Literally the only reason I keep a Windows machine around is to run proprietary software that I simply can’t replace, like games and software suites for specific hardware.

Thanks to WINE/Proton, I can’t even remember the last time I turned on that Windows machine. I think it might’ve been years. I should probably turn it on just to cycle the battery (notebook) a little and run updates.

The writer of the video is (presumably) a paid, working writer.

Why do you think that? To me, it just seems to be a guy with a YouTube account. He’s got exactly three videos listed, all from the last few weeks, although the account was created 16 years ago.

Besides which, how is being a professional writer automatically connected with being a professional video editor?

I’m not sure that your analogy works, either. All he said was that it was difficult to replicate his existing workflow with free software in Ubuntu. He never claimed to be editing video to a professional level; that requirement seems to have come from you.

The most insidious part of OneDrive and Google’s equivalent (Photos, etc.) on Android is that they both treat the cloud copy as the “original” and the local copy as temporary. That is, in normal usage, if you delete the local copy it remains in the cloud, but if you delete the cloud copy it also deletes the local copy automatically. Under both systems, if you want to delete something from the cloud but keep the local copy, you have to go through a separate, clunky web interface.

Yes. https://xkcd.com/1053/

For VHS, it was much more common to record things from broadcast. Even if someone had multiple machines, copies using standard consumer VHS degraded noticeably even in one generation.

For DVDs, writing drives were expensive and uncommon for a long time, and most early players didn’t like burned discs, so you were limited in how you could watch them anyway. I know that some people got into the mindset of physically cloning the discs, but I feel like it was at least as common to rip, re-encode just the main title with a more modern codec to shrink the size, and store that smaller copy electronically.

In both cases the trading value of the currency has almost nothing to do with who originated it, and almost everything to do with how the general public feels about it.

Just like crypto, most “government” currencies are worth what they’re worth only because everyone agrees that they are. That’s called “fiat” currency. And that’s why fiat currency exchange markets exist. The US Dollar hasn’t been “convertible” (redeemable for a fixed amount of precious metal) since 1971, and many other world currencies were already backed in some way by the US Dollar at that time.

The real difference is in the supply.

Government fiat currency is difficult to counterfeit, although the government (or reserve bank) can always make more whenever they want. We trust them not to print more money, increasing the money supply and devaluing the currency. However, this is exactly what has happened sometimes in the past, and no doubt will happen again in the future.

Crypto currency is virtually impossible to counterfeit, and IIRC there’s a finite (but not precisely known) amount of it that can be made, no matter who you are.

Personally, I still use physical fiat currency and no crypto. I’d like to use crypto, but regulation in my country makes it very difficult to use without registering your details with a central authority. And although everyone’s pushing e-money options which are similarly tracked, thankfully I still have the option of using anonymous cash.

I don’t do anything bad or illegal. I just believe that government and big business don’t deserve to know everything I do in my life simply because they want to.

To say that social media is just people socializing through media is rather like saying that newspapers are just news on paper.

In both cases it ignores the deliberate, pervasive, and frequently toxic efforts of the platform curators to maximize “engagement” with their audience in pursuit of ad revenue.

When I socialize with people offline, it looks almost nothing like modern social media “services”.

As the owner of a relatively new Android phone, who wanted to disable a software update nag, this is no longer always true.

In my research I built a history of instructions for disabling these nag screens/notifications on phones from this manufacturer. At first, there were things you could do on the phone itself. Then you had to change a setting with ADB. Then you had to disable a system app with ADB. Then you had to get root access to uninstall the app with ADB. And now, for my phone and other recent models, there’s literally nothing you can do, even with root access in ADB, short of flashing custom firmware.

Yes, and you’ve got to remember to download it as soon as you buy it. I’ve been stung a couple of times by companies going out of business or inventing rationales for removing “old” things.

I presume that the code was tested for various cases where there was at least one previous password on record, but everyone forgot about new users with no previous passwords. However I’m having trouble imagining what the code could actually be doing.

I can only imagine a dynamically typed language, and a “checkedPasswords” variable being declared but uninitialized, then a loop incrementing that variable for each non-similar password pulled from the records, and finally a check to see if checkedPasswords equals the number of stored previous passwords.

The execution environment could type and initialize the variable by default after the first increment, but in the case of the user having no previous passwords on record that wouldn’t happen, and the final equivalency check would be comparing an integer to some internal “NaN” state, thus failing.

I fixed it, but that is weird. I originally thought it had a double “r”, but I looked it up to check and I’d swear that the results spelled it with only one. Now I check again and it’s a double “r”.

Must be arrabbiata, 'cause it’s got quite a burn.

I know it’s a really picky take, but I resent the implication that I should want to keep my personal files mixed in at the same level of the file hierarchy as all my applications’ random settings, cached data, and temporary garbage. Documents, Music, Videos, Projects, .config, .cache, SelfishAppName, OtherSelfishAppName…

It bothered me when Microsoft started doing it in Win95, and it still bothers me in Linux. Especially when software acts surprised (or occasionally indignant) that I don’t keep all my files in those directories. I have lost small bits of my own work over the years by forgetting to back up things that recalcitrant software refused to store anywhere else.

But I am amused that this is the same name that I use at the top of my own storage hierarchy for self-made things.

The original StarCraft and Brood War expansion didn’t require Internet for installation. And while the original boxed copies (I got the “Battle Chest” re-release which is the same) required the CD to be in the drive, the last one or two official update patches let you copy the .mpq (?) data files from the CDs into the installation directory so you can play without them.

Reading current discussion, it seems more like “You say that it’s impossible to dirty your house, yet nothing’s stopping anyone from dumping out this bucket of mud on your floor, curious!”

Sorry for not being clear; when I said “keep track automatically” I meant dynamic typing. Of course you’re right that “keeping track of your variables” could also be interpreted to refer to static typing.

I started programming in a time when the idea that the computer could keep track of your variable types for you automatically was a fever dream, so it’s wild for me to see some programmers now throwing shade at particular langages for “not implementing proper variable typing functionality”.

It feels like someone saying that low-fat milk producers are too cheap or lazy to put enough fat in their milk.

Fashion really does go in cycles.

Years ago I used to have Lakka on a bootable USB drive to turn an old, low-powered laptop into a dedicated emulation machine.

The specs are hard to read, but I believe the main processor is an AMD A6-1450 APU, designed for tablets and released some time in or after 2013. Not a powerful chip by modern standards, but IMO still useable depending on your expectations. It’s definitely capable of emulating SNES without breaking a sweat. Even PS1 shouldn’t be a problem at native resolution. N64, Saturn, and Dreamcast are probably where you’ll start seeing slowdown in some games, and anything more, like PS2 or GCN, is unlikely to be playable.

Man pages are the only reference material I know that has more information-free circular definition chains than Wikipedia. And I imagine that it’s for much the same reason; they’re primarily written and fought over by experts who only need terse reminder notes for themselves, and who can’t remember what it was like not spending every day up to their elbows in the subject.

It’s the first law that I’m aware of that legally requires an automated system that you own and operate to snitch on you at any time, to anyone who asks, without asking your permission.

For the moment, it only has to report a piece of data that you are free to lie about. For the moment.