Considering if I should pull out of the ACA plan (not renew) or stay in and hope they don’t touch it come 2025. If they make any cuts or kill it, I will not be able to pay for the plan on my own, even a very low dollar one. Living’s overrated anyway, if my health goes in the gutter after 2025, RIP me I guess.

Gemini eats glue. Claude and ChatGPT are a lot more coherent.

“But think of the jobs the meteor will create!”

Kids these days won’t experience the dialup days…

dial-tone seven-digit number beeps ringing 20-30 seconds of dialup modem connecting noises

The moment you forgot the speakers were turned up from listening to The Offspring earlier

WELCOME!

YOU’VE GOT MAIL!

2020*

No, no, it’s fine. Americans don’t know how to use apostrophes properly.

32-bit -> 64-bit

Factorio: Space Age has entered the chat

Server authoritative multiplayer system (server only takes player inputs and spits out results, making editing data impossible), with a lag prediction system clientside, works wonders. Aimbotting will always exist, but detection should be server side.

False prophets will arrive and mislead many

Problem is these aftermarket roms have way more frequent updates. OP is tired of constant updating, complicated interfaces, and wants something that “just works”. Good luck with that.

Unfortunately, anything modern is designed to be cheap and throwaway in design, as inflation would easily push the price of the devices today up to 4 times that of the old stuff it it were designed with the same durability. Anything old enough to be the kind of device that lasts decades is incompat as technology has marched on, and old stock “new” still has an age issue - yes, electronics still go bad just by age.

Best I can say is, for your phone, a modern old people flip phone will still connect to the cell net, but it has a stripped down Android - this is because designing a one of a kind OS for a phone that has to use VoLTE VoIP and RCS messaging would be absurdly expensive, and slapping a bottom barrel SoC with Android already made for it is way cheaper. Phones all come with web browsers because the data net is now they do voice these days, so why not include a basic feature that can be useful to some? My first cell phone was a flip phone with 1.5MB RAM that didn’t even have bluetooth and it had a web browser… which was hot garbage, barely able to show me a paragraph on the tiny screen and slower than dialup but I did on occason try to use it.

You can try the Lightphone or Lightphone 2, which is an “anti-feature” phone that specifically does not come with any features.

Samsung washing machines have been a PITA due to Samsung making them with sketchy quality. I’d say a cheap front loader from the hardware store would be good enough, if they have a non-smart appliance.

The smart TV thing is getting annoying, especially since everyone is doing it at all price points, but a computer monitor ($~100 for 21") does not have smart anything, has hdmi, and probably you will use your own stuff to connect to it. Only problem is if the monitor lacks an HDMI ARC port, which is an HDMI that can send audio data back thru the link for sound systems, which you will need because monitors have trash speakers, unless you have a god tier set of 2.1 speakers with a 3.5mm jack.

As for the car and bluetooth, it’s always a hassle - the older the car the less likely bluetooth will work reliably if at all, but if you take calls on the road, you have to keep this working, as it is a safety issue. As for car spying, research the car and find out how to disconnect the telemetry modem. Until very recently, a lot of older cars with telemetry run just fine with the modem disconnected, or an aftermarket head unit installed with the telemetry unit disconnected.

Ah, someone brought their emotional support truck for the bread and burger run

Microsoft Flight Simulator: A whole airplane on the couch

2014… the POS edition (basically LTSC) was 2019

You do migrate to newer versions of those ossses with new de and backend lib versions, and all the breaking changes that entails which means spending another week chasing down broken stuff and learning how different things work now.

Which is about the same

Consider that Microsoft will have supported Windows 10 for 10 years as of next year, I will say it had a good run. Considering the longest support cycle for an OS I can find that is even remotely usable as a daily is Slackware 14.1, at 9 years, and support ended for that almost a year ago.

This is like people complaining about how Ubuntu 16.04 LTS support ended not long ago (2021-04-29)

Or macOS 10.9 Mavericks (2016-12-01)

Or Android 6.0 (2018-08-01)

Or Debian 8 “Jessie” (2018-06-17)

Or Linux Mint 17 (2019-07-01)

Or Fedora 23 (2016-12-20)

Or Slackware 14.1 (2024-01-01)

Of all of these, not even Slackware comes close to how long Microsoft has supported Windows 10 post release (2015)

It does, as DDR5 comes with rudimentary ECC protection builtin.

My problem is this is an AM4 system using DDR4 memory… already outdated.