A mindset I just fell into as a much younger man for reasons I no longer remember was assuming everyone knew more than I did and did things the way they did them for a reason. And I should learn what that reason is before I go proposing changes.
That mindset has never steered me wrong. Even when I change something someone else put in place what I come up with is a better solution for taking the time to understand why the previous person did it the way that they did.
Advertising being allowed to become the dominant monetization method for the internet was a mistake.
I’ve never seen anything that makes most of its money from advertising that doesn’t get worse and worse for it over time as a result. Once you let the advertisers in they will ruin whatever it is they are being allowed to leech off of. Might take 1 year, might take 20, but once they get that foot hold they will run it into the ground because like a billionaire and money, it is never enough.
I have no plans to make a shift away from Android based purely on this. I already maintain fairly platform agnostic software and service usage patterns just for these kinds of reasons. So just calling smartphones “done” as an active interest and just using whatever is the cheapest thing that gets the job done for as long as possible is not a very hard thing for me to do if it comes to that.
I found some generic guitar riff mp3 years ago I liked. Been using that on every phone since then.
But not his job right? He alone is far too valuable to be replaced by an IDE. /s
Gross. It looks like an open air mall food court.
I use whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is on my desktops and usually laptops (besides my Macbook) at the time, and whatever the latest stable Debian release is at the time on my home lab servers.
I am very much a utilitarian and function over form kind of person so I choose what I do because it is the best fit for the problem I was trying to solve, usually with little thought to looks or UI design. I find I don’t really care so much how something is done on a given platform, just that there is a way. As a result stuff like theme options, dynamic wallpapers, etc are not something I really care about. I have been using the same black image as my wallpaper on every computer I have used for at least a decade now for example. I arrange the UI in whatever way I feel is the most functional for me within the constraints of what the platform supports out of the box. Meaning I couldn’t care less for stuff like the old school Window blinds program and what not.
Ubuntu over Windows because I wanted to get away from the ever increasing ads and general slop that Microsoft was putting into Windows while still retaining some support for gaming(thanks to Valve and Proton) and building my own systems.
Debian on servers over Ubuntu or something RPM based because Debian stable is rock solid and will run whatever you put on it without issue in my experience.
The biggest issue with AI as it currently exists with LLMs and such as I see it is that there is a pretty big gulf between what AI is today and what the average person has been taught AI is by TV/Movies/Books/Games their entire lives.
And OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, et al are heavily marking the former as if it is the latter.
The big players are marketing the expectations creating by science fiction, not the reality of their products/services.
I like the Nathan Fillion comment during some red carpet interview when the interviewer was trying to egg him into saying something that would get rage clicks from one side or the other of the current political trash fire.
“its just a movie guys”
Superman was not a brooding edge lord until Snyder’s take outside of specific story runs, and it is obvious that a lot of people don’t know that.
I don’t understand how someone makes the logical leaps they do in these kinds of cases. Even from a purely selfish stand point, the risk of exactly what happened and the fallout are just not worth it to make that appointment right then and there or just have the kids sit in the lobby.
I must be losing my grip on reality, trying to reason why someone that thinks this way does the things they do.
No matter if you end up getting him a pair or not. Be sure he understands that such things as bullying people for having the “wrong” shoes is shallow clique nonsense and he should be better than that.
I recognize that news outlets have bills to pay, and I am generally willing to pay for something when it is worth it to me. But they all need to realize that not all of them can get away with a $10-$20 a month subscription fee. That is as unsustainable as the current advertising in every square inch of free space and data broker model.
A far more healthy for the entire news ecosystem would be accounts linked to your online IDP services of choice (Google, Apple, Microsoft, whoever else has one they want to support) and things like Google Pay/Apple Pay. Then you pay some small usage fee like power/water/toll roads. Then how much you give any given outlet depends on how much of their stuff you use.
That would refocus news on being things people want to read and less on advertising influence as well as cut back on the rampant consolidation that is and will continue to come of the current models.
The average person doesn’t like violent civil unrest, shocking.
Also, I bet you can mess with the numbers to mean about anything you want by changing what classifies as “violent”. A lot of people include property destruction in their definition of violence. But a lot of other people don’t and only consider that property damage.
content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners
That is a honey pot rights holders will be falling over themselves to pay Plex for access to once they hear about it.
Been telling anyone that would listen that they need to get out of Plex since they implemented that first iteration of trying to require you to sign into your own self hosted server with a Plex.tv account. They were telegraphing what direction they were going in with that kind of user hostile move.
Lots of responses about how it was easy to get around so no big deal (or worse that they liked it for some coping mechanism reason) and that nothing else was as easy and feature rich as Plex so it was worth it.
Well now a few years down the road from that they are now going to use that beach head on everyone’s Plex server they can to collect what is being watched and sell it to the highest bidder.
Nothing teaches you what the documentation says like plowing ahead without reading it, fucking something up badly, having to crawl back to the documentation hat in hand and actually read it.
I find that Apple supports their software and services on platforms they don’t own cradle to grave while holding their nose, seemingly just so they can say they are available on other platforms. And catch a few bucks from people that don’t have their hardware but really want to watch Ted Lasso and the like legally on their Android/Roku/Fire TV device.
Sure, it technically works, but like you have seen it is clearly a very distant afterthought.
Open a Grindr account using his profile picture.
Advertising as a concept is not bad. But given the realities of capitalism, the greedy executive and shareholders can never resist the easy money. As a result anything that implements ads will eventually be completely overrun and ruined by them. Might take a year, might take 10, but once that door is opened it is inevitable.
My solution is perhaps more convoluted than most. But I got tired of trying to cherry pick the best printer from the limited selection and built a Windows 11 VM in Virt-Manager and passed through the USB port my printer is plugged into. Now I can buy whatever printer I want/need without worry of compatibility.