More like, on the scale of mortal vs god, the things that are important to us either aren’t important to god(s) or may be so insignificant to be actually imperceptible.

As a thought experiment, say you get an ant farm. You care for these ants, provide them food and light, and generally want to see them succeed and scurry around and do their little ant things. One of the ants gets ant-cancer and dies. You have no idea that it happened. Some of the eggs don’t hatch. You notice this, but can’t really do anything about it. So on, and so forth. Now - think about every single other ant you’ve passed by or even stepped on without even noticing during your last day outside the house. And think about what those ants might think of you, if they could.

Now an argument that a god is omniscient and all powerful would slip through the cracks of this because an omniscient god WOULD know that one of their ants had ant-cancer and an all-powerful one would be able to fix it. But the sheer difference in breadth of existence between mortal and god may mean that such small things are beneath their attention. Or maybe he really does see all things at all times simultaneously down to minute detail. We don’t know. It is fundamentally unknowable to mortals. Our scales of ethics are incomparable.

We also don’t know if the ethical alignment of a god leans toward balance rather than good. It would make sense, in a way, if it did. Things that seem evil to us are in fact evil, but necessary in pursuit of greater harmony. Or in fact even necessary to the very function of the universe from a metaphysical perspective. If we assume the existence of a god for this argument it leads to having to assume an awful lot more things that we can’t really prove or test one way or the other. But one thing that seems pretty self evident is that the specific workings of a god are fundamentally unknowable to mortals specifically because we are not gods. We don’t have a perspective in which we can observe it so any argument made in any direction about it is pretty much purely conjecture by necessity.

I’ll believe a corporation is a person when I see Texas fuckin’ execute one.

… I don’t, actually, I’ve been using ClassicShell basically since the day Win10 came out and it’s always worked perfectly. Don’t think I’ve even updated it actually.

(Not OP) Point taken, but in that case the solution should also be obvious. Just use a different one that does provide that. If the product sucks, hit the bricks. DDG and Kagi are looking for market share, they’d love to have you.

I would much rather wear a silly hat than have open skull brain surgery to implant a device that will stop receiving security updates in 5 years.

We’ve been able to stick an electrode to the outside of your head and pull electrical activity data from your brain without invasive open-skull surgery for a couple decades now. Neuralink hasn’t actually accomplished anything new except making this same thing way, way more expensive and way, way more likely to end in death of the patient.

The data is never getting deleted in the first place, “delete” just needs to set a flag for non-visibility. The language used in their disclaimer leads me to believe exactly that is what is happening.

People lashing out about Linux terminal commands and people editing their own Windows registry entries are not the same people, lmao

A regular Windows user being instructed to enter the registry would have a stroke and shit their pants when opening regedit, and those users would never have found the tech support thread instructing them to change a registry key in the first place. Someone who already knows about but is uncomfortable editing reg keys may fall into the group you’re describing, but they would probably have an identical discomfort about regedit or about unknown terminal commands. Someone who is comfortable editing reg keys already has a Linux install on their home machine.

That’s pretty much exactly it. Windows as a whole is now catering to the lowest common denominator. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially as more and more of the world population are adopting computers (or being required to adopt them, for work). But in trying to make things easier for beginners they’re damaging some of the tools that we experts are used to. It’s a give-and-take sort of situation, and I’m not as livid about it as some professionals seem to be, but the fact remains that Windows is situating itself to be used by… idiots sounds rude, so we’ll say “beginners”. Folks that don’t know where or how to find what they’re looking for. Web search in the start menu, and Cortana-now-Copilot are two prime examples of that - tools that “nobody” really needed in Windows but that help someone who has absolutely zero idea what they’re doing get things done, even if poorly or inefficiently.

I’m not upset at their attempt to add accessibility to Windows, but I do wish they wouldn’t make their existing product worse in the attempt.

Corporate corruption is what makes America what it is

So if your MAF sensor shits the bed you’ll never know about it because you’re overwriting its data. And from there it’s only a matter of time before your car requires dealership service to turn on because it can’t phone home properly because some bullshit proprietary data key is broken.

The game of cat and mouse will continue. People will hack their cars and manufacturers will install anti-hacking measures and then people will hack the anti-hacking measures. It’s just another thing where instead of being a mutually beneficial transaction it will become a hostile arms race between the consumers and manufacturers. We’re already on this path; the only real hope I’m holding out for is the advent of an open source car.

