I've know people in my life who put less mental effort into living their lives than LLMs put into crafting the most convincing lies you've ever read
BaumGeist
joined 2 years ago
Oh yeah, re-reading my comment I didn't make it obvious enough, but I assumed this was something you found and didn't make yourself. When I said "they" and "them" I was talking to you about the creator, not talking about you (and past you) to the rest of the community.
I remember when all the named sites were good. Facebook was once the gold standard because they kept out the young'uns and boomers. Amazon not only had trustworthy reviews, but also only sold from trustworthy sellers—e.g. you didn't have to put up with shady sellers mixing in lower quality merch with the generic stuff that goes into big grab bins in the warehouses. Google searches were good for finding information beyond the most surface level of any topic without getting slammed by SEO procedurally generated blogs. Yahoo outperformed google in everything but search for a hot minute; I remember using it for email, news, and watching the latest music videos on their embedded RealPlayer java applet!
Youtube got monetized is what happened. The original owners sold off to Google because Google Video sucked, and the owners couldn't keep up with the growth of the site. Google decided that they should make money off of their shiny new toy. It stopped being about sharing videos, and became about keeping you engaged with "Content" so you could see more ads. YouTubers got incentivized by the algorithm to go with what appeals most to the broadest possible audiences, and the algorithm evolved in the direction of showing people whatever kept them watching ads. The front page, which used to be about highlighting odd, unique, and (most importantly) new ideas became about showing you whatever was most like whatever you had already sunk the most time into. It's like how once you buy a product, all the targeted ads change to selling you the same type of product. Their algorithms don't understand one-off purchases nor limited reserves of interest in a topic.
And on top of that mound of shit, they changed the community to enable their greed: once being a "Content Creator" was a sustainable source of income production values increased, which drove a need for a future guarantee of further income. This wave of videomakers attracted a userbase that, on average, cared more about quantity and style than substance. In turn, these types of users became instrumental in maintaining revenue for youtube-based businesses, so catering to their expectation of high-volume with ever-increasing production values became the most important factor to creators, which drove a need for increasing revenue streams. That's why even with an ad blocker, youtube is still mostly ads: sponsored segments, product reviews, and soooo much shallow pop culture engagement—references and reviews and critiques and thought pieces about media and people that won't matter in 5 years' time.
Ironically this is exactly what went wrong with analog TV and then cable, and it's what's going wrong with streaming services now. The iriny being that that is precisely why they had a large influx of users early on: it was all thevTV watchers who were tired of 1/3 of their valuable time being wasted with ads. They learned nothing and refuse to acknowledge the shortcomings of the For-Profit model, electing to blame the ad-blockers, pirates, and "striminals" who make up a percentage of their viewers—instead of ever introspecting and considering that it's really their fault for pushing away the even larger subset that simply just stop watching entirely. Those who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it, just faster and in a more spectacular way.
Oh! That's also an experience I've had. Lessons learned and whatnot. Sorry I wasn't here earlier to chime in and save you some time. Glad you've got it working again and learned something along the way, though!
TIL. I didn't know there was a standard, and I've never seen "hxxp", although the rest is familiar looking.
Sorry I'm late to the party: your disk is still using DOS/MBR layout, but you're trying to use UEFI
Unfortunately MBR disks don't work with UEFI. This tracks with the partition type, since fsck is treating it like ext2 (the suggested filesystem for /boot sector) instead of vfat/FAT32 (the suggested filesystem for the Efi System Partition).
First thing I would try is forcing fsck to treat /efi as vfat, since it kept defaulting to ext2. That will tell us if you've got the filesystem as vfat and fsck is wrong or if it's actually corrupted. If it's not corrupted, you should roll back the changes and follow a different guide that mentions changing from MBR (Master Boot Record) to GPT (GUID Partition Table). If it is corrupted, I'm gonna guess you tried to change the filesystems without removing the original fs first, thinking you could outsmart the computer and avoid temporarily relocating your files (speaking from experience). In that case your only hope would be disk forensics software. Best bet would be to salvage what you can, then change the disk type.
