PC building is niche, yes, but do you think “almost no one” builds PCs, like OP said? And that’s not even including the people who’ve had to install Windows on a pre-built system for one reason or another.

My point is that OP sounds like a smug Linux user shitting on people who use Windows. Even 5% of Windows users is too big a group of people to be described as “almost no one” simply because of how big the userbase is. That would be like saying, “Almost no one installs Linux” because Linux only makes up a small portion of the worldwide PC userbase.

That’s what I’m saying. Windows installation is idiot-proof. And I’m sure there’s enough people who maintain their own systems or at the very least have had to install Windows for one reason or another that to say that “almost no one” who runs Windows installed it themselves is just the “Linux Master Race” talking.

You don’t think that many people build their own Windows PCs? Linux gaming isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things, and there’s plenty of people who dual boot for various reasons.

I’d almost be willing to bet that there are more people who’ve installed Windows on their PC than there are people who’ve installed Linux from a pure numbers standpoint.

Amazon already has their own pharmacy, btw. They even bought a prescription delivery service a few years back, called PillPack or something. Buying CVS would give them brick and mortar stores for the pharmacy they already run online.

As much as I hate Amazon and their overreach into every sector of the economy, I’d love to see them bring the full might of their lawyers against Musk.

IMO, I think creative people are at the heart of a social media platform. A big part of art is the community aspect of sharing it with others. So they interact with each other as well as create Content ™ for others. This is especially obvious with platforms like YouTube, but even Twitter is like this. If there weren’t people posting photos, drawings, music, game dev posts, and livestreams, Twitter would be a very different place. Creative people are responsible for much of the original content online. Without them, Twitter would basically be news, political rants, and reposted memes.

Twitter was largely considered the best place for artists by process of elimination, and I know plenty of artists were dying for an alternative but didn’t have one. Places like DeviantArt don’t get traffic from the general populace, and Instagram’s algorithm is horrible for discoverability. With Bluesky getting enough people to make it worth the migration, the creative people are moving over, and their followers will join them.

I know the only reason I ever made a Twitter account was because 70% of the people I followed on Tumblr left for Twitter after the porn ban. Hell, Tumblr dropped like 99.7% in value after the porn ban because they drove off almost their entire userbase.

Nor would they care if they knew about it.

I think “leave” is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.

I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, “The creatives have moved to Bluesky.”

Yeah, I figured you didn’t mean that and wasn’t trying to imply that you did, lol. I was just trying to specify that when I was talking about the Wright Brothers I meant the technological jumps between their first flight and the moon landing. We’re probably several technological leaps away from anything that could be considered actual AI.

The Wright Brothers didn’t figure out the moon landing. They figured out aerodynamics. There were plenty of other discoveries that went into the moon landing such as suborbital flight, supersonic flight, and orbital dynamics to list a few. It’s less about the specific time as it is about the level of technology. The timescale is much harder to put down due to the nature of technological innovation.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the most dangerous things about these AI programs is the lack of responsibility or culpability.

Definitely not a question of AI sentience, I’d say we’re as close to that as the Wright Brothers were to figuring out the Apollo moon landing. But, it definitely raises questions on whether or not we should be giving everybody access to machines that can fabricate erroneous statements like this at random and what responsibility the companies creating them have if their product pushes someone to commit suicide or radicalizes them into committing an act of terrorism or something. Because them shrugging and saying, “Yeah, it does that sometimes. We can’t and won’t do anything about it, though” isn’t gonna cut it, in my opinion.

People are going to go where the people are. There’s a critical mass that has to happen for there to be enough impetus to cause a major shift. And this goes doubly so for people like artists who depend on being seen by people in order to put food on the table. I’ve seen tons of artists asking since Musk originally bought Twitter about where the hell they can go, because they’re chained to the popular social media platforms.

The hard part would be doing it in a way that pulls in the kind of people who listened to Alex Jones.

The funniest thing to do would be to turn it into either a legitimate leftist new site or a leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill (though I don’t know how that would work).

As my dad’s friend would say, “Wash with colors only? Clothes are one color: laundry-colored!”

10 is the last version of Windows I’ll be using, and I don’t want to have more full screen ads for 11 pop up on top of whatever program I’m trying to use. The previous time it happened is what prompted me to do it in the first place, and I’m definitely not gonna let them force update my Windows version like they’ve done in the past.

Stuff like this is why I disabled the TPM on my computer. No TPM means that you’re “not eligible” for 11, meaning I don’t get nagged by the random full screen pop-ups.

There is an alternative that I wish I could think of the name of that communities have been using for a number of years now to set up cheap, small-scale satellite internet networks. I looked into it once as an alternative for my neighborhood to dealing with the bullshit that is Comcast and Verizon, and ended up getting an ad for milsec strategic level network infrastructure from Boeing or something. Regardless, it’s a known and proven alternative that’s cheaper than the big guys and has hit a point where some places have set it up as a part of local government run infrastructure.

I think after 4 years of Trump, if there are still elections in 2028, we’ll see a Democrat elected president simply because of the fact that how bad it is under Trump will be right in people’s faces. In 2032, however, we’ll definitely see the Dems lose to somebody even worse than Trump for exactly why they lost in 2016 and 2024.

The Dems don’t learn anything and lose, then 4 years later they win because the Republicans made things worse, and then they learn nothing, double down, and lose again, starting the cycle all over again.

Not “tyrannic” yet, but Project 2025 is 3 months away.

Flowery words coming from someone who now lives in a tyrannic monarchy.