TheFogan
@TheFogan@programming.dev
- Comment on Steam for Chromebooks is getting axed in 2026 instead of exiting its 4-year beta 9 hours ago:
Honestly I think that’s the constant problem of every “low cost computer” setup that comes out.
Like say netbooks, it’s so commonly assumed the ipad killed the netbook… as a former netbook owner I disagree. I bought an acer aspire 1 when they were on sale for like $100, it was a really low powered, basic windows system. If I recall it was running win XP in the vista era. For me it was a good choice, a nice note taking, word document writing and basic web browsing computer with a decent battery life, and tiny enough to slip in a bag with little work.
I worked at staples at the time, and if I recall they were around $200 regular price, but frequently on sale for 100-150, and when they went on sale they sold like hotcakes. They had other netbooks in the 300-500 price range… I don’t think I ever saw one sell, and to this day I don’t get the appeal. You’d need more hardware if you were say, editing graphics… or playing games, or doing something more complex, but why would you do those things on a 10" screen. Same price you could buy a real laptop, bit bigger, but more importantly a comfortable screen size and a full sized keyboard. So in short, the netbooks went from a cheap option that can do the the main fundimentals of a PC slightly worse, for 1/3rd the price.
around the same time the ipad came out… for $500, the netbooks shifted their focus, more and more models in the $300-$700 price range. Nebooks shifted to being what I would effectively describe as… small little boxes, that do most of what a laptop does, much worse with a tiny screen… for the same price, maybe a bit more when comparing spec for spec.
Honestly i see the same with chromebooks. So you’ve got chromeos, which has less general computer support than regular linux. Can’t run MS office, slightly lesser game support. No special form factor or advantage for games like say the steam deck etc… No matter how you slice it you’ve got a computer, designed to do… say 70% of what you can on a regular laptop… for the price of… a regular laptop.
- Comment on Steam for Chromebooks is getting axed in 2026 instead of exiting its 4-year beta 12 hours ago:
While I hate googles tendency to kill everything I have to ask, did google really promise chromebooks as a gaming system? I always understood them as dirt cheap computers made to handle the basics of word processing and average web based applications. Ideal only to be school or work computers
- Comment on My earphones' cable has been oozing sticky goo for over a yer now 2 days ago:
You clearly left out the main thing anyone would need to troubleshoot this issue… what kind of music are you listening to. Obviously low quality music will wreck headphones no matter how good they are.
- Comment on Bird 1 week ago:
I mean, you gotta admit the differences is something that varies, especially just on size and build. If I saw a guy offering fancy feast to a tiger, I’d probably also question it.
Also would say, this could be the best scene ever in a Jurrasic Park movie. Trex is charging in… a kid just drops birdseed on the ground, T-Rex stops and begins eating… Palientologist asks kid “how the heck did you know that would work”, Kid “Bird!”.
- Comment on Why democrats under Biden administration didn't release Epstein files? 3 weeks ago:
I’m my country, it works be the sole decision of the AG
It works like that… but the problem is effectively we give the president the power to fire and replace the AG. So… in short, the AG is hand picked by the president and then approved by congress.
With a crazy president like this that effectively has 100% of his party members in congress intimidated to back every one of his picks, the AG is basically his hand picked employee.
- Comment on the living dead 3 weeks ago:
Could you imagine the confusion if you are used to it though… you’ve considered this scent to mean dead your whole life. would be kind of like as a human noticing your heart isn’t beating, your skin is pale… realizing you are in a coffin and everyone’s performing a service… hmm… guess I am dead. course I guess that’s kind of the difference is humans aren’t so accepting of things. we could be unable to move, realize we are looking from the perspective of our head, which is on the ground 2’ away from the rest of our body and our first thought would be, "Hey can you hear me? Hello!!.
- Comment on just wanting to see what happens 4 weeks ago:
currious of the chicken/egg scenerio when it comes to candidates on the ballot though. IE is there only one candidate in the primaries because no one is going to vote anyway, or is no one going to the primaries because only one person is on the ballot.
- Comment on Why is so hard for musicians to have a good living and be famous? 4 weeks ago:
Simple concept of nationalization/globalization. Honestly I would say records or whatever the first tool of pre-recorded music distribution came out that the game changed. IE if we want music somewhere… 99% of the time, hiring live musicians is a pretty silly excess, and well if you are using pre-recorded music, your local band needs to go toe to toe against big record labels… which have highly talented artists, the best marketing and production resources in the world, data driven approaches to attempt to pick the most likely to appeal to the broadest group of people possible etc…
When it does come to live music… Generally speaking the people that do want it, are relatively low budget. If say you are running a bar, how much extra money would you anticipate live music from a relatively unknown band would bring you in a night. Most likely not much if any. On top of that a lot of people enjoy doing music, and there’s just more musicians with pretty good talent, but lack of demand in places for them to go.
