A Phlaming Phoenix

Ditto, this and Yakuake, which is great at keeping it out of the way until I need it.

This would fundamentally break the Unix/Posix functionality of layering file systems. All containerization would break. You would lose the ability to map in one filesystem’s content within another’s. I don’t think the right way to get people used to Linux is to fundamentally break it.

File managers - even the dogshit one you get with Gnome - already register external storage devices in a list that’s shown no matter where in the file system you are. Assigning a drive letter doesn’t clarify anything. What beginner/grandpa is even looking at the contents of the FS root?

You could try gconf

I’m not adopting the conspiracy here, but if they can’t find the shooter with the whole country getting behind him, then they would want the optics of finding the shooter. Which could backfire, of course. It would be very telling, for example, if the cops got real confident about it and then the real shooter made some kind of public display with the false shooter in custody.

I don’t know what you’re currently accustomed to or what the feature/workflow differences would be, but I’ve had some music folks I know be successful with Ardour and Reaper. Have you checked to see if those would let you do your thing? The other problem I’ve had is audio interface support in Linux, but that seems to have improved a lot. I’ve got an old Axe I/O Solo that didn’t work at all a few years ago but now seems to have full support.

I don’t pretend to know how to accomplish this. I may be completely wrong here, but two things that have to go:

• Religious thought (“faithbrain” or the Peter Pan-esque belief that things are true because you believe they are true, despite a lack of evidentiary or even argumentative support, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary)
• Social media bubbles (billionaires controlling the content people see, creating bubbles of “information” that skew the public in their favor)

There’s almost certainly more to do as well, but those things stand out to me. Also, it seems hard to believe that we could make any progress on these fronts given the current situation.

Really, the media finally realized millennials don’t care if we killed Applebee’s or whatever, and they’ve moved on to the next thing to scare boomers with. “They hate us because we buy bags of paper napkins” becomes “They hate us because we can use old style keyboards.” Generations are not a monolith. You can compare them, but it’s stupid to pass judgment in that way.

God damn you.

It’s very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn’t generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren’t going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.

I don’t want thinner. I want more functionality. Don’t expect me to pay 2 grand for a laptop with no external USB or HDMI ports, for which privileges I can pay an additional $100 or so. I’m frustrated enough by the lack of Ethernet jacks on my Lenovo. The last time I had a Mac (work shipped me one), I was even more frustrated by how bad the built in trackpad and keyboard were and the fact that using an external device to replace them came at a premium price.

The article quotes extensively from the study about this and gives examples regarding what kinds of tasks qualify for those levels.

There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don’t understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like “make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it” is a foreign concept.

I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I’m also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I’m comfortable with. I don’t tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.

Some of it is a fad that will go away. Like you indicated, we’re in the “Marketing throws everything at the wall” phase. Soon we’ll be in the “see what sticks” phase. That stuff will hang around and improve, but until we get there we get AI in all conceivable forms whether they’re a worthwhile use of technology or not.

We recently went through a nuke-n-pave on my kids desktops. I plugged in an external drive for them to do backups, and we walked through the process. This was in Fedora with pretty much default Gnome tools. They came away understanding the process and how to track it, but I think they still don’t really understand file organization.

Modest Mouse called this out in their song Novocain Stain back in '97 or whenever.

Interchanges, plazas and malls And crowded chain restaurants More housing developments go up Named after the things they replace So welcome to Minnow Brook And welcome to Shady Space Well it all seems a little abrupt No, I don’t like this change of pace

I did this swap recently as well, on Fedora. I had to do literally nothing, as the drivers were already available and installed. I uninstalled akmod-nvidia to tidy up, but I suppose even that wasn’t strictly required.

I still remember having to operate on their old desktops with the snap-down clamshell design. Infuriating.

There’s a trust issue here as well since AI only works if you train it and we are training it with our activity, reported to private companies who can do whatever they please with it. I don’t trust anything Microsoft does.

I did the same thing. It’s one of the cheapest upgrades you can get for a PC, but Apple will charge triple the actual cost to maximize profits.

Since the act of writing to an SSD is an act of wear that will eventually lead to a broken storage device, using an SSD for swap is a uniquely bad idea, right? Are Macs still designed so that you can’t replace your own hardware easily? I’ve never owned one, but I was asked to service one many years ago and it was a real pain.