Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.

If you like chicken, go to the corner of 53rd and 6th and find the halal cart with the longest line. Ask for the chicken and rice. Go around back and squirt half a gallon of white sauce and maybe a little red on it. Cover it up, walk about half an hour to work up an appetite, find somewhere comfortable to sit, and thank me later.

They have a chain now but nothing beats the OG cart. Even the pizza. Rose’s Pizza in Penn Station has my vote. May not be the best but it’s good! First pizza I had in NYC and while others were good, I haven’t found one I liked much more.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

I’m sure some are, but I stand by my assertion that I’ve met flat-earthers who were simply sceptical and pushing that particular point of view.

This was also when they were new. I’m not sure if those people represent the whole or if I just met an outlier (and online, at that, where anyone can say/claim anything). I certainly don’t mean to speak about all of them.

Insofar as humidity exists everywhere… I suppose it is.

Speaking as somebody who’s lived where humidity is stupidly annoying… no, it’s not. And those of us who have experienced real humidity love it for that reason. We love getting out of really bad humidity.

I mean, I suppose it could get humid. I’ve only visited. I also suppose any coastal area could get humid, due to proximity to the ocean. But the South ain’t playing when it comes to humidity, and that’s what I meant.

Yep. The kids born in the late 80s/early 90s were my little buddies, kids, who kids my age, would look after. Just like the kids born in the late 60s/early 70s would look after us. But now, I work with people that age, and we’re all just old. Like you’re still young in your 20s, you hit 30 it starts to be over for you as far as doing young people stuff. I have friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and I identify with all of them age-wise. 60-65 and up I respect but I think of them as “older and wiser.” Younger people (20s) seem like they’re too young to relate to. We’re cool, but they’re a generation apart.

As far as generations go, I’m technically GenX, but I identify with most of GenX and older Millennials. I feel like we had a lot of the same experiences. I don’t really buy into generational divides anyway. They’re fine if you’re in the middle. When you get closer to the edge and start mashing the names together, I feel like you’re admitting the groups are not that distinct after all.

I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

A little, but none of us are young anymore. ‘79 here. Love being able to claim the 70s though I don’t remember them.

I like Quentin Tarantino but mostly in theory. He makes classic Hollywood type movies because that is what he loves. I don’t often agree with him though. Like others, I think Pulp Fiction is his best work. It’s the most fun and that’s important to me. It also stars people I like, and that shouldn’t matter, but it does.

Never lived there but I’ve visited CT. Went to a movie with my wife. The first Narnia film, so it was like 3 hours long? It was nice when we went in. It was nice when we left. However, during the film there was a blizzard, seemed like it dropped snow a foot deep! That being said, the city had cleared all the roads. They know how to deal with the snow. Of course when you get to side streets it’s a bit dicey, but the main roads? Like to our hotel? Clear as you like. The roads are twisty and windy up there, and people drive crazy — well, they drive appropriate to the state of the roads, to be fair — and I never felt unsafe despite being unaccustomed to driving in snow.

Beautiful area. Summers get hot, winters get cold. You gotta plan for each. But it’s nice and not too humid.

Yeah, I don’t know why this is a debate. LGBTQ+ ally my whole life, though I’m cis/straight myself.

I almost get it. Like the fear that you hook up with a girl and she has boy parts. It’s not really reasonable but it’s a common male fear, I guess. Like she’s gonna be so convincingly female, so perfectly female presenting but she hasn’t had the bottom surgery. I think that’s kind of a fantasy, because pass as the sex a trans person feels isn’t as easy as cisgendered people think it is. I have trans (MTF) friends, and they do not pass well. Oh, I fully accept that they are women; what I don’t do is assume I’m entitled to every female body, or for the female bodies I have access to, to fit into my potentially narrow view (it’s not narrow, but if it were) of what makes a woman attractive. At the end of the day, she’s a person and her body is what it is, take her — as a complete person — or don’t, but don’t waste her time and definitely don’t think you can shame her for it. And it absolutely don’t mean she’s any less a woman. That, I do feel strongly about.

Also, I’ve known a couple tomboys, girls I grew up around who weren’t conventionally pretty, who liked to play and fight with the boys (and they’d kick your ass, too), and the older adults said “oh yeah that’s a baby butch right there” and later, when trans people became more visible to us (I’d say late 90s early 00s), the assumption that she’s gonna transition. Going on like 30 years later, they’re still girls and they’re still straight (and the one I’m thinking of, definitely wears the pants in the relationship, her guys tend to be kinda meek) but that doesn’t mean she’s gay or trans. Oh, plenty of LGBTQ+ in the family, but you can’t say because a girl doesn’t like pink and doesn’t like dresses that she’s lesbian or trans. It doesn’t work that way. But as her peer, as her playmate, and often as one whose ass she’d kick, I didn’t care. I love her for the person she is, not for the box society puts her in, or checks for her. And if she did bring home a girlfriend, or if she did tell me she never felt like a girl and was going to transition… my sister (not really but like a sister to me) would be my brother or whatever and that would be okay with me, whatever the case, and I’d have their back regardless.

Yeah but look at flat-earthers, how do you justify that?

I remember when the flat-earther movement was new, there were some people in it who claimed to be smart. They said they don’t really believe it, they just like to be sceptical… and contrarian. Basically they like to argue, for the sake of making people question what they’ve been taught and what they don’t know from their own personal observations. Like “are you really any better than us because you trust people who are more trustworthy?” I can almost see the point. But yes, that’s kind of how it works… I don’t need to be smart about some broad or niche category if people certified and well read on that thing who are accredited by reputable institutions tell me what it is and around the world, they agree, in different languages, it’s not a conspiracy. But I guess some healthy scepticism is good.

