Oh, I wasn’t trying to excuse it now, just saying there was a time where it was a reasonable approach if you found yourself out of your depth and really just needed to have your machine up and running again, rather than stemming from someone having no desire to learn a better way.
“oh, I don’t bother to fix anything and just do a fresh install (that idea is especially persistent in Windows users)”
In fairness, not everyone who did that was just trying to avoid looking into things and learning the correct way. I can’t be the only one who had Arch on a system before getting a smartphone, so early days, that was my sole means of accessing the internet, so if it went down hard and I didn’t immediately understand enough of the error message to at least have an idea of man pages to give a read, I didn’t really have a whole heck of a lot else available to continue trouble shooting. These days, worst case, I can turn on my laptop or grab my phone and search things until I understand the issue and find a solution.
That said, nearly all of my system breaking issues were self-inflicted by trying to do things I didn’t fully understand, just because I thought the end result sounded cool, or not checking the news and unwittingly doing the exact thing the latest post was warning people to be aware of and not do with some sort of major upgrade/change in the base system.
as Valve somehow got PC gamers to insist on DRM.
Reading this and your other comment, this bit seems a bit disingenuous to me. Nobody is insisting on Steam in order to have DRM. Valve found a way to make Steam’s DRM palatable to gamers, and from there even managed to make people have a preference for it as a distribution channel. You pointed out yourself, gamers were not happy about this with the initial roll out with Half-Life 2. Whether it was their own games, helping jumpstart the age of indie devs, or the other parts of Steam like the communities and chat, they did actually add stuff to the program that gamers found value in. Nobody should operate under the illusions that a corporation is their friend and will actually look out for their interests, but it doesn’t help anyone to exaggerate making claims like “PC Gamers insist on DRM.” Heck, one of the most common complaints I see about Steam is people complaining about it having DRM like Denuvo in some games, or requiring you to launch some publisher’s launcher and sign in to one of their accounts to play a game when you’re already signed in to the account in Steam you bought the game with.
Even if Musk had remained entirely apolitical, I can’t imagine the Cyber Truck doing much better without also doing something to address the high profile safety issues with the car and the insane number of recalls issued for it. Even if it had managed to get off to a stronger start, I would still expect people to abandon it in droves once they realized it was an overpriced deathtrap that could crap out on them and leave them stranded at any time.
But there was help for people like this uncle. There were massive campaigns to address vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID, to which they collectively said “No thanks, I did my own research.” What were we supposed to do, set up reeducation camps and forcibly round them up and ship them off? I can’t really see that being a viable solution.
I’ll be the first to accept that Iran, just like Cuba and any other country under long term sanctions from the US for refusing to kowtow to US demands, is essentially crippled from the start and unable to function as well as they could have without that ongoing interference. However, that doesn’t negate things that they’ve done on their own, like harsh repression of protests or that lady who was sentenced to being whipped for singing a song without wearing a hijab the other day.
I’m basically saying that my view of him is like my view of whoever wound up being Putin’s handpicked successor would be. I find them suspect by virtue of passing the screening process to even wind up in that position to begin with, and that will only change if they start taking actions that are at odds with their predecessors’ once in power. If his other positions turn out to be even half as good as his stance against Israel and the US in the current war on Iran has been, I will be happy to realize that my suspicions were unfounded. At the same time, just because they’re in the right on this specific topic doesn’t mean they are flawless in other aspects. Like, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church was surprisingly progressive for civil rights for African Americans for a white guy in Kansas in the 1960s, but you won’t catch me singing Fred Phelps’ praises in light of all the other heinous stuff he’s done in his life.
You know, that was a bad assumption on my part commenting on an article about conservatives and their conspiratorial views, but it still just changes the specifics of things, rather than the grand picture, as your uncle still didn’t live in a vacuum. The vaccine skepticism and other nonsense still made things worse for everyone, and caused needless deaths, aside from your uncle’s. I get that it can be harsh for those who personally knew an individual, but you can’t ignore the impact that line of thinking has on everyone else around them and pull out the surprised PIkachu gif when people are less than sympathetic towards them.
