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I still like technology. It’s still possible to find technology that doesn’t spy on you and that you can control yourself. I use Mint, by the way.
Foss got me back into computing and seeing how fun it is. And turning my back on corpos as much as possible.
Installing Linux and bucking the yoke of Microsoft from my private life has reminded me that using a computer used to be fun and rewarding. Not even kidding.
My brother wanted to play Project Zomboid on a private server, and I’ve had more fun setting up and managing the server than I’ve had playing a lot of games that came out in the last few years. I need to get the time to setup CRON jobs backup and update the server and mods. I’m trying to figure out if I can do it all from my Proxmox OS, or if I need to build separate cron jobs both inside and outside the VM and schedule them with enough buffer that they won’t run at the same time… Trying to get a nice and quiet hour to myself to really dig into it.
Dude exactly the same here. I didnt realize computing had become depressing to me. Linux made me feel young again!
side note one of my co workers said it got so bad and he hates windows so much he just pretends he doesn’t have a laptop and uses his phone for everything. I’m like…bro go mint. Its so much better.
I have to use a Windows 11 machine for work, and I feel better every week about my decision to switch my personal computer from Win 10 to Mint. I’m trying to get my wife to switch over, but she swears up and down that she needs Microsoft Office to do basic document functions… I’d love nothing more than to get her away from that, and stop the $160 or so that I spend every year on Microsoft office.
seems like we have the same life. I also am forced onto 11 for work, and i DESPISE IT. every second i’m on win11 makes me so thankful i got rid of that garbage in my personal life. My SO actually did switch to Mint with me and we’ve worked through issues together, now we joke that she’s “Defeated Lynux” xD. So far, not a single thing has needed windows, except one time i tried to do a firmware update on a mouse through a linux vm with windows and bricked the mouse, and needed actual windows to reflash it. But thats a very small use case. and we can’t play spyware trash games like pubg or fortnite (which are brainrot anyways). I do miss pubg a little bit tbh, just driving around and causing havoc ha.
ah, unfortunate that they need office. Libreoffice won’t work at all?
NGL. I kinda miss League of Legends. I’ve been looking for ways to run it from a VM, no dice. I may end up making a portable installation of Windows 11 and keep it on a removable SSD, and then only boot it when I really get a hankering for playing Ivern.
Libreoffice would work fine, but it looks different, and for the layman, that can be completely unacceptable.
It’s not the technology that’s the problem (mostly), it’s the corporations that control 99% of it.
I use mint too! Only switched last year and i have never looked back.
Pry my old phone from my cold, dead hands
I’m ->||<- that close to getting like an old nokia 3310 and only using that
Haha remember when nokia used to make linux phones for a while? Maemo leste remembers.
The team behind MeeGo are still around and still offer linux phones. :)
Sailfish OS’s heritage lies in Nokia times, especially in the MeeGo operating system. Prior to 2011 Nokia and Intel had a vision of an open mobile operating system. Together they invested around 1 billion USD to the project and created an open source based operating system called MeeGo, which was used as a basis for several devices, such as the iconic Nokia N9. Although the Nokia N9 became the beacon of open source operating systems, Nokia decided to end the project and chose instead to continue with Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. The rest of that is another story.
The passionate team behind MeeGo refused to quit working on the project they’ve believed in. They, or currently ‘we’ saved MeeGo by setting up a new company, Jolla Ltd., to develop the swipe-based MeeGo into the flowing user experience that is Sailfish OS. We quickly enhanced Sailfish OS to run Android apps and it became hardware compatible with Android chipsets. In November 2013, we launched the beta version of Sailfish OS to the market with the Jolla smartphone.
Also doubles up as an improvised weapon!
Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.
Theyre still tools, still utilities. Just because douchebags are using them in power games more often doesn’t make them any less so.
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
I still blog. Nobody reads it because search sucks, but I keep blogging. Others do too. There are dozens of us.
Me too. With no telemetry or interaction I don’t even know if even a single person has read my dump of thoughts.
WordPress has the ActivityPub plugin, which is the only way I’ve managed to disseminate my articles and have people interact with them.
Who’s your webhost? The data is almost certainly there.
It’s just a static jekyll server I host on my own.
All over the place, they just don’t get indexed high in search…
Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
they’re right here actually
I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging
I don’t know though
YouTube?
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch my eyes out.
But without the red circle and arrows how will you know you’re supposed to be looking at the exploding police car?
Just seeing all those thumbnails with the shocked face and stupid arrows makes me want to scratch
mytheir eyes out.