Now, these alt-right guys? Yeah, I don’t get it. They aren’t fulfilling promises on anything but making things harder for minorities. They are doing what they said there. You knew he was going to go after brown-skinned people and the gays, so no surprise there. Tearing down institutions, this hyper militant shit, yeah maybe he didn’t campaign on that but I feel like, if you didn’t go out and vote against him last November, you kinda did cosign on all this.

Wouldn’t “GPT it” be easier/more likely to say?

I generally don’t use these, but Copilot (in Windows) uses one of them (I’m not sure which) and I’ve thrown a few questions at it when I’m bored. Nothing that matters. We have Windows 11 machines at work. I find AI amusing but I don’t take it seriously, and I don’t use it at home or on my mobile. It’s really not for me.

I don’t like Grok but they have a good name. I mean I don’t “like” any of them, but I like that one less because of its… the stuff it’s said. Mostly because of who’s been training it. But “Grok it” sounds better than Chat/GPT it and sounds almost as good as “Google it.”

I’d have to ask how old this system is. Ours was black, made by Kenwood, and had a wooden cabinet. Tinted glass door. Tape player was a dual front loader. That looks like a CD cartridge loader. We had that too. Our cartridges held six discs and they swiveled out.

Wasn’t mine, it was my mother’s, and she still has it. It still works. The doors on the tape deck have snapped off (we were rough with them) but you can still snap tapes into it and they play.

I remember when my mother got it. She’d just gotten divorced, had a bit of money, walked into a Circuit City (this woulda been like 1989?) and asked for the best stereo they had. And I think either she or I asked about Sony, because I remember the guy saying Sony was for people who want people to think they have an expensive stereo. Kenwood was for people who wanted a good stereo. I don’t know how true it was. Maybe he just wanted to make a commission. I think she paid a couple grand for it. I don’t recall. I didn’t pay for it. I bought my Super NES from that same Circuit City though, and I paid for that out of my allowance. $150. I didn’t bring the tax though. My mother did cover the tax. But anyway.

But while it wasn’t mine, I was the one who put it together, because back then you didn’t have Geek Squad (which is Best Buy, but you get the idea). I think they might have had “professional home installation” but that has never been cheap or affordable. Plus, my mother’s oldest son (me) was a computer guy. She figured, if he could put together a computer (that is, connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to a computer and turn it on — I wouldn’t start building them for another 15 years — I could assemble a stereo. Which just meant stacking them on the shelves, and connecting them via the wires in the back. Two wires — one red, one white — connected to each component and plugged into the… switcher? Whatever it was called. Pretty easy. Did it again when we moved. And then again when it came from the garage, which was like a family room, to the living room when we turned the garage into a granny unit for family who would move in. And then, when I did that, I was able to connect the TV to it, which greatly improved our sound.

Oh yeah, OP doesn’t show the speakers. Did that Sony kit include them? I’m sure it must have. My mother’s Kenwood came with speakers as tall as the cabinets! Two of them. The speakers only lasted maybe 20, 30 years though? My brother, then grown, found her better, more modern speakers to hook up to it.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.

Facts

Thanks! I’m new to this so still finding my way. I appreciate the clarification.

Maybe it’s the original? I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter. The Fediverse means all these Lemmy instances are networked, meaning if one kicks you off it you decide you don’t like it, you can join another, as opposed to Reddit, where if you say something one group doesn’t like, they can kick you off the whole platform.

Disco Elysium is the kind of game I’d love to sit down with the developers/producers and try to play it, and ask them questions about it.

I own it on Steam, but I can’t remember if I bought it because it was on Mac, or if I bought it before I switched. Either way, I’ve tried to start it a few times and I just don’t get anywhere. It’s the kind of game I should like, but I don’t have the patience to learn it.

Some people say you can use a de-Googled Chromium browser to enjoy the fruits of Chrome without supporting Google’s ad business. I say just use Firefox.

By the same token, when some people say to buy an Android phone and deal with CFW, I say just get an iPhone.

I mean either way, Google gets your money and you contribute to Google’s market share by buying one. Not using Google Play Services as an individual does not hurt them nearly as much as their efforts to keep you from doing so implies it does.

Of course, switching phones can be costly, but if you’re in the market for a new one, I would say if you’re going to pay roughly the same price, let it be the more private one, albeit the one that is further from open source. I mean it runs iOS, which is a stripped down version of macOS, which is UNIX certified, but you can’t run a few apps that Apple doesn’t approve of. Fortnite is back and emulators are back though, so a lot of bases are covered.

That said… the keyboard sucks. Sometimes if I’m gonna be typing (e.g. using Lemmy), I’ll actually turn on my old Galaxy S10, just to use Gboard (which is on iOS but sucks there). I like my 16PM for a lot of things, but typing isn’t one of them.

So yes. You can stop rewarding Google’s bad behavior by not buying their phones. Draw a hard line between your personal data and their servers. But in doing so, consider getting in bed with a different monster rather than “the devil you know.” It’s not an easy decision. And, as a guy who’s been mainly on iPhone for almost 10 years… I kinda want a Pixel. Maybe not the newest one, but I mean, I’m using a 6-year-old Galaxy phone and it’s fine. I like both platforms. Both have their strengths. But I personally trust Apple more than Google. To each their own though.