The people who make decisions at Youtube clearly do not even use their own website or app and there is no way to give feedback either.

Ed Zitron, famously verbose web blog guy, wrote a post about how he thinks most of these big businesses are run by idiots that are out of touch with both the product and the users.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It’s simple: they neither know nor care what the customer wants, barely know how their businesses function, barely know what their products do, and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical, because it does an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate.

This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you’re saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

Sometimes I forget people watch YouTube on purpose. Other than music videos and the rare “how do I do this thing in this game?” I just don’t use it

I feel like an alien sometimes. Reading books like some sort of lost time traveler.

Yeah I don’t like ai stuff. And I certainly don’t need AI to group my tabs. I can do that myself just fine.

Even when it gets it right, you have to then check it carefully. It feels like a net loss of speed most of the time. Reading and checking someone else’s code is harder than writing your own

Update: installed mint. Seems work. Had a problem where it couldn’t see the HD. Had to change an option in grub

Pasting what I found online to fix it:

“”" thank you so much! what was the solution!

for anyone might read this in the future: in the bootmenu where u can select which version of linux u wanna boot u can press “e” and then u need to add intel_iommu=off at the end of the line of the “linux” row - i had some double dashes at the end for me it did the job when I add them before the double dashes.

Then I could see the harddrive and install mint mate on my old macbook air

also needed later on to set the parameter permantent by opening a terminal and used this command sudo nano /etc/default/grub

edited this line like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash intel_iommu=off” then save and exit nano and this command for updating the boot thingy

sudo update-grub “”"

So far most things have worked fine.

It’s a little annoying when steam wants to redo the vulkan compilation thing every time, but it seems to work fine if I skip that.

Modding I’m not sure how it’ll work yet. Some stuff probably just works, if it’s like “edit this file” or “replace that file” but I haven’t tried yet.

The police are not effective at dealing with school shootings.

Feel like ads in cars should be illegal, but the US doesn’t have a government that believes in good things.

Only recommendation: some wifi cards (with certain chips, I forget which) in my experience have required me to go hunt down a driver, so check reviews for any card you’re looking at to see if people report it working out of the box.

With Linux mint, with one machine, I had to explicitly open the driver manager and tell it to use the drivers for the wifi. It wasn’t obvious but I’d read it on some random forum and remembered. Once I knew that was a thing, it was easy. Opened the driver manager, plugged in the install media (USB stick) when it asked, and then told it to use the proprietary drivers.

My old desktop I went with Linux mint. I had some trouble with the installer that I didn’t solve, but switching to slightly older but still supported version of mint worked. Games worked out of the box with steam.

I was playing a MUD for a while (I’m old, but aardwolf is still going). They have a special client you can use. That worked just fine through WINE.

On my newer desktop, I tried mint. I foolishly didn’t test much on the live disk, and only after installing did I realize HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, didn’t work. Proton also crashed explosively. That was a bad time.

I then tried pop!_os and that has worked fine. I haven’t played much yet on it- just my usual guild wars 2 and binding of Isaac, but it’s been fine.

There was a weird issue with audio crackling in gw2, but I think I fixed that by changing a setting somewhere.

I also recently installed mint on a ~2014 MacBook Air. Not for gaming, but so it can get security updates and stuff. I needed to fuss with grub - something I never would have figured out on my own by someone on stack exchange had figured out - and now it works fine. Haven’t done any games on it, but I bet it could run really light stuff better than it could have as a Mac.

Generally, I’m a big fan of it not nagging me. It doesn’t ask me to use OneDrive. It doesn’t want me to make an account anywhere. Pretty much everything can be changed if you’re determined enough. I’m pretty easy to please though, so all I’ve done for customization is add a clock widget to the desktop and turn off edge tiling.

One thing that I expect might be a headache is mods. A lot of mod tooling I think makes assumptions about windows. There’s probably a way to run like vortex in the same environment as whenever proton puts the game, but I’m not sure how to do it. You can also probably find where the game files are easily and edit them. I’m hoping the community starts adopting Linux more so people write guides (and please write them on the public web instead of making 20 minute videos or burying them in discord)

Luckily Baldur’s gate 3 (which also runs fine) has its own mod manager, and that works fine.

Oh, I did have a weird thing once where the desktop environment had a keybind that was interfering with a game once. I think middle click, maybe? I forget exactly what it was, but I just unmapped the keybind in the desktop env and the game was then fine.

Google and Microsoft have competing services, but those companies also suck. I think they’re less popular, but I don’t know much about why.

I’m not aware of any smaller competitors, though some probably exist. It would be a big risk for a company to go with a new provider. There’s a lot of library support for the big players, for one thing. If you want your python application to talk to AWS, the boto library is just right there.

You could run your own hardware somewhere, but that has its own host of problems, if you’ll pardon the pun. I worked somewhere a long time ago that had its own servers in a data center. The place got flooded in a big storm and we were down for a couple days.

I’ve only used Google a couple of times, and by accident. The ebook reader I have seems hard coded to search Google when you ask it to search the web for a word in the book. I intensely dislike the AI slop. I do not want an AI summary of the Wikipedia article. Just take me to the wiki article you dunces!

Are you familiar with AWS? Amazon Web services. Many, many, websites use them and I don’t think there’s a way to tell as a user.

Like, you go to a website and their images are hosted on s3 (an aws service) and their database is on RDS (also AWS), and their whole backend application is using eks or ecs or whatever.

That’s extremely common. Companies don’t run their own hardware anymore very often.

I don’t think the board wants to do that, because the board is composed of CEOs and friends of CEOs. The rich have class solidarity. They’re not going to fuck each other over like that.

I just wrote elsewhere in this thread but to repeat myself: I think the real job of a CEO is to schmooze with other CEOs and rich idiots. They get funding. Everything else is pretty much a liability, and would be better handled by someone with relevant expertise.

My understanding is CEOs are mostly good at schmoozing with other CEOs and investors. A lot of investors operate on vibes, so having a CEO that can vibe with other rich bros can open pathways to funding. That’s about it. Everything else they do is a liability or could be better handled by someone with relevant expertise.

Also, we probably shouldn’t be driving most of our productivity based on the vibe check of a few rich boys.

Good to know. I had some trouble a couple months back getting wifi and Ethernet working, and learned my phone can provide Internet over USB.

When a certain saint allegedly shot a CEO dead on the street, there was a big surge in support. Sadly, no one else has followed suit.

A lot of people are sick of the ownership class ruining everything, and would cheer for spilled blood.

If someone shot the ceo of uber dead, people would celebrate. They’re all scum.

Any ethical super intelligence would immediately remove billionaires from power. I’d like to see that.