He does look like he’s going to give himself a heart attack.

they say it’s worth it

Narrator: They did not.

Agreed. The biggest reason Zoom took off is that folks could join a video chat from any platform simply by opening a link in a browser.

I understand the distrust for Proton, but I can’t help but notice that this could be a huge upgrade for folks fleeing from Microsoft and Google suites.

Edit: But for anyone who wants to conference call with a clean conscience, check out Matrix.org.

because you probably don’t know how software is built.

Oh shit. Nevermind then.

What I’m hearing is: I can replace saying “I have a dumb little WordPress blog that no one reads” with "I host a part of the ‘Deep Net’.

Sweet.

What do I do if adult tells me they want to play with hot wheels with me? I say yes.

Fuck yeah. Hot wheels are great.

I find it bizarre that people find these obvious cases to prove the tech is worthless. Like saying cars are worthless because they can’t go under water.

This reaction is because conmen are claiming that current generations of LLM technology are going to remove our need for experts and scientists.

We’re not demanding submersible cars, we’re just laughing about the people paying top dollar for the lastest electric car while plannig an ocean cruise.

I’m confident that there’s going to be a great deal of broken… everything…built with AI “assistance” during the next decade.

I hate investing

Mutual Funds / Index funds are your best bet. (Look for descriptive words like “broad”, “mix” or “full market” in the description).

If you can, pick out one named “target retirement YYYY” with YYYY being within a few years of whatever year you will turn 67.

It will automatically follow investing best practices based on your current age - agrressive earlier, and very cautious later.

I’m not familiar with all the details of how it works

Perfect recipe to get ripped off. (Most people I know say that insurance/investment combined products suck. I’ve heard some disagreement whether they’re just a bad deal, or such a bad deal they ought to be a crime.)

I can’t prove anything, but:

• There’s evidence that billionaires are taking much more than they earn, and that we (everyone else) would be dramatically better off without them (whether we tax them away or… Come to some other compromise.)
• Billionaires own most media outlets and social media sites, even those these don’t actually make much money compared to everything else the billionaires own. This makes some people ask why they bother…
• There’s a noticable tendency in billionaire owned media to focus daily on divisive topics. The specific topic changes, but the divisiveness continues.
• There is history of powerful authoritarians investing heavily in divisive propaganda, primarily to break apart and distract groups of people who could overthrow them.

What I have laid out is not proof that today’s billionaires are directing their staff to verbally attack minorites at any opportunity.

But it certainly is something to think about next time a vicious rumor about a minority group comes along.

Edit: Yes. I do understand that neither men nor women are minorities. But there’s still enough differences to allow pushing a divisive narrative, which I suspect is enough reason for certain motivated people.

And to the “could just be a shitty set of incentives” argument. Fair enough. It could be. It’s highly suspicious, but it could be.

Would you accept “under-regulated capitalism” or “capitalism treated as an ideal rather than a tool” as a more specific root cause?

the need to constantly change jobs to move ahead financially also keeps people on unsteady ground with relationships.

That’s a great point.

A college class introduced me to “The Birth of a Nation” aka The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

Did you enjoy it?

Fuck no. It is a deeply messed up racist pile of shit.

It certainly opened my eyes to it’s place in history.

Since the film itself is best left to the trash heap of forgotten awfulness, here’s two points from Wikipedia that feel worth remembering:

• “the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history”
• was the first motion picture to be screened inside the White House (for President Woodrow Wilson)

If I recall correctly, it has been released for moile on and off as experimental builds. Last time I grabbed an APK, it wasn’t ready (as an editor - as a document reader it works fine).

Put any person who has zero computer experience in front of a windows computer or Linux computer and I doubt they would say the windows computer just works and the Linux one doesn’t.

I did this experiment on my own kids. They find Linux more usable, and find it hard to believe people tolerate Windows.

There’s also some indoctrination involved.

But they have access to both, and they prefer Linux. I think that the “Windows is genuinely easier” argument doesn’t hold any water anymore.

Sure, but it’s not quite the compelling argument it used to be.

Today, I’m not sitting here pining for old Linux software that stopped working. And the small amount of old windows software that did finally stop working actually works now only works on Linux with Wine.

That’s another of the decision points that finally switched to fully favoring Linux, for me, in the last decade.

There is such a law, but many of us feel that Microsoft has proven malice a few times, when it comes to open standards.

I will be back to the theaters for this. Sure, I just got my home theater setup how I like it. And yes, classic films in my collection are showing daily at whatever time I damn well please. And my snacks are both superior and cheaper.

I forgot where I was going with this.

Oh right. To the other room to watch a movie without any fucking ads.

Can I find a broken window and start sanding it with sandpaper, as an extreme example?

Yes, provided you have a way to polish it back to transparent again, after changing the shape.

I feel bad for not trying hard or smart enough

People who have accounted for their own spent time often feel the coupons are wasteful. That’s before accounting for the costs of purchases made that could have been skipped, or where the discount led to buying a worse product, and needing to rebuy a better one later.

wondering if there are privacy trade-offs.

I’m not familiar with that service, but it’s a safe bet that it has privacy costs. People don’t set up and organize discount programs out of kind heartedness. At best they plan to sell us something we don’t need. At worst they’re selling everything they can learn about us to anyone with a nickel.