Well, the Snaps are one of the things they took out. Flatpaks are enabled in the software manager by default though.

I believe everything that comes preinstalled, including Firefox and LibreOffice and such, is installed the traditional way as if you did “apt install firefox.”

I installed LibreWolf and like it. It’s just firefox with telemetry removed and some privacy hardening out of the box.

Check out Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu but has Canonical’s controversial stuff removed, plus an added layer of polish.

Alright fine, I can tolerate the little ✨AI ✨ sparkles in my M365 webpages a while longer if it means more kaboom at the end.

I wonder if it’s a white balance thing, as in the setting you’d see on a camera or in a post processing tool.

For instance, consider that “soft” or “warm” light bulbs (say 3000K and below) are common in cozy indoor areas. They cast a much more yellow color of light compared with a daylight bulb or actual daylight, which will look very blue in comparison.

It’s like the model detected that the image was people in a living room and it applied a warm white balance to the whole picture because most images of a family in the living room have warm lighting globally.

But since it is a machine and apparently has not yet been explicitly taught that comics generally have bright colors and no strange tints, then it does not adjust accordingly.

I wonder if that is even giving it too much credit. Maybe it’s just the deterioration from all the iterations of garbage in, garbage out.

I didn’t exactly say I was innocent. 👌😎 👍

I do read what they say though.

Wow, this is really impressive y’all!

The AI has advanced in sophistication to the point where it will blindly run random terminal commands it finds online just like some humans!

I wonder if it knows how to remove the french language package.

You just aren’t thinking like a billionaire, man. What you do is get the two people anyway, and still force the 70 hour work week.

Your job is not to find a reasonable steady state of operation. Your job is to exploit the resources before you (even the ones with emotions and families) to extract value for the shareholders in the most efficient way possible, before somebody even more evil and clever than you figures out a better way and we direct future fresh meat to his meat grinder instead of yours.

Turtles are kind of in between with their wedge-shaped heads. They need the awareness to hide from predators, but some of them are also predators themselves or they at least snap at fruits and veggies to eat them.

Here’s my tortoise doing his best disappointed-in-you baby yoda:

And here’s the yellow belly slider locking target on to some shrimp.

But it sounds like the rules aren’t as consistent in the water, judging from other comments. Even something like an alligator snapping turtle’s eyes are no further forward than these pics.

Your comment just made me realize I did a kind of GOG holiday sale shopping spree this year after having not done a steam holiday sale purchase in like a decade.

And the majority of it was having cheap easy drm-free access to some very good and very old games. Like yeah I know I have my ISO of the TIE Fighter collector’s cd-rom somewhere around here, but if I can permanently have legit drm-free access to all versions of the game for just a few dollars, then supporting the business enabling that is a no brainer.

So the space obsessed man-child generated his own stupid encyclopedia, and for this generous all-giving knowledge resource he chooses a stylized BLACK HOLE for the logo.

It feels like the nerd equivalent to that quote about how the anti-semite arguing in bad faith enjoys seeing others frustrated by their hypocrisy. Here lemme just find that pasta…

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Jean-Paul Sartre

I know I am not alone here, because Lemmy and all, but holy god damn does that little AI sparkle trigger me more than any other AI term or image.

Yeah the “shopping around” aspect isn’t even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.

Today the situation is flipped. It isn’t difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you’ll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.

The problem is that right now the “good” prices are crazy.

I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.

I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.

And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.

I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.

impossible! I checked!

I watched the Steam Frame VR headset video of his, after not watching for a long time.

His voice was grating, sure, but the overall delivery was so much worse. He was like a cartoon character that couldn’t decide if they were doing an advertisement or a school report.

Oh I’m well aware, that’s why I threw in the part about needing to be utilized. Because even if the engineers are good with their finished product, some VP will eventually ask their director why the team’s output has dropped or why they have so many people for so little work.

I’m an engineer working on a new product right now. Fortunately we’re a small outfit with niche customers.

That’s one thing I love about FOSS, that the only stakeholders are the devs and the users. The goal is to make software that’s good at what it does.

When it comes to any tech company’s product, you not only have all the stakeholders that corrupt the end product, but you have giant teams of marketers, designers, engineers, and managers that need to constantly justify their existence and or be efficiently utilized at all times.

Honestly it’s like lesser version of enshittification, the tendency of commercial products to always be changing things.

Well, like any decent VR game there are settings to help with that. I’m pretty sure I used the teleportation movement the whole time even once I was used to it and didn’t get nauseated.

Getting used to it was a huge factor on its own. Back then, I had been playing so much VR that in the flying game Ultrawings (think pilotwings for VR) I worked my way up to where I was flying the stunt plane with full FOV and no anti-nausea measures enabled.

That whole article reads like he was a reasonably intelligent person who was born into a christian family. So he’s been conditioned to automatically see homosexuality as bad, and been educated in writing eloquent arguments to support his position, but he’s just aware enough to not take a stand and actually say what he thinks because that would get him in trouble.

Even just considering your snippet:

I’m pretty sure there are genetic dispositions towards different kinds of sexual behaviors and patterns—just as there are genetic dispositions towards such things as alcoholism, racism, elitism, etc.

This is just an opinion and the logic seems sensible. But why make the comparison to only negative traits and vices?

A genetic predisposition towards homosexuality does not make homosexuality a ‘good’ or a ‘right,’ or even ‘okay’ for some people.

Stating the obvious then referring to 3rd party opinions. Doesn’t seem to do much other than keep up the negative tone.

Just as with every other human behavior, a wider worldview must be used to judge the righteousness of a human action or behavior—including acting on homosexual tendencies.

Whoa, I agree! And using my view of the world and society at large I hereby judge that we need to lay the fuck off of people who act on their homosexual tendencies and focus on actual problems! I wonder if the author can say the same.

Also, I just want to point out and give a “fuck that” to the heavy focus on “choosing” and “acting” rather than simply existing. In my experience that is a very common step in the short process of dehumanizing somebody and mentally writing off their concerns and rights.

Dehumanizing somebody for a trait they were born with is obviously doable, but it is still a tougher sell for some people than dehumanizing a person for an intentional act. Even if that act didn’t hurt anybody or anything.

I’ll leave the whole train of thought of “how can you punish people for acting like the thing they were born as” as an exercise for the reader.

If there was one organization with the motive and resources to help develop an open phone hardware platform, Valve sure seems like a good contender.

C’mon Gabe, make a name for yourself in computer history. Secure a place in the history books next to Torvalds and Stallman rather than Gates/Jobs/Zuck types.

Make “steam compatible phone” become the new “IBM compatible PC”!