Unfortunately changing the disk type is not as easy as changing filesystems, the part of the disk that tells the PC where the files are located is the thing that's being rewritten, so that operation does "erase" the disk (all the bits are still physically there, but the PC doesn't know where they're located). You'll want to do a full backup of all your /usr /bin /root /lib /home /etc and anything else necessary to get your system back to how you like with all your important files, then change the partioning scheme to GPT and, hey, since it's now a blank disk anyway, might as well treat it as a fresh install of Arch to avoid further headaches.
The big takeaway is that you do not own this computer. It is not yours, it is being lent to them for a very specific purpose. And what you want to do, hell what you're already doing, is way outside of that purpose.
How would you feel if you lent a friend your conputer to check their email and found out they had bypassed a lot of your security mechanisms (passwords) to set up their own admin account?
What about when you begrudgingly get a MFA app on your personal phone because your employer's too cheap to shell out for a yubikey or hardware token? How would you feel if their app also rooted your phone just for shits and giggles?
What you're proposing is not only dangerous to your career, it's also potentially illegal. And also just downright unethical.
what does it mean if intent is "low" or "high"?
Also this is either quite old, or they're just delusional boomers ranking google, amazon, facebook and youtube above the "crap" line. I haven't even touched Yahoo in ages, so I'm just giving them the benefit of the doubt there
Debian + Gnome. The debian wiki is full of great documentation. If you prefer watching, there's so many great (and not-so-great) courses on YouTube. I personally found tutoriaLinux's series helpful. Please understand that is merelyy what helped me at that point in my journey not necessarily the best tutorial series for you or anyone else.
My biggest tip is, regardless of the teacher or the lesson: follow along. Learn by doing, not by watching someone else doing. If you find yourself thinking anything like "couldn't I have done this" or "but what would happen if I changed this parameter": Do It. Try it out. Seee what happens.
Coincidentally, my second biggest tip is: use a test environment to do anything that you don't fully understand. Even if it's only a new folder with a bunch of empty files to practice file manipulation commands, it's way better than losing your important files. Anything that affects software configuration should be backed up first, anything that affects the OS should be tested in a VM
Your time is quite valuable, but there's a reallllly good chance you're underestimating the cost of your process in windows:
The OS is cheap. Even buying a key at full price, it's like ~$100 ballpark. But the software you use costs money, and if it's business grade, it's an "As A Service" subscription plan. And any plugins (including VSTs) aren't free if you want good quality ones. And support plans cost money. And upgrades cost money. And getting new hardware because the newest version of the OS doesn't supoort anything older than 5 years costs money. And you still end up spending your valuable time on troubleshooting, whether it's you or waiting on a tech to do it, because problems and errors still occur.
Seriously, keep a spreadsheet of how much time you spend on getting your programs and hardware to work the way you want, even if it's the time you have to spend waiting for someone else to do the fixing for you. Your time is valuable, and you don't deserve someone pulling the wool over your eyes to rent you something you should own.
I'm not saying Linux is a better fit for you, nor that you're in the wrong for not wanting to hop on the hypetrain. Just that it's not as cut and dry as it seems, the cost isn't as low as you think, and the whole "Just Works" narrative in any tech is a myth.
I want to open the internet but its not on my desktop. How do I get it back? Also, what happened to my C drive? All the files are gone now, and there's all these other ones I don't need called like "lib" and "home." I tried using that app store you showed me, but I couldn't find microsoft word; it tried to install something else instead, I think I might have a virus. It's probably that "wine" virus I tried installing, some guide on the internet said it would give me word, but it didn't bring word back. I don't think it did anything, but you should still do a virus scan. I tried to, but I couldn't find the Norton button.
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check the Downloads folder, OfficeInstaller(1).exe through OfficeInstaller(12).exe
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It worked before you messed with it. Why did you do that? What do you mean you were "installing word" it's just a program you click, why'd you need that black window with text in it?
try to teach them about the terminal
I shouldn't have to learn all this hacker shit to install a simple program.