Around where I’m at you’re at semi-significant risk of getting pulled over if you’re driving under the speed limit. The police assume you’re drunk or high and if you’re not they’ll give you something about “being a hazard to other traffic”. Speed limit+10 is the safest speed to move at around here because you’re matching other traffic and matching what the cops expect of you.

There are, but they’re hosted on Discord now. It’s pretty much entirely taken over that niche.

I miss IRC.

Why not both? It can always be both of them.

Personally, I’ve never been polled. Not once. And neither has anyone else I’ve ever met in my life. I’m not saying they’re made up wholesale, because frankly, I have no idea. But I am saying that, at the very least, they’re not likely to be an accurate representation of the American citizenry as a whole. If nothing else, the percentage of “undecided” voters raises some eyebrows for me for the reasons I just stated. If you’ve lived in America the last 8-16 years and are somehow still a fence sitter, you’ve managed to ignore a veritable deluge of information being sprayed directly into your eyeballs with all the delicacy and care of a fire hose.

I understand the average person is probably pretty dumb, but I have faith in humanity that a significant percentage of us aren’t that dumb. Being on the bell curve means you’re plenty intelligent enough to understand whether you want to vote for red or for blue and for what reasons. I refuse to believe that there are people in America legitimately weighing if they would rather vote for protected freedoms for American citizens or vote for banning books that speak about protected freedoms for American citizens. The two choices are so wildly opposed to each other in structure and in intent that there isn’t a choice to be made, all people will land on one side or the other of this argument and there is no center ground to waffle around.

Twenty years ago, I understood undecided voters, because there still remained some small amount of nuance in the way American politics were carried out. We have now lost that. Our political landscape is now Blue Team vs Anti-Blue Team and the fence that the undecided voters were previously sitting on is now uninhabitable rubble, because there is now no component of our government that can come to a sensible cross-aisle decision. The independent, moderate voter is now a relic of the past in our supercharged, hyper-partisan pre-civil-war violence mockery of a civilized government.

If Trump is any indication, no politician will ever need to be ‘competent and coherent’ ever again, constituents would vote in a literal corpse if it had a sign propped on it saying “gays bad”

It is impossible to escape political propaganda in modern America. It’s on your internet, it’s on your radio, it’s on your cable TV, it’s on your streaming TV, it’s on your super bowl ads, it’s on your gas station pumps, it’s on your news sources, it’s on your social media. “Oh I don’t pay attention to politics” is no longer a reasonable excuse because that is impossible, it’s shoved down the throat of every citizen nonstop from every angle. The two candidates, in this case Trump and Biden, are such polar opposites of each other in every single possible regard that the only way someone can be undecided between the two is if their multiple personalities are arguing over it.

In what ways? Genuinely curious, I’ve been using Firefox as my daily driver for most of a decade and haven’t even looked at other browsers recently because it’s never given me a problem or lacked a feature.

I remember hearing something a few years ago about some companies working on better tactile feedback on touch screen buttons, making them more “clicky” and feeling more like real physical buttons. Sounded complicated and I don’t think anyone really did anything with it except for Samsung making the home button super clicky on my old Galaxy. I wonder if that will ever resurface, it seemed like a good compromise for folks who wanted real buttons.

And you might want to interact with the product you’re bashing before you talk so much shit about it. I own a 4 year old Z Flip I bought secondhand two years ago and I love it. I work in a mechanic shop and this phone has been dropped on concrete many times, had tools dropped on top of it, had chemicals spilled near or on it, been caught in the rain, and besides all that I open and close the fold a couple dozen times a day most every day. I put the cheapest Amazon phone case I could find on it and to date, I have developed a nearly invisible hairline crack in the very center of the fold that you can only even notice when the screen is off, and one tiny crack in the corner of the front screen that doesn’t fold. Whole phone is mint otherwise. It’s been incredibly durable over the two years I’ve had it, far above and beyond what I even expected when I bought it. And being able to fold out the screen for reading or watching videos, or gaming, or comfortable texting, is excellent.

Your point is taken in that yes a flat screen phone won’t have a folding hinge that will eventually wear out. But my phone has lasted me two years, after being bought used two years after its release, and I expect an easy 3 more before I end up replacing it so long as I don’t drop anything too heavy on it. I consider that a fine lifespan for a modern smartphone. I’ll probably never go back to a slab phone unless I don’t get a choice when the time comes for a new one.