I agree. Newegg used to be great but not anymore. Amazon often has what you’re looking for and at the best price. Not everyone has a micro center or equivalent nearby.

I agree, post an alternative instead of just bitchin!

Will never happen. Those platforms literally push addiction. It’s why the fediverse won’t ever compete imo - there’s no dopamine hit here of likes, # of friends, send a snap right now (or whatever they are called), streaks, etc.

I’ve been playing around with AI a lot lately for work purposes. A neat trick llms like OpenAI have pushed onto the scene is the ability for a large language model to “answer questions” on a dataset of files. This is done by building a rag agent. It’s neat, but I’ve come to two conclusions after about a year of screwing around.

1. it’s pretty good with words - asking it to summarize multiple documents for example. But it’s still pretty terrible at data. As an example, scanning through an excel file log/export/csv file and asking it to perform a calculation “based on this badge data, how many people and who is in the building right now”. It would be super helpful to get answers to those types of questions-but haven’t found any tool or combinations of models that can do it accurately even most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.
2. these models can be run locally and just about as fast. Ya it takes some nerd power to set these up now - but it’s only a short matter of time before it’s as simple as installing a program. I can’t imagine how these companies like ChatGPT are going to survive.

The most annoying thing isn’t even the price hikes or the direct sales - it’s the ambiguity they’ve introduced into things. “Hey we need pricing for xyz”. “Ya, we’re not sure if we’re going to quote that”. Like wtf? We’re a middleman who has deployed VMware on our systems for decades mostly because that’s what end users want - but it doesn’t matter to us, we can deploy in other options easily enough.

But like - It’s like quote it or take the account - but the customer has a project and you won’t make up your mind. Seriously, we have quotes stuck in pergatory for over 6 months, yet they won’t call the end user and sell direct. Customers literally can’t buy VMware even if they are ok with a 1000x cost - and they wonder why people are moving on.

Budgeting season is sept-Dec. I think everyone I know is kicking off a migration project for 2025 to another platform - mostly because they can’t get a quote/licenses. VMware is screwed and it’s only just begun.

I don’t know. There’s a surprising amount of stupid people here. They live in near poverty and are easily manipulated into hating others as the reason for their miserable lives. It’s really that simple in my opinion. Yes there are lots of people who don’t vote, but I’m not sure that it would change the current split if they all did vote. We need more and better education.

Anyone still defending Microsoft at this point has cognitive dissonance and deserves what they get. Seriously people - just use Linux. And for the 1% of you that can’t get that 1% of your programs working in Linux - just dual boot.

It’s like people forgot how to use computers.

Oh right! Forgot about that one! FOUR major screw ups.

This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.

They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.

I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.

I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.

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Honestly-I always wondered how in the hell women with nails even just a little bit long typed comfortably on a keyboard. I figured it was either a) not a big deal or b) a super pain in the arse and another example of the world (for whatever reason) not making a simple product to solve a simple issue (like bandaids that match people’s skin color for example).

Now I know! :)

Phones must be a bitch as well…. The solution to that might be a bit harder to pull off…

Until it shows up for everyone. That’s not paranoia, Microsoft has a bit of a trend in this department.

I’m old

I remember dlp tvs and 40 inch tubes that weighed 200lbs.

I bought one of the first 1080p large screen LCDs that wasn’t $10k. A Sony XBR 46” for like $3000. At one point, I thought “man I should replace that TV, I can get a bigger screen, a thinner bezel, and better blacks”

And then I remember that this 20 year old TV has no internet connection, no ads, no bs, a million connections of any type (want to hook up that retro console - boom this tv can do it) AND it still looks good after all these years. It’s arguably a great tv, better than a lot of the crap being sold today. Funny and unexpected.

I think I’ll keep that TV forever.

Somebody much smarter than me needs to hack this system. I’d pay to support it.

It’s beyond BS that functionality gets deleted from a product I purchased. I knew the risk of investing into an ecosystem that “required” an app to work. Shame on me, I get what I deserve I guess. Still doesn’t make it right.

You must be fun at parties

But you’re describing something like a hard paywall. I have to do a thing BEFORE they publish the video. Fair game. Weird that they don’t do that, but then bitch about me using an ad blocker.

I think we’ve reached the point of “violently agreeing”. :)

Good chat.

I think if companies put effort into reasonable amounts of ads, and tried hard at keeping the malware in check - people would be more willing to let the ads through and let them make money. If they make money, I get content - win win.

You may be right, but I can’t imagine how they’d actually pull it off. The internet as a medium just doesn’t work that way - there’s always going to be a flag or a call for me to go pull ad data from somewhere else, and someone somewhere will write code that ignores that command.

Great for them if they figure it out, but the medium doesn’t work in their favor. They want the frog to be an elephant, and when it proves to be a poor elephant they cry to the govt. to fix it with laws and dmca takedowns and whatnot. That’s just a waste of taxpayer money, and annoys people on the medium.

Agree 100%. IF they figure it out - which they won’t for more than a day or two. They know the only real solution is to lock their content up and protect it, but they don’t, and then they get bent out of shape. The companies get weird about it - not the users.

No, I’m on the “you’re freely posting content to the internet - some of which I want to consume(videos), others not so much (ads)” plan. I never asked them to post anything, never entered a contract, etc.

If they lock the content up, and stop freely posting it, then fine, I’ll stop consuming and go elsewhere. If I can’t live without the content, then I can decide to pay up. It’s their content - they can do whatever they want with it. But they can’t get mad at ad blockers if they put their stuff out there for free.

I’ll never understand the entitlement of these companies when it comes to ads. You send the content freely to my computer along with BS ads. It’s my computer. I’ll display what I want using programs I want.

If you want me to pay for that content with $ or by watching ads - then put up a hard paywall and stop sending the content for free. You can’t get uppity and complain about ad blockers - it doesn’t make any sense…

The real problem is your content sucks and nobody is willing to pay for it. And that’s your problem - not mine.

Here’s some free apples. There’s a newspaper ad stuffed in there as well. Oh you ate the apples without reading the newspaper? Foul ball! /facepalm

Edit: never mind the fact that many ads have been served that are downright malicious code…