Personally, I had to deal with those sorts of yokels yelling at me and being jackasses because I was wearing a face mask in the fall of 2020, actively following up on the health issues that arose after I had the OG Covid and was left unable to walk more than two blocks from my apartment without being completely exhausted, and had to deal with my body deciding that it was an excellent time to develop an autoimmune disease and nerve damage. I’d be yelled at to take off “that face diaper” because Covid isn’t real, and vaccines are fake, blah blah blah, from the same sort of people who were all in for Trump, so I’ve got a bit of a bias there. Still don’t have much sympathy for them, though.
As someone else pointed out, they had access to the same information as the rest of us, and chose to go with the dumbest possible conclusions they could draw, yelling “Fake new!” and “Do your own research!” to the rest of us desperately screaming at them to knock that shit off, get with the program and stop actively making an ongoing pandemic worse for themselves and those around them. They decided that they and their misinformation monger(s) of choice knew better than the rest of the world, and now we all have to live with the consequences of it.
I’m not sure why people have decided he’s a bad leader, given that he hasn’t made any meaningful leadership decisions since taking office.
Probably something to do with the fact that he was in a position to become the leader of such a repressive government to begin with. Maybe he will break with past policies and be a champion for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ causes, but if someone was already tipped to take over the reigns of such a government, I assume vetting processes mean he’s generally onboard with what the government was doing beforehand unless I see them taking actions that show otherwise. At this point, who knows how he’ll be, as he’s been set up with something of a PR softball in responding to an aggressive war lead by Israel and the US. Postwar, we’ll see how he shakes out domestically.
That said, I’m still hoping the Iranians just trounce their enemies in this conflict. Whether he’ll ultimately represent an improvement for the Iranian people over his predecessor or not has nothing to do with the fact that he’s on the right side of the current conflict and crushing it at the moment.
They fell for a scam. That doesn’t merit the death sentence.
You know, if this scam wasn’t both easily avoidable and actively calling for the imprisonment and/or death of various groups of people within the country, I might be a bit more sympathetic. I know it can be tough watching someone you know fall for it and not being able to stop it, but getting mad at internet strangers who say that MAGA followers got what they should have seen coming to them has the same vibes as going “But my uncle was a good guy before he fell for all this Nazi stuff Hitler is saying, he didn’t deserve this,” while overlooking that they volunteered to be a guard at one of the camps.
Nobody is forcing people at gun point to go MAGA at present, and adopting and promoting that ideology has real impacts on other peoples’ lives, which currently include arbitrary imprisonment, an inhumane death camp in El Salvador and Trump’s brown shirts beating and killing people in the streets. So it might suck on a personal level, but who are you to tell someone who lost their access to abortion, medical care and/or the ability to just live a normal life if they happen to be trans or gay in the wrong state, or even someone they know being rounded up by ICE that they’re bad people when they say, “Well, good thing another MAGA person died, that’s one less of them fucking up my life,” in a situation like this?
Again, it sucks for you that you lost your uncle, but he didn’t live in a vacuum and the ideology he adopted has real, severe consequences for everyone else who has to deal with it.
With that said, I do think we need to give some serious thought to deprogramming these folks and reintegrating them with civilization in the near future. “Screw them all, let’s just kill them,” is hardly going ti be a viable strategy when we have to face our own period of de-Nazification in the future and could be helpful in actually getting some off the indoctrination pipeline and reducing their numbers in the present. There are millions of people who have openly embraced fascism in the US, and millions more supporting right-wing extremists in Latin America and Europe. Indefinite imprisonment or mass executions are both equally unfeasible as solutions for when we collectively pullour heads out of our asses as humans and go “Oh shit, we really fucked up with this fascism stuff, again. What do we do now?”
No, no, that’s crazy talk.
Fingernails and toenails. They grow back.
That was pretty much how things worked for Ticketmaster in Norway when I had someone bail on going to a festival we were planning on attending together, as I recall. So it can be addressed, just probably need to be in a country with a functional government and regulations.
why bother if that’s the case?
I always understood part of the appeal of building your own being that you could go PC of Theseus on it and upgrade parts gradually over time, rather than having to drop $1,500-$2,000 all in one go.
- Allow parents to set age-appropriate content controls from the start, including limiting access to social media, apps, and AI platforms.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t most, if not all, OSes have these capabilities already? Parents already don’t use them, what is supposed to make me think they’ll suddenly start using them if only there was another law mandating them?
The only time I see it is to do with mounting my NAS at boot and unmounting it on a shutdown.