I can hear the responses already…

• “Empathy ain’t shit in a gunfight.”
• “Mexican food won’t help with that, dumbass.”
• “Fucking commie”

Because they don’t care about evidence or facts unless it fits into their narrative.

You can point to posts advocating for violence or censorship coming from their ilk and they’ll just attribute it back to the other side because “we wouldn’t need to if they didn’t do it to us first.” It’s just the abuser justification, “look at what you made me do”.

Or they will just outright deny reality, dismissing opposing evidence as conspiracies, exaggerated, or misunderstood. Did Elon really do a Nazi salute? “No, no. He was just sending his heart out to Americans!”

And when there’s overwhelming evidence that they can’t do mental gymnastics around? They shut down the conversation. They stop talking about it. They ignore it. They bury it. Out of sight, out of mind.

When someone is indoctrinated into that way of thinking and makes their politics a part of their personality, you are not going to beat them at their own game. Their sense of identity is tied to their beliefs and their ego will not let them accept anything that goes against those beliefs. They need to be deprogrammed.

"Art isn’t about artistic expression. Billions of people make paintings and most of them go unseen. Museums, on the other hand… They don’t make paintings, they make experiences. For a nominal entry fee, consumers have access to an evolving and ever-changing catalog of content.

This is the future we envision here at Remedy. High quality games that build upon themselves, creating an experience that grows with the player. For that reason, we’re announcing that the Alan Wake series will no longer be individual games, but instead a live-service experience with episodic content."

• also that guy probably

With a bootloader signed using Microsoft keys, or a bootloader that needs a MOK to be set up to install third-party keys in the Secure Boot database?

I did the latter and it was a pretty annoying process that would scare away beginners—hence me saying a “workaround” was possible. I’m not using a common distro like Fedora or Ubuntu, though. Is setting it up less painful on those?

If I want to maintain my Windows computer, do I need a new computer?

You don’t need a new computer, but Microsoft’s influence in the industry made it really inconvenient to run any other operating system alongside Windows on the same PC.

When you start, you need to change some BIOS settings to be compatible with both Windows and Linux. More annoyingly, every time you switch between them you’ll have to change tbe Secure Boot option. Turn it off before booting into Linux and turn it back on before booting into Windows. There are workarounds to that, but they’re not beginner friendly.

You also can’t install both Windows and Linux on the same drive. Windows likes to “repair” itself from time to time, which ends up breaking the Linux boot loader.

If I was already looking for a laptop, do I just buy the cheapest one and reformat? Does Distro utilize Touch Screen?

ThinkPads have a good track record with Linux support.

Hardware with niche features (like multiple screens on a laptop) will be less likely to have drivers for those features on Linux.

Touch screens don’t have a standardized way of connecting to a computer, so support will vary and you’ll need to Google it to find out if some laptop model is supported. If it is, pick any distro that uses KDE Plasma or GNOME for its desktop environment and you’ll be fine. If you’re coming from Windows, I would recommend Plasma over GNOME.

Literally create all the service problems by normalizing launcher DRM

I hate DRM as much as the next person, but if Steam didn’t exist and digital downloads still became a thing, there would still be launcher DRM. Thanks to corporate greed, DRM is an inevitability in the industry.

Games distributed on DVD were packed with DRM fuckery, needing to be inside the computer to launch and using kernel-level drivers to enforce it. Before DVDs, you had games on floppy disks. Those came with physical codewheels that the player had to use to decode a password before it would start the game.

It’s poor journalism, yes. Especially if it’s a lack of disclosure rather than an explicit refusal for disclosure, as investigation takes time.

However, my opinion is that for a corporation, an explicit refusal to provide data could be valid data when morally judging them. They are entitled to the same legal “innocent until proven otherwise” standard as individuals, yeah. But a non-person entity doesn’t need the same privacy rights that a person does. They only need whatever privacy is required to maintain confidentiality (e.g. trade secrets, business strategy, insider information, etc.).

