experbia

weird. who could have predicted a rug pull from an analytics and spyware company… lol.

if you get in bed with adtech vipers and don’t anticipate problems, you’re gullible as hell. if you don’t stop them (or worse, if you let them) ad people will sell you, your soul, and your passion to the devil for a single penny.

I was once personally responsible for making Red jump off the long ledge in front of the elite 4 in the very first Twitch Plays Pokémon. it happened a lot but I know I caused it once. sometimes it’s so easy to be a villain.

as a gay, I take some undeserved pride in being so terrifying to straight conservatives that many of them started walking around with poop on their butt because they’re scared if they touch their b-hole they’re suddenly gonna “break” and go gay

I always thought it should be “unlock”, because that’s more what is happening. you’re not buying it, renting has a connotation of a fixed term ownership time, but unlock describes the action… they’ve had the movie the whole time sitting there, probably in a CDN near your home already, but you’re not allowed to see it until you pony up. it’s locked away.

same. I buy a lot of software/games and media/music/movies, and before I buy I always make sure I can pirate it down the road if I need to. if I can’t, I reconsider how much I need it. I’ll switch to my pirated copy at the drop of a hat without a drop of guilt. if it has annoying or unperformant drm? it makes me sign up for an account to use my paid software on my own computer? its servers go down and it won’t boot? switched.

this was my experience too. kept putting it off because I assumed I’d need to tinker a bit. didn’t at all, worked immediately with only the simplest configuration. genuinely amazing, I wish my software worked that well.

probably. this doesn’t surprise me one bit.

If you have a smart TV, it probably runs an ARM-architecture Linux or Android (which amounts to a bunch of extra stuff piled onto Linux) to drive the logic and ui to support connecting to the internet and downloading and updating streaming apps and other smart TV crap.

most of the time they’ll run some minimal stripped-down version of these operating systems to support only features needed for the TV and it’s functions. buildroot is an open source project that specializes in producing hyper slim Linux OS installation images for devices like these.

if I had to guess, they had a USB full of shows plugged in and the smart tv’s solution was to just boot up the linux version of VLC in a bare x session when the user hits play on “totally_not_pirated_smallville_s01e03.mkv” on their thumbdrive. not a terrible solution, honestly: VLC just plays anything.

The old kernel is because a lot of low level hardware has available drivers written for it that are intended to be loaded into old versions of the Linux kernel (at time of release perhaps) and are then just never updated lol, at least not for ARM. sometimes there are breaking changes with kernel apis and stuff as the kernel version increases over time, so the easier solution for someone trying to make a TV, over begging and/or paying the hardware developers to update their drivers, is to just run an old kernel version.

everything is a hack. nearly all these smart devices are just general-purpose computers with ancient (predictable, cheap) software and inescapable interfaces taped over the front, and a whole lot of digital duct tape on the back.

I agree. and I happen to enjoy baking. arch was my first distro and after a whirlwind tour of other options at some point, has remained my daily driver os for the better part of a decade.

i don’t suggest arch to just any newbies. I suggest it to the ones who are overtly interested in baking. I don’t suggest it to people asking the best way to get tasty cookies, who are perhaps the majority, but not by as much as people seem to naturally suspect. sometimes I think some people giving answers don’t remember or realize that there are many kinds of people interested in learning about Linux and therefore many right answers for a starting distro.

I don’t think anyone would say next Saturday meaning this Saturday at all

I am someone who does this. I know it’s convention to say “this Saturday” for that, but when I’m not thinking about it too hard, it just comes out as “next Saturday” aka “the next Saturday I will experience after this very moment” aka what you would call “this Saturday”. I usually have to immediately follow up with a disambiguation, because I usually only catch myself after having said it.

i agree with this and don’t even think about it because it makes so much obvious sense, and i confuse people often who believe it to mean the one after the next one (aka “this” one) smh

as already mentioned, ampersand allows you to “background” a task. but if you’d like the output from your program alongside the loop monitoring system info, consider using a terminal multiplexer like tmux.

on the terminal, this will let you open a “split screen” pane with another shell. you can use hotkeys to create, destroy, or move between views.

you don’t see a tool being too simple for the problem at hand to be a problem in tool selection? that’s also crazy.

the cutest character on ST:D is also the cutest character on the fediverse. who’d have thought!