Neocities exists
Maybe this is it
Technology nowadays is basically a cult, a coercitive cult. They often take technology as an end in itself rather than as a means to other ends, they reify it and even deify it, and they treat any moderate stance as an enemy and as a brake on their shitty eschatology.
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
But also open source, self hosting, and diy tech is booming
how can I use it to feed my family? I’m genuinely asking, I lost my enterprise job I hated.
This might not be your issue but replace the subscriptions you use with FOSS ones.
Windows for Linux. MS365 Office for LibreOffice (although I guess you could say Google docs too). DropBox for Filen (or other services). … Gameing for retro Roms? Etc.
Theres also lots of foss support for pirating streamed media.
I couldn’t belive how many my live at home 18yr old cousin was paying for.
- hotspot WiFi
- playataton online
- game pass to play whatever game
- Netflix
- Spotify
- YT premium
- … let alone the mobile plan itself
Not sure unless you find people that want to switch over to non Microsoft etc products and you help them. I had a decent side gig getting people out of marketing companies by building them basic static websites and an email. Mainly plumbers, machine shops etc. They went from paying over a grand a month to like 20 bucks. It got out of hand from word of mouth and my lack of knowleges pretty quickly though
Honestly, here’s the thing. My PC is still running Win10. It just works. My life is stressful and chaotic and my escape is gaming. I love modded Skyrim and I love gaming and when I get a chance to sit down at my computer I just want to fucking escape. I don’t want to troubleshoot, I don’t want to fiddle, I just want to load my game and have fun.
That is what has been keeping me from switching to Linux these past few years. I have Win10 tweaked in the registry so it can’t run copilot or AI, the start menu can’t connect to the Internet so it can’t show me ads, it’s still Microsoft and I don’t love it but I don’t have to think about it.
If someone came along and said hey, for $100 I’ll install Linux on your computer, make sure all your drivers are installed, make sure all your hardware works, and get your games and files moved over, tested and working, and be around to troubleshoot in the future and teach you basic troubleshooting if you need me (for an additional reasonable fee), I’d pay it. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want to spend my time or limited brain power doing that stuff and I’d be more than happy to offload it to someone else.
As someone who does Linux tech support for 2 people as a hobby/because I love them, it would cost you more than $100 for all that.
But $300 for the setup and then $100 per year for support would be reasonable as long as you don’t expect me to drop everything and rush over when something changes/breaks.
I’d happily pay that if it allowed me to not have to deal with it.
I’m not a technological idiot, it’s just not my thing and I find it very stressful to deal with. It would be worth it to me to not have to.
I hear you. It’s a pain even when you have the skills to do it. I am looking for a secondary income stream and want more people using Linux, so maybe I should offer that for people. But ugh, the ways a computer can break can be so stupid.
I understand that you do not want to fiddle with a computer, I was once like that and that is what kept me from switching to any OS on my computer. I want to let you know as an experienced Linux user though that once you setup linux, you do not need to do any more fiddling. For the files and personal stuff, just back it up to an external hard drive. That is pretty much it. I could help you for free, but I do not really have somewhere to message anyone.
This is completely false ime. Updates can break your setup, though on stable distros they usually don’t. Also anytime I installed a game I’d have to invest time to set it up. For older games this could take an hour or more to get everything working. For newer games some features might not even work.
I ditched Linux for a reason. It was useable but I need my gaming machine to be stress free, not another work project.
I was referring to stable distros. But once you got all your games set up, aren’t you kinda good to go? But I get your point still, though.
modded Skyrim
Probably a good thing you haven’t switched then. In my experience setting up mod manager and any external tools (like Nemesis) was not easy, but it’s doable. Mods themselves may not work though, especially if they are more external to Skyrim. So, for example, you can forget about ENB shaders. I mean, when I tried them they worked, but basically no other mods and in an empty area with 7fps is not exactly playable (on Windows it was unstable ~30fps with mods).
After using https://github.com/Anon00b/MO2 to install MO2 for Linux I just used MO2 the same way I used it in Windows and all my mods played nice.
Vortex is a flaming turd on linux. I recently deployed a 2300 mods collection for CP2077 with it. It took around 35 hours - with a premium nexusmods account, and thr download itself was only around 1 hour. In comparison, the multiplatform NexusMods App they mothballed completed the same task in about 3 hours, but since it never was really finished, it failed at the end of deployment. There is a community fork of the Nexusmods App available, but it sadly failed the same way - it can’t cope with really large collections, and i am not good enough of a programmer to really help out - i can read code as long as it does stay simple, but writing it is a completely different thing.
