This looks like a very classical and well-known case of executives copying each other.

That other company is doing layoffs and seems fine? Reports the line going up? Let’s do it, too!

The guys across the street are already implementing AI? Investors love it? Let do it, too! We may have taken a risk with blockchain, but this one is just sure to work better for us!

The big name is going for the money, predator-style, and they’re still afloat? Finally, we can cash out, too!

It’s usually a place where you’re not bombarding your brain with stimulation all the time, so your brain tries to use the downtime to work with all the information you’ve been putting into it.

This is actually a big part of learning anything, called diffused learning. Think of how you suddenly get something after a period of rest or not doing anything, some time after you’ve initially focused on a thing for some time - your brain has actually been using the downtime to structure the data and make better sense of it.

This is also why a lot of people that know how a human brain works suggest mediation and walks, especially without listening to music or podcasts, as well as spending little to no time reading, watching or stimulating your brain in any other way before bed. It needs that time, it’s crucial for development. Journaling helps here, too, because it’s both reflection and somewhat of a downtime.

Doing chores and not listening to anything counts, too.

But it’s all easier said than done in this age of constant hunt for one’s attention so they spend more time on your app, giving you more data to sell and more metrics to make the line go up (gotta keep the investors and stakeholders happy, can’t afford to not show constant growth).

The suits did. You know, so the line goes up. Because we’re all gonna die otherwise or something.

I think it’s just true for the vast majority of countries, unfortunately. A country has to have a lot of things figured out and done right before it can regulate and train its police force so well that its population doesn’t nearly universally agree with the ACAB sentiment. Or at least doesn’t belive they’re all incompetent.

i3 isn’t a proper DE, though, but I definitely would go with that with that little RAM.

For strictly DEs, I’d pick XFCE - it’s just lovely for what it demands.

Recommend anything to read on the matter? Sounds very interesting, but I’m afraid I may find some dubious material before striking anything good.

Who says the Linux community is crappy to newbies?

Don’t worry, we have that, too. ;) It’s a whole package!

Jokes aside, glad to help. Feel free to drop me a private message here or in Matrix if you have any more questions or something. Happy Linux’ing!

Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton, allowing non-Windows gamers enjoy what they pay for on multiple platforms with great ease; their efforts have been massive for gaming on Linux, and without it, I wouldn’t have paid for a lot of games, earning their developers a whole lot of absolutely nothing.

Also the community hub, the workshop, the review system, the cloud saving, the functional wishlist, the gifting system, the shopping cart, the anti-cheat (you’re better of with it than without it), the discovery queue, the sales dedicated to specific types of games that actually help people discover games and drive the revenue up for the developers, the (I think) complete transaction history, the refunds system, the friends and the chat and profiles - and probably many more things that I’m either not aware of or couldn’t list off the tip of my tongue, combined with internal works that, again, do help the devs in the end.

Steam is much more than a place where one pays for a game to then simply download and play it. It’s much greater and more functional than that. None of the developers have to put their games on Steam - nobody forces Epic Games Store or GOG to be this subpar in comparison. Same way nobody forces gamers to use Steam. People use Steam because they love it - or because there’s no good-enough alternative, but that’s hardly Valve’s fault.

Steam charging 30% is not just worth it, but also surprising, given what putting your game on Steam gets you as the developer, and what it gets us, the players.

You can always dual-boot, i.e. have both Windows and Linux… or multiple Linux installations, if you please.

Start with Linux Mint for greater stability and familiarity. Soon enough you’ll learn that distributions are basically fancy pre-packaged collections and configurations of mostly the same applications (they’re also called packaged), which should make choosing your distribution a bit easier. There are differences, of course, but you’ll need a deeper knowledge and more of a nuanced list of requirements before it starts to matter much, so don’t stress about comparing them and choosing “the best” for you - you’ll always be able to switch the entire distribution or reconfigure your own to fit your specific needs surprisingly easily.

I’m self-taught as well, and I’d say look through the current job market and offerings, but don’t worry all that much - teaching yourself IT usually nets you a considerable amount of transferable skills that you build upon if things don’t work out in one field; you also learn to learn and get much more comfortable with switching branches.

The less volatile your branch is, the less likely it is to turn out to be a fad that you’ll have to drop several years down the line at best. Crypto and blockchain, for example, were probably often recommended when the thing was on the rise, but that’s nowhere near as popular and safe now; I believe the current AI hype to follow the same fate. Basically, look at the news and trends and be careful with whatever big and stupid corporations push for, praise, or massively invest in: that’s usually nothing but good marketing successfully baiting the suits.

Web develoment is probably going to stay simultaneously volatile and relevant for decades more, so that’s a good option. Embedded development shouldn’t be going anywhere either, although that’s more low-level and intimidating, but it can be fun and stable and pay relatively well. I hate the smartphones industry and can’t really say much about Android or iOS development, but I doubt it’s doomed or anything.

So far, it seems like not following whatever Elon Musk or other billionaires tell you is the future is a good bet.

Like any good cartoon villain, Putin has enough in his biography to explain basically everything about his character, at whatever point of his life - it just doesn’t make the villain less evil and deserving of being removed from any sort of power and, hopefully, put to justice, with the former being imperative.

