Nah, the Seffians treat Discworld with the same reverence that we treat Shakespeare. There’s a famous musician on Seffi who calls ximself Wind the Rince.

Plot twist: the Seffian’s name is Rickas’Tley

Some people are being a bit pedantic about not technically needing the internet for email, and that’s true, but the pedantry is hiding the fact that actually email is really cool in how it exists in whatever form we want it to be in! It can be transmitted over internet, or over bare TCP/IP, or even peer-to-peer. Most applications don’t take advantage of how versatile email really is.

Of course, Micro$oft makes it rely on an always-on internet connection because it’s better for their bottom line.

It is the year 2,002,026.

Humanity has conquered capitalism and moved off of Earth. Disease and accidental death have been eradicated. We’ve invented marvelous and miraculous technologies and used them to catapult ourselves to distant worlds.

It’s an open question whether or not our descendants can rightly call themselves “human” anymore, and indeed some on far-flung planets do not.

On the planet Seffi, which we call Kepler-725c, one of those human descendants watches the end of a two-dimensional audiovisual narrative, a recent fad on the planet. They aren’t watching it on a computer, per se, but on a holographic mesh device operating across a distributed cluster of nanomachines. The human descendant telepathically interfaced with it to launch the application and the narrative, and now xe marvels at how immersive and compelling the narrative was, despite being contained as it was within a two-dimensional non-interactive form.

A list of people who contributed to the construction of the narrative concludes its display, and the holomesh reverts to a waiting state, displaying a simple black panel within a white frame. And within that black panel, a small, orange-and-white triangle sits, perfectly centered. The human descendant doesn’t know what it originally represented, and muses briefly about it before deactivating the holomesh and walking out of xeir home to enjoy the sunset beneath the purple-blue trees.

You might just do it now. You can probably be ok for a few weeks.

I honestly feel like I’m doing Linux wrong, because with one exception it’s been seamless. No driver issues, no framerate problems, no game compatibility problems for anything I play. I thought I was having issues with Bluetooth dropping randomly, but I’ve tracked that down to a hardware issue with the antenna.

The exception is that my Wi-Fi chipset has a bad driver that I think causes it to sleep after every packet, meaning that my Wi-Fi speeds are so slow that a speed test times out. This isn’t an issue for me because I was planning to be hardwired anyway, but if you’re going to put it on a mobile device you should check your Wi-Fi hardware; I think a fix is coming soon, though.

In fairness, I’m not a cutting edge guy (I mostly play stuff a few years after it’s released, patient gamers style) and I don’t play many games that have any kind of anti-cheat. But I regularly get three-digit framerates on highest graphics settings.

I’m not interested in getting into a distro war. I think we should encourage people to get into the ecosystem via whatever user-friendly means possible. Once they’re in, then they’ll be a lot more likely to try out another distro.

When I bought a new gaming PC a few weeks ago (where I live the pre-builts that were assembled before rampocalypse are still at a reasonable price until the stock runs out), I asked if I could get it cheaper without the Windows 11 license. The sales guy said, “well, it’s already installed.” I told him, “I’m literally going to take it home and wipe it for Bazzite.” He said, “good call, but seriously, they’re practically giving these licenses away, so even if we could it would only take like $20 off the purchase price.”

Kind of a bummer to waste that $20, but honestly the satisfaction of hitting “reformat” on a brand new, slop-infused, bloatware-infested, data-harvesting-ready SSD and watching it all vanish before I even used it was almost worth the money.

EDIT: Not to mention, I got back a significant amount of space. 15+ GB.

Do it! Just choose the most normie distro you can find (probably something like Mint or Ubuntu) and free yourself!

This was a personal device, not a mission unit.

The capsule isn’t. It’s the mission commander’s personal device.

Fun fact: it’s actually called “Maundy Thursday.” No, I don’t know what that means without looking it up.

I love that idea. Props to your teachers for running with it.

I mean, generally I agree, but what gives me pause here is that Graber is basically moving into a focus on federation full-time. A leadership change like this would be a perfect moment to pivot away from atproto and into a more walled garden, but Graber isn’t even leaving the company.

This could just be theatrics, but it’s at least interesting that they aren’t taking this opportunity to close it all off when they absolutely could.

I would like to read that paper.

Hey, fyi, this is called spam, and it invariably backfires every time.

You must adhere to my religion or you will no longer be working for this company.

That has been audited by third parties around the world. I detest Apple’s business practices, and even I know this ain’t it chief.

No, this is different. They’re not saying “we’re allowed to,” they’re saying “we didn’t do it”:

In no circumstance did the test affect the standard functionality of the device nor did it limit access to its main features. The users could and can continue to normally use all HDMI inputs, external devices, consoles, subscription streaming apps, or standard broadcasts without any type of interruption or obligation to watch advertisements.

Which is totally believable. /s

I fundamentally disagree with both your premise and your example’s conclusion. I’m not saying that it can be justified, though; just that it must be contextualized differently. To wit: it would be right for you to criticize them even if you are being hypocritical. You have far fewer resources to dispose of that oil. Your business model is not predicated upon handling oil well. You are not enriching yourself at the cost of others. And yes, there may be others doing it as well, but the combined impact of every individual doing it is almost certainly a tiny fraction of the company doing it.