I think the implications behind there being infinite time in the past are fun if you assume that the universe works like a stochastic state machine. It means that either every finite event that has happened and will happen has already happened an infinite number of times or the universe is infinitely large.

Preinstalled stores are limited to manufacturers and distributors and they suck, so nobody uses them. It’s pretty easy for someone with a tiny bit of tech knowledge to do some research and find out how to enable the ability to download APKs from the internet, but sadly, that’s not most people. Google doesn’t have a monopoly because Play Store is good (it isn’t), they have a monopoly because they’re anticompetitive.

Google made the Play Store the primary (and only, for most people) way to install apps on Android.

My experience has been that singleplayer and indie games work best, so that’s not surprising!

Maybe I’m just really unlucky when it comes to liking games that don’t work on Linux.

Sure, but it’s not impossible to play any Blizzard games because the launcher login page is broken like it is on Linux. Blaming the game will only get you so far when so many games just don’t work and devs don’t care.

Not just the bandwidth, but RAM usage, energy consumption, and cache storage space. Ads cost us money.

I have high hopes for the future. It’s just not quite there yet.

Microsoft did ruin Windows with Windows 8, then they made it even worse with Windows 10 and now they’re making it even fucking worse with 11. Windows 7 was the golden age of Windows.

I had Windows 10 on an older (but not ancient) machine and it was literally unusable. 10-15 minute boot time and another 5 or so just to get a browser to open. The misery didn’t end once things were open; everything was still slower than when I had windows 7 on what would now be considered a truly ancient machine. I put Linux on it and experienced a roughly 5x speedup.

Trying to get games to run without being a Linux pro is much harder than I was led to believe. Some games just work out of the box, but a lot of them absolutely do NOT, even if protondb says they will.

I think that any operating system that mostly runs 3rd party software should be legally required to open-source at least the components necessary to run said 3rd party software. Also, OSes should just straight up not be allowed to show ads, full-stop. Making people buy hardware and then bloating the OS with ads in updates is a bait and switch and if our government had any balls, would be illegal.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/bitnet-scaling-1-bit-transformers-for-large-language-models/ use 1 bit instead of 8 or 16, yay performance gainz

This shouldn’t be opt-out. This is the digital equivalent of some fucking pervert showing up at your window and taking pictures of your TV and then letting a bunch of other perverts pay to find out what you were watching so they can use that info to manipulate you, multiplied by however many millions of TVs they’ve sold. Even if the punishment for that crime was just a single week in jail, the people responsible should be facing several hundredthousand years behind bars when you add it all up.

HA, I hope you’re joking. Surely nobody’s actually done that, right? …Riiiight?

Everyone I’ve spoken to who has a password change rule just changes one character from their previous password. It does NOTHING.

YT ads will never be unblockable. They legally have to be indicated somehow and people will always write software to detect them. Worst case scenario, you have to download videos you want to watch ahead of time.

Neither can I, that’s why I think that allowing this feature to be used for free apps is purely a malicious move by Google to push people away from sideloading in general.

That’s a very legitimate reason! I was talking about free apps, but I failed to mention that in my comment. My bad. Any legit reason for free apps?

What legitimate reason would an app developer have for not wanting to let people install their app from sources other than the play store?