My first experience with WINE was trying to install an old Windows 3.1/95 pinball game (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/3-d-ultra-pinball-creep-night-3fh) and just double-clicking the installer to see what would happen.

It installed and launched without issue and even added a shortcut to the KDE app launcher.

I use Bottles now to keep cleanly separated environments, but … even I wasn’t expecting things to just work like that? I thought WINE would be more difficult to figure out but nope!

It feels stupid to say, but of all the things that got me to move to Linux and never even install Windows 11, it was that stupid Start menu. Windows 10 was kind of perfect. You had your full list of alphabetical apps if you needed it, but you also had the ability to pin nicely sized tiles for frequently used apps, sort them into groups, and even make folders. Windows 11 gives you a little grid of icons. Just a huge step back.

I don’t have the energy to rice my desktop anymore and KDE has been perfect.

The thing is, though, is that Microsoft is literally incapable of solving this problem when you think about it. So much of Microsoft’s current business model is centered around being able to subtly direct you and your actions and maintaining tight control over the UI experience is key to that. People aren’t stupid and they’ll always feel that friction, so it’s just a push-pull of how much they think they can get away with at any point and slowly nudging it until it pisses you off again.

Honestly, just most, but who’s got the time?

I just want Lemmy to have a better, more wholesome, and welcoming experience for new users, as such I’ve decided to block the things I think we can all agree are bad:

• Calls for violence
• Politics
• Sex
• Nu metal
• People who put egg in potato salad
• Jerry (all of them)

Boo! Add pawb.social, furries deserve to be there, too! (complimentary)

I remember downloading a copy of King Missile’s Detachable Penis incorrectly credited to The Flaming Lips. Like … I must’ve known it wasn’t them, but it sat on my Flaming Lips playlist for years and I just assumed it was something from their earlier, weirder 80’s days.

I remember talking about this on a message board once before and like 3 other people chimed in with this exact same song, apparently it was a bit of a thing. Probably just one person’s mistake, but the internet felt a lot smaller back then and it’s not surprising it would’ve propagated like that.

Isn’t this one of Zitron’s oft-cited horsemen?

I’m constantly struck by the imagery of the giant warrior from Nausicaa. There is a timeline or a reality where this worked, but they couldn’t help themselves. They woke the beast up the second it was even halfway possible and now it’s tearing itself apart in self-destructive blasts because the whole thing was under-cooked (and probably the completely wrong direction to begin with).

If there’s any consolation here it’s that hopefully this has soured enough people on the idea that a second effort won’t even get off the ground. I hope …

There’s never going to be a “Year of the Linux Desktop” where there’s some critical inflection point like a lot of people think. But Microsoft has fucked up here in assuming that consumer trust is a linear relationship and it’s not. They broke the trust, the cracks are there, and users will keep bleeding. They’ll keep a certain percentage of users through apathy or complacency, but the momentum is flowing in reverse now.

What it takes for any one person to cross over is going to look different, whether that’s Linux getting up to speed on a feature they were looking for or Microsoft crossing yet another unacceptable threshold, but despite all my anger and personal grievances aside, I truly believe Microsoft as a company is incapable of correcting this problem.

Their goals are entirely misaligned, they believe they can dictate the market at the consumer and their revenue is dependent on that. They’re bleeding more money and talent through this AI debacle and that’s making them even less capable of facing and addressing the issues. Unfortunately I don’t think they’ll ever fully implode, but just like Chrome eventually ate IE’s market share and now won’t go away, so it will be with Linux.

Bonus points: I’m calling it, I truly do believe that in ~5 years or so Windows will cease to be its own operating system and start shifting towards a Linux distro with a bespoke DE (again, see Chrome/Edge). They don’t want to have to keep maintaining an OS like this and one of the biggest arguments for doing so has been the backwards compatibility, but everything is cloud and SaaS now and they want to push more business customers in that direction anyway. Server will be a thorn in their side for awhile, but consumer facing Windows distro will be the perfect testing ground. Mark it, ~5 years … EEE

Benn Jordan is a gem, do yourself a favor and just go watch all his stuff.

