I at least have a core group of friends that use Signal and I keep Element installed on my phone and computers hoping someday more people move to that over the next decade

That’s on you. Why would this be any different in user behavior? It’s just a difference in underlying tech architecture

Socially it sounds like you want to be an asshole user but don’t want to put in the effort to be an asshole mod or an asshole server admin. Of course you running into assholes constantly is also very likely a personality flaw on you rather than others

I was sceptical on how good it could be when it was first announced. Steam Deck 2 will be day one for me though

I’ll keep an eye on this. Maybe even sub for minimalist usage. Currently use Proton Unlimited and probably at around ~200GB usage for storage and active use the VPN and email. But something fediverse is more interesting to me. I doubt it can suitably replace Proton for me now but it’s at least cheap. Nice to see cloud document/office stuff. Proton still doesn’t have a Linux sync application so that’s a weakness. Less sensitive stuff I’ll use Firefox sync for passwords but that Chrome web browser integration I think is a major feature for the Google ecosystem

I know a lot of people are opposed completely to crypto but for privacy services I would prefer paying with crypto. I prefer numerous options but I generally think Monero should be the minimum. Maybe trocador.app to support more. I will probably sub with a credit card to check it out and support though

Good. I saw an article the other day that kept referring to protesters against Palestinian genocide as “agitators.” They already lost conservatives to thinking mainstream news media was corrupt. Maybe they shouldn’t operate in a way where leftist also abandon them and possibly get hostile like conservatives

I’d have to read more to see if I had any faith in its potential, article paywalled for me.

In my experience with friends, family, and coworkers when people show me crazy loony shit, it’s a YouTube video or a podcast. YouTube was always the #1 crackpot incubator but I think podcasts have passed up Facebook at #2. I don’t know what goes on in the lands of twitch.tv and if that gets categorized as social media and does it even matter since you don’t need an account to view

For a while I thought of Reddit as regularly trading position with 4chan as an anglosphere mass shooter’s favorite social media

Not long ago I finally saw clips of early 2000s Alex Jones 9/11 conspiracy vids. They were like the crazy stuff you’d see a coworker going off their rocker would start showing people on YouTube. I think I’d expect crackpot peddlers to adapt faster than government regulators for how they reach mass audiences

Maybe it would have been better received 10 years ago but I don’t know about being beloved like the elder scrolls or fallout games. 10 years ago was Fallout 4 but even in Skyrim era, it’d be great graphics but without the wonderful whimsy

Starfield is too normal. Bethesda games excel when they take the weirdness of the world seriously. Starfield is too serious conceptually. Elder Scrolls, just the concept of everything being canon because of dragon breaks and other weird aedra/daedra/chim/godhead shenanigans lets writers write wild while it still fitting in as serious in universe

They’ve managed to do that well enough with Fallout even though it’s supposed to be alternate reality world. Still wacky even if not as lore interesting as TES

Starfield is too unimaginative of a sci-fi universe so far. It’s too normal and because of that, they can’t write whacky in a way that people buy into and love. So then they end up judging the game by its systems and mechanics and technical merit way more than they do elder scrolls games or fallout.

Also base/ship building is given too much focus for a single player game. These games aren’t pretty enough to be a single player game that gets beloved for base building like Animal Crossing

The best I can do for the price and consistency is Verizon 5G home internet and it’ll fluctuate between 80Mbps and 300Mbps down. Upload at best 30Mbps. Not lucky to live in a fiber neighborhood. All the cable providers are worse than 5G alternatives though I’m certain the 5G services will get worse with age

Before people just used chegg at least for math homework. Ai chat bots are quicker and can write papers but cheating has been pervasive since everyone once laptops became standard college student attire. Also the move to mandatory online homework with $200 access codes. Digitize classwork to cut costs for the university while raise costs on students. Students are going to use tools available to manage.

This eras, “you won’t have a calculator everywhere you go”

Ya but in discussion of the article, I don’t think it’s about the direction of society. It’s an article about people the author doesn’t like. How they classify them. And an empty call to action at the end to get revenge on nerds of which the author probably would be considered one. It’s a bad article

Purpose of the article, why does it exist and why does it have so many upvotes? Does the article help or harm the direction of society? Is it just an eloquent version of an Instagram comment dunking on people? What communication should be signal boosted that would be effective in driving action towards swaying society in a better direction

I know it feels good to dunk on others and do so with generalities but just the last line, get revenge on the nerds.

