I recently had to explain to my boomer mom why a Ring doorbell was a bad idea. She didn’t seem to get that the system is cheap because it’s constantly feeding whatever it sees to both Ring and your local cops.

Glassholes was coined back when Google was working on Google Glass about 10-12y ago and people kept theirs on and recording while in public

Welp, guess it’s time for IR reflective tattoos to defeat facial recognition

Get ready for corporate announcing the layoff of 67% of the workforce

I mean, that’s your path forward if you want a current graphics stack. Linux Mint is a Ubuntu derivative, there’s no supported frankendistro that updates everything on your current mint release to current versions of the kernel, drivers, mesa and all the rest of the libraries you want for up to date software support - you get that with a rolling release distro rather than a snapshot distro frozen 6-24mo ago when they cut your current release version.

That’s not really the case with current Nvidia GPUs (yet anyway) - the Nvidia provided dkms driver is the best option outside very limited use cases

There’s not really an upgrade path from Mint to a rolling release distro like Fedora or Arch. The simplest thing to do is rsync -axHAX your /home directory onto external storage and then install Fedora, Bazzite, Arch or EndeavourOS and copy data back as needed.

+1, I only have a yt music sub because it’s grandfathered in with my yt premium subscription and extra drive storage. YT music recommendations are mildly terrible compared to Spotify, but I’m not throwing $15/mo at Spotify when I only use it a few times a year.

That’s a good start, now keep going

Look at MIT and UC Berkeley’s CS curricula and start tackling things that you haven’t covered. They’re both available freely online and you might still be able to find video recordings of Cal’s lectures somewhere (they recorded every class for students who weren’t present or had difficulty understanding in real time until 2015 or so but were hit with an ADA accessibility lawsuit because they weren’t captioned or something.)

Greetings fellow human!

01001000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101111 00111111

It’s a six year old system. Optimistically you’ll be able to salvage the PSU, case and storage. Whether you should salvage the PSU and case is up to you, prebuilts aren’t known for picking the best of these.

Personally I’d use the machine for something else (or sell it to someone for $300-400) and build what you want. (Edit: I’ve had good results moving the core system components into a USFF or NAS case and repurposing as a home server. That’s a pretty typical end of lifecycle role for an aging gaming desktop.)

Why are we tolerating this criminal behavior by corporations?

Because it’s done in the open and it’s accepted as part of the cost of the device. This is an expected consequence of our adtech surveillance economy where devices are now subsidized because they can harvest data about you, your usage and your behavior to sell on an ongoing basis. We’ve been screaming about these sorts of practices since the late 90s and consumers have just blithered right along with every new and creepy intrusion because they get cheap things and don’t think about the real costs or consequences. And so … Here we are.

I’m just waiting for them to add a sideband channel to some LoRa network so they can exfiltrate data even when their devices are “offline”

Interesting that the one has such large capacitors in it. I imagine that is as last-ditch effort to keep the board powered long enough to finish flushing all of its caches in the event of a power failure.

That’s exactly the point of power loss protection (aka PLP.) As a side effect of not needing to wait for a flush after a write synchronous write workloads are dramatically faster on enterprise drives with PLP.

Edit: To add a bit of detail - you don’t need to wait for a flush after a synchronous write with PLP because the drive firmware can lie and immediately return from a flush call because there’s enough backup power to complete that flush if the power were cut.

Hell even Costco probably has photo paper

How else are they going to maximize wealth extraction?

I don’t use Samsung unless I plan to unlock and root the device. I have 70+ apps disabled on my Samsung tablet and it’s finally usable. Hopefully someone else comes along with a high spec OLED tablet sometime soon so I can stop buying Galaxy Tab S devices.

I for one support the AI centipede and hope it shits into it’s own input until it dies

I’m waiting for someone to knock it over with their car and shoot it, that’s the American way after all