His latest on robot dogs is amazingly well-executed and researched with terrifying conclusions.

Yeah, nothing will help attract players like diluting any weak identity it already had with an open deluge of metaverse slop. Everything will be everything. It’s not enough to have a product anymore, it has to be a whole ecosystem. God forbid a single bloody dollar slip through your grasp.

House of El - AL: OpenAI’s $1 Trillion Bullsh*t Is Falling Apart

This video covers the topic very well (and I appreciate and recommend her channel overall).

The long and the short of it is, they fucked their product up. Most of us here are not terribly fond of AI, but let’s for a moment just take it for granted that it is a product that does a thing. OpenAI will swap models out on the backend based on your use case and if it detects certain patterns, also as a sort of protective guard rails in some ways. It’s also extremely unclear on billing and token usage (paraphrasing, I’m not intimately familiar with the details myself, watch the video). This is highly problematic if you’re trying to build a service on top of it. AI is extremely finicky and not having clear ideas on token usage limit or what models may be running on the backend can affect that. This has rightly made even the devout users upset at these choices.

And from what I understand in the video, this is not a case with other providers where you stick with exactly the specified model and token usage and billing are more clearly indicated.

So now not only are they fighting a losing battle against the profitability of the entire tech and service model, they have a spurned and dwindling customer base to contend with, too. They are turbo fucked. Still, no one can say how or when this all finally goes tits up, but at least it’s kind of funny.

What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?

Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.

Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!

My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!

Nah, I’m another nano guy. You can set up syntax highlighting for it you know?

It’s not that any one is better than the other, it’s up to your use cases. I’ve learned vim a few times in my life already (and mostly just know the hjkl bindings from playing tons of terminal roguelikes) but it always decays because I don’t put the knowledge to use. Because it just doesn’t fit my use case.

I write small scripts, some Python and stuff and I’ll usually use PyCharm to debug that these days. So nano is relegated to the small tasks like config editing or quick, in place fixes to scripts.

The thing about this though, is that it’s not a new problem at all. LLMs didn’t start to get good enough in the early 20’s and only then did they come up with this idea. I worked for a company out near Seattle back in ~2014 that was already well into trying to tackle this problem.

They ran callcenters with a variety of contracts for different companies and took calls, chats, and emails. The main business model wasn’t the centers themselves but the information gathered by the ticketing system to help build tools like this.

Personally, with that insight and assuming surely there must’ve been other companies moving along that path, I find it quite telling that they still haven’t sufficiently stepped up to the role. There are some hard limits on cost and hallucinations that I think will ultimately fail to deliver a truly long-term, viable product. When you see they can’t maintain the veneer on even that use case, you’ll know the bubble has to be close to popping.

Of course no one can really say for sure, we’ve all been predicting it for some time and when there’s this much money invested they’ll protect that reality ferociously, so who really fucking knows. But still …

I appreciate your cynicism, shit sucks.

But I do choose to see this as a good sign; that they were pressured into taking even this much action when they could’ve just continued doing nothing and it would’ve been easier and probably less controversial. I hope it amounts to something, but tides are shifting even on the business end.

Seager explained in this morning’s update while there won’t be a “global kill switch” for AI features on Ubuntu, their plan is to deliver all the AI features via Snap packages. So removing AI features on Ubuntu will come down to removing Snaps.

IMHO opt-in means the snaps wouldn’t even be on the system unless you had already opted in, but I was never going to use Ubuntu anyways so what does it matter.

But imagine if you could just like, ask your phone to set an alarm! And then it would do it!

… what do you mean we’ve already had that tech for a decade?

I was thinking more Jokerz, but honestly ICP is cool by me. Not really my thing, but they’ve always been anti-fash and after Violent J’s daughter got into the furry fandom and formed an alliance, they’re solid in my book.