I still haven’t bought a PS5 because of this lol. At first it was too expensive and scalpers bought them all, so I thought “no worries, I’ll wait a year or two and get one on the cheap when it’s older.” And then the price kept going up over time so I just never bothered.

We had a little pirate movie ring going in college - this was in the UK in the 90s and there were certain films that were banned that you couldn’t get, like Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Reservoir Dogs etc. Someone somehow had access to Swedish satellite TV and so had shitty VHS copies of them with Swedish subtitles, so we had a counterfeit ring going that passed around 3rd-generation VHS copies of all these banned films.

Then DVD arrived and all these movies were just released on regular DVD so it destroyed our whole operation lol. The Exorcist was the first movie I bought on DVD.

We didn’t really have internet access when we were at school but we’d coordinate days where someone would bring in the floppy disks for something you wanted and you’d bring in a stack of blank disks and copy them on the school computers lol.

It’s like magic too, because any new weird kind of package manager I add, it’s just picks it up and starts updating it. It can even update Windows apparently.

I use an unholy blend of paru, Flatpak, Docker and AppImage apps (no Snap!) with Topgrade to update it all.

I have a 2TB external drive that I got for under $200 a couple of years ago, and the other day I saw the exact same drive in Staples for $650. It’s fucking wild out there.

I have a .scripts folder in home with a bunch of things. Most of them are for backups, aka they just rsync a bunch of things from different places into one place on my backup drive. I also have one called get_trailers that I can run in my Radarr folder which takes the names of any movie folders in there and uses yt-dlp to search and grab the trailers from Youtube and puts them in the correct folders alongside the movie.

I actually find it pretty helpful for tech support stuff. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s usually at least in the right general area and TBH it beats going through endless forums where the answer is buried among 8 pages of people bickering about nothing, or those ones where someone has your exact problem and then replies “nm I fixed it” and doesn’t say what they did.

I tried out a game/demo thing that was a tester for AI NPC dialogue. I asked an NPC to tell me about himself and he replied that he could not connect to server lol

As a side note to the general “try a bunch and see what you like” recommendations: you could also try using a virtual machine (something like Virtualbox) that lets you run a PC inside your existing PC first. That way you can try a bunch of distros without worrying about wiping your existing setup, and it’ll get you used to the install process. If you mess it up, just delete the VM and start a new one, no harm done. Then when you find one you like and feel comfortable with the install process, you can back all your stuff up and do it for real, knowing pretty much what to expect.

Architecture is the other one that vaguely worries me. I don’t like the idea of unknowingly walking around in a building that was designed by AI. I work with AI and it can’t even be trusted to write a blog post correctly, let alone design a building that’s safe. And I know if I’m thinking of that now, it means someone else has already thought of and attempted it at least 6 months ago.

As someone with a degree in the arts, I’m pretty sure that almost all art as a career is under threat from AI. Sure, AI can’t match the human experience and expressiveness needed for really great art, but that’s not what most artists do to earn a living. And the vast majority of the people who traditionally pay for artists to make stuff for them really don’t care at all. Now they can get Grok to fart out a logo or a poster in 15 seconds and not have to talk to an artist, they’re all set.

I feel like Ubuntu used to be the sort of default “new user” distro, but they keep going off on these weird tangents so that doesn’t really work anymore. Then it felt like PopOS might have been the new one, but now they’re mid-way between transitioning to COSMIC so that’s not really a good fit either. I think maybe Mint is the default one now, but also Cinnamon is kind of it’s own thing so it doesn’t set a new user up well for becoming familiar with the more universally used DE’s like Gnome or Plasma.

I think Fedora and Debian are also a decent fit for new users, but that’s also not a very exciting answer so that’s probably why it doesn’t come up as much lol.

I’m not sure if CachyOS counts as a “gaming” distro or not, but I use that on my desktop/work machine. I’m pretty familiar with Arch (BTW) and I can do a manual setup from scratch if I need to (that’s what my laptop runs) but Cachy just seemed like a way to use Arch with a simple setup and a bunch of default optimizations. So tl;dr laziness I guess lol.

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I had a very niche problem on Fedora once that I was personally unable to solve, therefore the entire project is trash and everyone should use CachyOS which I haven’t managed to break yet!

As a European living in Canada, it’s quite annoying to think about having to do extra stuff (even if it is very minimal) because one state in America passes a stupid law.

But also not surprising at all TBH

No so much quitting, but I got booted because my cat killed my whole team.

It was back when I was playing Call of Duty, and it was in hardcore mode where it allowed friendly fire, but within limits. If you accidentally shot a team-mate you’d usually be okay (although they’d have some choice words for you on the team chat), but if you went around massacring your team-mates you’d get auto-booted. Anyway, we were in a situation where the whole team was hiding behind a wall, getting ready to take on someone who was hiding and being particularly troublesome. I was about to throw a grenade at them so my finger was hovering over the button, and my cat happened to walk past and rub himself on my hand because he wanted pets. He head-butted my finger, which made me throw a grenade right at my own feet, followed by an explosion and the game ending, at least for me.

I didn’t get a chance to explain myself, so I wonder what everyone else thought I was up to lol.

Nice! I did mine as an alias:

alias yt='yt-dlp --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4"'

And then just yt [URL] downloads the thing.