Sounds edgy but it’s a slogan that is poor communication. It’s focused on US based tech billionaires and paints them as representatives of nerds. Look at voting data. Tech employees are leftist. People that go to school are more frequently leftist. Rhetoric like this is unintentionally anti-intellectual which promotes conservatism. And in my personal life, there sure seems to be an ocean of nerdy women in the US including in tech like bioengineering and UX and marketing design that is intertwined with today’s techno-facism. I don’t get why these pundits can’t ever stay focused on class warfare and end up resorting to social/racial/gender otherings. Why use language that is so so broad and is a term that most applies to people in your base

Also I’m at a loss at how finance/real estate/insurance/material and manufacturing billionaires have somehow managed to be overshadowed in public perceptions of evil even though they’ve consistently been at it for millenniums and are a cohort of multigenerational families of wealth built on slavery and genocide. They make up venture capital funds that give them ownership across all these companies. Tech CEOs end up owning an ever shrinking portion of a company they did or didn’t found until ownership is mostly a smattering of many large finance companies and family offices. Weirdly fetishistic of proper rich despots rather than these new tech billionaires who still have to go to JP Morgan Chase to facilitate their transactions

Also in the comments co-opting conservative rhetoric like herbivores and I guess carnivores?. That’s weird. Who actually talks like that seriously in real life? My whole life on the left we’ve been so terrible at creating insults but also terms of endearments. It’s weird how bad we are at not only labeling ourselves but also continuing to build terms into positives. Anything eventually becomes an insult towards leftist and conservative terminology is used awkwardly

For the side that places so much emphasis on the power of language, labeling, othering, etc … we’re terrible at it. The side of people with art/literature/communication/whatever degrees. Practically any college level degree is the realm of mostly leftist but in practice people well studied in communication can’t effectively and accurately communicate to people

If Americans discriminated so hard against Chinese Americans - it’d probably hit all east/southeast Asians - to the point that they were excluded from defense/security, that would decimate defense/security product development

Waydroid is very close to greatness. My major hope there is Valve contributions to Waydroid for probable Steam Deck integration will make it incredibly seamless. There’s also the Android Translation Layer being developed

https://gitlab.com/android_translation_layer/android_translation_layer

Anything closer to supporting regular Linux applications the better. Though I’d expect anything like this to just be Android with well funded alternatives to Google applications/services. Whatever happens will be good for non-Google/Apple/Microsoft directed platforms

I have a Legion Go with Bazzite. Happily playing the Oblivion remaster on it. Just have to set the TDP to 20+ to get stable 36fps+ at low settings. Looks good to me

Besides that I mostly play Hades 1/2, Warm Snow, Victor Vran, and turn based JRPG games and the Yakuza games turn based or action. The only thing kind of hardware intensive graphics are the latest Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. Hades and Warm Snow have me interested in trying more rouguelites. Afterimage is getting me into metroidvanias. A bunch of games-games.

Yakuza and the JRPG can be narrative heavy but usually more over the top nonsensical or whimsical which I enjoy a lot more now that I’m getting towards middle age and edgy like I had thought as a teenager and in my 20s don’t feel as “adult” like how I now recognize “adult”

Regardless. Steam Deck 2 is going to be amazing long term because of the Switch 2 being the baseline for power for the next decade. PS4 isn’t dead for popularity yet either

Definitely the least excited I’ve ever been for a console. 1st month Xbox SX buyer that eventually traded in for a PS5 and it’s incredibly redundant with my PC. At this point I’m happy playing on Steam Deck level graphics settings. Next consoles need a better gimmick than better ray tracing, bigger open worlds, more fetch quests to advertise scale

I think DarkTable is as powerful if not moreso than Lightroom but Lightroom has AI image processing tools that will get things done quicker.

The whole of software dev is dominated with open source softtware. So like PostgreSQL, text editors like Lapce or Zed, KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager, torrent programs like qBitorrent, VPN like OpenVPN or Wireguard. Pretty much all the video game console emulators. For a while you would get Linux game ports that would use proprietary wrappers but eventually WINE would become better anyways. Don’t know if there’s a proprietary software better than QGIS for that. I love Distrobox and Boxbuddy. Git.

Web browsers based off Chromium or Firefox, OBS, Handbrake, VLC, ffmpeg, image magick. Krita and Blender are competitive with proprietary software. I think the latest Pinta is solid as a paint.net analogue. Audacity is super popular. Ardour for more complex things. Kdenlive isn’t as good but solid enough for the vast majority of people in my opinion.

Topaz Gigapixel is top but Upscayl is good. I always liked Windows Task Manager but on Linux I think Mission Center is just as good. None of the open source stuff competes against Topaz Video AI in my experience

KeepassXC password manager. At some point I stopped using winrar and was all in on 7-Zip and Peazip if not just using the Linux file roller software that the distro came with. I’m happy with Jellyfin over Plex. There’s Kodi. Over the years I always see people use draw.io

Nice. I think now since like 2003 IE, is the most interested people may be in using something besides the current most popular option

Vietnam is like a cultural a bridge between East Asia and continental southeast Asia. Long term they’ll gain a lot from this US blunder. Even before Trump term 1, China, South Korea, and Japan had established a business presence in Vietnam

The vast majority of people have no idea how much turmoil there’s been in federal backed research and development. Even stuff like wildland firefighter’s getting workforce hit right before fire season is about to begin. Friends that did bioengineering (lab grown food and lab grown organ research) for private companies that have been laid off because of federal grants cuts/uncertainty