I haven't had any issues with steam on linux, but I don't play a lot of online games these days, especially fortnite. Dad gaming is all about the roguelikes these days where I can play the entire game end to end in the hour of personal time I have left before bed.

I've never linked my PC to a Microsoft account and don't plan to. It's all operating system not a social media account

My copy I lost the key that came with my disc ~15 years ago so it thinks it's a pirated copy. Thanks microsoft. I only have windows installed to play steam games.
 
Luckily Valve has their own branch of Wine, Proton:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
 
And apparently many/most games support running on Proton these days. I'm sorely tempted to just yeet windows once and for all.
 
I will upgrade my computer when I feel like it, thanks. On my "gaming pc" I visit like, 6 websites (gmail, steam, slashdot and a handful of others) and use Steam, security updates are nice but I'm not at enormous risk, and if anything happens to the PC I'll just wipe it and reinstall anyways. This is my only windows PC at this point, there's nothing to back up.

Home assistants to do things like, set a timer, set an alarm, check the weather, turn "smart" lights on/off, adjust "smart" thermostat can be handled by an open source LLM running on a raspberry pi class device. I suspect offline "home assistants" will start hitting shelves soon enough. Weather or news API is the only tricky thing as there's some cost associated with it; the device might come with a 1 or 2 year free subscription to those services.
 
As soon as those devices become available/reliable, I plan on ditching our google home setup.

Yeah, because THE GOVERNMENT BUILT THOSE HOMES.

The Canadian government used to build housing because of COURSE builders want to make a profit, and there's no profit in providing homes for the poor. When the austerity budgets hit in the 90s, the funding to build those homes went away. The responsibility for building homes has been pushed off onto provincial and municipal governments. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunda...

Stop giving the capitalists more money to do this stuff. They never will. They don't want to. If it's profitable for people to be homeless (and it is; our current system requires the constant reminder that you could be homeless to scare you into accepting even the worst jobs) then it doesn't matter if the regulations are relaxed or there's innovation funds. None of those homes go to the poor.

Even when you put conditions on a development--like the developer has to build some low-cost housing as well--they'll build the luxury condos first, then sell the part of the development that was supposed to go to low cost housing and it never gets built.

I half agree with you, and I fully agree with you for all of the part where you're saying that Musk is just a billionaire that's playing us.

But EVs now will get better. The batteries will get lighter and cheaper and there are places where the grid is shit but everyone has started installing solar and batteries at home because it means more stability. But BE cars and trucks are hugely heavy, destroy the roads, and require an upgrade in DRIVING infrastructure. Turns out a 9000lbs BE Hummer is too heavy to be stopped by conventional guardrails at 100km/hr. Forget about the cost to upgrade the grid, we're already so far behind on keeping the roads in good repair and BEVs are NOT helping.

Honestly, the best solution for the environment will be electric bicycles. I've seen a couple analyses done, and you can make a good argument that the lifetime emissions of an electric bike are LESS than those for a conventional bicycle when you take into account the diet of the rider. Turns out electric motors are so good for that sort of thing that you have to be a very small vegan to have any chance of out-performing the electric bike.

And at that point, the stability of the grid will be even less of a concern. Electric vehicles are the future, I just hope it's mostly bikes.

I hate basically everything about gmail. Other than the reliability, the UI and filters are honestly terrible. I'm forced to use it at work (in the web interface), and good luck getting it to filter multiple exact strings, and it definitely can't filter anything based on X-header information. It's a wonder to me that it can be so bad and still be so ubiquitous, but it's big and free and has momentum and it does have extremely good uptime.

I had their free hosting for many years, and I'm glad I pay someone else to do it now. People are so used to how bad gmail is they don't realize that life can be better. (That said, I don't know what the other free options are like; I presume that they have similar limitations.)

It also restricts the voice of the youth on political issues. Youth can't vote*, but they can express their opinions, and youth are overwhelmingly liberal until at least age 16
 
*In a handful of cities, including, yes, you guessed it, SF, youth citizens can vote at 16 in local elections, and public high schools are polling stations, so most youth in those areas have already been voting for 2 years before they leave public schools

Why not sanction 500, or even 1000 at a time? 15,000? Let's cast a wide net, and then redact as necessary. This is one of those rare cases where "shoot first, ask questions later" is probably a valid solution.

BBC is worlds better than Fox News and all other cable news. Stop complaining.

I read a bunch and I also really struggled with the first book. I would start a new chapter and it would take me a page to realize we'd skipped forward/back in time, and that the characters were somehow related. I'm american born with no asian heritage, and I found all the names really difficult to follow as well. I thought the plot was good but the translation was awful. I did not bother with books 2 or 3

It's a bit more than a couple days. It's not, like, the whole year, but let's not hyperbolize in the other direction and minimize a very real issue. In Canada last year, there were weeks at a time where it was bad for you to go outside. Some jurisdictions were worse than others. I would say that we had anywhere between 4-6 weeks last year during the summer that exercising outside was probably bad for your health (in the Okanagan Valley).

But something that I find interesting living here is that much of the year, our air quality is a 1 (the best), and on moderately bad days where you can smell smoke but not necessarily see any haze, it'll rank as a 3. When I lived in Montreal, it was a 3 all the time. I mean, maybe that's not actually surprising--Montreal is a city of 4 million people (in the Metro area) and I now live in a city of 40k (the whole valley is 400k).

But yeah, the air is gross in cities, it's probably not good for us, and forest fires are making it worse. That's life now. I don't know what's actually to be done about it short of rewinding the clock 100 years. Hopefully battery tech gets lighter so when we finally do switch to EVs, we not only have reduced vehicle emissions, we also aren't pulverizing the tyres as quickly. Then maybe we'll see some city air quality changes.

The people complain bitterly when you try to tax them on anything, too. We have a carbon tax that's more-or-less revenue neutral, and gives back money as a carbon credit, so quite a few people make more than they spend. They don't like that either.

Basically they want the right to do nothing at all, pollute the air, make life miserable for other people, and if you tell them that that should cost more or be illegal, they throw a fit.

Capitalist systems are not inherently unregulated.

One of the costs of doing business is following the law. If your product kills people, it is not allowed to exist. If you can make it so your product no longer kills people, you can keep selling it, even if making it non-lethal is a cost on you. But everyone else is (supposedly) held to that same standard.

Capitalism didn't (and will never) find a solution until it was necessary to find a solution. Something that made it necessary for companies to find a solution was the government deciding that it was necessary to eliminate a dangerous substance. Then the companies that used to mine asbestos or make asbestos into products went and did something else because the cost of business involving asbestos was too high.

Unregulated markets aren't a necessary nor sufficient condition for capitalism.

Oh, sorry, I meant that as a consumer, you can't escape them, not that they're necessary. I 100% believe that we could make do without them if they would just stop using them. But if I want to buy frozen corn, right now, I have no options.