I’m close to a similar point, my PC has been Linux for a couple of years but my old surface book has been on windows 10 (with some 6 year security update thing that was mentioned during the time Win 10 was dropped).
The main reason I haven’t dropped it is that I sometimes use it for work or uni, so compatibility and other people being familiar has been a priority but I’ve graduated and got a work laptop so it’s probably time to drop Windows outright.
I’m actually pretty lukewarm on the Witcher franchise. I’ve read all but the most recent book, tried the show for 2 seasons, and played all the games. As much as people hype this franchise as some sort of rival to A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings, it absolutely falls short.
That said, the Witcher 3 specifically deserves all the love it gets. I actually boycotted it for a few years after release because the graphic downgrade it had after the early gameplay trailers came at a time of extreme manipulation of this sort from other studios, but eventually picked it up with both DLC in a sale, approaching it with a lot of cynicism.
Not only does Hearts of Stone tell what I’d consider the best witcher story, Blood and Wine is a fantastic post-game to the franchise in its vibrant pageantry romp through a riviera; it’s just a happy environment to end Geralt’s story in.
It is my first distro where I’m not dual booting to Windows.
I swapped to it in May from Endeavour OS as I happened to be doing a clean install, and 90% of my PC usage nowadays is gaming, and I have never looked back, even though I thought Endeavour OS would have been the end of my Distro hopping.
Don’t worry, they make them look like people as a silly game, we’ll be chased down the street by drones. L
It’s strange to look back at the Legend of Korra and realise it was totally fine, just worse than the original show, when comparing it to literally everything else that’s come from the IP since.
I played and modded Skyrim at the wazoo back in the day too, and haven’t touched it in a decade. It still holds a really special place in my heart in a worldbuilding and lore space that nothing I’ve played since, newer or older has sated quite as strongly, including other elderly scrolls games.
I’ve just started replaying it, as there is basically an entire story’s worth of high quality expanded mod content to explore, plus the original game has faded to a point of re-enjoying it. I’m probably going to introduce my partner to it with my own riff on the Gate to Sovngarde modlist.
The thing is, I don’t care for the next game. I have no trust in Bethesda to make something that scratches the itch that Skyrim did, I don’t expect it to be moddable in the same way looking at the creation club, and I literally expect it to be an objectively boring game.
If I want more of the elder scrolls experience I fell in love with, I have it in the old games.
I finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I’ve been running the same PC for 10 years, and it’s really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn’t play new games at all.
I haven’t replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.
Funnily enough I actually have Firefox open by default whenever I boot up my PC.
I have no taskbar or desktop items. I always default to a specific workflow of pressing the windows key (or whatever we call it for Linux), and searching for everything. I have since early windows 10.
I realised that 90% of the time, I was opening Firefox, so now it just opens. I have a pretty minimal toolbar setup for it, so it’s basically just an address bar that automatically focuses when I start typing.
One day I’ll set up something where I have multiple search hotkeys for web search, file search, application search, music etc, that will sort of replace this.
27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.
I don’t actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.
Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you’re motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you’re going because “that’s what you do”, then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.
The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.
I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it’s no longer the default expectation.
I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
The only time I ever find myself getting preachy is when people who eat meat talk about halal meat as unethical. I have no idea why it bothers me so deeply when it’s technically fighting for better treatment of animals, but there’s something especially frustrating about the options are:
Kill them quickly.
Kill them slowly.
Don’t kill them.
Honestly if you never go back, not much. It wouldn’t even impact your credit rating, and your country likely doesn’t have the means to enforce it. I could imagine you get harassed by us debt collection agencies but they can’t do anything about it either. If you’re never returning to the US, it’s fine.
You could likely even still holiday in the USA. It won’t impact your visa as it’s not a criminal offence either.
I’m not a lawyer, and could be totally wrong, but I asked my dad who is also not a lawyer.
When I was still using Instagram reels, I was always amazed how quickly the algorithm figured me out. If I hesitated for even a second on a reel, it would amend my next ones immediately. I assume the real trick is comparing it to the average time spent on a reel, everyone spends longer on a wall of text reel, but when I stop on a Linux reel for an extra second, I’m immediately in the 1% for engagement.
I read something years ago about how your phone keyboard tracks your recommended words, it knows if you’re more likely to type apple or Apple, or if you type soup more than average, and any app that gets that data and compares it to the baseline has an instant, in depth profile on you.
As much as the UK is slow to act and the people won’t face full charges, the big name in UK politics that appeared in the files, Peter Mandleson is gone, and his closest political ally Morgan McSweeny is too. These are two of the most loathed corrupt politicians of the current government and their involvement made them too toxic for politics. Prince Andrew had had his royal styles, peerages and titles stripped too.
The UK is a disgusting country and the second most implicated after the USA but it’s response is very different, namely the people involved cannot run the country anymore.
And everyone please stop using it as a forum for the love of God. I have no use for discord as a platform, but every damn FOSS program asking me to go there for troubleshooting is insanity.
I do agree entirely. If I could use the internet of 2015 I would, but I can’t do so in a practical way that isn’t much more tedious than asking an LLM.
My options are the least rancid butter of the rancid butter restaurants or I churn my own. I’d love to churn my own and daydream of it, but I am busy, and can barely manage to die on every other hill I’ve chosen.
Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.
I’ve become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I’d be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.
I’m getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it’s really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that’s perpetually ready to support me.
The irony is that I’ll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.
I backed it in 2015 and suspected it was a scam then, with most advice online being that you should only buy it if you think you’ll enjoy what’s already out.
I think the saddest thing is that they have a lot of genuine ambition, and we’re trying truly innovative things a decade ago like a persistent world space “from pupil to planet” weather simulations that were incredible, and more. But as time has gone on, the bar has risen and everything that they had that was ahead of the curve has been done.