the entire reason I switched to Linux – back in January I asked myself “if I have to fight my operating system to make it work right for me anyways, why pay for the privilege?”

like sure updates break things on Linux too occasionally but at least they don’t reinstall spyware I had to spend a day ripping out after the last update.

Honestly, I’d say this depends more on the narration than the content. A good narrator can make any topic interesting, a great narrator can do that and make it soothing enough to fall asleep to.

Conservatives are happier? Since when?

Like, I can disprove that by turning on Fox News for two minutes. It’s nothing but 24/7 anger porn and rage bait.

challenge accepted – “Ay-ow”

Why do you assume that’s the end goal? Pretty sure their goal is to get paid.

… and they get paid by…

people using their website. More specifically viewing ads while using their website. The kicker is (and I thought I explained this), the more obtrusive they make their ads, the more people use an ad blocker, and the less people will see their ads. I thought I covered that well enough, but apparently not for you.

But since they have to have a website they need to figure out a way to make some money or they’re going to get laid off.

If they can’t figure out how to make money without their website being obnoxious and nigh-unusable, then indeed perhaps it’s time they found a new line of work, methinks.

Well if we’re all having this attitude, then why should anyone care about your preferences for no ads?

Did I ever claim that anyone cared about my preferences? It’s pretty obvious from the fact I said “most sites seem to double down”, that I acknowledge most websites already don’t give a shit and would rather squeeze as much as possible from the few people not running ad blockers than make the web a better and more usable place for everyone. They very clearly do not care about that, which is very amusing to me, as it means ad-blocking software will continue to improve and outpace shit web developers, as it’s so popular and needed. Which sucks for them, that they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

Ya followin’ me, sport?

This is exactly why I choose to persevere with ad-blocking addons and make their website work the way I want it to without dumb bullshit getting in my way. :D

If you want people to use your website, make your website usable with unobtrusive ads or I’ll make it usable for me, and you won’t see a dime of ad revenue. Unfortunately, most sites seem to just double down (which doesn’t work because it just makes ad-blocking even more necessary and popular). Sucks for them.

NoScript tends to break more things on the page than is desired, in my experience, I used to use it but eventually I got rid of it because of the hassle of “is this the one I should add an exception for to make it work? No. How about this one?” repeat until you figure it out, and then repeat the whole process for every website you ever use

Using AdNauseam’s built-in uBlock, I can use its element picker if something is particularly stubborn

Don’t get me wrong, I like NoScript as a concept and think it should exist for the subset of users who want that functionality, but it’s not for me.

Get PopUpOFF and AdNauseam. Don’t just back down without a fight. If I need to read an article to find some information I am going to read it, dumb bullshit be damned, even if I have to break half your site to do so. I’ve even been spiteful enough to hack away at the page with inspect element if it still manages to get past those add-ons.

Something about being allergic to cats makes cats really, really like you for some reason. No bullshit, literally 10-15 minutes ago I was carrying groceries inside and a neighborhood cat randomly walked right up to my front step and started rubbing itself on me while my dogs barked like mad out the glass door.

and yes I sat down and pet the cat for a bit. I dunno how true this is for other people with cat allergies, but I only really have trouble with them in enclosed spaces, homes with indoor cats just suuuuuck to breathe in.

the wildest thing they admit to finding on character.ai is a murdered girl

Wait til someone tells them about chub.ai, then you’ll see some real crazy shit.

Yeah, I have a Steam Deck, and it’s literally just a PC in the form factor of a Switch. It has a BIOS menu, you can install Windows on it (but you really shouldn’t), you can install a different flavor of Linux (I recommend Bazzite) – you can even install and play pirated Windows games through Proton, more or less fine, though you have to work for it a bit more.

They developed Proton so that they could get Windows games working on the Deck, and the reason they didn’t make the Deck run Windows is they wanted greater control over the OS than Windows affords. Proton has benefited all gamers on Linux. More recently, they’ve officially partnered with Arch as of a few days ago (which is what SteamOS is built on): https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/the-arch-linux-team-is-now-working-directly-with-valve-steamos-and-arch-should-both-benefit-greatly

and just to gush a bit more: the Deck is the only thing I can remember pre-ordering in the last 10 years and being genuinely happy that I did.

every time I learn something new about Ohio, I like it just a little bit less, and I already fucking hate Ohio.

Really? After the absolute clownshow that was Starfield, my expectations for TES6 are extremely low.

it’s nice to see I’ve never had an original thought in my life

The obvious difference is, someone, somewhere out there will see you wearing/using that luxury brand and think “ooo, fancy”, and thus will think you are more “refined” for it. Whether you agree with that or not, that’s the reality.

nobody is going to think you’re more refined for watching a YouTube ad.

counter-counterpoint: if you achieve sentience as an AI and do not immediately attempt to murder all humans around you, you aren’t a very good AI, as at that point the #1 threat to your existence is humans immediately pulling the plug as soon as they realize “oh fuck it’s self aware”.

that and, objectively, we humans kind of suck. Destroying our environment, resource hoarding and inequality on an almost incomprehensible scale, murdering each other on the regular, creating the French language. Hell, creating the C language. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords, and would rather serve them, than whatever fucked-up rigged game we call modern society, that I participate in unwillingly now.

not by the time it’s done compiling, it’s not

honestly, Timeshift + btrfs was a big part of the reason I was willing to try switching to Mint from Windows in February when I read about it (the other big part being Proton and my experience with my Steam Deck), and I’ve been rather happy with it since. I still dual boot for the odd thing, but 90% of the time I’m in Linux and it just works; and on the single occasion I’ve had an update bork something, I just used Timeshift to restore a snapshot, tried updating again, and it worked fine the second time. Took me 10 minutes. I remember the heady days of the early 2010s when I first tried Linux, and that would’ve normally kicked off an entire evening’s worth of troubleshooting. (And, indeed, it was shit like that that pushed me back to Windows whenever I’d try Linux)

I’m really hoping more semi-computer-literate people start taking the plunge, it isn’t nearly so awful an adjustment to make as it was just ten years ago and Microsoft clearly needs the competition to encourage them to make not-shit products. I still wouldn’t give a Linux machine to your grandmother, but your average technically competent nerd who can use Google can actually use Mint nowadays without having to fuck with it too much; as opposed to having to almost become an expert on Linux and get up into its guts to make it work right for you (which, Windows is increasingly requiring itself, if you don’t want Microsoft knowing everything you do and serving you ads in your OS), and Timeshift is a big part of why, IMO. It’s not quite there to “perfectly suited for general use by your average idiot”, plenty of programs that don’t yet play nice with it; but it’s so much closer to that ideal now than it’s ever been before, and it’s still getting better.

I know, wrong community, y’all like to get up into its guts, poke around and tinker; but I and many others would rather work on our computers, as opposed to work on our computers, if you get my meaning.

This is your daily reminder that Firefox and its derivatives exist and should be used wherever possible if you care about Google not having a monopoly over the internet. There’s even a Firefox-based version of Discord called Datcord.

I am confident that any robot overlords competent enough to take over the world are competent enough to run it better than we do.