There’s also Léon the URL Cleaner, which is pretty good.

It’s a “beginner-friendly” distro so people might subconsciously think you should “graduate” to use something “better”.

Which is ridiculous, of course. No reason to switch if it works for you!

If the speedrun strategy is “introduce a stupid law, wait for everyone to go ‘holy shit none of this can be realistically implemented in this timeframe’, wait for OS vendors to just ban the use of the OSes in the country, watch the local industry as a whole to rally and petition the government to stop the madness before there’s a new dark age, repeal the clearly stupid law”, all before the California law comes to effect - I’ve got to say it’s a bold strategy and we’ll see how it plays out.

Edit: Also, not going to upvote a Lunduke video - I’m glad he crams every bit of substantial information in the thumbnails so I can just not listen to him at all

Crackheads? Looks like it was designed by methheads.

My first reaction was, damn, is that from that episode of Top Gear where they made the stupidest RVs imaginable? What janky nonsense is this, I wondered before reading the comments.

Fun thing:

My laptop (from 2020) somehow skipped last year’s update and only recently decided to update to the most recent Windows 11 release. And my first thought was “oh shit, is it going to install that Recall nonsense?” …good news: not only is Recall not installed by default but the laptop is officially too shitty to run Recall. (…it’s perfectly adequate for running everything else though!)

Which got me thinking:

Remember how mad everyone was when Windows 11 came out, requiring TPM 2.0, and how people were asked to buy new hardware?

Gee golly gosh, I hope Microsoft isn’t seriously going to say “yeah, you’re going to need to buy a new computer - so you can utilise all these awesome new AI features, you see.” Because people just love buying new hardware. Again. In this economy.

Don’t worry, this is very old news.

OpenOffice.org was basically stuck in a bureaucratic hell of their own and couldn’t really do major decisions without the leaders’ approval. I think Sun Microsystems/Oracle was involved.

Some high up developers got basically kicked out by the governing folk, so they decided to start the Document Foundation to make LibreOffice, and vast majority of the developers followed. They were just happy to be actually able to do something.

OpenOffice got donated to Apache Project and there’s been very minimal maintenance on it ever since.

Firefox. I’m not happy with how Mozilla Corp is operating, but I’m not switching to a Firefox fork unless there’s actual developer exodus (akin to what happened to OpenOffice/LibreOffice). Ultimately, at this stage, those forks depend on upstream Firefox developers for 99% of the work.

Spent some time imaging a bunch of floppies from my late father last summer, and I noticed that on every single 3.5" floppy box, the keys were the same. The locks had same bitting.

…also just noticed that the single 5.25" floppy box (of Commodore 64 floppies) I have at hand that even has a lock is currently unlocked. And the key is at my parents’ place. …have to check if the key is the same as the rest when I visit the next time.

My Xbox gamertag/Steam id is “Rose in Shadows” and also using “Rosa Umbrarum” and variations.

The inspiration came from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The last line of the novel is “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus” (“The rose of the past endures only in name; we hold the bare names”) Which is why I usually put “Yesterday’s Rose” in the name fields.

I don’t know much of Latin at all. Also, the z in the username was for edginess, to make it a Notorious Hacker Alias or someshit.

That’s a bit weird. They didn’t get this worked up about being called “Micro$oft” or something. This is probably hitting the nerve in a completely different way!

Well, military/espionage operation codenames have absolutely nothing to do with the operation, for obvious security reasons.

So it’s the opposite of epic, actually.

Episode 230: Google
“…over there, you can see a YouTubeAI datacenter on fire. It’s not supposed to be like that.” - Roz, probably

Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.

Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to “why isn’t the sound working?” was usually “you tried to use anything but direct ALSA”.

My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much “this is an awesome platform, you’re sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?”

The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.

Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. …Yeah, I’ve been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.

Not to even mention “blew $500 on Claude credits and spent a whole day on doing something that a professional could have done correctly in 10 minutes for $50”

I was about to ask “I’m mildly concerned, are American Evangelicals okay?” but then I remembered there has never been a time when they have been okay, so I don’t know why am I even asking.

Oh good, the Bitcoin argument.

“Sure, Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy, but you know what else wastes energy? The Visa payment network.”

Yeah, but Visa handles six quadrispillion transactions per megawatthour, Bitcoin handles two drug purchases. Not the same results, is it?

So yeah, training humans takes a lot of energy. But in the end, you get a coherent, capable and well functioning individual. Spend the same energy on training LLMs and you get a system that’ll happily tell you to glue the cheese on pizza or something.

A significant chunk of American pop culture of the past decades is based on the premise that The Government is Hiding Something.

Trump’s going to throw a big wrench in that by releasing fucking everything. Except a few things. A few great secrets.

I swear American pop culture in the coming century or so is just going to be The Government is Hiding The Epstein Files, over and over and over.

I just went grocery shopping and oh wow looks like onions are nice and cheap and domestic.

Early this week I was cutting onions (figuratively), I feel better now that I’m cutting onions (literally). Made some tacos. Things are good.

I was so happy that I could successfully cancel Crunchyroll a few years ago when I was cutting down on pointless subscriptions.

They’re the only service I’ve subscribed to that had frequent payment shenanigans going on. Most of the service works fine, but if you look at the payment side - why, look at the time already, it’s jank o’clock. Payments sure went through as far as PayPal and my bank were concerned, but stuff on Crunchyroll’s end was often just “pending”. Wouldn’t let you unsubscribe while there were outstanding issues, of course!

So if Crunchyroll had promotions that never went through, I would just say, well, that sure sounds like Crunchyroll all right.