Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme. I mined bitcoin in the early days when you could literally make 1 whole bitcoin in two weeks. The next two weeks I mined 0.3 bitcoins. That’s when I realized that it was a scam.
It’s not about facilitating peer-to-peer transactions like its proponents claimed. It’s about creating a huge money store. The more we use it the more inefficient it gets.
The dislike button would be a godsend with all this ai slop.
Yeah I think a lot of Apple users get really attached to their gadgets and want to use them forever. Also, there’s the resale value that helps the kind of customer that wants to buy the new thing every year. So making sure that the products hold up for a long time is probably a really solid strategy for them.
This is unironically a huge issue, and it’s just fascinating how the psychology of pricing and valuation works.
Semi-large company needs something. They make a budget for €100k and start looking at different alternatives. They find alternatives a) €120k, b) €80k, c) €15k. I bet you they’ll try to ask their superiors to expand their budget in order to buy the premium €120k solution, and they will not in any way consider the €15k one.
Come to think of it, it goes beyond software as well.
My biggest issue with PDF it’s hard to read on screens. On top of that PDF forms are notoriously buggy, tables are almost impossible to machine-read without specialized software, and even copy-pasting can be a hassle.
I get that print will continue to be a thing to some extent, but I don’t think that business or government documents need to be typeset with static pages. I think it’s time we move on to a much simpler standard that is made for free-flowing text.
PDF has also been problematic as a standard format, since it referred to proprietary features up until 2023.
I have a Pixel 9 Pro because when I bought it it had the best camera that you can could in Europe. I tried the best iPhone and Samsung phones at the time and Pixel was for sure better, especially in low-light conditions.
Only Huawei has better cameras (by a fair margin as well). I’ve never experienced that it feels slow or underpowered, but maybe that’s the case on paper.
I think lots of people would care if it had a fair algorithm. Tinder is hated for several reasons, but that’s probably the main one.
We’re supposed to excuse Americans for what they endured in 9/11 but fuck if we show any signs of empathy with Iraqis that lost half a million people because George W Bush threw a tantrum.
Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.
Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.
I’m hopeful.
As a Linköping native, I can tell you right now how this is going to go down.
Saab will offer a really sweet deal including Canadian factories that can produce everything that Sweden makes for the Gripen. It will be on a short timeline and a good price. Canada will be locked in to help co-design the next generation of Swedish fighters.
Canada will use this as leverage against the USA. Then the USA will finally set their foot down and tell Canada in no uncertain terms that if they buy Gripen they’ll get locked out of various US weapons systems indefinitely and end up on the US’s shit list. But if they stop their ridiculous outburst they can get on the shortlist for some really cool destructive toys.
Also, aren’t we all supposed to be one team America, you me and Mexico, guy?
Canada will most likely cave and Gripen will have fulfilled its role as a bargaining chip. I wouldn’t even blame Canada, this is how it’s gone down almost every time in the past 30 years and Canada has much better reasons than most to keep on the US’s good side.
Fighter jets running on fiber?
This somehow assumes that your fingerprint is going to vary, and be unique, every time you interact with a tracker. That’s basically not ever going to be the case for casual use.
If Cloudflare fails the tick-box Captcha and I need to tell it what squares contain motorcycles, that would suggest that I currently have a unique fingerprint that they do not have yet enough history on to tie to a person. How often do you get to do the square puzzle nowadays?
There’s no way remote-controlled drones are going to be top-shelf items in the next generation. Even now, comm interference pretty much prohibits the use of remote-controlled drones in any scenario which involves actual armies rather than shepherds with AKs. That’s why Ukraine uses fiberoptic cables for their FPV drones. Beyond that, in a real war satellite constellations will go down real fast.
The scariest part is how the general population just accepts how bad Windows is, because they don’t have a concept of what a decent piece of software looks like. They just assume that they hate computers but are simply forced to tolerate it to do their job.
Imagine they removed the oil, engine and fuel lamps, and then while driving:
Car Malfunctioning. Attempt Repair?
Isn’t it a bad thing to be unique in this context? If my browser is 1 in a million, that means that a tracker can pick me out of a lineup of a million users, no? That’s why a captcha can verify you as human simply by checking a box, because it can identify your unique browser as associated with human activity.
If I’m not mistaken, we want the opposite. We want our browsers to be as generic as possible if we don’t want to be tracked.
Likely there will be no such thing as a 6th gen fighter jet. The pilot will be replaced by AI, so the next gen will have completely different requirements.
To be fair most Gripen crashes happened in the early days, as a result of purposefully pushing the plane and pilot to their limits. Flying low enough to scrape treetops, sudden high-G manouvers… they train like they’re in an actual war.
So KDE Plasma is just a graphical environment that you can use on any distro. It’s my preferred desktop environment, but Gnome and XFCE are famous ones, and lots of nerds/programmers love i3 (a tiling graphical environment which encourages you to use keyboard only).
So when choosing a distro, we’re looking at other qualities.
A Linux distro is basically a collection of tools that constitute your OS. The most notable difference between distros is package managrment – how do you install new packages?
This might sound weird but the reason is that open source software comes with tons of different options that can be toggled before compiling to binaries, and at the same time we need our ecosystem of software to play nice accross different packages. They often depend on each other! So that’s why different philosophies split the community into so many different distros.
When installing new software, you essentially run a specific command from the terminal. Your package manager (which is a core part of your distro) then downloads and installs all dependencies. There are graphical tools to help beginners with this, but in fairness I think you should be prepared to learn to use the command line to search for applications and install them. You won’t avoid the terminal as a Linux user.
A really common distro is Debian. It’s the basis for tons of other popular distros, including Ubuntu. My problem with Debian is that they are a bit conservative, which means that they’re often slow with rolling out updates for KDE.
Since I’m also a KDE Plasma person, I run Neon https://neon.kde.org/ which is based on Debian but focuses on rolling out stable updates for KDE packages.
I do not recommend starting with a hobbyist distro like Gentoo, Nix or even Arch if your focus is productivity or gaming. If you want to learn about computers, then those distros can be incredibly rewarding, but they are time-consuming. Go with something Debian-based, or alternatively OpenSUSE or Fedora.
Regarding your other questions, you likely do not need to swap out hardware. But some graphics cards have poor support for Linux, so research your model in advance. You can also try running a distro of your choice live from a USB stick (most distros support this). It’s slower than running from hard drive, but you can get a feeling for what works out of the box and what may need further configuration.
Many games will not work properly on Linux, at least not without extensive tinkering. If you’re serious about certain games, I’d say Windows is unavoidable. I detest dual-booting but if you only have one computer then it may be your only option. However games that work on Deck should work fine on any Linux machine.
Hope this helps.
Maybe reconsider which model you’re using?