[rant]
If you trust anything Google in '25 you’re a muppet. Or at least uninformed. Either way you’re part of the problem, and deserve to be treated as such.

I get it’s impossible for some to completely de-googlefy their lives. Myself still use YouTube, either directly or through Piped. But there’s always that bloody risk Google will fuck with you and your digital belongings, that you need to take into account.

So I don’t blame those two for publishing their videos in YouTube. I do blame them however for doing so exclusively. Just publish the same video across multiple platforms dammit — YouTube and PeerTube and Vimeo and Odysee and Dailymotion and everything else you find.

inb4 “AcKsHyUaLlY Rick Beato uploaded it to Instagram too!” — it doesn’t count because:

1. Meta is as trustable as Google; as in, may both die in a fire.
2. Instagram is mostly focused on photos and brainrot videos (akin to TikTok). Not really a good place to share anything with more depth than a puddle.
3. This is just a guess from my part, but odds are Rick Beato only shared the video there after realising something was off with the YouTube version of it.

So my point still remains - they’re still putting all their eggs into the same basket.

Someone might say “But that’s too hard! And the platforms have almost no user!”. Well… then don’t complain when Google goes like “A content creator is a user, not a human being. It’s fine to butcher its videos automatically, no need to ask its permission”. Just like it did.

“AcKsHyUaLlY Ritchie was talking about user trust over the creator” - the same point still stands. Once you have multiple copies online you can reliably say “no, my content is genuine, it’s YouSlop doing this shit. If you want a more faithful version of the video hop into [insert alternative]”.

Some days I really hate human short-sightedness.
[/rant]

HN comments are almost as bad as YouTube ones.

“Two plus two equals five!”
“No, it’s four.”
“WAAH, THIS IS CENSURRSHIP!”

It would be hilarious if not sad.

I am so bloody glad I upgraded my computer last year.

Yes, and that’s what I’m using. Or trying to - people flat out refuse ditching WA because everyone else is using it. That’s why I’m hoping the barrier won’t be lifted just for Europeans.

Further info on the compound. Wikipedia claims it to be as toxic as chlorine. That was also used in WW1, under the name “bertholite”.

Question: will this interoperability only apply to Europeans? As in, will WhatsApp keep some artificial barrier elsewhere?

I’m asking this because I’m in Brazil. And I desperately want to ditch WhatsApp, but here this would be social suicide, given almost everybody here assumes you have WhatsApp.

Can I send anyone the excess vitamin D I’m getting?

Bloody Spring. (Southern Hemisphere.)

Even then, I think “check nearby people for what they use” shouldn’t be underestimated. Of course you wouldn’t tell them to use Neon itself, but if they’re using Kubuntu you’d probably be abler to help them than if they were to use, say, Mint, right?

My point is, that people underestimate the power of offline help, and having acquaintances who know the system well enough to help you out. And that matters a lot when picking your starting distro.

Do you know anyone in real life that has some experience with Linux, and is willing to help you out with it? If yes, use the same distribution (distro, or “OS”) as they do.

If not, as others said, Mint is a good start.

TL;DW: an extremely convoluted explanation of the optimal strategy for Guess Who.

Let’s call

• “pool” - the number of characters a player did not rule out as not being the right character. For example, if there are 20 chars and you ruled 8 out, then your pool is 12. Your pool is “a”, your opponent’s pool is “b”.
• “bid” - the number of characters in the pool that a question applies to. For example, if your pool is 12, you ask “do they have a beard?”, and there are 4 bearded characters there, then the bid is 4. And if your opponent asks “does he look like a bitch?”, whatever you do, do not include Marsellus Wallace into the bid.

So. If I got this right, your bid should be either a/2 or b-1, whichever is the smallest. That’s it.

Don’t forget the soundtrack. Ich brauche Zeit, kein Heroin, kein Alkohol, kein Nikotin. Gib mir Benzin!

I don’t know which one is the coolest. But people keep me asking this one:

“MSG ME! MSG ME!”

Yup, pretty much.

And it’s culture-dependent so it might backfire - it might convey the person is a moron, or that they’re someone you should suspect.

There’s something I call “the paradox of mediocrity”: what’s made for everybody is mediocre for everybody, and pleases nobody¹. That’s because quality is, in large part, subjective; and the same things a demographic hate are often the reasons another loves it.

