They are much much more likely to use phones/tablets/maybe even Chromebooks. Torrenting is much easier with a PC. Torrent apps for the others do exist, but do require understanding how to use them (and not use them if on cell data without actual unlimited plans). They are used to just streaming things and not really care about keeping the actual files. So even being patient enough to wait for a file to download is at least a good thing I guess.

More efficient if the file is less popular or super niche with few seeders with tiny upload speeds or no seeds (due to age of the torrent or the before mentioned). Torrents for sure are more resilient as far as being harder to just shutdown a site. It is still nice to constantly have all options possible to make getting files easy. Though I will say that torrents are more efficient the larger the file. 4k media being a very good example.

I have added all the houses on my street to OSM and used StreetComplete for things. The only very frustrating thing I hate is that my house is technically in a tiny town’s zone as far as utilities, but my street address is under a larger small town. I have made sure that my house and the others on my street have the mailing address town. But when I search it on Co-Maps it still shows the tiny town name. Which if I wasn’t aware of this happening, I would think the address I searched isn’t the same place. Does anyone know if there is a way to force OSM to use the correct address?

I wanted to like ME because the only thing keeping me on Waze is the user reports for traffic/cops. But they really need a better UI for it. I click report and there isn’t a clear display that it went through. And when I did see that someone had reported a car on the side of the road or a crash (I can’t remember which), it doesn’t show a marker in the actual map. Just had a small mention alert at the top and wasn’t clear where it was. Otherwise it is smooth in animation and works for navigation.

Would be really nice if AA during the deal was able to get docs from Nvidia like they did with music from Spotify. Like source code that could be used for drivers on Linux or older cards that aren’t updated anymore. Schematics would also be fun to see. Not really for AMD, Intel, or some of the larger Chinese homegrown companies to use. But for people that do hardware repair.

Obviously drivers wouldn’t be able to be offered by the distro repos or the major FOSS drivers for legal reasons. But maybe separate patches that could be applied to the less functional FOSS ones by the user. Maybe help with some of the projects that use software to make non-Cuda cards able to run programs that would require modification to run without Cuda. But I know extremely little about that outside of knowing the exist.

Since Nvidia is fine with getting pirated books, seems like they would have a fun time trying to sue for code piracy. None of the above is easy and straight forward, just would be funny to see happen.

Not a bad stance. But they are a major provider of media that regular users might use. They also tend to be the people that would rather not bother with FF if they see it as “not as capable” and never leave Chrome. Which further feeds the goals of Google to be the default just like MS did with IE (but much more cleaver by providing the base for endless forks).

MS fucked up by caring that IE was the “only” option and didn’t push creating such a good base to have forks to keep their versions of “standards.” Google did an amazing job at pouring money into getting Chrome past the early years of lack of mature features (and while they still had good will of helping to get people away from IE).

Not a coder, so my opinion is just opinion. The frustrations presented are valid especially with the open push that AI keeps making to remove all parts of the human element to basically everything. Even beyond his points, we have been seeing such massive levels of tech literacy (and even general literacy) even before the massive LLM bubble. AI isn’t “evil” or “bad” but the rush for profits over uses that actually help humanity (plenty of very real accessibility things that could be game changing if profits weren’t the real reason).

Stuff like Vibe Coding and the lack of understanding old systems and why they were done certain ways means we are beyond fucked if anything happens at different levels. The capitalist profits of companies (especially large and mega corps) come from exploitation of their workers and from the communities of OSS.

The following is personal ranting.

Even just working on PCs for regular people is maddening when my younger co-workers that interact with customers we get have basically zero clue as to things many customers are asking help with. Not like any of them or myself should know everything (especially at a retail PC repair level of pay and zero training outside of “make sales”), but even things from PCs a decade ago is over their heads. One easy example off the top of my head, is just knowing that the normal SATA to USB-A adapters don’t work with 3.5" HDDs due to power and they just assume the drive is dead. Hell even just knowing the general file structure of Windows has become a huge issue for both my younger peers and for the customers knowing where their shit is saved. Went from having some knowledge/understanding, to basically thinking shit is “magic” with zero concern for knowing the trick.

No one “easy tip they don’t want you to know” fixes the person in the post’s problems, or for regaining general tech literacy. But capitalism must go to remove the death spiral of making everything profits over people. And education can’t keep being de-funded which leads to students just being “passed” in order to keep the little bits of funding. The students that would be failing should also not be treated like losers, and not make repeating classes such a big deal (or a social shame). It is better to repeat something and learn, than it is to get into “the real world” and have it much much worse (shit was/is already bad enough with people getting promotions into leadership roles that literally don’t know what the shit is about/how things work).

My main browsers are FF or Zen (a fork of FF), but I think a lot of sites aren’t able to work with just a plug-in due to how deeply they are coded for Chromium. Some of them being Amazon sites like Luna, Amazon Music, and Audible (pretty sure their other media sites/services also refuse to work if any hint of non-Chromium browsers are detected. I have run into non-Amazon sites with media or similar tell me to “update your browser” or “use a supported browser” (which is at least more honest than telling me that my FF is “out of date”).

While there are likely elements in some sites that actually can work with FF (I have had really random moments where I got part of a song to play on Amazon Music but then gives the “browser is out of date” message). The Chromium focused coding is IE all over again. Just a self-fulfilling cycle of making it look like FF is not as capable. And I hate that in the instances where changing the User Agent to be Chrome works, that it just keeps stats looking like Chrome and forks are what people are using (and might lead to seeming like FF is used less than it actually is).