Removed by mod

We should expect more of that with the upcoming UE5 titles. The devs that have devoted to releasing those seem to have very hard time optimising - they’ll likely expect us all to just own 4090s and still run their game with DLSS ultra performance or other fake frames.

STALKER 2 will have the janky soul we expect from the series, but this mostly, mostly due to engine choice and apparent attempts to visually impress the player. Or the investors.

As a Russian who’s been thinking about what could’ve been done about Putin’s many moves towards authoritarianism, I say this: I don’t know. I dint think anyone knows either.

indsight is 20/20, so good luck trying to convince people to act now, before the far and distant future is here; it’s probably part of our nature to not be that much concerned with the long-term, as it’s the short- to mid-term that keeps us alive, i.e. fed, sheltered, hopefully healthy etc.

At this point, it feels like history is indeed very cyclical, at least society is, and now anyone left of outright fascism seems to be in minority, with many others either failing or refusing to recognise what’s likely coming. I don’t think it’s new, either - I’m sure people of our ages had things to compare their situation to during the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent events, just like we look back to their times and wonder how in the world could we possibly let that happen.

It’s probably best to vote and to protest and to be politically active and all that, before the right-wing or some other authoritarian group manages to manipulate its way into your government, local or higher, and start doing all it can to make you not even think of voting or protesting or being politically active. The caveat is you just don’t have any guarantees that any of that is going to work.

What’s even more important to remember is the fact that we cannot come up with some universal solution that’s going to always work the best way possible in every political and economical and social circumstance. This is what makes recording history and experience so important - it will allow us and those that will be after us to analyse the multitudes of factors and tendencies that lead to things and hopefully figure out reliable and effective and predictable mechanisms for society to function and prosper in mutual respect, egalitarianism, support, etc.

My last take is probably a little controversial: I think we shouldn’t ostracise people we see as fascist or right-wing or authoritarian, etc., but rather be welcoming and supporting, giving them respect, community and opportunity to speak and be listened to with kindness and understanding; many turn to violent and inhumane ideologies because, well, they don’t value themselves, feel threatened, humiliated, afraid, or something along these lines. It doesn’t have to be true, because it’s about how people feel, and we must work with how people feel and influence that on emotional level so they feel like they being in a group that’s based on being “anti-woke” or just “anti-” something - that’s a dead end; they should feel like they belong to groups that envision future and prosperity, where people know they can be trusted and can trust, where they can respect and be respected. You may not like it, but you have to understand that the human psyche can be very flexible and eventually turn a person you could easily turn into a human-loving ally into a bloodthirsty fascist just because they couldn’t find their place anywhere else, so instead they’re easily picked up by a group that manipulates confused and lost people into a sense of community and belonging.

Fascism has to be the unappealing option for them, and that requires a mind healthy from trauma and loneliness, the lack of that feeling like you’ve been played and robbed of something you own - like some great historical period the mouthpieces promise to get you back into if you yell at teenage girls for wearing bright-colored hair and rainbow pins.

Ranting is just a detail here, focus on the point - it’s a place of discussion. Like a tavern back in some older days. People talk here, come up with ideas, act on some of them, and it’s through this ranting, too, that some people may eventually pursue political or otherwise influential careers, try and bring changes they want to see, exerice their rights.

You can’t just get up and go to vote without having discussion either. This is all part of the process.

Lemmy, too, has algorithms that determine what you see - how many upvotes a post has, how many comments, how recent, etc. The communities you subscribe to may have some high-quality, niche posts that you’re very likely to miss because they’re overshadowed by bigger, more active communities where posts simply gain more traction - RSS lets you circumvent that.

Catered feeds, for example.

You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.

It’s much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you’re interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you’re basically on the algorithm’s mercy as well.

What phones would you consider worthwhile in terms of price, i.e. those you can cheap out on, but not suffer the consequences of it being slow even in the simplest tasks?

One Android phone I had, Nokia 5.1, had to be replaced in less than 5 years because it often froze and lagged when I had to make or receive a phone call, open a single tab in some light-weight browser, etc.

I’m not a big fan of the smartphone industry and especially the reviewers because they seem to have a very twisted idea of a budget device. Or maybe I’m a cheapskate.

What if my phone isn’t supported by any ROMs? Is there an easier alternative to building it for your device on your own, following the given instructions, for example?

The lower amount of content on Lemmy is balanced by the increased quality and the fact I can’t spend all day on here

This is easily one of the greatest aspects of the fediverse for me so far; Reddit seemed great at first, when all of its content and communities were new to me, and as it gradually got more familiar and filtered and fine-tuned through my own activity, I noticed that I’d been just scrolling the thing mindlessly, aimlessly, hoping to experience something good, have a nice laugh, a nice read, just anything - ultimately wasting dozens of minutes, sometimes hours, with nothing but a sad sigh as a result.

Browsing Lemmy is a genuinely fun activity for a relatively short amount of time a couple of times a day max, always having a good time thanks to its quality and always having nice conversations because it’s the culture so far, and never scrolling through endless equally poorly-thought-out posts or comments because even if there are any, they’re few and far between.

I think I say the same things whenever I get to praise the fediverse in general and Lemmy in particular, but I just can’t help myself.