If they had non-incriminating and non-confidential evidence proving their innocence, surely they would prefer to release it to minimize reputational damages. So, if they choose not to, it either means that the evidence needs to be confidential, or that it actually is incriminating. Which of those it is, who knows. It’s still not a good look, though.

even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake

IIRC, even the HL2 engine was just an improvement on the HL1 engine with a commercial physics engine bolted on top.

Much like Google used to, Valve doesn’t really do anything new. They take existing ideas and remove the rough edges to provide a more polished experience than what is already available.

To their credit, that’s exactly why they succeeded with most of their ventures. Gabe Newell understands consumers well enough to know that most people don’t care about anything other than user experience. Or, as he put it, “piracy is a service problem”.

A general rule of thumb: if a corporation is not disclosing data to substantiate its claim of innocence, it’s likely because the data proves the exact opposite.

That’s a lot of whataboutism and it doesn’t really answer my question.

The CPC itself isn’t Marxist. China, as a whole, is Marxist-Lenninist pending the final transitional stage where the new, benevolent ruling class dissolves itself and hands power back to the proletariat. It’s been that way for decades.

And a state-owned enterprise isn’t inherently communist; it’s whatever the state is. If it’s controlled by the state, and the state isn’t classless, there needs to be full transparency in how the enterprise is operated. If the public has no say in its operations, a SOE is just a nationalized corporation executing on the whims of a ruling class—and that’s closer to capitalist-socialist ideology than communist ideology.

Also they’ve been separated out of CDPR recently

Someone corrected me on this recently so I’m paying it forward.

CD Projekt owned GOG, not CDPR. CDPR is a separate company under CD Projekt and isn’t related to GOG other than both previously having the same owner.

How much say does the proletariat have in how those state owned enterprises are managed or operated, or into what their profits are put towards?

For localization, would -kun work? It wouldn’t be a correct translation, but the idea of the average citizen being conditioned into having that closeness and familiarity with Big Brother might make for an interesting take.

Pretty easily, even without introducing a new scan code. If the keyboard uses USB, Windows could have just matched against the vendor and product IDs. Or they could have set something in the USB descriptor.

The only reasons I can think of for doing it this way are either out of laziness because it’s easier to make a global hotkey than change a driver, or to intentionally make the key useless as a modifier key.

If people in government were more tech literate and willing to stand by their morals by whistleblowing, they would create a torrent of the encrypted evidence and set up a dead man’s switch for the key.

Funny how it’s only a problem when using the Snap distribution.

Is it? Or is it just a way to record which employees need mandatory cybersecurity “training” that tells them to use a 28 character password with at least one number, one upper case letter, one special character, no strings of 3 or more repeated characters, no strings of 3 or more incremental letters or numbers, and no strings of more than 5 of the same character class?

He has one hell of a smoker’s lung.

Windows’ UX is shit.

Windows 11 still has its settings splattered across multiple applications. The Settings application has all the shiny new gimmicks they added, yet still lacks any way to change some basic settings. If you need to reset a local user’s password, you’re stuck going back into the now-gutted Control Panel to do it. And if you want to change something that Microsoft feels the average user shouldn’t be allowed to know exists, you’re using the group policy editor to do it.

Or, how about the way that there’s at least two applications installed by default that do the same or very similar things? Windows Media Player or Videos? Paint or Paint 3D? Cmd.exe or Windows Terminal?

How about the design language inconsistency? The Run dialog was left looking like a Windows 7 dialog and didn’t get a dark mode until the mid 2020s. The Event Viewer and Windows Firewall UIs are still something right out of Windows XP, but with Vista-smeared paint applied on top.

Or, if that’s not bad UX, then how about the ads in the start menu? Or how OneDrive tries to trick you into uploading your desktop to the cloud? Or, maybe all the telemetry services running in the background and slowing shit down?

If you’re using a distro with a worse UX than that, then that’s on you. There’s plenty of options that provide a more cohesive UX than Windows

int total Records = 10

The parser is not going to be happy about this one.