• 2 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle


  • The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade.

    Yeah no shit! When my computer does full-screen, disruptive things that I didn’t tell it to do, I figure out how to remove that malware. I’ve been off Windows at home for about a month now, thanks Linux Mint! Getting some games to work has been challenging, but most things have just worked and quite a few work much better!

    Performance is up overall, and my confidence that my computer isn’t running a bunch of secret ad and spy ware is way up. Hardware like my gamepad and microphone would randomly disconnect and have issues on Windows, all working perfectly now.

    Unfortunately I’m still deep in MS land for work, but there’s almost a comedic quality to it. Everything’s very slow, everyone has constant issues with Teams, or Office online, or Dynamics, or copilot shoving it’s tendrils into everything. Watching businesses struggle to keep operating in the face of Microsoft’s inadequacy is like being a mechanic watching a motor grind to a halt because the owner/manufacturer replaced all the oil with syrup.

    Like yes, it’s my problem to fix, but I’m just glad it’s not my car.


  • I had in some ways the opposite 23&Me experience and goals. My parents told me growing up that I had some small native ancestry. This is actually a common myth many Americans have either been told or somehow deluded themselves into believing.

    So I did the DNA testing (which I now regret from all the obvious enshittification and privacy reasons) to prove that my ancestry was boring and predictable. Which it was, no indigenous ancestry, just the expected European countries that my great grandparents came from.

    They also do a lot of nice health screening things and I think that’s probably the much more valuable aspect of it. It really is very American that people are so much more concerned with what DNA says about one’s race or ethnicity than about their health and wellbeing.













  • Huh, never saw this one but in high school I had a dream just like this. I met a beautiful woman, perfect in every way, we got married had some kids, I even got some ways into middle age. Then, I was sitting in chair and noticed that my vision seemed… blurry at the edges, in a very “vignette filter” kind of way and I immediately knew I was dreaming. Woke up just as the existential collapse started. For several years after I’d try to remember her face, what our love had felt like, any of the details that had seemed so solid and tantalizing real for those few sleeping hours.

    In retrospect, a lot like that Rick and Morty episode with the life simulator game. I wonder if one of the writers ever had that dream too? Brains are weird, and I haven’t any dreams nearly that all encompassing since.