When you make a lot of money, the number you see in your account starts to become part of your identity because it differentiates you between you and the people you see every day.

“Tres Comas is for winners.” (A wonderful line delivery by the huge asshole venture fund bro in Silicon Valley, that illustrates your point)

Where would I even start.

There’s a lot of good information provided video game reviewers. I tend to start there, when looking for something new.

In particular, I’ve learned about entire genres such as “cozy games” and “couch co-op”, that way. Then, once I know what the genre I’m in the mood for is called I can search for “best cozy games of 2020”, to find ideas of what I might like to try.

In order to not worry about whether each game will run, I feel that the SteamDeck is the current nicest all around game console available, followed by the Nintendo Switch.

The first thing I do to, if I need to get the size down, is swap out Gnome for one of the X11 Windows managers, usually XFCE.

I usually do this by starting from the minimal install and building up, as schizo already suggested.

That said, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Linux Mint is an easy way to get Debian’s core with the XFCE window manager.

Looks like Mint starts at 3GB - 8GB, depending on options chosen?

Disclaimer: It’s honestly been awhile since I really paid attention to my own Linux install size, as long as it’s below 40GB.

the live disk won’t find my Wifi

Oof.

In case it helps: I have solved that problem for myself using a $9.00 USB Wifi dongle.

For whatever reason (other contributors facing the same issue?), I have found that every cheapo USB Wifi dongle I have tried has worked perfectly with the minimal Linux images.

I realize I might have just gotten really lucky a bunch of times, but it could be worth a try.

Lol. Good point.

Dang. Not a scrap of awareness of the irony, in the article.

I’ll bet substantial amounts of money that the claim of “advanced reasoning abilities” will be ruled to be outright fraud, if it ever goes to court.

It’s the same claim made by traveling freak shows about horses that solve algebra problems, and the technology is essentially the same, under all the abstractions - learning models are great at repetition, and don’t understand jack shit, today.

“We’re confident that the AI we sell can take care of everything…except anything we actually want to see get done correctly (such as selling it).”

They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries.

This is a great point!

Yeah. At least until his yes-men high five him and slap him on the back on his way to board the deep space or deep sea vessel that he designed himself.

But losing 75% of population, I can see some nuclear war breaking out

Seems pretty likely (eventually). I take hope that I’ll be in the direct blast radius, and not a mutilated horribly scarred survivor.

I choose not to think about this one much because it’s well outside my circle of influence.

The current trend sucks, obviously.

But historically, we used to be so much worse to each-other.

There’s reasons (data and practicality) to have faith that things will continue to improve.

But it won’t be enough, for many of us, in many of our lifetimes, so let’s all stay angry and active.

Lol.

“But honey, I left you a README file…”

Ha! I have an AI for that! Gotcha!

…

On, but the AI trains now on other docs that I used an AI to write…

…

Oh shit…

Yeah. When I need additional insights on a difficult technical configuration, it’s nice to be able to speak to an artificial insufferable dipshit, rather than a real human insufferable dipshit.

The AI ones continue helping me even after I explain to them how they come across to real humans. (I do my best not to mention it to the insufferable Human dipshits, of course.)

Yeah. We desperately need anti-trust laws to actually be enforced. I think we’ve proven that nuanced and thoughtful rules don’t cut it, so I’m in favor of some deeply restrictive new rules that are impossible to mis-interpret.

I also think we should create laws with immediate financial incentives for breaking up monopolies.

I’m essence, we need a law that I, as a random citizen, can just climb into any parked Amazon truck and take it home.

I think Amazon would be a lot more interested in splitting the company along appropriately legal lines if the alternative was the owned capital just getting declared public property on a random Tuesday next year.

I’ve found enshittification to go in cycles, with mixed results for recovery.

• Google successfully embraced extended and extinguished XMPP, but now it seems like most folks use Discord, Skype, Zoom, Signal, and whatver Meta calls their spyware today. Our chat experiences certainly aren’t living the FOSS dream, but at least Google Talk doesn’t feel mandatory anymore like it briefly did after it “extinguished” XMPP. (Did Google kill Talk? I can’t keep track of what Google hasn’t killed yet.)
• Mobile operating systems have been a bumpy ride with highs and lows, but Android, the current most common mobile OS, is a lot more open than anything we had before. The vendor builds of Android that most people accept are, indeed, enshitifying now, so I guess the verdict is still out.
• The web itself tried hard to go fully proprietary several times: with Microsoft COM, Microsoft ActiveX, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, among others. These are all completely gone now. Today, almost every scrap of technology serving and browsing the web is open source. Of course, most of search is still closed and enshitifying, and the open options for social media are very new, so there’s still plenty of room to improve or lose ground.
• The Commodore 64, a (delightful, but closed) proprietary platform, was once the single best selling single computer model of all time. Today that title goes to the Raspberry Pi, a mostly open hardware specification that is rapidly improving.

Anyway. There’s cause for hope, along with plenty of reasons to be concerned.

Annecdotaly, a recent patch had notes that implied it fixes this issue. I got so tired of the dock being unreliable that I haven’t confirmed it, though.

I am unable to speak using contractions.

Same. I am anxious that the alien dopplegangers will figure this out, though.

You make some great points.

For anyone having trouble wrapping their head around doing this analysis for themselves, I’ll share mine:

1. I seriously doubt my personal operational security (OpSec) has kept my own federal government out of my business. I might be one of the few people who could have a chance, but I’m not interested in spending my energy that way.

I like to think my OpSec has kept foreign governments out of my affairs, but I’m honestly not sure. I know my government’s rules, because I read my local laws. There’s a lot of governments whose rules-of-engagement I don’t even know what are, and I’m confident that some of my “someone could probably” conspiracy theories are science fact somewhere in the world. Guessing which/how/when is a lot harder, than just suspecting/assuming I’ve missed something.

2. I’m confident that my OpSec is good enough that large corporations know that I exist, but are confused about me. I like it that way because I’m 90% sure they’re colluding to keep my salary lower, and that pisses me off. Thankfully big corporations aren’t motivated to do much more than make it inconvenient for me to evade their net.

3. I’m less confident about smaller businesses, honestly. Like anyone, I use a local dentist and barber. I didn’t choose my dentist or barber for their Cybersecurity practices.