When I can’t block the ads, I always opt for the “non-personalized ads” option, since I know they are getting paid less. Also easier to ignore an ad when it is random.

I tried the bing chat (part of the work license), asked it some random questions, asked for more accurate information and pointed out the flawed answers it gave. It told me that I was being rude and ended the session. (smh)

Some of my saltiness comes from the fact that I tried to answer questions a few times, but told I wasn’t worthy enough to participate in the conversation, and so I was confused by the system. Also, I saw people answering with lots of points, but their answers were trash and I couldn’t impact that response/point gathering, and just made me think it was just another gamified system, and engineers love to game a system. :)

This was my experience as well. They seemed to angle the system away from the casual user, which I didn’t have time to sit around and answer questions to get enough fake internet points to interact more.

Sorry, when I said “life critical”, i mean things like email, banking, self-hosted NextCloud for files, etc. For me, everything else is flexible as I don’t have business things that have to run on Windows (that is my work provided laptop), so I don’t have to have the Adobe suite for photo editing, i can use one of several open source alternatives, and all of my hobbies have open source alternatives like Blender.

The only game I cannot get to run is Space Engineers. Numerous other newer and older games work great. To be fair, I’m not an online/multiplayer gamer, so the challenges people run in to due to anti-cheating requirements don’t affect the games I play.

What was really interesting to me, is that I tried Windows 11 Pro and 6 or 7 different Linux distros over several months before landing on Pop!_OS. I mention this because it was all the exact same hardware and so I was able to compare performance in an Apples to Apples situation. There is an obvious application loading improvement. Even comparing against something like Garuda that is supposedly all about performance tweaks.

I switched to Pop!_OS earlier this year and couldn’t be happier. All apps run way faster than they did with Windows on the same hardware. All but one of my Steam games run great (one day I’ll get that last game to work). My “life critical” things are web based, everything else is adjustable.

That is 100% up to every team to decide. Version numbering is completely arbitrary.

(Hyperbole) I’m shocked! I have been informed for decades, usually at high levels of snootiness, that Macs don’t have viruses unlike those pathetic other operating systems…

(hahaha)

Recently I was thinking about how I missed webrings for websites instead of reliance on search engines, many of which aren’t even directing you to the sites anymore just showing AI summaries.

No MFA, and stale passwords up to 4 years old. And they say “anyone can do IT”…

Was anyone else expecting an article talking about the subject? I was reading and then, “Oh they’ve set up an interesting topic to discuss… wait, other articles to read, where is this article?”

Also, the internet access mechanism (starlink) is incidental to the subject matter, why mention it in the title?

Also, what @paultimate14 said, “youth not respecting tradition”…

Good read, thanks for sharing.

I’m teetering on this edge currently. “Oh, I haven’t made GitHub contributions to my two open source projects in awhile, and I need to brush up my coding skills in case I cannot find another Director level job, and …” then I’m exhausted and dreading the next day’s meeting schedule.

I’m always curious about this particular feature/argument. From the aspect of “i can unit test easier because the interface is abstracted, so I can test with no database.” Great. (though there would be a debate on time saved with tests versus live production efficiency lost on badly formed automatic SQL code)

For anything else, I have to wonder how often applications have actual back-end technologies change to that degree. “How many times in your career did you actually replace MSSQL with Oracle?” Because in 30 years of professional coding for me, it has been never. If you have that big of a change, you are probably changing the core language/version and OS being hosted on, so everything changes.