• 1 Post
  • 151 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • Oh they most definitely do. I briefly worked at a company that sold data to car flippers and we for sure knew if any particular car was ever used as a taxi or not. Even if we didn’t buy this data off taxi company directly, we could easily determine it by seeing unusually high mileage between services and checkups. And we definitely know the identity of the driver, so it’s just a matter of putting 2+2 together.












  • Exactly! I rant about this a lot, but I know at least couple of people who run with laptops that have broken audio. As it turns out, installing sound card drivers is not really an option as the janky-ass drivers that the manufacturers put out nowadays can irreparably brick your entire system. It is beyond my understanding why recovery, restore, and even safe mode would even try to load them in the first place, but, apparently they do, and then crash before you could even do anything, leaving re-install as the only option.

    Meanwhile, I rm -rf-ed my /boot directory the other day, and then df-ed a couple gigs of /dev/zero straight into /dev/sda. Got it back up running in just a few hours… of kicking myself for why would I do such a stupid thing.




  • drathvedro@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.worldPrivacy tool
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    arrow-down
    14
    ·
    26 days ago

    This is by far the worst take I’ve seen on the topic. Sorry for being rude, but it sounds like you haven’t touched a computer since that last time in 1990.

    Power management is a joke

    Surprise, it’s 2024 and windows will obliterate the battery even after you turn off the machine.

    There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.

    There is, though it’s via dconf, but it’s justified as it’s a thing few people would want to tweak.

    Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel

    Sounds like an excel problem to me

    Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort

    I don’t use either, but I’m pretty sure filter views are available in libreoffice calc. Open source DB’s and Access? What are you talking about, exactly?

    Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default

    The what now? Are you talking about CUPS daemon? systemctl stop cups && systemctl disable cups. Enjoy your 2.5megs of ram back at a cost of not being able to print anything. Now try and do that on windows without bricking your system.

    and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?

    If you insist on needing a GUI, go ham. But don’t you diss the command line. Being able to do things without GUI is anything but a con.

    Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”?

    That’s notoriously a windows problem, not a linux one. You must be misremembering it

    Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won’t even recognize it

    Not recognize it like, not being picked up by xinput, or not even listed in lsusb? I haven’t ever heard of non-class-compliant mouse. Is that something to do with the G-Hub thingamajig? If so, that’s on logitech, not linux.

    My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of windows since 2000, at the least, and would probably work on Win95

    No, it won’t. If linux didn’t pick it up without a driver, then win95 won’t either. And it’s even worse in reverse. I have a bunch of old hardware that won’t ever work on modern windows because the last drivers released are for WinXP, which are not compatible nor even portable to subsequent versions. All of them are plug-n-play on linux, though.

    Linux doesn’t even use a common shell

    Huh? You mean the desktop environments? The shell is a thing very few people ever care about.

    If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

    The overwhelming majority of systems are either in GNOME/GTK or KDE/Qt ecosystem, unless you really know what you’re doing and want to go with something completely different. But even then, there’s a lot of re-use or re-implementation of components from one or the other. It’s great to have this choice. Sure, it can be a hassle if components from one don’t play nice with another. But then, you’re comparing it to windows, that uses components from 3 distinct eras, that don’t really work together either.


  • Not in my area, unfortunately. We do have a couple of local competitors still. But, even though I hate it with passion, I rarely bother checking with them because they have so few drivers it is almost never the case they can even find me a car, never mind price-match the offer, and I usually have shit to attend and no time to babysit multiple apps waiting for one.


  • Well, I’d like that to happen, actually. As it stands, the only use of AI I am legit a fan of is music mixers like suno and udio - it makes me smile every time I hear a creative mix of lyrics and genre. Others mostly just litter the internet with unhelpful stuff of questionable legality. When it gets good enough that errors are so rare that I could trust the output without checking, while being built on free and licensed stuff, I’d be much more more inclined to use them.