Apparently there is such a thing as a “Nexus Collection Downloader” for Mod Organizer 2, although I’ve never tried it. MO2 generally works fine though.
Will give it a whirl. My experience with Vortex after seeing the NexusmodsApp, that was coming along nicely, being shelved to go back to their tech-debt ridden piece of shit client (even back when i used it on windows it was a buggy mess, and the experience on linux is far worse with awful r/w performance and loads of different UI glitches. Once the whole window just collapsed into a 1x5 cm square with one black and 3 white borders while i was doing something else on the pc not even involving the app - unrecoverable. I became so infuriated that i even posted on the nexusmods forums (https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13543600-useable-linux-support/ - i was somewhat surprised that the mods approved the post at all, but since noone engages with the post, i will probably not get any response regarding their plans)
I’ve spent the past couple of years moving away from Apple devices and commercial software, into self-hosting as much as possible. While at this stage I wouldn’t go back to my previous set up, there’s no denying that it’s nowhere near as stable and easy to maintain.
Home Assistant, for example, is an incredible tool; that fails to turn some lights on and off far more often than Alexa ever did. It’s frustrating. Not so much that I’m going to bin it off and go back to relying on Amazon, but enough that I mostly just end up feeling kinda pissed off that the big companies have pushed me into a place where I’ve had to learn how to be a part time sysadmin, alongside my 9-5.
that fails to turn some lights on and off
This is the biggest issue I have with smart gadgets and home automation - they fuck up. Not even getting into the additional pains of fixing the automation when it fails, I’ve literally never gone wrong with pressing a light switch, or possibly pulling a cord. Full 100% success rate without rounding, even when the wifi’s down. I have to walk past the switches (and cords) to enter and exit rooms, so not pressing them on the way past doesn’t even save me any actual time.
Most of the automation I see seems to be the same - it introduces a chance of failure to something that already works, and/or imagines itself a solution to something that isn’t actually a problem. Boilers, fridges, toasters, beds - these were basically solved technologies until someone came along and decided to reinvent the wheel.
There’s a handful that do provide quality of life improvements to disabled people, but the overwhelming majority just seem to be parlour tricks that don’t reduce the human workload.
I am curious as to how out-of-touch your single downvoter is. Because you hit that nail right on the head.
Like, for my current place I’m still designing a CCTV system. But it will be using dumb PoE cameras, hardwired into a traditional NVR. But everything will be shielded, airgapped, and using dumb(ish) components that do not “phone home” to their manufacturer in any fashion.
I’m even looking into solid state and mechanical components for other home automation functionality. Like, nothing computerized to any degree, and therefore, incapable of being a threat or a data leak.
I’m mildly interested in one of those coffee mugs that heats your coffee, as I drink mine slowly while working.
But I don’t want an app for that. I just want a wireless charger puck and a temperature dial, with maybe a failsafe so it doesn’t overheat when empty.
So much tech should be small little closed systems, but then you lose the ability to shove pop up ad notifications at the user, or scrape and sell their location, or preinstall residential prices you rent to highly suspicious companies.
All this tech will be hugely inefficient and destined for failure until it becomes self contained and independent of a subscription.
I’m really happy with my Nextmug. No app, all manual. Basically it’s exactly what you described.
I got gifted an Ember and while it had an app, I never installed it or used any smart tech. Out of the box it was set to some temperature that was reasonable, so that was that
I’ve got a nice vacuum Stanley coffee cup that keeps my coffee hot for several hours. No electricity or app involved.
vacuum Stanley coffee cup
Sweet peak consumerism.
‘Peak consumerism’ would be using disposable cups from cafes. I’ve had it for about a decade and make my coffee at home. Grow up.
Grow up.
Why?
Then buy a knockoff. Thermo cups from Stanley are actually good even when considered overpriced. The Stanley and the knockoff I have are the best termocans I had up until now and I have a few
I got a 5 dollar one off Aliexpress 10 years ago, still running strong.
Nice. I’ve been hesitant to buy anything off such sites after a bad experience. I have doubts about the quality of their offerings.
I bought mine mainly because it fit into a bicycle water bottle cage. When I punctured the outer shell and it lost it’s vacuum, I bought another one, but for some stupid reason, they redesigned it and the new one didn’t fit into a bottle cage any more. A bit disappointing, but it’s still a good cup.
Just get a yeti mug. Keeps it hot for hours and no tech involved.
One issue is that it starts hot and very slowly loses heat.
A smart mug can be set to your desired temperature, get there immediately, and stay there.
That being said, as a former Ember mug user, there is no need for that thing to only be controllable through an app. A dial on the side would be fine.
