experbia

My local store uses these but they lock up if you bring them out to the 2nd row of parking spaces out front. It’s enough to get the cart to your car, then you go to return it and it’s totally locked, so everyone just shoves them into the planters in a big pile of tipped over carts instead of physically lifting the whole thing and hefting it to the cart returns to return it. The store has signs everywhere now telling people not to throw carts into the planters, and the employees know the problem, and the city has evidently complained multiple times, but district management evidently refuses to believe it’s got anything to do with the cart locks and I was told by an exasperated checker that they’re apparently considering getting security guards to confront people and make them return carts?? lmaooo

I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I’ve not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.

So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was “BILLBOARDS!!!” and I hate it.

Nope 😂 though, despite their decision obviously having nothing to do with me, I did find it to be somewhat flattering and a bit reassuring that the fine Valve engineers seemed to make similar decisions to me.

I use Arch for all my computers, including my “critical” systems. I only do full upgrades when I know I have the time to troubleshoot something broken, but rarely need to do so.

More than this, I actually use Arch as the OS for thousands of computers for my work that end up in customer hands, who expect stability. I’m not sure at what point it stops being Arch, though - I pin the package repositories to internal mirrors with fixed package distributions from specific dates to control the software that goes to them, so it’s not really rolling release anymore I guess - I control the releases and when updates go out.

Arch is what you make of it. My Arch project desktop pc is constantly shifting and breaking and needing attention as I continually improve it and play with things. My Arch laptop that runs my life and work and is the most important computer I own is a paragon of stability and perfect functioning.

it never ceases to amaze me how stupid we all are as a civilization.

we’re opting out of it, but nature will continue. this will be a very curious and fairly hospitable world full of interesting xenoarcheological mysteries… in the distant future, to a visiting spacefaring civilization.

Wells Fargo are simply criminal, it has been demonstrated again and again. It would not surprise me in the slightest if I were to learn that this was an intentional test to see how many people would notice a missing deposit or two and gauge how often they can simply swipe some deposits “accidentally”.

Of course they are. Citizens can be conscripted.

I’m convinced this is a major great filter event for all intelligent species. “Can the natural consolidation of power and resources in the world be sufficiently counteracted to avoid massive cataclysmic population crashes?”

It’s just a sob story to emotionally manipulate you.

I’m seeing this line of thinking more and more. The echo chambers increase in intensity every day.

“If you have a negative emotional reaction to a news story about your team, ignore it, it’s a liberal psyop!” - How miraculously convenient for your average psychopathic conservative. From the same people who espouse “law and order” and “Christian morality” but also “it’s not a crime if you’re not caught”.

COSMIC is now on my radar, thank you. It looks very intriguing.

I have been tempted by GNOME several times, but I disagree with some of their design choices and find them a bit frustrating. I feel that it’s fairly strongly-opinionated software. The benefits, of course, are obvious: internal consistency that leads to a higher quality experience. But, only if you buy-in to some overarching design philosophy. That’s one of the reasons I left Windows! I also have a suite of Kwin scripts that make my life a lot easier, so it’s pretty hard to leave Plasma at this point.

Still, that keyboard has tempted me a lot nonetheless…

Using touch on Windows has definitely set my expectations much higher than the reality on Linux right now, so this is a good call! You won’t know what you’re missing, so it’s not going to bug you. I kind of wish I could return to this blissful ignorance. I have another 2-in-1 with Windows 11 on it in the house and anytime I look at it to keep it patched up and fix issues for its user, it reminds me very effectively of how far behind my 2-in-1 is with touchscreen interactions :(

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

Thank you - I was already aware of this, actually, but I choose to leave it disabled because when this is set, touchscreen drag-scrolling of webpages breaks and it selects text as though it were a mouse click-drag instead. As it turns out, I barely use Maliit anyway because of its other deficiencies, but I definitely touch-scroll my browser a lot, even in laptop mode. A generally disappointing dilemma!

If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.

100%. Even as a power-user (understatement) who overwhelmingly prefers keyboard input to control things when I’m “gettin’ stuff done”, I will sometimes miss the general consideration level of Windows’ input handling when it comes to mouse and especially touch. Mouse is pretty damn good these days on Linux, but touch…

Touch is abysmal. A ton of modern laptops have touchscreens, or are actually 2-in-1s that fold into tablets, etc, and the support is just barely there, if at all. I’m not talking about driver support - this is often fairly acceptable. My laptop’s touch and pen interface worked right out of the box… technically. But KDE Plasma 5 with Wayland- an allegedly very modern desktop stack- is not pleasant when I fold into tablet mode.

The sole (seriously, I’ve looked) Wayland on-screen-keyboard, Maliit, is just terrible. No settings of any kind (there is a settings button! it is not wired to anything, it does nothing), no language options, no layout options (the default layout is abysmal and lacks any ‘functional’ keys like arrows, pgup/dn, home/end, delete, F keys, tab, etc), and most egregiously, it resists being manually summoned which is terrible because it does not summon itself at appropriate times. Firefox is invisible to it. KRunner is invisible to it. The application search bar is invisible to it. It will happily pop up when I tap into Konsole, but it’s totally useless as it is completely devoid of vital keys. Touch on Wayland is absolutely pointless.

Of course, there is a diverse ecosystem of virtual keyboards and such on Xorg! However, Xorg performance across all applications is typically abysmal (below 1FPS) if the screen is rotated at all. This is evidently a well known issue that I doubt will ever be fixed.

In the spirit of Open Source Software, and knowing that simply complaining loudly has little benefit for anyone, I have at several times channeled my frustration towards developing a reasonable Wayland virtual keyboard, but it’s a daunting project fraught with serious problems and I have little free-time, so it’s barely left its infancy in my dev folder, and in the meanwhile I reluctantly just flip my keyboard back around on the couch with a sigh, briefly envious of my friend’s extremely-touch-capable Windows 2-in-1.

I love this guy, one of my few favorite YouTube channels and subscriptions. Anything he fixates on is suddenly interesting.