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Cake day: October 1st, 2023

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  • I don’t base the choice of my OS on being able to play one game. KDE is a DE, not an OS. X11 is a window manager, not an OS. Almost always, I will use a Wayland (another window manager) session, but to play Oblivion streamed to my TV, I have to switch to an X11 session. The guy asked for any features that aren’t compatible with Wayland. I have one that I keep X11 around for, so I gave it. Given that you don’t even seem to understand what you are arguing, I’m confused why you piped in with probably the stupidest “solution” to my use case.



  • Sure, people can use the presets, but on a lower end machine, those aren’t perfect for getting the most out of your specific hardware. What I meant there was that consoles, and by extension the steam deck/steam machine, have the exact setting loadout for that hardware dialed in.

    Sure, he could pay someone to upgrade it for him, but at that point it loses a lot of the benefits that come with being able to upgrade in the first place.

    The Fractal Terra is actually larger than all modern consoles. The Fractal Terra is 11.4 liters. The PS5 is 7.2 liters. The Xbox series X is 6.9 liters. The steam machine is 3.8 liters, 3x smaller than the Fractal Terra. When it comes to dimensions, the Xbox series X is smaller in all dimensions, and while the PS5 is longer and wider, it’s height is half that of the Fractal Terra. The steam machine is pretty similar in two of the three dimensions, but the depth is less than half that of the Terra. The Fractal Terra is a really nice, small case, but it’s only small for a PC, not a console.

    As for normalizing incompetence, I doubt you have as extensive a knowledge as you do for computers for every single thing you interact with every day. Knowing “how to use one” is different from knowing how to build and upgrade one.

    You come across as someone who is smart, and yet doesn’t fully understand that half the population is below the 50th percentile. The generalizations you make for yourself and those you regularly interact with cannot be made for everyone.


  • You really do, and you not thinking so is telling of how skewed your view of what common knowledge really is. Where does someone start when building a computer if they don’t know what goes into a computer? How do they pick parts if they don’t know what changes will make their computer better or worse? I love PC part picker, but let’s be real, it’s for people who already know what they are looking for. PC part picker makes things so easy for you and I, but drop any tech-illiterate person into PC part picker, and they won’t actually get anywhere. Plus, I’ve had it get the dimensions of a GPU wrong before, and without verifying through a different website, I would have bought a card that didn’t fit in the case I was using. Even the gold standard sources of information make mistakes.

    As for the pre-built argument, to someone like my brother who knows nothing about computers, but regularly games on his PS5, the steam machine and a prebuilt are essentially the same. He wouldn’t know how to fix the computer without sending it off to the company, which is how he’d fix the steam machine as well. He also wouldn’t see the PC as something that could be upgraded. If a game wasn’t running well, he certainly wouldn’t know what part would need upgrading in his machine to make his experience better. In that sense, the pre-built is effectly non-upgradable. He might know to adjust the in-game settings, but wouldn’t know what settings to change. On a prebuilt, this would be an issue. On a device that millions of people use, all with the exact same specs, this information is readily available. Think of the steam deck, you could look up “<game name> steam deck settings” and get the best loadout for your exact hardware. Hell, a bunch of modern games have a “Steam Deck” settings loadout built in. With a prebuilt, that’s not possible. And finally, the steam machine is considerably smaller than any mini itx prebuilt I’ve seen on the market. Hell, a mini it’s motherboard couldn’t even fit in the steam machine’s case. To a lot of people, not having a big box in their living room matters. I’ve had a hard time convincing my partner to let me have a PC in a Fractal Design Terra case in the living room, and that’s a case that is small and clean looking.



  • Not trying to attack you or anything because you did say that you don’t see the appeal for your own case, but that’s because this product isn’t for you. If you see building a PC and putting it in your living room as an alternative, it’s not meant for you. This is for everyone else who doesn’t see those things as easy. Being someone who has been building/upgrading my own gaming PCs since I was a preteen, I understand how simple it seems to you. But not everyone has that perspective. What seems like simple step-by-step instructions to you is actually really complicated. Part compatiblity alone is difficult, and even the best sources of info can get it wrong, and that’s really demoralizing for someone who doesn’t even know what RAM is. Step-by-step guides seem easy, but there are many predatory ones out there, which suggest using a free trial of paid software to do the things FOSS software can do. You and I know how to avoid it, but if someone doesn’t even understand the concept of an .iso file, how would they know that better alternatives exist? Also, an extremely common case when following tutorials online is that they are out of date, or an unexpected error happens when following them. You and I can quickly RCA these issues and get back on track, but when you don’t even understand what the steps you are taking are actually doing, these minor hiccups leave you dead in the water.

    What you are actually suggesting here is people do like, a year of introductory computer classes. It doesn’t feel like that to you because you’ve been figuring all this crap out as you go along, but having walked people through the most basic of IT problems, you are overestimating what a normal person finds intimidating when dealing with a computer.




  • Just the other day I was researching potential solutions to a programming issue I had at work. Basically, I asked AI “Is there an API call available to tweak this config” It responded “Yes, you can do that with the tweak-that-config command”

    I went to check the documentation for the “tweak-that-config” command. It just plain didn’t exist, and never had. Turns out there was no API call to tweak the config I wanted, and attempting to use AI as a search engine is, in fact, a waste of time.