If you close it, the rate of heat loss in even a cheap vacuum flask is minimal, as in “scalding hot coffee poured in the morning is too hot to drink 8 hour later” minimal.
very slowly
Do you need it to be scalding hot the next day or something? My thermos keeps things insanely hot for like 12 hours. It’s actually pretty ridiculous because sometimes the coffee I made before 8 am is too hot to drink even by lunch.
It’s actually pretty ridiculous because sometimes the coffee I made before 8 am is too hot to drink even by lunch.
That’s the exact problem a heated mug solves. It cools quickly then stays at your ideal temperature.
That’s the point I was trying to make.
just get a cheap ceramic mug and drink your coffee faster. Are we putting caffeine into our bodies or are we just fucking around?
I think I’m fucking around because I drink my morning coffee slow and enjoy it
mm. I suppose theres nothing wrong with fucking around. I should fuck around more. OK I withdraw my grumpy comment. I think I’ve grown as a person.
Look into getting a burnout mug. They have an extra layer before the vacuum layer that quickly absorbs heat then retains it to cool hot drinks to a drinkable temp then holds them there for hours. Zero electronics.
Tea candles are wonderful for this. I keep my Chemex over a candle and pour myself smaller cups from it, but I’m sure you can find solutions where you put the coffee cup directly over the candle as well. A coffee cup with built-in heating elements and electronics sounds insanely overkill.
Or you could use a spirit lamp instead of a candle. Top up the lamp and your drink with alcohol!
Don’t actually do this unless you have some very high % drinking spirits, fuels usually have various toxic things added to them to prevent you from having fun.
60 years ago techies decided that technology couldn’t be trusted, because it is programmed by humans. I’ve yet to meet any programming wizards or seasoned IT personnel that adopt the latest crap. We’ve always distrusted our creations. We know how many mistakes we made while making them, that we weren’t able to fully fix.
20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.
Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest
Holdon let me screenshot…
What flavor of astroturf is this?
Is this just retweeting, or whatever mastodon calls it?
Farting
re-queefing
Lets just say its tomato flavored, because tomatoes dont taste like much of anything anymore.
I just ordered a mechanical watch. Primarily because I think they’re cool, but it not even having a battery feels as far away from a smartwatch as you can get to me, and I like that too.
honestly, I like my Seiko mechanical watch, but there would be periods I wouldn’t wear it and then have to re-set the time often enough that it irritated me and I got a Citizen Eco-Drive, and I fucking love the thing. It does everything I need from a watch: tells me the date, tells me the time, has an easy way to switch on/off DST, even automatically accounts for leap years and has a few functions like a stopwatch and a timer that I never use; but it doesn’t play stupid games like modern tech and it never needs winding.
Having said that, seeing the winding mechanism through the clear back glass of my Seiko is magical in a way you can’t get from any electronic watch.
Yeah, I bought an Eco-Drive 10 years ago and it’s still working great. I never have to worry about it, it just works. I’ve bought two more since, the very cheapest basic model I could find (BM-8180 https://ebay.io/m/wZhDp4), and a fancier dressier one (CA-4553 https://ebay.io/m/TbSiJ5). My original GN-4W-S has taken a real beating over a decade, the glass and body are scratched all to hell, it’s been dropped and banged against door frames &etc. It doesn’t seem to mind, still keeping time like it did brand new.
If you want a watch that just does its job and doesn’t really need anything from you, the Citizen Eco-Drive models are great.
They should make a watch stand that rotates so they stay wound
Edit: patent pending, don’t steal my idea pls
I have bad news for you…
they do, but I’m not enough of a watch collector to necessitate owning one (I have a grand total of two, the two I just listed, and one is usually on my wrist)
It’s true.
I’m this 👌 close.
I’m only this 🤏 close.
Yep, nowadays I avoid the latest tech the the plague.
20 years ago, technically competent people had an integral role in the development and use of tech. That position is now infested with people who think economics is a science and money is real.
Ecunomics is a science. It is not hard science, and like all science, what you derive from it depends on the hypotheses you made.
True economist can work with unreal hypotheses and get wrong conclusions. The fact that it’s not hard science allows a bench of idiots to decide they know better an come up with flat-earth level theories like trickle down economics.
That’s the history of enshitification in a nutshell (sorry to people who hate the term, it’s just apt).
Engineers had some social power in these institutions for a brief moment. Sadly, we weren’t able to get to any kind of class consciousness before the space was enclosed by capital, not even basic trade unionism.
All they had to do was make some of us millionaires and the rest basically comfortable until our skills were devalued enough that we’d lost our bargaining power as workers.
Anyway, best time to plant a tree 20 years ago and all that…
Technically economics is a subset of sociology and thusly is a science. But the people your probably referring to probably wouldn’t consider a backyard blacksmith to be under goods manufacturing either so ditto. This is just a reminder that economics isn’t just dumbasses who think that the only thing that matters is line go up, but the actual science side of it are generally in secondary fields or quietly working for the government or certain consultants.
Economy is a social construct. It is a liberal arts, not STEM.
So is history, but a whole lot of it is still scientifically based. The term soft science has existed exactly for this purposes for decades.
As an intellectual discipline, economics is closer to theology than physics, with finance an entirely arbitrary, cherry picked subset of rules to justify a particular economic model.
Economics is the control mechanism that filled the void in society, vacated by religion, after the Enlightenment. Every economic model is functionally equivalent to any flavour of religion, just with a little extra accounting blended in.
We did away with one unhinged narrative construct, things can’t get better until the current dominant fantastical conjuring is dispelled.
As an intellectual discipline, economics is closer to theology than physics
Absolutely. Ask any economist where clean air sits in any economic model, and they would call it an “externality”. Or a healthy forest. Or clean water. Or any of the other hundreds of millions of things that make life on this planet - or even a vibrant civilization - possible.
It’s also why capitalism is the most cancerous economic system possible, and leads only to ugly fascism-adjacent authoritarian feudalism and (eventual) systemic civilizational collapse and the early death of billions just so a few obscenely wealthy people can accumulate even more wealth before the end.
That’s because the IoT gadget is now a cheap option on the shelf; they’re prolific, but any technically inclined person can see the realities…versions going out-of-date quick, people neglecting patching, etc.
Huh? There’s more and more local-only options. Out of of my whole smart home (300+ devices) maybe 10 require an internet connection, the rest either work locally or don’t connect to wifi at all (zigbee, zwave).
Most of the cheap IOT crap is still insecure, requires a signin and a cloud connection to spy on you and steal your data. Of course there are options to secure the devices (always have been) but for the nontechnical person this is out of reach, not only because doing that requires knowledge but also bc most people don’t even know about these issues or care about their privacy.
The S in IoT stands for Security.
Yeah, 20 years ago they weren’t a self paid tracker that reported my every action on the web - tracking was minimal and limited. But now maybe not a forest as much as just limiting what tech I have in my house - for instance last week I bought an analaog scale to replace my 15 year old smart one from Withings that has been without WiFi for years.
I also limit how much time I have my phone on my person, or total screen time.
Stuff like that was also kind of present in the past.
My non-gamer friends suddenly became gamers thanks to 3D games.
I remember people telling me not to buy a video game controller, because everything will be motion controls in the future.
My stepfather wanted to cut our cable TV internet the moment 3G modems came out. He even talked about Soviet TVs with wired remotes to try to convince me and my mother.
My late stepmother accepted that I won’t go to a trade school to become some kind of repairman after Facebook became popular, although she thought “software developer” was the same as “CNC machine programmer”.
I call this phenomenon “normietech”, and AI is the worst example of it.
The difference is that the things you mentioned are mostly conspiracy shit or just people not knowing better and be afraid.
However we have intelligent people being afraid because they understand and normies not being bothered because they don’t understand…
I think this is worse.
The first part maybe, but not the second. That’s a wholly new thing since electronic has come to mean being tracked.
Tech used to be fun for some reason and innovative and you knew when something new was made it was better than the previous model and you would notice the improvements, now when something new comes out there’s no more excitement because it’s the same shit with a new model number and that’s why it seems like techies aren’t interested in tech because they already tried everything 5-10 years ago and the new stuff just isn’t “new” anymore, it was just simplified for non tech savy and rebranded as “new”.
That’s so not true.
It’s just that the focus shifted from nerds doing nerd things to economists enslaving nerds because they realized there is a lot of money in there.
Tech is still exciting. The constant enshitification and “profits!!!” is what is annoying, depressing, and outreagous.
Take WASM for example. It’s absolutely stunning. Imagine what we would have done with it 15 years ago. Now, it is still some niche because they haven’t figured how to squeeze money out of it.
k, if its so stunning, why didnt it take off? why didnt asm? Sure it enabled processing nearer to local data sets. I have no use for that and I dont want the data near me processed.
That’s the whole point of the entire thread?
Old tech wasn’t spying on you and selling your data.
It would if the worst people on earth were buying it back then.
It was, but not as much, and with far more subtlelty.
