• 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • If you go that route, and assuming you’re in the US, I’d recommend looking for a government civilian job rather than a contractor position. The pay will be slightly lower, but you’ll have pretty steady pay increases year-to-year, the benefits will almost certainly be better, and you’ll have better job security.

    The major downside will be that you’ll likely wind up working for/with a bunch of people who are just trying to keep their heads down and coast until retirement. A major upside will be that you’ll almost certainly be able to retire comfortably.


  • I would say the potential for misuse, while definitely present, is outweighed by the potential benefits.

    A creep watching you from their basement is less likely to act on their dangerous impulses.

    An overcrowded bar, poses a lot of risks in itself and the ability to determine how crowded the bar is without having to be physically present can mitigate your exposure to those risks.

    In a crowded bar you have a higher risk of being drugged or assaulted because security and staff will likely be distracted or simply unable to notice and intervene. Also, in the event of an emergency that requires you to be able exit quickly, such as a fire or earthquake not only will it be much more difficult to leave it’s also more likely that people will panic and exasperate the problem.

    Is a camera with a public live feed the best way to achieve that? No, probably not. But it’s simple, cheap, and gets the job done.

    A bar is also a public venue. In a public place you have absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy. So, while in most circumstances it’s unreasonable to expect that you’re being recorded, it’s equally unreasonable to expect that you’re not.



  • Personally, I don’t like the idea of any recommendation or advertising algorithm using personal information of any kind. Though I can understand why location would be needed for advertising: in order to ensure ads for regional services are not shown outside of that region.

    The kinds of data that I think should be used:
    -Recommendations:
    -Like history
    -Watch (or view) history - specifically (and only) if I click on a post or watch more than some reasonable percentage of a video that would indicate I watched the entirety of the video.

    -Advertisements:
    -Location (based solely on IP)
    -The content currently being viewed, based on a general categorization of the content. If I’m watching a video about technology I don’t need to be seeing ads for financial services.





  • The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I’m sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on “accidentally” after some updates.

    They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it’s impossible to actually do that in practice.

    That’s just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don’t give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn’t even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

    They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

    Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.




  • Honestly, if you don’t have the time to tinker and learn the system you’d probably have a pretty bad time with Linux.

    Pretty much regardless of distro or DE, you are going to find games that either outright will fail to run or will require some tinkering and additional troubleshooting on your part to get them to run. Nvidia GPU support, while improving, is still pretty lackluster. Especially if you want things like raytracing or DLSS.

    Also, it’ll be an entirely new OS, with its own learning curve just to figure out how to do basic things.

    If you only have two hours a week to game and you want to be able to just jump into a game, know that it’s going to work, and not worry about it, I wouldn’t even say stick with Windows. I’d say stick with game consoles. All of the current gen consoles have some pretty good accessibility features for people who visually impaired.

    All of that said, if you still wanted to try out a Linux distro, since your main focus is gaming, I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s generally pretty stable, is very easy to rollback if an update breaks something, and has a version that is preconfigured for nvidia gpus. In its installer you can choose your DE, I’d say go with KDE, since it has all of the accessibility features you listed, you’d just need to enable them in settings.


  • My experience has been that 1440p is noticeable jump in quality on desktop monitors but less so laptops. On desktop 4K is virtually unnoticeable, a high refresh rate, HDR, and OLED are far more noticeable.

    For TV, I’ve found that it depends more on distance from the screen and resolution and bit rate of the media. I sit about 8’ from a 65” 4K tv and the difference between Blu-ray quality at 1080p and 4K is night and day.




  • There is a local Administrator account in an AD environment (just like on all Windows systems), but that may be disabled.

    As for the domain users, you have a locally created profile and because it caches your credentials you can sign in offline, but your account isn’t local in the sense that you could sign in offline (or without access to the domain) indefinitely. For on-prem AD, at least with 2012R2, 2012, and 2008R2 (the last versions I worked with, so can’t speak for newer) by default the length that clients held onto that cache was 30 days, but it was configurable in Group Policy. If your device was away from the domain for longer than that you would no longer be able to sign in.

    Depending on how your domain is configured you might even have your profile redirected to a network share somewhere, making the account even less local.

    Microsoft accounts on personal devices function in basically the same way. If they’re offline for too long you stop being able to logon, but you won’t lose data in your user folder (unless you’ve setup profile redirection to One Drive or an SMB share on a NAS).

    In neither of those scenarios would I say your account is local, because a network connection is required for initial sign in and then periodically afterwards to be able to use the device with your account.