  • Well it’s third world problems, but the specific event I had in mind was when Russia froze all it’s citizen’s foreign assets in 2022 in an attempt to save it’s own currency from plummeting. This left a lot of people stranded, myself included. I did eventually get mine out, but the law, as far as I know, is still in place, so I tend to think it was purely by luck and some mistake on the bank’s side. Others didn’t have it that lucky, I’ve heard of people being fined as much as $400 for just trying. But, it’s just one case, I believe there’s lots of other places where you just can’t trust the government with money - African, South American, Central Asian countries first come to mind. Even Canada had a scandal where they froze COVID protesters assets - I don’t support the cause, but I don’t think the government should have power over dissenters assets either.

    Sure, offshore accounts and physical assets can work in those cases too, but it can be challenging to get a hold of them as an ordinary citizen. Crypto circumvents that by being uncontrollable by design and widespread enough that I can exchange it in some back alley in one place and then again in another with less risk and overhead than any other way.


  • drathvedro@lemm.eetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldGet your vote in now!!
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    28 days ago

    I’d say fake money.

    For uber, we’ve never had the overpriced cabs that it was made to circumvent in the first place. It was more of a wild west with lots of smaller companies with in-house made sites. We’ve even had an app that checked their prices, ordered the cheapest ones and cancelled others once a car is found. Then a major player entered the market, and they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, giving estimates but driving by the meter, which ended up consistently much higher in the end. Then uber came, and started undercutting everyone with stupidly low prices, but their app/maps are an unbearable garbage. So they did a merger with previous one, combining the idea with decent app, and continued until competition crumpled. And now they’re screwing both drivers and customers hard, but there’s now no alternative.

    The only good thing that came out of it is incentive structure and a punishment for drivers for not taking orders. It made it so that as a customer you can safely order without fear that you’d have to wait for hours to find a car - your hot potato order can’t be passed off forever, and somebody has to pick it up eventually, even if it’s a bad driver who majorly fucked up recently and now has to take it for redemption, or otherwise lose his job.

    Airbnb never made financial sense to me. Because every time I looked there, I found the same, and much better options, for as much as half price on local ad boards. Seems to be just a convinience factor, as renters just put their properties at 2x there for an off-chance a rich tourist checks in.

    AI to me seems like a dead end. The innovations are cool and flashy, but they inevitably fall short of being reliable enough to be useful. Like, I don’t use chatgpt anyhow because there’s always a chance it’ll spit out plausible bullshit which makes it so that every answer must be double-checked. And if you can find the source to check against, then why even ask the bot in the first place? Same for art, it can get you maybe halfway there, but refining the prompt takes skill and time that’d be better spend learning to edit and make real art instead.

    But for cryptocurrencies I should’ve bought in way sooner. Even if they didn’t hit ATH’s every few years. I find that even drug dealers and crooks are more trustworthy than my own government, who is actively malicious, and has hurt my financial wellbeing harder and more often than even the crypto rug pulls. And that’s coming from someone who got hit by luna, ftx, and even mtgox, among others. Still better than the government straight up saying that you don’t own any of your money anymore. Yes, the ecological impact sucks, but it’s not a crypto problem specifically. I don’t see how mining is worse than, than, say, a literal mining operation across the road that uses electrical heating because they’re too poor to fix their windows and put proper insulation, and running heaters just makes financial sense? There must be regulations to make dirty power more expensive, which will make the problem solve itself. And if we have green energy, who cares what one’s using it for? Mine, game, hang christmas lights, whatever, who gives a shit


  • A think to note is that it was completely salvageable. I believe it’d be just a matter of running sudo apt-get install pop-desktop and he’d be back on track. Meanwhile, on windows, download a sound card driver from manufacturers site, click “install”, and your OS won’t ever boot again, not in safe mode, not in recovery from live usb, not anyhow, because it always tries to load all drivers, including broken ones for some reason.