I don’t keep up on the appliance world very much, but for many years I have been under the impression that when replacing one it’s always a good call to NOT get the Samsung.

I have literally never seen reason to doubt that rule.

I’m actually pretty happy with my current appliances, but I don’t stick all to one brand and I stick with the simpler cheaper designs. If paying for the next higher tier brings higher build quality or upgrades the core function’s power/capacity, then I’ll probably go for it.

From Wikipedia, here is the article snippet that originated the term.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

That kind of suggestive language gives me a large hadron.

It amuses me to play Roblox with my son when he’s on a tablet or console and I’m using the Sober app to run the Android client on my Linux desktop that was built to be a windows gaming PC several years ago when he was a little baby.

He has an old PC that he doesn’t use much, but he’s got a much fancier one on the way.

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 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.

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.

Thank you, GiantChickDicks, for making this Thanksgiving even more wholesome.

And I completely agree. I could see myself as that person getting immense fulfillment from creating a feast for my loved ones. I love cooking even for myself. Unfortunately(/s) I have long held the position of the fun dad and uncle, and that is where my fulfillment lies. I’m the one that keeps all the kids in the other room playing games so they leave the other adults alone.

But when my mom calls down that it’s time for certain kids to help with certain dishes, they go running out of the room to help!

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.

In many cases I don’t think they are even intentionally tailgating. They just suck at driving and they’re used to following way too close at all speeds.

It seems to me that the combination of AI + engagement stats + advertising rates is probably enabling historically massive fraud.

But if the perpetrators of the fraud are tech giants worth trillions, and the companies selling the ads are the same tech giants worth trillions, how are individuals and small companies supposed to make good decisions about their ad budgets or do anything about the fraud?

I’m not going to shed any tears for the advertising industry, but I’m not looking forward to the side effects if the AI bubble pops and vaporizes $10 trillion of tech market cap. (all the big players would still be worth a trillion dollars but people would lose their shit)

I am 100% in favor of pushing the distinction.

Let’s get the pedophiles treatment or therapy or whatever helps them while they continue to not hurt anybody while contributing to society.

Let’s get the child rapists 3 hots and a cot with concrete walls all around.

I can totally see conservatives processing it that way.

You know how they are always looking back to the good old days when they may have had it worse but people unlike them had it a LOT worse? Well if you keep going back as far as they want to take things, to being ruled by nobles or royal families, taking a wife in her teen years was absolutely nothing. And true servants of God need not be limited by the laws of man or some bullshit.

Consenting adult males, however, have penises and cannot make babies. So it is an affront to fragile conservative sensibilities as well as fragile conservative gods.