Posh person nonsense. At fancy parties you’re supposed to use different food weapons for each course and work your way from the outside in. Fairly sure the only reason it was invented was so rich ppl could show off how many fancy pieces of cutlery they owned.

Which is the vibe I get from Gnome’s design and its devs’ attitude in general. “Fancy party”. A bunch of dumbass rules you have no influence over and which people will sneer at you for breaking.

Orrrr I can use something else. Which I do. Something that respects the fact that my computer is in fact mine.

And like i said. It’d be fine if gnome was gnome… If it stayed in its fucking lane serving the people that like it.

But the gnome Devs have a lot of influence on how things like Wayland are taking shape, so their “let’s turn Linux into iPad” attitude does in fact affect me.

Because the point of Linux is I get to make it my own

If I wanted to use what the Devs tell me is the right setup and “just works”, I’d not own a computer at all. I’d just get an iPad, which has that appliance like “no options, just does what it’s made to do, works great under those constraints” thing going for it.

Gnome is very competently made except it’s made for a different genre of person to me, and their attitude towards customisation is outright disdainful. You install an extension or mess around in tweaks and gnome looks at you like you just used the salad fork for seafood.

I think it’s made for people who like Macs or sth.

Wouldn’t be a problem(people can use whatever makes them happy) if the gnome Devs shit attitude didn’t trickle outwards and harm customizability in other environments.

One of my professors in college demanded the class turn in a video production assignment as DVDs.

… This was in 2018

I was the only one in the class who even had a DVD burner (… Because I’d used it some years prior for PS2 games piracy and it was still in my storage box)

So the class bought a spindle of DVDs and I spent an afternoon burning everyone’s assignments to DVDs.

No idea what would have happened if they didn’t have a pet ultranerd like me. Like, did teach expect 'em to go and buy a USB DVD burner just for that?

She was a stand user.

That’s sorta what you get with decades of janky adaptations to not break old applications while also adding stuff that will be useful to newer applications. A whole lotta jank.

I agree it could perhaps be more orderly, but hey, as long as it works…

(EDIT: Although apparently /usr/ means Unix System Resources??? Idk, I don’t trust ddg THAT much)

Why is cat in your etc

That’s not where that goes, it goes in /usr/bin/

Auto-generated captions take 10 minutes to make something that a human will take 12 hours to fix.

The samesuch human could have used the samesuch 12 hours to caption by hand, the only difference is you didn’t have to pay a license to an AI provider.

You now planted in my mind the idea of a text editor but it has literally EVERY fancy effect one can think of. Like the text animates fancily when you type it, and every interface element is animated and blur-glassy, and when the color of things changes because of code highlighting it does so generating particle effects etc.

It sounds fucking useless. Someone who’s good at the coding start making this and I’ll donate to your patreon/ko-fi.

Bonus: It’s made in Electron and extremely bloated.

At school.

While the adults are doing adult stuff (fighting on the rebellion, doing science, suffering in the dystopia) the kids have learning to do.

I’m assuming it’s the editor for making things on some game engine or a video editing software, not your text editor. Even the most obese text editor isn’t Like That.

If the artist responsible for the Michael Jackson parody “Eat it” uses the bathroom, is the stuff that comes out of him Al Slop?

Surprisingly reasonable?

I was terrified that entering the corporate world would mean being surrounded by people who are obssessed with AI.

Instead like… The higher-ups seem to be bullish on it and how much money it’ll make them (… And I don’t mind because we get bonuses if the corp does well), but even they talk about how “if you just let AI do the job for you, you’ll turn in bad quality work” and “AI just gets you started, don’t rely on it”

We use some machine learning stuff in places, and we have a local chatbot model for searching through internal regulations. I’ve used Copilot to get some raw ideas which I cooked up into something decent later.

It’s been a’ight.

She ever give a reason, or nah?

Prescriptivists should be shoved into all the lockers in the world.

That was why I mentioned Gen 2

It dropped in 2000 after a LOOOONG development hell. And one flap of the butterfly’s wing would have stopped Gold and Silver from being released

Which in turn would have killed the franchise’s momentum.

Do I have the power to change things on a large scale? Cuz like, I was already an adult by 2011, and I still just sorta watched as shit went to shit. I did ‘my part’, and I warned people when I could about alarming trends they were unwittingly contributing to, but no one cared, and to be honest, unless one can actually hit the powerful folks, there is very little an individual can do.

If I have power to change things, to actually affect the powerful people, then I’m going to Y2K and I have a few ideas:

• Stomp Jair Bolsonaro to death a full decade before he becomes popular. When he was a nobody state representative from São Paulo who was only there to generate more seats for his party.
• Arrange a convenient accident for Steve Jobs years before the iPod drops. People talk about technology becoming boring, I place the blame for that entirely at Apple’s feet. And it all began with the iPod, which in turn, if you believe the stories told, was Jobs’ baby, to the point he harrassed the engineers at Apple for years until it was EXACTLY as he had planned.
• Stop 9/11 from happening, which slows down the US’s descent into being a Police State, which in turn slows down the rise of neoconservatism/neofascism pretty much everywhere. Oh it’ll still happen, but maybe if it happens more slowly, there might be fewer victims and people might do something about it sooner.

Oh and

• “Disappear” Peter Thiel. People really sleep on how much damage Thiel has done because he doesn’t post cringe as often as say, Musk. But he’s the high priest for the techbro “we are building god” faith.

I can’t exactly do much about Climate Change with the time given. For that I’d need the same power-scale but to go back to the 60s, when the first scientists took notice of the trend but had their research suppressed by big oil.

Darling if you want to stop Nintendo from becoming Nintendo it’s not the GameCube you have to fuck with. The GC was already a gigantic flop (although home to 5 or 6 amazing games). Nobody cared about it in the early aughts and in fact it carried the stigma of being “for little kids” and you could be bullied in school for having one.

You need to hit them where it actually hurts.

You need to stop Pokémon. I feel stopping Gen2 from dropping might have done the trick, made it into just another fad that passed instead of STILL TO THIS DAY THE BIGGEST MEDIA FRANCHISE IN THE WORLD.

Nintendo would have died in the n64 years if Pokémon didn’t carry them on its back (and also completely change the face of pop culture by getting the west into Anime).

Every time they made a flop, Pokémon is what saw them through it.

Sturgeon’s Law

Derived from a sci-fi writer who was told sci-fi wasn’t respected as “real literature” because “90% of sci-fi was shit”, to which he supposedly responded:

“Well, 90% of everything is shit”