- Comment on This is the dumbest idea ever 4 weeks ago:
I mean the general logic of it isn’t totally off the wall, any more so than say why we’re annoyed that ID laws make it harder to vote.
But I could still 100% say, obviously if you need/want a drivers license, it’s fair to say you have reliable transportation. At 79 you are almost certainly either not working, or so well established wherever you are that you aren’t at risk of getting fired for needing to schedule a 3 hour trip to the DMV.
- Comment on Found a 2009 YouTube video about a green, healthy looking fir tree growing inside a man's lung. CNN video shows a surgeon and the patient being interviewed.. was it a hoax? 5 weeks ago:
It sounds like the initial story was slated to air on april 1st. Origions of the story are hard to trace, and it sounds like the source itself is known for running with hoaxes. So maybe they were actors, maybe just a doctor looking for attention. Biggest thing is a lack of any real details or credibility to work with. Kind of how most hoaxes go. they leave out key details so that you can’t fact check them.
- Comment on Found a 2009 YouTube video about a green, healthy looking fir tree growing inside a man's lung. CNN video shows a surgeon and the patient being interviewed.. was it a hoax? 5 weeks ago:
journal.chestnet.org/article/…/fulltext , looks pretty hoaxy
- Comment on Wake up babe new shape just dropped 5 weeks ago:
Going off webster… it looks like this really is only stretching the lines to fit one adjective
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
So in short the arguement is… over time it should be like corporations in America, we just watch as the biggest eat the smaller ones until we’ve just got one giant nation? Isn’t that basically the plot of 1984… (basically the world is down to 3 super nations… with effectively the same government. In perpetual war with eachother just to make sure resources don’t pile up to the point where everyone can survive comfortably.
Because I mean that’s basically it, having diverse nations is a good thing. Allows us to actually see differences in laws, learn from different governments, good ideas can be copied, bad ideas can be avoided. Any big nation can trample all the smaller ones. It’s a really bad idea to let them.
- Comment on Why does everyone hate Income tax ? 5 weeks ago:
Because big corporations tell us what we like and don’t like. People who can toss 90% of their income into stocks/investments etc… that can be used to make more money, would rather have as much as possible. Hence they preffer the costs to go onto when you are purchasing things. While poorer people obviously are spending most of their money on things.
In short it’s a way to keep taxes lower for people making a good amount of money, Especially makes things better for those who can invest and multiply their money.
- Comment on Why do so many homes in rural areas have a front yard full of junk? 5 weeks ago:
Based on my limited knowledge, but knowing a few people with yards like that. One is certainly something you are right about.
But also, least to my knowledge in this area, junk yards, scrap yards etc… are a pretty good distance away. So selling/getting rid of large, heavy junk costs more than the scrap is worth. Hence old washing machines etc… In rural areas a lot of people are scraping by on food stamps, barely keeping the power on etc… would have lost the house years ago if it weren’t paid off by the previous generation.
Obviously no HOA’s, no one worried about how the houses look, and it’s common enough that no one is really embarassed by it.
- Comment on Why was file search much faster in Windows XP than in subsequent versions? 1 month ago:
8 I believe was the last in their “tick tock” strategy…
IE “ticks” were the ones where they threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, basically putting users as paying beta testers.
“Tocks” were when they’d basically look at the piles of complaints from their ticks, try and fix as many as they could, and impliment some of the small features people wanted.
Ticks: Win 95, Win ME + 2000, Windows 8.
Tocks: Win 3.1, Win 98, Win XP, Windows 7, "sorta windows 10, hard to really say that model was made to be the start of more or less a auto upgrading by default as the new normal)
- Comment on Chickenslap 1 month ago:
to my knowledge these calculations pretty much have to be assuming a vacuum. IE there’s no mention of heat loss between slaps. which would be inevitable as 23k instant slaps, would take considerable time.
- Comment on Jigsaw Trolley Problem 1 month ago:
That’s like the old joke of the CIA loyalty test.
A CIA recruit reached the final stages, at the last step he found his mother tied to a chair and gagged. His prospective boss hands him a gun and says "To prove you are ready for this job and will follow any orders, You’ll need to kill your mother, I’ll be outside.
