

When I needed surgery my private dentist still sent me over to the public system, though. Took a look at my X-rays, told me she wasn't gonna touch any of that without an MRI and an OR on standby and told me to go to my public doctor with a note and tell them to get me booked with a maxillofacial surgeon, which I did. It wasn't that big of a deal in the end, but the reaction was... revealing.

MudMan,
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Wine is spoiled grapes, all cheese is just milk you left out for so long it got dry and sausages are what happens when you disembowel a pig and stuff its guts with its own minced ass. Today I ate a thing that looks like the first draft of an Aliens facehugger they rejected for being too spiky.

People buy food so processed they forget we're just gross hungry animals just putting random things in their mouths to see if it keeps them alive for a bit.

MudMan,
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Man, I am so glad "anarchocapitalist" is starting to stick. I can't believe they got away with the other word for as long as they did.

MudMan,
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I've been seeing this story do the rounds and I feel like we're burying the lede here.

Who the hell is watching porn over Plex? That is somehow simultaneously the most uninformed and the most complicated way to access porn.

MudMan, (edited )
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I mean, in fairness their strategy for space exploration seems to be to point a starship in a random direction, hit "go" and beam down to every planet with a remotely breathable atmosphere in their PJ onesies.

The impressive part is they still seem to be the dominant superpower in half the galaxy, so... yay for them.

MudMan, (edited )
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I am always amused by how "Linux newbie" guides are consistently tons of pages of choice paralysis and esoteric concepts but they all take a stop at "well, the UI looks kinda like Windows on this one, so that will probably help".

Look, I'm not particularly new to Linux, but also don't daily drive it. In my experience the UI is not the problem. Ever. Compatibility and setup are the problem. Every Linux distro I've ever seen is perfectly usable, nitpicks aside. The part that will make a newcomer bounce off is configuration. Especially if they're trying to mess with relatively unusual hardware like laptops driven by proprietary software, with MUX switched GPUs and whatnot. Only people deep into the ecosystem care about the minutia of the UI and the package management.

MudMan,
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I'd agree that can be an issue, but my guess is that trying to resolve those preemptively just adds to the perception of flamewars and drama around the platform. I'm a big proponent of not bringing stuff up to newcomers unless it's very directly in their way.

Ultimately a new user moving to a new OS needs two things: for everything that used to work for them to still work AND for at least one thing that didn't use to work to work better.

A useful guide for newcomers should drive to making those two things true, IMO. Sitting there choosing the nicest looking UI is a great passtime for tinkerers, but newcomers need exactly one option: the one that works. They can get to the fun customization later.

To me at the moment this reads less like a welcoming introduction to a exciting new alternative and more like a cautionary tale of why I shouldn't try. Oh, so my Nvidia hardware is a no-go, most of my apps may not work, I have to choose from a bunch of stuff that all looks the same to me and apparently there is a crapton of drama about things I have never heard about or understand, but that people seem to have very strong opinions about. Well, I guess my old printer no longer being supported on Win11 is not that big of a deal...

I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I'm saying this constructively. Experts have a tendency to underestimate how lost newcomers can get and to misunderstand what the real roadblocks and churn points are. I'm trying to provide a perspective on those.

MudMan,
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Who in the world celebrated that?

Like, I get the self-reinforcing bubble that Linux communities exist in and all, but... nobody did that.

The vast majority of Windows users are random people that never touch anything beyond the Start menu in their entire computing lives. What segment of the Windows userbase is out there celebrating any features, let alone command line anything? This is not a thing. At least not in numbers large enough to matter.

Sorry, I try not to get involved in these arguments. Frankly, grown adults taking sides on operating systems of all things like it's Sega vs Nintendo in a 90s playground seems very strange but I don't begrudge people finding communities wherever. It's just... you know, come on.

MudMan,
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Counterpoint:

Q

MudMan,
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Yeah, right. Like Riker hadn't tried that already on the first day he got access to a holodeck.

Next smartphone I buy, which one do you recommend?

Things that make me angry about my current smartphone Samsung Galaxy S21Ultra on a Verizon plan is the mandatory software updates in which they install WITHOUT MY PERMISSION stupid apps like Netflix and addictive gambling games and stacking block games and Candy crush. God knows what else they install without my permission. I...

MudMan, (edited )
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I have a Xperia 1.

It has a flagship SoC, but it also has a SD card slot, a headphone jack, no notch or cutout, front firing stereo speakers and a nice blocky look without a massive camera bump.

The downside is software support can be a bit spotty and the cameras are made for manual use, as opposed to being AI-driven point-and-shoot things. That last one could be a positive depending on your preference, though.

But overall? I'm very satisfied, and I went there specifically because I was tired of the ongoing Apple-ification of Samsung in the first place. You may want to consider coming to the dark side and incentivizing Sony to keep making a phone with a feature set, instead of copy-pasting Apple's or Samsung's playbook.

MudMan,
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I have to use cameras just out of politeness and I also do a bunch of audio only calls and frankly the video calls are much more stressful and often less productive.

MudMan,
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You know what? I hate when I catch myself doing that. I don't feel I'm being phony or forced in calls, but sometimes I switch the camera off and I feel my face drop and I feel kinda guilty.

MudMan, (edited )
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Wait, how bad are bachelors' degrees in the US/anglosphere? I was contirbuting to research projects and had a specialization by the time I was done with my five year bachelors' equivalent.

In fairness, I think the system has since been reformatted so that the fifth year is now a (paid for) master's, but still. That graph makes it seem like it's high school with benefits.

MudMan,
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Pricing doesn't hurt.

But yeah, people will pay for convenience. Nobody wants to dig around for pirated links if a simpler option is available.

But yeah, I hear you on international licensing. I try to keep up with Star Trek content and man, I don't know how you can bungle up a licensig deal that much.

The latest bit of genius includes Amazon Prime listing three seasons of Lower Decks, but the third season consisting on a page that tells you they don't have that season available, despite having had it before.

There is a fourth season. It's not available anywhere.

I gave up and pirated it, knowing it will eventually show up in a service I do own. It was all getting spoiled for me in social media anyway.

MudMan,
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Eh... what the hell is that link? The recommended videos on that place are WILD.

I had heard some rumblings about Rossmann being on some weird alt-right focused service, but I had honestly forgotten and I wasn't expecting to get a faceful of it by accident. Yikes.

MudMan,
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And you know what? It makes sense. A big part of making a moment of a media launch is to get like-minded people talking about it. It's harder now that media is largely on-demand, so it's great to have a place to go for the discussion afterwards.

Which is why staggered, inconsistent launches make no damn sense in the 21st century. When pirates can deliver a way to join that hype moment and you can't, for the content you're creating on the service your followers are already paying for you have entirely missed the point.

MudMan,
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This guy gesticulates with one hand for a couple of seconds, then grabs the microphone with that hand and then gesticulates the exact same way with the other hand and just keeps doing that for the entire twelve minute video.

Once I noticed it became almost impossible to keep paying attention to what he was saying.

MudMan,
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This is the tamest version of this meme possible. I do have to say, despite the lack of sex stuff it is not inaccurate.

MudMan,
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So this is a US thing, with the weird half-full-of-water bowls, right?

I've had a messy clog maybe once in my life, but evven then it didn't just fill horrifically with water and overflow. It's such a trope that all I can assume is that maybe US toilets do that sometimes?

MudMan,
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I had it running at 100+ fps.

Some of the settings there are absolute killers. Volumetric coulds is nuts. The game is 90% staring at the ground, and I lose 10+ fps with that. Ditto for transparent reflections, and the settings for global illumination on high are insane as well.

Sure, once you tune it down selectively it looks like CS1... but it also performs like it.

I really don't understand some of the choices they made here, either in the way the visuals work, the way the default settings work or the way they communicated it. If they hadn't come out saying it'd be super heavy and they renamed "high" to "ultra" or had an intermediate setup between medium and high they wouldn't be getting this much crap.

MudMan,
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I'll admit I had to get "Rift Apart" explained to me, too.

MudMan,
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If property rights are still enforced in the turmoil probably indefinitely. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy it, though.

I come from a place where survival agriculture was the norm well into the 1980s. Would have to start having cows and pigs again, need to work out a salting station, which we haven't had for a few decades. I remember soap making was a mess. We got rid of our wood-fueled kitchen at some point, so that's a problem until society settles back in enough to start selling those again. We'd probably have to go back to setting up a corner for a fireplace in the meantime. That's before my time but it should be possible.

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