Not a shitpost, OP. Correct me if I missed something.

Is the issue that there are people paying for YouTube Premium?

Every article I read about Intel makes me more thankful that I got a Ryzen 1700 in 2017 and never looked back.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it every corn you love, every corn you know, every corn you ever heard of, every cultivar that ever was, lived out its life. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident recipes, listicles, and culinary doctrines, every shopper and forager, every binger and dieter, every planter and harvester of fields, every succotash and popcorn, every monoecious couple in love, every pistil and stamen, hopeful seedling, barbecuer and chef, every eater of cornmeal, every corrupt subsidy, every cob and kernel in the history of our tummies lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

I don’t want to distract from the article itself, but on a generic level, The Signpost is worth reading for anyone interested in the “behind-the-scenes” of the project. They published another article about this a couple weeks ago.

I wouldn’t use Mullvad when it’s openly hostile to peer-to-peer torrenting. Even outside of the obvious – piracy is one of the best and most unique use cases for a VPN – I use torrents wherever the option is available for legal downloads because that’s normally faster, spares a load on the server, and strengthens the download’s resiliency. That Mullvad wants to restrict that is their (reasonable) call, but it’s not one that’s going to get my money.

Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I’ve heard some wild takes on Lemmy lately, but I still shouldn’t have assumed.

But now I still have to disagree; this is part of a worldwide psychological experiment for Google to learn about users’ willingness to do useless work.

EDIT: I’m a dum dum.

I use and routinely contribute to OSM, and I hate Google Maps both ethically and because the actual underlying map is just half-baked.

This is a ridiculous explanation for why GMaps suggests nominally slower routes alongside the main one. What’s happening in the OP image is clearly a bug, not Google begging you to pretty please do 8 superfluous minutes of data collection for them.

• Some people have areas they’re more comfortable with. For example, some people are afraid of driving on a bustling highway or through a claustrophobic downtown. Alternative routes make it more likely that this person can forgo a few minutes in favor of something more comfortable.
• The router isn’t omniscient. Sometimes the human using the router knows more about local conditions than the router itself does, e.g. that a road it’s taking you through has a problem. Alternative routes again make it more likely that you give the user a satisfactory route.

This comment is just fucking stupid and based on nothing when a much more cogent explanation exists. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that you travel farther, but seriously? Show any evidence at all that this is why it performs this extremely normal and explicable routing operation.

That makes good sense; sometimes you have an unrealistic expectation for the quality of answers, and seeing the mediocre reality grounds you.

That leads into another idea: checking a candidate solution’s correctness is normally much easier than finding the solution. Computational complexity theory shows this rigorously with more formalized problems. So given a wrong answer, you have a much easier gateway from which to fall into the problem. (I’ve had this happen really badly at least once.)

I disagree. It’s more like the bystander effect than anything. If I ask a question right now and you see it, unless you’re especially passionate or sympathetic or unless the answer is trivial, you probably have better things to do, feel someone else could answer better, think I can probably figure it out myself, etc. Core point being that you’re faceless in a crowd of people who could also potentially help by answering.

Misinformation, on the other hand, triggers an emotional response that gets you personally hooked into the discussion – at least moreso than the initial question likely would’ve. Someone else has stepped out of the faceless crowd of bystanders and fucked it up, and suddenly you feel like less of a bystander.

Source: personal experience in large, collaborative projects. “Someone else will get it” is almost reflexive for unfinished work, but when I see direct misinformation, it feels like my job to correct it. I’m not afraid in the former case that my work will be lambasted; I’m afraid I simply don’t give enough of a shit to try.

Twitter user discovers Cunningham’s Law. More at 11.

(This, by the way, is one of the main engines behind massive collaborations like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc. By pointing out that the Twitter user failed to mention the Law, I’m arguably falling prey to it right now.)

You’re going to the bathroom, you’re not playin’ Battlefield.

You’re shittin’ in a bucket, you’re playin’ Battlefield.

Rage Against the Rage Against the Machine

Wow, thanks! Let’s switch topics. I’m trying to start a business where I sell fruit to weathermen. Can you help me with that?

It’s not even the style on its own*; it’s that you wrote a frankly bloviating short essay about an obvious concept that can be summarized as “most people who watch the weather don’t know what a public key is or how to use one”. I’m disgustingly long-winded, and even I wouldn’t expend that much effort. The style is what escalates that from “padding a high school essay” to “Oh, yup, a GPT wrote this.”

* “It’s not X, it’s Y” yeah, yeah, I know.

Dude, I’m sorry for saying this (because I get this a lot for my often overly formal writing, and I get it’s ironic on this post), but…

Your writing reads like it’s LLM-generated. Like, really heavily reads like an LLM wrote it. Long scrawls for pretty simple concepts, I don’t know how to describe why the cadence feels LLM-y other than “vibes”, flawless grammar, needless lists of nouns and adjectives, “it’s not X; it’s Y”, and this weird fucking lifeless demeanor that feels like it has no voice.

Oh, TIL. Thanks.

I want to roll a marble down it.

I wasn’t necessarily suggesting apt in the CLI; just the APT repository generally, which ZorinOS’ built-in package manager has access to. If sudo apt install hardinfo will find it, I have to imagine the GUI frontend will. Granted I don’t use Ubuntu or its derivatives because Ubuntu is terrible, so I can’t say for sure, but this sure doesn’t seem like their fault.

Okay, so:

I tried installing a program called “hardinfo”. My ZorinOS software store didn’t find it through flathub.

That’s fair. Repo fragmentation is a real thing on Linux, and it seems like Ultimate Systems didn’t put their software on Flathub.

So I googled it, found a .deb file, which my Zorin store loaded up to install.

So instead of just using apt – like every introductory tutorial to Ubuntu and its derivatives leads off with – you chose to do it (effectively) the Windows way that you’re familiar with where you hunt and peck around the Internet for an install file. It’s an understandable mistake (that I think most Windows expats make at some point), but the blame from this point on lies squarely on you.

Then I hit install, and it spits out a message like “Software was not installed. Requires these three dependancies, which will not be installed”. Didn’t tell me why they didn’t install. Just said "Hardinfo needs these programs. Good luck figuring it out asshole.

You didn’t have the dependencies, and it told you which ones to install. Why does it need to tell you why it needs them? Nice to have, I guess, but if it’s mandatory, it’s mandatory. No amount of explanation is going to get you around the fact that this software will not function without them. Dependencies aren’t a Linux thing; they’re a reality of modern programming. And I imagine apt would’ve automatically resolved this and asked you to also install the deps.