  • Carrot@lemmy.todaytoMemes@lemmy.mlVote!
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    1 month ago

    I partially agree. I think not voting is a vote for whichever candidate you like the least, since if you had voted somewhere else, the candidate you like the least would have gotten a smaller percentage of the votes. If you want to cast a blank vote, vote for whichever party would do the least damage., since that will actually have a measurable outcome. If you think all candidates are equally bad, including 3rd party, I think voting for someone who has some level of cultural relevance and holds the same views you do makes the most sense, since that makes the statement that you would vote for candidates like that person.


  • Carrot@lemmy.todaytoMemes@lemmy.mlVote!
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    1 month ago

    You make it seem so black and white. I don’t think it’s as simple as the lesser evil choice is 100% wrong full stop. For instance, I support the lesser evil mindset over the not voting mindset. However, if one exists, I support voting for a politician that genuinely supports your views over the lesser evil mindset.

    Not voting makes no sense to me, because a null vote has the same effect as a vote for whichever candidate you like the least.


  • Carrot@lemmy.todaytoMemes@lemmy.mlVote!
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    1 month ago

    I guess the fundamental difference between your perspective and mine is that I don’t see it as refusing to play their game, I see it as just another move in their game. I think there is no way to avoid playing the game, and so you should make a move that leads to the least bad outcome. It doesn’t take much effort, maybe a day of research at most to pick whoever you want to vote for. Not voting is technically a vote for whichever candidate you like the least, at least it has the same outcome.

    That being said, I agree with you in that that won’t result in change on a larger, long-term scale, and that actions must be taken outside of the system to get what you want. But that stance and my stance on not voting are not mutually exclusive.


  • Carrot@lemmy.todaytoMemes@lemmy.mlVote!
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    1 month ago

    I don’t agree with this, but I understand the sentiment. While I think, at the core of it, the folks at the top of both sides have the same goals in mind, I don’t think the elections are rigged to that degree. Also, while voting 3rd party feels like a waste of a vote, I don’t see it as one, since third party votes are counted, and can have some semblance of social sway. Not voting and voting for a party that you disagree most with will have the same effect however, since both pull the vote towards the candidate you like the least.


  • As someone with a little insider baseball knowledge, it was just a few hours down of DynamoDB and DNS. However, that caused EC2 to go down for ~1 day, which causes pretty much 1/3 of the internet to go down. Once EC2 sorts themselves out, then teams/companies (almost all amazon services use EC2 in the back end) that use EC2 have to get their ducks back in a row, and that can take any span of time, depending on how well their code was written to handle failures + how many people they are willing to pay oncall/overtime.



  • Carrot@lemmy.todaytoMemes@lemmy.mlVote!
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    1 month ago

    I don’t know if I understand what you are suggesting. Are you saying the working class should vote third party, or each person should vote for themself? Or when you say vote for our own parties do you mean not vote at all?


  • Carrot@lemmy.todaytoMemes@lemmy.mlVote!
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    1 month ago

    I don’t think I understand what you’re saying. Are you saying that the time it takes to look into a candidate is the damage being done? I was thinking on a larger scale. All 4 options lead to a politician getting sworn in, who will inevitably, directly cause people to die. Picking the option that appears to be likely to kill the least people would theoretically cause the least damage in their 4 years. I’m calling 4 years the short term here.


  • Carrot@lemmy.todaytoMemes@lemmy.mlVote!
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    1 month ago

    I’d love to have a discussion about this. I am a socialist through and through. I believe that the system needs to be dismantled to achieve any meaningful change, and that no progress can realistically be made within the system.

    I’d argue that there are 4 actions within the system. Vote red, vote blue, vote third party, and don’t vote. I’d argue that all 4 options will never lead to meaningful change. However, given this, every American who is eligible to vote is forced into playing the game, there is no way to abstain. Even not voting leads to a meaningful outcome within the system, and thus is still playing the game.

    If no actions within the system can change things, I pose that the only way to disrupt this system is by dismantling it from the outside via revolution.

    This however, cannot be done overnight, even if you are consistently acting on it. These types of things take a general sense of civil unrest to get kicked off. I believe that under capitalism, this unrest is inevitable, and once it hits a tipping point, the revolution will start. In the meantime, I feel we have two actions we can take.

    First, we should be ushering in the revolution. Organize, make people aware of the alternative, disrupt the system in any means you reasonably can, try to get people to be sympathetic to the cause, etc. Don’t slack on your responsibility to prepare and eventually initiate the revolution.

    Second, since we have no choice but to play the game we’ve been dropped in to, you should vote for short term damage mitigation. If you are forced to take an action within the system, I feel people have a moral obligation to try to reduce the harm to others as much as possible. This involves making a vote, since not voting results in almost the same outcome as a vote for the candidate furthest away from the one you considered least harmful.

    I have yet to see an argument that shows how not voting is going against or dismantling the system. However, considering so many people believe that not voting is the right choice, I’m really interested in hearing someone explain it to me, as there must be some reasoning behind it that I’m not seeing.