TL;DR: you overestimate what "noobie" means
I don't buy the whole "the more users a software has, the better it gets" rhetoric. Historically this has been the opposite of the case. There's an even higher users-to-contributors ratio amongst the general population. Not all users share the same respect for the philosophy behind FOSS.
If the driving force behind design decisions becomes "what keeps people happy so they'll keep using our software" and not "freedom," there's now a practical incentive to sell out and introduce more Intellectual Property shenanigans into the ecosystem. After all, it's a lot easier to hire devs and churn out new features and keep the software actively developed for the foreseeable future if there's money in it. And the only way there can be money in it is if there are proprietary licenses shitting up the place, and Shit As A Service suscription models as far as the eye can see.
Linux always has been, and should always continue to be, about freedom. If that freedom comes with user-friendliness, great! If not, then we have to pay the price: taking responsibility for the tools and tech we use and learning how to use them properly and contributing to them to maintain a community of likeminded people. Otherwise, we're not worthy of the freedom and the responsibilities it entails.
I get your point about elitism and gatekeeping. We're no better than Windows users or Mac users or any other OS' users. We just have a set of values unique to our community, and they have sets of values that differ. We also shouldn't be throwing users under the bus in the name of politics, but part of what makes Linux slightly more bearable is the way the driving philosophy of Free Software is evident throughout. Linux is better than it could be because it attracts the people who want to be here for the community's values, not the people who have to be coaxed and coerced into accepting the values to use the "best"/"easiest"/"friendliest" software.
Can't answer most of your questions, rhetorical or not, but don't have much to add or argue with either. One caveat I want to make is:
Don't think that for a second. There are more now than there ever have been. The problem isn't simply that YouTube choked out all the others, it's that YouTube moved the goalposts so we wouldn't even consider the others. E.g. back in the day if you wanted videos about a very specific topic—say, you need a new phone and you want to find out if the PinePhone is right for you—you would have to go to all the video sharing sites and, if you were lucky, you would find a video or two somewhere. Nowadays you just check youtube. Youtube shifted the goalposts from "hosts videos" to "hosts videos about everything," and now people won't consider adopting alternatives unless their community just spontaneously exists, and is big enough to have everything, and also it doesn't show them people they hate, and also it has this ambiguous list of features that youtube mostly has, and also...
And who can blame them? Who wants to check 8 different websites with 8 different interfaces and 4 different apps and 2 without apps and 2 that don't work on mobile at all and partially overlapping communities and offerings and STILL risk not finding anything when checking one unified platform will guarantee you the video?
It depends on what you mean by "replacement," as I mention above. As far as I know, there are no exact replicas of "[website], but only the good parts."
Every Social Media alternative is either too small to be attractive to the people who expect a very full social experience (e.g. Lemmy instead of Reddit), or it's just recreating the same flaws again, but more subtle and insidious (e.g. Threads instead of Xitter). The problem there is that the will of the herd doesn't make smart choices, so you're either left with site that's just like the last one and doomed to recreate its downfall in a few years (because the average person likes what they already know and liked) or a site that is too forward thinking and will never have more than a few hundred thousand followers in your lifetime (assuming it can last)—a number that might seem large in a stadium or a BBS forum, but seems small on a site like facebook.
That being said, I like where the fediverse is going with services like Matrix, Mastodon and Lemmy. Maybe one day we'll see a more fb-like experience
As you said, DuckDuckGo is a fairly good search engine. Better than Google currently, sadly. I remember when it was definitely a harder choice and really required strong values. 'Nuff said.
For Amazon, I like using Ebay, Etsy and specialized online stores. Brick-and-mortar is only necessary if it's groceries or not a large chain (which all have websites anyway). The trade-off is the guarantees: some baseline of quality, and a definite refund when you get scammed. Hasn't been an issue for me yet, but I make it a point to not buy online if I can try in-store.
Yahoo and Youtube: not really. As aforementioned I don't use one, and I too am suckered into the pretty multicolored void of the other.
TV and streaming: cough !piracy@lemmy.ml cough (follow the checklists in the megathread first)