I mean, my main machine that I play games on runs mint and I don’t have any real complaints about it. Like, maybe I could squeeze a bit more performance out of it, but most things are running smooth enough for my taste.

Plenty of people are more picky and insist on running things at 240 FPS at 4k for a title that just came out, but, I think most people probably wouldn’t notice a significant difference between games on mint or games on catchy. Maybe a few cases where something peculiar about a specific game makes it chug.

Yah, like, it’s not perfect, but no average user is going to brick their machine trying to use Linux mint, and they’ll be able to figure out how to do everything most people will want to do.

Ok, but robot pickers are expensive capital costs, and are set up to work in a warehouse environment with boxes, not a retail store full of soft goods and shelves. Unless you’re talking about recapitalizing the entire store to be a wearhouse, in which case there is a huge opportunity cost in regards to using good retail realestate for a warehouse.

Gonna have to use human pickers unless the grocery store is willing to completely recapitalize and the margins might not justify the high cost of retail real estate.

Nah, it would be more expensive since they would need to hire more pickers. also would probably loose customers who wouldn’t want someone else picking out their groceries.

To be clear, it doesn’t actually save them very much money. Like, it may seem like they’re reducing the number of employees, but, most of those employees spend most of their time doing other stuff like restocking shelves, all they’ve really done is reduced the number that hop on to registers when there is a rush.

Like… it’s actually more expensive for them in a lot of ways.

They don’t want the risk of actually having to design, build and market products to consumers. They want to sell a fungible commodity that someone else makes a product with, they get to make money regardless of the success or failure of any given product.

Ultimately, they’re not really interested in any of this because they think that it’s a useful technology. They’re only interested because the business model of building a bunch of data centers and selling the computer is simple and low risk. They wouldn’t be putting any money in to it if not for that business model.

Most of the leadership at these companies made their names in the cloud services and web hosting boom. They’re sticking to what they know and what has been the only really big success for the industry in the past decade.

Linux didn’t support the chips because Qualcomm hadn’t released what was needed to do so. They didn’t make the necessary drivers, nor released what was needed for someone in the community to make it for them. Same issue Nvidia cards have had with Linux.

It’s not anything about Linux that makes it incompatible, but the companies are unwilling by to provide support and unwilling to let anyone else do it for them due to being protective of their proprietary firmware.

CKAN (mod manager for kerbal space program) created a multi month long battle for me because it started making copies of the original game for mod installs with symlinks to the original game files rather than just copying it outright, this made it impossible to boot certain mods because part of their first time set up was overriding files. Eventually I realized what the problem was and just manually copied the files in to the folder before loading up the mods for the first time.

WHICH IS INFURIATING! The whole reason I made new game installs was so that shit could be overwritten without breaking the base instal! WHY THEY HELL WOULD IT DEFAULT TO SYMLINKS FOR THAT?

As far as discord is concerned, I’m a proud citizen of Albania now. Much like Eric Adams.

He’s gotten a lot better. Turns out therapy works.

“Name 3 package managers”

I will simply reinstall and forsake my files if it shits the bed catastrophically

So generally, in the PRC, the central government will put out a request or state a problem, and then provinces will attempt to implement a solution independently. If the central government likes the out come of one of the trialed system they might make it national policy.

That’s basically what social credit was. The central government gave a vague cryptic request for potential solutions about low trust in modern society, and a bunch of different provinces implemented various ideas, some via contract to private companies. Some provinces didn’t trial anything, some trialed systems that were basically just credit scores, some trialed a system of ranking “how good of a citizen you are” and gave gift cards and stuff to people who scored high.

Ultimately, the central government choose not to adopt any of them and the various trials were spun down. So, social credit was a lot of things, and thus multiple different ideas of what it was are correct, although a lot of reports on it mixed and matched different parts form different trials to make it sound as bad as possible, and some will just talk about one particularly benign system to make it seem like others are being hysterical. Ether way it wasn’t ever a nation wide thing and is largely defunct now.

I’ve tried a few of those, I always get a buzzing or it gets weirdly hot, one just blew out my headphones. So I don’t really trust them at this point.

The big problem for me is that there is only one port, so you can ether listen to something, or, charge the phone, not both. Just having two ports would solve this.

Also, not something I really care about but a lot of people do, the headphone jack is an analog output, where as the USB-C is a digital output, and you need an analog signal to run a speaker. So they need to have their own DACs (Digital-Analog converter), and many of the USB-C headphones have poor quality DACs that loose detail. Used to be the DAC was just in the phone, and was generally of good quality.

The US was the first place smartphones took off and in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone, so the initial set of adopters got iPhones because android wasn’t really a consideration. Then the network effect, people got what their friends or family had. Also, since a lot of people get their phones payed for through their cellular carrier contract, they not super price sensitive since the cost was buried in a monthly bill.

So lots of people are used to IOS, and don’t see a reason to switch. Especially now with the one major differentiator, walled garden vs open platform, is disappearing with Google locking down their platform.

most people are generally not ok with being tracked and surveilled. It’s only the fact that they aren’t aware of how wide spread a given system is that lets these things grow.

With computers, phones and the internet, the surveillance is not super visible, or the implications of it are not so visceral. People always have this idea that they can just choose not interact with it. So it’s much less prominent of a worry for most people.

But with a networked camera in a public space recording everything, able to easily map every trip someone makes by car (which is basically all trips in much of America). That sets off alarm bells. That’s an immediate “what the fuck? Who said you could do that?” From most people.

Flock was betting no one would notice, or that no one would care. They’re so chronically online, tech business brained, that they failed to understand that most people see a meaningful distinction between the internet and the real world. This was inevitable, and now it’s a huge boondoggle and their company is probably cooked long term.

I mean, I see it all the time in like, military history books. But like, not in casual conversation or company statements.

They’re offering a 5 seat SUV body as well. Not a minivan, but, closer.

There are immutable/atomic distos downstream of Debian and Arch as well.

But I’m just not convinced atomic or immutable systems really bring anything to the table in regards to a daily driver. Like, the problems they solve are not that prevalent in my experience, and the limitations seem very extreme.