I am in the south region of the USA, so humidity is for sure something I need to be aware of. But I can bring it inside for periods of time if it gets bad enough before I print, and my filament is staying inside anyway. My dad also made sure I know where the propane heater is located for quickly getting the ambient temps well above good ranges for prints. Just have to make sure to be super aware of making sure to keep the side door cracked while I am inside and the other safety stuff. Won’t be an issue in a few months once we finish a big sorting out and purging of other things in the room it will eventually live in. So glad I won’t have to worry about summer humidity in addition to heat.

Thanks! I will definitely make sure to give it a chance to get warmed up slowly before my next print. Once the space frees-up in the house, the next step will be putting an enclosure together for fumes (and get a dryer/heater for filament).

Thanks for the reply! Would have been pissed if I bricked it thinking it would be okay without asking around.

The fact that there are functioning mods that do bring back the feature shows how much MS is just making up excuses. Also kind of funny that MS knows it can be useful since they made a big deal about vertical tabs on Edge. Not like previous versions of Windows weren’t wonky about how things worked with the vertical position anyway. Sure far fewer folks bother moving it to the top or sides, but those folks tend to be really vocal about it. I am sure that if MS does “find a solution” and bring it back.

They will treat it like it is some “innovation” or otherwise “new” thing. At this point I think that 11 is never getting it, and that 12 (or whatever) will reintroduce it to make more people “want” to upgrade faster than they have with 11 so far. Though I am sure that it will be only able to be used if a MS account is used. Maybe even make it something that the ARM/Copilot+ devices get first to try and push those harder.

That being said, I am kind of shocked we haven’t seen a new wave of third-party docks like we saw with XP/Vista. I remember Dell and HP going hard with adding their mods of Stardock back then.

All very valid things, but at least the parts that are people related can be reduced (I personally find that my friends and I are much worse about using phones when at a house). Going in the afternoon on a weekday (and not opening week) means fewer people in general. Also tends to mean older folks are more likely to be there based on my experience working at a cinema (albeit was over a decade ago so maybe boomers are also bad about phones these days). Could even luck-out and be mostly empty and help with the special extra loud candy packaging made for cinemas. Might save a few bucks of course, but doesn’t help with the pre-roll stuff.

I guess I lucked out when I bought my BD-R drive before I was aware that MakeMKV needed extra stuff like firmware. But my LG WH16NS60 is one that took the flash (never had to mess with firmware on an optical drive and was worried I would brick it). But the process was pretty easy and getting into ripping BR after so long meant that the easy option was around to handle the steps. Kind of considering getting a back-up drive to have around if/when the one I have dies (especially since big brands are dropping out or may do so in the coming years).

While not as easy as just using torrents or other P2P. I have found it kind of fun to get back into ripping CD/DVD/BD and learn/re-learn how things work these days. Also nice to have all the options I can to be able to have access to media in the event any of them are down. The only super frustrating thing is that so much of modern releases don’t get physical (or even purchasable digital) releases. And in some cases where a physical release is an option, they are DVD and not even a 720p BD. Digital options are even worse in a lot of random cases where a store might have just part of a show (or even episodes in a season not part of it).

Currently the only real issue that I have is that I really really need to build a new main PC and finally turn my current PC into only being for ripping and hosting what I have. And to get large HDDs to replace the 2TB and 4TB SSDs I currently have for it all of course. I really would like to have good copies of 4K stuff without having to worry about going with bad encodes that look worse than many 1080p releases that my TV upscales.

It is more leeching than sharing, but if it is actually torrenting then it should also be uploading while the “stream” is playing. So kind of like PeerTube. Just really depends on both how it is setup, and how popular the video is at any time. Though it sucks that there isn’t a good way to make sure connections happen.

There are lots of times that I get torrents the regular way that I would like to have uploading to other peers at the same time. But will notice that I get few to zero peers for uploading with popular files. There are times that I will leave it seeding for weeks without any uploading. So I end up deleting the torrent so I can move files or free up space because I already made a second copy to sort. Not always the case, but frustrating to not even see a few MB go to anyone. With PeerTube I see my upload working more consistently, but main issue there is just not often that I am watching something that a lot of others (or any others) are also watching.

The article is interesting, but they really went hard with the title just to only talk about it for like two sentences. I was hoping for more since it seems like a pretty fun topic.

I think that Snowden (and other leakers) would argue that the US is much much less transparent. Though it is best to just assume that all major govs are spying on everyone (even if it makes an ass out of u and me). Though we can agree on open source hardware.

True, but if the option to start using it isn’t there. Then it also won’t have data to even get started. I remember when I first started using Waze back on my Galaxy S3, it wasn’t super helpful (for both the traffic and in some cases the map data). This was mostly due to it not being used by many people in my state at the time (the friend that told me about it used it in a much larger city with more “tech” people around). So even if it doesn’t help me directly right away, I am more than happy to start using it daily to report what I can.

I haven’t heard of that one. Will look into it just to have options.

Good to see devs willing to do the work needed in order to draw hard lines on the capitalist leeches that divert money away from the project. I am looking forward to the traffic system that they mentioned as a future option. Would allow users that are okay with turning on those features for adding crowdsourced traffic data and stuff like marking cops posting up to get their quotas.

Literally the only thing that keeps me on Waze is that stuff. I have to deal with a lot of interstate travel to and from work and knowing that a big crash happened so I can re-route before getting stuck is crucial. I will still make sure to have this installed just like I had Organic Maps as a good option. And to see what stuff I go to that needs to be updated on OSM and StreetComplete. Had to add all of the addresses on my street on OSM a while ago just to be able to correctly enter my address. One of those addresses that is listed as one town for mailing and is technically within the borders of a smaller one with regards to utilities and plots of land.