10 seconds after leaving the recruiter hears the bang of a gun… followed by other bangs, clangs of metal.
Prospective recruit walks out the door… “The god damn gun you gave me had blanks in it, so I had to beat her to death with the chair”
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I would say there’s room for discussion, but one of the biggest things I’d note the largest one is, generally race itself isn’t a concept that fits. Biologically the difference between white and black people is smaller than the difference between white and other white people.
Now I would note the biggest things of all forms is, just taking out the unnecessary divisions in general. Good news is for the most part the problems that “identifying as a different race”, are inherently knocked out with general societal progress. IE if you are a white person that identifies as black, you don’t need to worry about getting into the black schools, or use the black bathrooms, because we already knocked out that problem.
Honestly that would be a nice step for society if we could hit that point in gender. Bathrooms and locker rooms are already just a general problem when we note genders and orientations aren’t the same. IE why do we segregate bathrooms? Because we are worried that someone might see genitals of an opposite gender? Why isn’t that equally as much an issue, or not real issue when we account for the existence of homosexuals? IMO the real solution is simply either the world needs to get less prudish and sensitive to the existance of non sexual nudity. Or just set things up to not mandate shared nudity. (IE allow actual privacy for showers and bathrooms.
Now one thing I do agree with on is, the concept of “cultural appropriation” etc… IE I do think anyone of any race shouldn’t face criticism for wearing clothing etc… of other cultures, provided they are doing so respectfully (IE not combining doing so and intentionally making a characature of stereotypes of the culture they are imitating.
My girlfriend wouldn’t even comprehend the concept of “identifying as black”, but 80% of her friends are black. She enjoys going to a nail salon that is almost all black women working, and loves talking to them. So I suppose the big thing I’m lacking is an understanding of where someone who identifies as trans-racial, actually see’s as their roadblocks. Because generally speaking, there’s not a logical reason to “identify” as a race. For the mot part just general racial equality groups have done well at removing restrictions on places you can and can’t go based on race. There’s no racial pronouns so there’s not a conversational issue where you would be constantly undermining in normal conversation.
So the big question is, what it that as a society a trans-racial person wants? What rights do they need to be accepted, because for the most part, just racial equality is already fighting for acceptance in a way that renders most of it moot.
- Comment on Microsoft is is bed with Google now, in a worse, more OS-integrated way than Mozilla was. This timeline sucks. 1 month ago:
I’m somewhat confused on the phrasing of this headline. “more OS integrated than Mozilla was?”. Is that meant to be more OS integrated than IE was? To my knowledge there’s some grey areas around mozilla’s actions recently, but I’ve never heard of them integrating into the OS.
But yeah I gotta agree on the core… If you don’t want want big tech spying on you… getting away from windows is necessary.
- Comment on Make dinosaurs weirder 1 month ago:
Honestly I think we need to do more blame to the general popular media. AKA while the actual real science has moved so much further forward. Most people will complain and hate it if their dinosaur renditions don’t match what has been set in stone in their minds by Jurrasic Park. Hence feathers are in the minority of renditions of dinosaurs for the mainstream public.
The scientific renditions are pretty accurate. The current movies, books, toys, cartoons, etc… on the other hand are all stuck on a modified for creative and practical reproduction variant of the version that science had in the 80s.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I’d say it partly depends on where you live… or where you plan to live. Bottom line is in the US anywhere that isn’t a big city. Being able to drive is basically going to be a pre-requisite to having a job.
- Comment on Why do low framerates *feel* so much worse on modern video games? 2 months ago:
Yeah but even now you can go back and play Majora’s mask, and it not feel bad.
But as mentioned the real thing is consistancy, as well as the scale of action, pace of the game etc… Zelda games weren’t sharp pinpoint control games like say a modern FPS. Gameplay was fairly slow. and yeah second factor is simply games that were 20FPS, were made to be a 100% consistant 20 FPS. A game locked in at 20, will feel way smoother than one that alternates between 60 and 45
- Comment on “Yay! We made our project objectively worse!” 2 months ago:
I mean at best though, it’s admitting they had something wasteful and useless for the last several decades and only just now figured that out.
- Comment on Why is Jordan Peterson both a Christian and not a Christian? 2 months ago:
What’s dumber is the video origionally was called 1 christian vs 20 atheists, and you see in the video at least one atheist brought up the video title that they all knew before they started. (In other words, