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Technology has stopped becoming a tool and a utility and has instead become a form of control. Where we once felt freedom to explore the internet and learn about new things we now have. This technology turned against us to track our every second and control our every thought. Plus the endless crap updates that just make things worse over time instead of better, yeah I could see why people just gave up on this bullshit.
Almost every refuge in internet is for profit data hungry giants. Where are the random forums, personal blogs and the virtual world that used to exist.
I still blog. Nobody reads it because search sucks, but I keep blogging. Others do too. There are dozens of us.
Old tech wasn’t spying on you and selling your data.
I have been told I am complaining too much about my company moving to windows 11 and that I need to grow up.
I will then watch those same people slowly but surely start to complain about changes and things not working. I got laughed at today for fighting the updates and windows 11 by a few people who are probably going to be made redundant by this change. (I’m not angry, making people laugh and being a loudmouth idiot is my favourite thing)
I have been in IT support since 2007 and I know that all the change is bad.
My personal computer is on Win10 LTSC IoT and I’m moving to Linux Mint (Thankyou to the people on this forum that recommended it).
Change in tech can be good but not when it’s Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.
Your confirmation bias will not prove anything.
Users have been complaining about every piece of software forever. They do not do it more on Windows 11 than they did on Windows 7 or XP.
I also work in IT support for more than a decade.
And switching to Linux just is not an option. They just do not have a decent answer to Active Directory. And retraining users to use a completely different operating system will have bankrupted plenty of businesses.
Change in tech can be good but not when it’s Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and HP making the changes.
Now, yeah.
I remember when a new microsoft OS was a great thing that brought wonder and excitement instead of bullshit.
3.11 to 95 was revolutionary
Upgrading from 98 to XP was amazing.
XP to 7 was like being blessed by a digital god.
7 was truly the pinnacle of OSes. Everything after 7 started to take the crap and fall apart though. 8 with its stupid tablet design for desktop, 10 for its spyware and bullshit, 11 because you’ve become the product instead of the OS, and also laying the foundations for a restricted, walled garden like apple has.
I’ve been on linux for several years now, but god damn do I miss windows 7. It was the peak of operating systems. sleek, stable, usable, and the first OS from microsoft that didnt need regular reformating to maintain stability. It didnt need babying. Things almost never went wrong, and when something did go wrong it was easy to figure out and fix… I went years between reformats, and those only typically happened because of hardware changes (which often werent necessary, but used as an excuse for digital spring cleaning, basically)
I never had 95, my family couldn’t afford a PC back then. But getting out families first PC running Windows ME and spending so many afternoons trying to fix it is that got me into IT support.
Moving to Windows XP was a huge step up and moving to Windows 7 was another step up.
Microsoft has never ever made an OS as good as Windows 7.
7 and XP are equal until in XP you try to drag a full screen window and cannot.
I’m on 10 LTSC IoT and I think (Thanks to people on the Linux sub) I’ll be moving to Linux mint Cinnamon.
Yah even “disruption” in tech has been captured by the rich. Nothing shakes up the established order unless it’s taking from someone who has less to give to someone who already has too much.
“Electric Vehicles? I don’t know, we need to go very slowly, and then consider how disruptive this technology is to the economy. A lot of big companies might not be able to divest quickly enough… (etc)”
then cut to LLMs and it’s like
“AI is here to stay. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle (or stop spending billions and billions of dollars desperately pushing the technology into every crevasse). We’re literally incapable of acting ethically if it contradicts with short term profits. Business = nature, we’re just following an evolutionary maxim — our hands are actually tied! Look, fascism and endless war are just good for business, I don’t make the rules (bribes government to make rules for them)…”
It’s actually deplorable, and it’s lead to a more impoverished future for everyone.
The company I work for has, until now, not really given much of a shit about cybersecurity. Sure, we had some basic stuff in place, and had managed to avoid any issues, but it’s fair to say that the boss’ focus isn’t on the computing side of things. But we recently took on a big contract from a BIIIG customer, and that customer has a contractual requirement that we achieve the UK government’s Cyber Essentials rating at the very least.
So out with the old Win10 PCs and in with some new Win11 units. They’re still shitty, but at least they’re compliant.
Trouble is, because the company broadly didn’t care, I was able to put Kubuntu on mine. You could argue that my PC was the most secure because I ran timely updates, where my colleagues were still using unsupported Win10.
Well, I’ve lost my Linux privileges because now the IT guy needs everyone to be in line, and on the same hardware.
So I’ve spent the past few weeks poking and prodding at Windows 11 to figure out how to bend it to my will without admin access. It’s been quite good fun actually. Aside from the whole using WIndows thing.
I moved to Linux Mint 2+ years ago. Zero regrets. 10/10, would recommend. Win 11 getting bloated is what finally drove me there. FWIW, Claude is amazing support for Mint and Linux in general.
It’s not just you, though. There’s a post on Hacker News right now about the 170k non-profit orgs just had their data deleted my MS recently. There’s a whole comment thread about how MS is no longer a serious company. Silicon valley professionals have lost faith in the company. It’s not just you (and me).
Oh no, you’ve triggered my occasional whine about Linux Mint. I was so happy to finally have a Linux distro to play with, twenty years after first wanting to try it after my dad brought home a copy of Linux Format someone left on the bus.
Linux just doesn’t like me. It was okay at first, though I couldn’t get my art programs to work (sorry, I love my SAI and psp 7, I don’t like krita and always hated gimp). But I could use it for intrewebz and storing my mp3s. I was so proud of my first sudo apt update. But after a while it wouldn’t connect to the internet so I can’t update it and now it’s just gathering dust taking up an entire SSD. I wish I was brave enough to reinstall it or replace it with a different distro, but I’m too scared I’ll brick my entire PC.
That is the end of my occasional whine about Linux.
LLMs are really good at resolving all of these issues for you
i wouldn’t say “all” but some. i’ve gotten the compose key and some edits to my xkbmap working with it.
Llms are perfect for linux and I think it might be what takes linux desktop to mass consumer appeal. I know lemmy is full of luddites but this is revolutionary tech for linux desktop and the next 10 years will be incredible!
you’re gonna make a lot of people very upset with your attitude. you’re supposed to be against LLMs because (checks notes) idk something about electricity consumption (which is not actually that big) and water consumption (which is not actually that big). and of course making artists unemployed (which btw they largely already were, and you can still donate to them via patreon, just as you could before, just that now there’s more competition in the field, which is somehow bad, because for some reason art is only good if some human suffered through the process of making it. suffering builds character or sth after all, amiright? /s)
Yeah I actually really hate this defeatist take. We should use that energy to liberate LLMs not to destroy them because the latter is never happening so it’s just wasted effort.
20 years ago, technically competent people had an integral role in the development and use of tech. That position is now infested with people who think economics is a science and money is real.
If they mean 20 years ago in the Covid Timewarp sense that the 90s were twenty years ago, then yes.
Literally 20 years ago the horror was already upon us. It was around that time that fear of the government chipping us to track our every movement was peaking, and hey, by the way, please buy and pay a monthly cost for this tracking device that has audio and video recording but also plays silly cat videos ANYWHERE!!!
20 years ago was 2006. I will point out that at that juncture the original iPhone wasn’t even out yet. It released the following year. Normal people who were not turbo-nerds or high powered businessmen did not own smartphones in any significant number at that point.
If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.
Remember having to pay for custom ring tones?
I remember them wanting me to pay for that, but I also remember getting a cable that allowed me to connect my PC to my phone and do whatever I wanted with the filesystem. The ringtones were in a different format but I got a converter and had the FF7 battle music for a ring tone.
I also recall some phones supporting MP3s for listening to music (though storage space was tiny) but not supporting them as a ringtone once connecting to PCs to share files was more common.
They also sold wallpapers, emoticon packs, and themes.
20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.
Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest
What flavor of astroturf is this?
Is this just retweeting, or whatever mastodon calls it?
Farting
Just came back from a 4 day camping trip in the mountains where I turned my phone off and forgot it existed and just sat back down in my seat in my cubicle at my IT job.
I’m fucking over this.
Hear me out… anti-WiFi trees.
They grow towards any RF signals and their leaves are specially shaped to attenuate anything over 900MHz. They use the extra energy to increase their density to better resist harvesting and increase their height.
I read about a fungus found near the reactor in Chernobyl that seemed to be using the radiation as an energy source, so it seems plausible for a plant to evolve to absorb RF energy.
The actual energy in the RF is basically nothing. The sun has been outputing RF since the beginning of existence I’m pretty sure something would have evolved to make use of it if it had any sufficient energy density.
But if you think about it your phone is generating an RF field off the back of a tiny lithium ion battery, almost all of that power is going to power the screen anyway, the dribble of power that so left over is transmitted and then spread out over 50 kilometers of area. Anyone location is receiving less power than it would if it just absorbed power from sound waves
Mate so true. 20 years ago there was no ai. Now we don’t know where will we go. There are so many face ai as well so idk what’s good and what not.