I’ll reuse an example from the text, Pulp Fiction. I love that movie. But I know plenty people who hate it. So let’s say we’ll make a Pulp Fiction 2.0, and address the issues they see with it…

• “It’s too violent!”—now the violence is only implicit.
• “It’s too hard to follow what’s going on!”—no problem, change the narrative structure to a stock one: setup, development, twist, resolution.
• “Why is Jules quoting the Bible? This doesn’t make sense lol”—let’s tone it down, now Jules speaks a bit less cryptically.

Done. Now Pulp Fiction 2.0 should be for everybody, right? Well. For some, the move went from awful to mediocre; and for some…

• It was supposed to be a violent world; violence should be an explicit part of the everyday of those characters—you grab a snack, chat a bit with a friend, and then murder someone. But it’s now implicit, so the movie lost meaning.
• That narrative structure, refreshing and different, was replaced with the same slop you see in almost every Hollywood movie. *Yaaaawn*
• You butchered part of the theme, moral rules in a fucked up world. What’s left is either philosophical masturbations for chair addicts, or no moral discussion at all.

Read the text in the light of the above, and you’ll notice André Franca is talking about the same paradox, through different words. And he’s saying how this happened.

The comparisons the author make show he prefers informationally dense works; plenty people are like this. But for plenty others, informationally dense means hard to follow, and that’s a "problem"². Fixing the “problem” means the work loses appeal for some (like Franca³), but makes it a lot more approachable by other people.

Today’s cinema often feels designed by committee, optimized for streaming algorithms and opening weekend numbers rather than lasting impact. We have better technology, way bigger budgets, more sophisticated effects, but somewhere along the way, we forgot that movies are supposed to move us, not just occupy our time between scrolling sessions.

A/B tests will wreck the soul of the work all the bloody time.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic. Maybe I’m romanticizing the past.

I do think survival bias does play a role (we forget about the older slop, but the newer one is still on our faces), but it isn’t just that. I believe there’s a general view that your work should appease every bloody body—and if it doesn’t, then “why bother”. And it’s outputting content that is lukewarm for everybody.

1. Neither “nobody” nor “everybody” should be interpreted categorically here. There are exceptions, just not enough to be relevant.
2. I want to emphasise that this shit is subjective. That’s the point of this comment dammit—it’s a “problem” for some, but part of the appeal for others.
3. Or me. I’m by no means a cinephile, but the same thing applies to other media.

[Edit: fixed grammar, reworded some things, but the basic meaning is the same.]

English: [ɔ:]. It rhymes with “dinosaur”.
Portuguese: [ä’uɾ]. Basically how it’s spelled.

I got a set of their stuff. Mostly plates. Older than me.

I don’t have Windows for years, but Schadenfreude is making me oddly amused with the current changes.

[Title]

Preloading will not solve bad performance. It will not reduce the amount of resources (CPU cycles, RAM) the program requires. It’ll only make the program start before the user asked it to, so some muppets blame their machines instead of their crapware OS.

Bad performance means the program is either doing too much, or doing it inefficiently. Given how excited MS is with AI (unlike its users), it’s likely a mix of both - “vibe coded” slop + pointlessly running some model. The bullet points highlighting how they’re moving options back and forth also stink like they added the kitchen sink to File Explorer.

You can access Xbox full screen experience from Task View, Game Bar settings, or use Win + F11 hotkey to toggle FSE.

1. I’m surprised Windows has multiple desktops now. This has been the default across Linux DEs for years.
2. They’re putting this crap there??? Pffffft. Then don’t be surprised if users don’t find it.

Point-in-time restore for Windows

I’m checking the documentation. Ctrl+F “folder”, nothing; “partition”, nothing. Then I casually glanced at it.

If I got this right, you can enable or disable the restore system; but you can’t tell it which folders and/or partitions it ignore. If that’s the case holy shit, might as well disable it and use a third party backup system.

Based on user feedback, we have added support for uninstalling Store-managed apps from the Store’s library page.

As another user here highlighted (and I agree with it), this shit is obvious.

If you need user feedback to know it, might as well ask users if you should go to work.

Related:

• Mustafa Suleyman*, Microsoft AI CEO, mindblown at people not being excited with his corpo-slop
• Pavan Davuluri, Windows chief, trying to address criticism without doing jack shit to fix what’s being criticised
• Microsoft still trying to push Edge down the users’ throats

“I don’t understand, why did users turn stupid out of blue? Those things used to know basic obedience! Now they can’t even follow simple orders like «be excited»! Let’s fire the User Taming Department and replace it with AI!” /hj

*aka “Suleyman the Chaoswrecker”. Not to be confused with “Suleiman the Lawgiver”, the Ottoman sultan from five centuries ago.