This is the first complaint I’ve seen about any of the new Star Trek shows that didn’t use the word “Woke” as a pejorative term. I’m impressed and appreciative of your well-thought-out take on it.

You actually do have some decent points, but I’m still an unabashed fan of the new stuff, especially Discovery/SNW.

It IS different, in all of the ways you describe, but every new trek has been a stylistic departure from the previous ones in some way, shape , or form, and I’ve been taking the plot armor Mary sue-ing as one piece of that. (Something DS9 also has to a degree, but they definitely held to the “difficult moral choices” aspect in spite of it).

Thanks for your opinion and insight.

Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it’s been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it’d say “water not found” because the standing water in the water line was “out of date”.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

Not in the US.

On an informal survey of several hundred men aged 18 to 60 at or below the income cutoff for recieving free medical insurance from the state they were living in, less than 10% knew Tylenol was bad for your liver at all and just over 25% knew that long term ibuprofen use was bad for kidneys.

The number goes up when income does, but considering the number of people working for minimum wage over here…

We have a culture of ADVERTISING medication here, every possible attempt at minimizing public knowledge of medical side effects is made at every legal turn because fear cuts profits.

Edit – I should add that I’ve met multiple educated people who heard that the Brits had some super dangerous liver killing over the counter painkiller that they just LET people have who were glad we didn’t allow that kind of nonsense here.

Very few people know what paracetamol is and would be surprised to learn it’s another name for Tylenol.

A few bad people who hate others because they think putting others down means they win picked a fight on the playground. They got other people on the playground to join them because they yelled the loudest and some kids thought that the louder you yelled, the more right you were. The people they were yelling about just wanted to be on the playground too, but the yelling people didn’t want them on the playground, so despite the fact that they didn’t want to, the people being yelled at played a competitive game against the people who were yelling.

After a long long long time (LOTS of sleeps) the yelling bad people won against the people they were yelling at.

The yelling people didn’t know what to do then. They only knew how to be angry and they couldn’t find anything else or anyone else to yell at and people were starting to leave their team because all the excitement was gone and there wasn’t a competitive game to play anymore.

So the bad yelling people panicked and started randomly picking other, smaller groups of people on the playground to yell about. They made up things about them and told lies.

It didn’t work at first, and they tried telling lies about lots of different groups of people one after another, and eventually they started picking on some people who were JUST different enough that some of their old yelling teammates who got bored and left believed those lies and joined the yelling again. There was SO much yelling and it was so much louder that it was impossible for anyone near the yelling people to hear the truth.

And that’s how we got from “abortion as an issue” to “trans people as an issue”.

So, for this, the easiest way I’ve found is to look at it in the following sort of way:

Using the example of coding, you can already USE software, think of that like knowing how to DRIVE a car. Start with learning how to REPAIR the car (GUI building block code).

Then learn how to MOD the car with a kit (high-level object-oriented, TYPED code with an IDE or editor that does stuff like auto complete, syntax highlighting, and has add-ins that assist in getting the typed code to completion).

Then learn how to create your own car mods from “scratch” (get to the point where you don’t necessarily NEED all those editor widgets to help code)

Then learn how the car functions at a base level and how all the various chemicals, heat, and aerodynamics, pistons, filters, etc interact to make the car function (interacting with and modifying OS-level code/low-level languages with things like hardware access instead of applications that run on the OS)

THEN worry about the various chemicals themselves create the energy needed to generate power for the car (firmware on top of circuits and chips like the CPU/GPU/PSU, storage controller boards, audio chips, and motherboard/bios)

THEN worry about the actual molecular interactions occurring in the batteries or fuel at the atomic level (binary electrical functions of the parts themselves, where 1’s and 0’s are just current on or current off).

Just because the binary is there at every stage doesn’t always mean that understanding how the bonds between the “atoms” operate is going to make you a better programmer UNTIL you understand what you’re trying to get those atoms to do and why.

For the briefest of moments, I thought this post was someone opening one of those packages of ea-nasir’s copper.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming

Basically, the rocking back and forth she’s doing as a coping behavior.

Yeah, it TOTALLY doesn’t have anything to do with him getting caught tripping balls on camera right next to his lady friend at the White House table who was so disassociated that the poor girl couldn’t stop stimming.

I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got “randi ke beej” yelled at me.

Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

Oh. Yeah.

There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

Well

You don’t know what

We can find

Why don’t you die for me little n00b

On a magic Corp Por ride

For gaming and everything else I couldn’t easily do on Linux back when mandriva and Gentoo were still considered fairly new distros? And because I didn’t know Linux well yet?

Linux has come a LONG way, but back as much as 20 years ago, doing something as simple as installing suse8 could see you with a fat string of error -3’s just because you had a slightly less common model of hard drive. Forget trying to play one of the few MMOs that existed back then.

Production mac’s were still running os8 back then.

It was a different world and gaming meant windows for almost all major titles because there were only so many WINE contributors.

So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.

I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.

Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.

I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.

All while still drinking and streaming video.

I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.

LOL

Ten years ago I would have just blocked the MAC address.

Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried/encountered them.

That’s great news and it gives me a lot of hope.

You raise some great points though. The average user isn’t going to use workarounds or alternatives, so we should focus on actually solving the problem instead of saying use this instead.

These kinds of things are the first things that come to mind when people start going all “Linux is ready for $blah” because while I can figure out how to deal with these issues, they’re invariably the first things I get phone calls from my non-IT-career friends about when they switch to Linux.

Windows changes insane amounts of interface whatnot on the regular, users can usually figure THAT out, finally, no matter what OS they’re using.

It’s the stuff that just works out of the box on windows or Mac but doesn’t on Linux that’s at issue, and it’s what will continue to halt widespread adoption at the casual user level, unfortunately.

The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)

TPM.

The ability to play multiplayer games that rely on anti-cheat ( seriously, make Linux a hit with the fortnite crowd and the upcoming generation will think of windows as boomerware )

The ability to use an HDMI cable at full speed. (It’s the leading A/V cable standard and the only one some people understand. )

Then there’s the stuff I’m unsure of the current status of but that I know was a problem once upon a time: Online banking, online doctor stuff, encrypted emails from mainstream providers, you know, anything that could qualify as “every day stuff” that works out of the box on windows and yet sometimes requires complicated (for grandma) setup on Linux.

Failed Fact Checks

None in the Last 5 years

I want to marry this rag.

Just out of curiosity, what are the ramifications?

I had a period of time 15 years ago where I was eating about 1000-1500 calories a day for months because I was so busy I’d just forget to eat.

Life is getting to the point where I’m forgetting to eat on weekends again and I’m contemplating just following suit during the week to drop some poundage.

I know if the weight loss is TOO fast there’s a heart component, but is there anything else to worry about?