Canadian here. Usians: make sure everyone you know understands that this is no joke. I live rural, I’m a socialist pinko but I live surrounded by rednecks, and we have conversations about insurgency on the regular. We have many, many Ukrainian refugees here.

Don Tchak never! The dude is completely corrupt, and I hear he has some very nasty sexual proclivities.

My bad, I was a kid during his Oilers days and I mean, look at him…

I also didn’t know what it was when I discovered their forum, which is a combination of kool-aid addled VCbrains and tech geeks having normal, informed conversations about tech stuff. I was hanging out there for a while, until I realized.

He’s gonna go full Buggin Out

He’s from Alberta, he didn’t turn, just stopped hiding it.

It’s worse for GenX, we watched Fat Albert and learned about things like drugs and prejudice from it. The Cosby Show happened during my cynical, anti-wholesomeness teen years so I didn’t watch that so much.

I started reading for the same reason, except it was he Narnia books and my gramma 🫡

I think the thing that’s shifting attitudes these days - aside from the fact that stability has long since arrived on the Linux desktop - is that Microsoft has taken a nosedive in terms of functionality at the same time, with little to indicate that the situation will improve on their end.

A fully stable desktop that never breaks is not really on the table, but Linux is by far the most stable and user-centred one, at this point.

Agree. I live in Winnipeg, Canada, and I have visited local datacentres - anything built in the last twenty years would be very hard to physically penetrate with stealth alone.

There are older ones which might be a bit less sophisticated, but that’s not the norm.

Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.

Those old computers you speak of: They worked. There is no comparison to be made here.

They were built in order to give us an edge on the battlefield. More accurate artillery and the like. They did math which humans could do, but which would take humans weeks or months, and the answers were required within timeframes more like 12 hours, because war.

They were so useful, so valuable, that they were worth the treasure spent. They conferred a kind of superintelligence to their users. Those with brains to understand could see this, and so yes, hobbyists found their way to building their own machines, once small CPUs became available, however janky. Anyone who had to do math, who had to do math, went into debt if they had to, and learned to use these janky beasts because the advantage was weeks or months of time they didn’t have to grind on paper.

There is nothing about AI that resembles any of that.

Radical interoperability. If I want to subscribe to this board via Gopher, or via Dialup modem, there should be an implemented way to do that.

(GreenKnight23’s Internet goes out) (Lambo stalls and blonde turns into Steve Ballmer screaming DEVELOPERS)

I ended up with adult “friends” who were putting up just as big a front as me, probably also autistic in many cases really, but very far from any sort of acceptance of that. But I believed that everyone was like this, others were just better at it than me, so I never questioned a lot of things.

Once I reached paragraph 2 and began to act on that, well, they have scattered to the winds. Though to be fair, I did move an hour away from everyone I have known, though for me it’s just pragmatic; I want to avoid the food riots (or possible Troubles, if the Usians go ahead and invade us; it will go as well for them as it did for the British in Ireland).

IANAL, but if it’s true that a lawyer only needs to create Reasonable Doubt in the mind of a single jurist… I’m pretty sure I could do that. Of course, her lawyer will probably be a gig economy worker too, so they might just pepper spray her and plead guilty while she chokes. Badum. Tish.

(Marxist) But also, this woman, and all gig economy workers besides, is basically a sharecropper without land. I don’t specifically think that what Nat Turner did was right, but I do understand why it happened. Likewise, someone who probably lives in their car 75% of their life because that’s about all they can afford, forever, at the door of some comfortable warm secure home of a person who is participating in your exploitation just so they don’t have to go retrieve their own extreuded meat paste sandwich… well like I said, I don’t think what Nat Turner did was right either.(/Marxist)

More generally: Back in the 80s when everyone had a suburban home and nobody suffered, you still wondered if those teenagers in back of the McDonald’s were messing with your food… and they were. And those kids had a bright future, or so they believed. We didn’t appreciate what we had.

This is the LSCD (Late Stage Capitalism Doomer) version of a little extra sauce on your burger. Pillorying this prole won’t even actually make anyone feel better, and it sure as shit is not going to fix a motherfucking thing.

😂

They know that whatever their money religion’s ministers say, at street level, NYC will be a great place to live, if Mamdani gets his way.

I display my movies and music in the order they were added by default, but I do recall a lot of historical problems with that functionality. It has not been a problem for me the last year or two, I would say, but I do remember it being a problem.

There’s still lots of room for improvement, to be damn sure. But can’t beat the feeling of freedom, you ask me.

Would you like help/guidance on your next attempt? It definitely works, but possibly not on corporate devices like Roku and such - I never did have a lot of luck with those, other than I think I had Jellyfin casting to a couple of Chromecasts we have kicking around. Not when the internet was out, of course, cause why would they keep working if Google can’t get their data on the spot?