Oh definitely

There’s plugins for tons of things from customization (like custom boot and suspend animations) to tools (like mangohud for performance/energy monitoring) to quality of life (like kde connect or syncthing or teamspeak right in the sidebar)

And it’s super easy to install and update, just go to their website in desktop mode and download and run the executable to install it, and then you can just install plugins and update without needing to leave game mode

There is a decky plugin that lets you turn on kde connect in game mode, though you have to pair in desktop mode first

https://www.newsweek.com/googles-ai-chatbot-tells-student-seeking-help-homework-please-die-1986471

Make sure to read the actual message, it’s a lot worse than the headline makes it sound lol (It’s also nice that you can look at the link of the full conversation to see how normal it was until the last message)

Recently I had two major problems with Windows updates that needed manual intervention in a very user unfriendly way.

Earlier this year one of the security updates for 22H2 broke my computer’s recovery partition and prevented the update to install and constantly fail. It took like a week for Microsoft to acknowledge the issue, at which point they said they would post a fix shortly. Then a whole month later they said they wouldn’t/couldn’t fix it automatically and anyone affected would have to manually delete the partition, shrink your main disk partition, and recreate the recovery partition. On top of that, there was no notification of the issue or how to fix it, one would have to notice the update keeps failing, look up the error, and dig up the instructions from their blog. And then go through the ugly process of editing partitions which I can’t imagine most users doing.

Either that or just live with no recovery until the next time you reinstall the os.

https://superuser.com/questions/1837245/kb5034441-and-changing-the-recovery-partition-starting-offset-in-order-to-be-abl

The second issue this year was halfway through a windows update (when it just reboots a couple times) my computer just simply stopped booting. I could power cycle and everything and after the bios it would just black screen forever. The only way I got around it was to hop into the bios and change the boot order. Another thing I wouldn’t expect normal users should have to do to just boot the computer

And I personally have seen all the ads in Windows explorer, the start menu, the lock screen, etc. and the massive pushing of Copilot being added to the toolbar even after removing it manually. And readding OneDrive. I’m in the US though so that’s probably why (it’s nice to know the only reason Microsoft does all this because they’re not legally pressured not to. Gives me so much trust in them to do the right thing with my computer and data)

I’ve since moved to Linux (which I’ve used on my work machine for many years) and have had near zero issues. It’s very nice not worrying how my computer is going to make itself worse without my consent next

edit: I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a fanatic that tries to convert everyone to Linux. For a lot of people Windows is the best choice, but in my case in particular it really has made things easier

The pinebook’s privacy switches (for WiFi/BT, camera, and microphone) operate at the firmware level, the operating system has no control over them

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Privacy_Switches

The keyboard operates on firmware independent of the operating system. It detects if one of the F10, F11 or F12 keys is pressed in combination with the Pine key for 3 seconds. Doing so disables power to the appropriate peripheral, thereby disabling it. This has the same effect as cutting off the power to each peripheral with a physical switch. This implementation is very secure, since the firmware that determines whether a peripheral gets power is not part of the Pinebook Pro’s operating system. So the power state value for each peripheral cannot be overridden or accessed from the operating system. The power state setting for each peripheral is stored across reboots inside the keyboard’s firmware flash memory.

A couple of favorites that are different from what others already said:

• I strongly dislike autorotate on my phone so I always keep it off, however it makes perfect sense in apps like YouTube/Twitch. So I have one task that turns it on when opening one of those apps, and off again when closing them
• When I’ve got Bluetooth headphones, I can choose to have incoming texts read out to me. Very nice when walking/running outside and not needing to pull my phone out
• Similarly, I’ve got a task that will (optionally) read out the name of the song that’s playing to Bluetooth

Buzzkill is very nice. I’m in a group chat that gets huge bursts of activity (like a hundred messages) and then goes dormant for a bit, so I set buzzkill to only give me at most 1 notification every 30 minutes, and keep the rest of them silent. That way I can still keep up with it without my phone blowing up

I could be completely wrong, but I think one of the first anomaly detection games was called “I’m on observation duty” which came out in 2018, but didn’t really get popular until late 2021 (when the fourth game in the series same out), about the same time “The exit 8” released funny enough.

That game is a little different where the player flips around security cameras and reports anomalies as they come up, but I think exit 8 was the first anomaly detection games that is “looping” and you have to decide whether to go forward or back depending on if there’s an anomaly

Humans evolved finger nails to separate Lego pieces

…I can’t think of a good reason for toe nails though

Oh I wish

Just waiting for the achievement reenabling mod so I can play with some of the real nice QoL tweaks

Woah this is awesome

I would love a source for this to pull up in future discussions

Not xkcd in this case

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/

Still very cool to think about

And thank you for the app link, if I ever get flexible enough hours I wonder if that sleep schedule would help my somewhat unhealthy relationship with sleep

I definitely agree some of the issues they cite are more complicated than they need to be

It would be awesome to base schedules around sunrise (especially sleep, your routine sounds very nice), but the wild variance the further you go from the equator might make that unruly.

Depending on the time of year my schedule would “shift” around multiple hours due to latitude, people in (southern) Norway would have to shift around 6ish hours, all the way to the extreme arctic circle where the sun doesn’t rise/set depending on season

I think I could adapt where I live, but I feel like “time of day” would lose all meaning without also knowing time of sunrise, whereas right now I can be reasonably certain how “active” the world is in any given timezone at 9:00 or 23:00

It is definitely interesting to think how different it would be to base everything around sunrise (you’d never really say let’s meet at x time, it would always be relative to sunrise), I just struggle in thinking people would be able to break the routine of relying on nice round numbers for time

As much as timezones are a pain (I’m a programmer who recently finished working on an international calendar for an app), I don’t think getting rid of timezones is a great idea. https://qntm.org/abolish

I think a much better goal would be getting rid of daylight savings. THAT causes so much headache for little reason nowadays

Reminds me of https://neal.fun/speed/

But that does position rather than rotation

Ack librefm completely slipped my mind

AFAIK they’re two separate projects for the same/similar goal. I know ListenBrainz has a recommendation system, but it might still be in it’s early days

There’s ListenBrainz, the open MusicBrainz version of last.fm