• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle

  • We just don’t make tech for old people the way we should.

    My mother in law says things like “Wow, your son is just so good with computers.” She was impressed at how “tech savvy” he was because he was able to change the brightness on her phone for her so she could show him a picture better.

    A lot of our UIs are built for absolute no-thinking usability. How would you propose changing the brightness on a phone that would make it more “old people friendly”. It’s not a matter of difficulty. She just doesnt remember these things, and a different flow may not necessarily be remembered either.

    And I’m not saying its her fault or that she’s bad because of it. She was raised learning how to do and remember things a certain way and that has necessarily changed over the years.

    A phone can do a lot of things, so unless you want to have 100 apps on your home screen, you’ll have to group some together. For instance, putting WiFi into a Settings app. Having every individual setting just available on the home screen potentially complicates things even worse by being overwhelming.

    Genuinely curious how you think things like this could be redesigned to be more old people friendly.



  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldHERE THEY COME
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    I could see not caring. but actively being proud of it is weird. And asmongold has a lot in common with pewdiepie in that his fans skew heavily towards being morons who will just follow what he says.

    And there are plenty of people who are well known who are terrible people. Knowledge isn’t a limited resource, you don’t have to forget something to know that a person is awful. So there is no value in not knowing it.


  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldHERE THEY COME
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    With the “general public” yes. Within the computing and gaming space, he’s pretty influential. I realize that “linuxmemes” isn’t about gaming, so there are a lot of non-gamers here but he is a well known name in his niche, which is PC gaming, which is a very relevant niche. It’s not like he’s one of the 1000 youtubers and runs a makeup channel.

    Yes, he isn’t universally well known. But given how well known he is in the niche, and how relevant the niche is, and therefore how likely his niche is to translate into linux users or linux haters, it’s extremely relevant to the discussion.

    And I’m not saying “everyone should know who Asmongold is!” anyway. I’m merely saying “he’s not irrelevant, and bragging about being out of touch doesn’t make you cool”.


  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldHERE THEY COME
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    11
    ·
    2 months ago

    no. but asmongold, even if you dont like him is one of the larger, more influential people out there. Should he be? Is his content that good? Doesn’t matter.

    “Who even is that” heavily implies “why should I care” and the answer is: because he has a fanbase of rabid morons incapable of independent thought who will do whatever he says to do. So linux spaces are very likely about to be bombarded with people who hate linux without having ever tried it because asmongold said he didn’t like it, or a bunch of people adopting linux.

    It also heavily implies “Im proud of the fact that I dont know who this person is.” Which is just not impressive. “Taylor Swift? Who is that?” indicates you are living under a rock, not that you are cool. And aside from pewdiepie, asmongold is probably one of the youtube gamer names people know.


  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldHERE THEY COME
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    63
    ·
    2 months ago

    A youtuber with 5 million followers and 5 billion views, and has won “Streamer of the Year” at the streamer awards in the past.

    If you’re asking out of genuine curiosity: a youtuber with a lot of influence.

    If you’re asking to brag how out of touch you are: someone with more influence than you.


  • bisby@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldPosting for a friend lol
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Yep! All those things are true, but it’s due to the hard work of the archlinux team and not discord doing anything valuable. The debian/ubuntu/etc team could probably repackage the tar.xz or include the deb file in their official repos if they wanted. They just don’t. And given how simple the workaround is, i don’t really blame them. Debian isn’t going to ship something that will require constant updating to work with remote servers, and ubuntu probably just wants you to use a snap anyway.

    The archlinux team is just pretty cool.




  • Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.

    Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on “Oh wow! it’s just like a regular computer”

    One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft’s BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it’s formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).


  • It’s immutable (you can’t break the core OS, there is no deleting system32). You can’t install packages (like you would from AUR), but have access to flatpaks.

    Firefox is preinstalled, but anything from flathub is also available.

    So yes, it has all the things most people need from a desktop OS, and is harder to break, and is supported commercially.

    It has a desktop mode, I’ve never looked into whether you can boot to desktop by default. But I would imagine if they released a desktop friendly version, that would be an option.


  • SteamOS has a web browser.

    It boots by default into Steam Big Picture mode, which is the SteamOS/HTPC style “intended to be used with a controller” layout.

    In the power menu, it has a “switch to desktop” button that drops you to KDE. Firefox is pre-installed, and immediately available for use.

    But also, it’s just an immutable OS with plenty of things installable via flatpak in KDE Discover. Which means Slack, Discord, Zoom, Chrome… all of the “desktop” things most people need are available.


  • Counter point… Both are generating perfectly valid JSON, so who cares?

    Python 3.13.2 (main, Feb  5 2025, 08:05:21) [GCC 14.2.1 20250128]
    Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
    IPython 9.0.2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
    Tip: IPython 9.0+ have hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.
    
    In [1]: import json
    
    In [2]: json.loads('{"x": 1e-05}')
    Out[2]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    In [3]: json.loads('{"x":0.00001}')
    Out[3]: {'x': 1e-05}
    
    Welcome to Node.js v20.3.1.
    Type ".help" for more information.
    > JSON.parse('{"x":0.00001}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    > JSON.parse('{"x": 1e-05}')
    { x: 0.00001 }
    

    Javascript and Python both happily accept either format from the string and convert it into a float they are happy with.




  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

    even if you can figure out specifically WHAT a function does, it’s not always clear WHY a function does, and honestly, if this function wasnt labeled in the code, no way in hell would I know what it does.

    It has an entire wiki page dedicated to explaining it, and it involves enough math that most people wouldn’t be able to follow along.

    Nothing this atrocious lives in any current codebases I work on… but if you work at an old enough company, some of the load-bearing code will be tricky to figure out what is calling it, but also it was written in a time where little hacks were needed to eke out performance.

    You only have to experience it once for it to be a memorable enough thing that you will cite it for the rest of your days.

    Or more realistically, it IS comprehensible, but the level of effort necessary to comprehend it is not worth it. So you leave it as “undecipherable” and move on.


  • The first few years of self hosting tend to have a lot of experimentation, so the overlap is natural.

    I’m hitting my grumpy old man phase of self-hosting where I want my Minecraft server and Jellyfin to to be stable so I don’t have to hear about it from my family. So ironically, my setup is starting to look more like an overkill setup because I want to self host with stability instead of tinkering around to see if I can run a different server distro, etc. My home lab years got me to find a real nice base, but now I just add things to that base and I don’t mess with the formula I have.

    IMO the distinction is that if you are doing it for fun (or education) and could afford to lose any service you run for an extended period, you’re home labbing. If you are doing it for cost savings, privacy, anti-capitalist, or control reasons and the services are critical and need to stay up, you’re self-hosting.

    tl;dr - experimentation vs utility