TheTechnician27
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571·15 hours agoYeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.
- I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
- I use a Captcha solver extension.
- I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
- I don’t use their DNS.
- I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
- I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
- I use DeepL over Translate.
- I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
- I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
- I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).
YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.
Robot clearly never watched the ending of Fallout 3 about letting the humans do it instead.
So going off the chalice in the movie, the distro that will save you from judgment is the plainest one – the one with the least bloat? That tracks.
I blame both, much in the same way that I’d blame a quack doctor and parents bringing their kids to the quack doctor.
13 words per minute isn’t impressive
Worse than that, it’s abysmal. That would’ve been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren’t nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn’t fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)
On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven’t done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school’s fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that’s the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.
That’s completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It’s just inexcusable, it’s absolutely not the kids’ fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it’s in Oklahoma.
The students will learn using a mixture of artificial intelligence platforms on their computers and virtual reality headsets.
Suspicions immediately confirmed that the principal is a complete fucking dipshit who just wants to chase whatever trends sound futuristic. What an awful person for putting kids through this garbage.
He actually threw $44 billion at it because he’s a fucking idiot who wanted to manipulate stock prices and then was masterfully forced into the purchase by Twitter’s legal team.
However, yes, he has since been destroying it, likely to the benefit of investors such as the Saudis.
Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.
You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.
The original Engadget article which was syndicated here:
(Yahoo! News isn’t as bad with link rot as MSN is, but it’s still not great)
I do realize the importance of the UX, which is why I listed some of the mountain of problems with Windows’ UX that make it an inferior one to Linux. As I noted, the reason people tend to find Linux’s inferior is that they’re simply nose blind to the landfill of Windows UX problems that would be a dealbreaker if they were on Linux but not Windows. (That, or they literally never use Linux and just assume it’s inferior because of memes that say it is.)
The reason I pointed out that Linux has faults with the UX is to say that it’s not some perfect wonderland with zero problems, but it’s a huge improvement over Windows.
7·1 month agoFor VPNs, though, you’re generally paying through the VPN provider, not through the app store to have access to the app itself.
Yeah, as long as the payment method is FOSS, secure, and works as intended, I have no serious issue with pay-once software being introduced. There are apps from F-Droid I would pay a few dollars to use if required, and I’d be happy if it meant more and higher-quality software.
I feel like the freemium model they mention with subscriptions is just begging for F-Droid to be enshittified. F-Droid would really, really need to prove themselves with pay-once applications first for my liking before moving onto something so much more drastic.
And then ads are just a non-starter. Ads only exist to be psychologically manipulative, they’re obnoxious as fuck in the present day, they’re a privacy nightmare, and they’re a vector for malware. I would see it as a betrayal of what F-Droid does for me, and I would actively see F-Droid as being sellouts who are only marginally better than using Aurora at that point.
111·1 month agoUpvoted because your experience is valid, but I will say that mercifully so far, I haven’t had this issue personally. Instead, rather, my Windows 10 installation is basically broken because MS pushed an update that requires it to enlarge the recovery partition, but because there’s another OS past the recovery partition, it can’t. So whenever I use it now, I need to wait for it to try updating itself, recognize that it failed, and then undo the updates and boot again (the entire process takes 10+ minutes). I only use this partition for emergencies where something critical absolutely won’t work on Linux, but it’s still hilarious to me that this happened shortly after I abandoned ship.
It’s legitimately staggering to me how much easier to maintain Linux is for the average use case than Windows. No messing with drivers; has preinstalled what’s essentially a GUI app store to manage literally all of my applications; updates that don’t require a restart; no bullshit with licensure; a trivial install process with zero dark patterns; no malware; and I could just keep going. Linux has faults with the UX, but having switched to it from Windows about a year ago, it’s extremely evident why this stereotype is perpetuated in spite of Linux being the sort of OS I would recommend to my grandma over Windows: nose blindness.
When Linux genuinely improves the ease of use over Windows, Windows users don’t even recognize it as a problem. Like imagine if the roles were reversed where on Windows I could just click a button, type in my password, and update every single one of my applications at once, but on Linux, I had to individually open any given app and check for updates manually. Windows users would rightfully be bemoaning that as too complicated for a lot of users and bitching about how tedious it is to maintain (in the case of Windows, updating is a bizarre patchwork whose difficulty depends on the application’s developers). But since it’s a problem they’ve become nose blind to, when Linux actually fixes this obviously ridiculous issue Windows has, it’s seen as “not a big deal anyway”.
Yeah, the bootloader really seems like a challenge. ADB fortunately is extremely easy, especially if you use a tool like
App Managerfrom F-Droid to correspond package names to specific applications.Just
adb shellwhen your phone is in developer mode and you hook up to your computer via USB, thenpm uninstall --user 0 packagename.
I can’t root my Android phone right now to install something like LineageOS, but yesterday, I sat down, installed ADB, and got rid of a mountain of unnecessary crap that comes packaged with Android and which is installed as a “system package” so you’re not allowed to uninstall it normally (e.g. Gmail).
It’s extremely easy.
Yeah, I was gonna say, Gen IX Pokémon looks like some of the clunkiest, most repetitive shit imaginable.