JS is a cancer infecting the programming world. It never should have escaped the browser. If null is the worst programming mistake ever made, JS is a strong contender for the second worst mistake.

The opt outs don’t work. Even if you opted out of the telemetry that only disabled some of it, not all of it, and MS constantly re-enables it with updates. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive, But. It. Keeps. Coming. Back. Windows 10 you could previously disable most of the worst crapware that MS shoveled in. Windows 11 you can’t disable it, they just don’t give you the opt outs anymore. It’s all mandatory. Even worse, they started backporting that stuff into Windows 10 as well. Did you notice when MS silently installed copilot on your Windows 10 system?

Ultimately though, I just don’t want to keep fighting a losing battle against a company I despise. I’m done giving my money to them. It would be one thing if they provided a good service that I enjoyed like Valve does with Steam, but the last time I actually liked a version of Windows was when XP was released. It’s basically been downhill since then. If there was a decent alternative to Android I’d switch that as well, but unfortunately Linux phone just isn’t ready for prime time yet. But thanks to the amazing work by Valve, for gaming systems, Linux is finally a viable alternative.

If you don’t see the point, then Microsoft has successfully boiled the frog.

One thing you’ll have to do (which is kind of annoying that it isn’t enabled by default) is go into the steam options and toggle “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”. That enables proton/wine for everything in your library. In the early days of Steam on Linux Valve setup a white list of games that ran under Wine that mostly contains their own titles in it, and for some reason they just never removed that behavior even though that list is unmaintained these days.

Not every game that uses anti-cheat, there’s plenty that do run fine in Linux, but the major ones it’s unsupported. Technically the games run, and run really well, it’s just you’ll get banned for running under Linux. The big ones I’m aware of that don’t work are Valorant, GTA5, Destiny 2, LoL, and Apex Legends.

Steam is available and runs great. Valve has really put an insane amount of work into making Linux gaming smooth and painless. They have their own flatpak equivalent called pressure-vessel that steam uses by default, and everything that steam supports in Windows is 100% supported in Linux as well. If you check out protondb.com you can put in your steam account name and it will scan it and tell you any games in your library that will have issues in Linux, but outside of a few of the competitive shooters that have super aggressive anti-cheat generally everything either works out of the box, or after some minor tweaks (typically adding a few launch parameters).

Additionally, there’s an excellent unified launcher called Heroic that lets you connect with and use the GOG, Epic, and Amazon Gaming stores, and provides a convenient wrapper around Wine/Proton for actually running the games.

Finally there’s another launcher called Lutris that a lot of people swear by and supports some of the less used stores like Itch.io, although when I tried it recently I ran into some problems getting it to work.

The EOL of Win 10 and MS silently installing copilot on my desktop was the final straw for me. I’ve been running 100% Linux now for a couple months with no real issues so far. I expected a few games to give me issues but so far if anything I’ve had fewer issues with games than I did even in Windows. Had a couple hardware problems, although those I’ve mostly been able to solve.

I’ve got it setup to dual boot “just in case”, but haven’t actually needed to which is great. If I still haven’t needed that partition a year from now I’ll probably just reformat it as extra storage and keep a Win10 VM around if I really get stuck on something.

You’re not wrong, but this rant isn’t really going to accomplish anything useful I don’t think.

It’s also not a warning, it’s a security update. The title made it sound like Chrome was going to open some kind of warning dialog, or that Google had issued a threatening press release.

Yes, but now the cheque cleared. Or he’s just trying to suck up to Xi, you know one or the other.

The issue isn’t international trade, you’d have these exact same problems with no trade happening at all. The issue is unregulated (or poorly regulated) markets. So many monopolies and duopolies, and the most extreme income inequality. They need to start taxing the fuck out of the billionaire class and breaking up corporations like it’s an Olympic sport and they’re going for gold. Bring back 90%+ taxes on the billionaires.

Yep, I see it with my own video feed. I’ll watch a video with the faintest right wing connection, say something about a game studio struggling with trolls. Then I’ll start getting videos suggested bitching about “woke games”. I tell it not to suggest those videos and they’ll go away for a little bit, but eventually it starts trying to creep them back in. The algorithm is constantly trying to push people to the extremes.

So I was spitballing some ideas around this a while back, although I was more focused on income inequality at the time. I think the best idea I came up with was something like a progressive taxation system where a company’s taxes were determined by the highest paid employee (including the value of benefits and things like stock grants) minus the lowest paid employee, divided by the company head count. If executives want to keep bringing in eye watering salaries they either need to pay all their employees significantly more, or hire a hell of a lot more of them at current rates. There’s probably some flaws and things that could be tweaked there, but I think it’s a start.

Biden would have done just as bad as Harris because Harris ran on Biden’s platform plus a little extra helping of GOP policies (for some stupid fucking reason). OK, Biden might have done slightly better, but not enough to actually win. Anyone who stood a chance of winning would have to run on essentially the opposite of Biden’s policies instead of pulling Kamala’s “nope, wouldn’t change a single thing” platform.

I’m not sure exactly what the point of this article is. It doesn’t actually allege any wrongdoing, and it seems he hasn’t been to Russia since Zalinsky took office. Even prior to that there could have been innocent explanations for his travel to Russia. Basically this is some smoke, but no actual evidence of fire. It certainly raises some eyebrows, but considering those eyebrows were already raised prior to this this doesn’t really seem to be adding anything new.

We also need competition and for decades now the offices that were supposed to safe guard us from monopolies have been green lighting again and again mergers and acquisitions that result in only one or two dominant players in every market. There should be a blanket rule that if there are less than 10 companies (of somewhat similar scale) operating in some market none of them are allowed to merge or acquire each other.

What? Vote for them? Be incredibly pissed they threw the election and now our democracy is fucked? Yeah.

Maxim 6: If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.

While everything you said is true the DNC is also equally to blame. For better or worse FPTP means we only have two parties, which means there’s an onus on them to appeal to as many voters as they can (to do anything less is to guarantee their loss). The DNC for decades now has followed a policy of appealing not to the general public, but to a wealthy subset in order to maximize their own bribes campaign contributions. That has seen a steady rightward shift of their economic (and to a lesser extent social) policies. This rightward shift naturally alienates a large block of those that would otherwise support them. After all if you’re a supporter of right wing policies you would already be a Republican, thus if you aren’t it’s because you’re looking for left wing policies. Something the Democrats increasingly do not have.

There are three possible outcomes for each potential voter. You can vote Republican. You can vote Democrat. Or you can not vote (or vote 3rd party, the outcome is identical either way). Because voting isn’t mandatory, the default state is not voting. Republicans have spent the last couple decades erecting roadblocks to voting, passing ID laws, closing polling places to increase lines, encouraging their followers to harass voters, purging voter rolls at the last minute, etc.

All that means that it takes actual effort to go out and vote. For an increasingly exhausted public, that is struggling just to survive day to day, that might have to take a precious day off from work to stand in an uncomfortable line for hours at a time while being menaced by unhinged MAGA, they need a strong encouragement to put up with all that.

From a purely logical standpoint the threat posed by Trump and MAGA should be sufficient motivation. But people are not always or even often logical. Republicans have spent decades fine tuning their propaganda. They’ve weaponized AM radio, and talking head “news” shows like Hannity, to convince their voters that Democrats are perpetually moments away from rounding them all up and having them executed. That’s the reason Republicans always show up to vote, no matter how onerous the process becomes.

Democrats in contrast have been hesitant to call a spade a spade. They should have been blaring the threat posed by Trump from day one of his campaign in the most explicit language possible. Every opportunity should have been taken to replay highlights of every unhinged statement Trump made to highlight exactly how dangerous he was. Instead they use euphemisms, saying things like “extremists” rather than terrorists, or “Insurrection” instead of attempted coup.

Added to all of that is dissatisfaction with Democrats policies right when they needed to be doing everything they could to convince people that if they just got off their asses and voted things would significantly improve for them.

So yes, this is very much a failure of Democrats. The party failed not just themselves but the American public. Unfortunately now everyone pays the price for that, not just the apathetic voters that sat out, but even those of us that did the sane logical thing and voted for the lesser evil.

Then unfortunately the fascists will keep winning. You don’t win over people by telling them if they campaign hard for you then things will be just a tiny little bit better than they currently are. It’s the motivational equivalent of “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”. Just look at the voter turnout numbers this election, they were abysmal. Trump absolutely stomped Harris, yet the total votes cast for him were still only a tiny fraction of the total eligible voters. Only ~65% of the population voted. That means if Harris could have inspired a portion of that 35% who stayed home to get off their asses and actually vote she could have won instead.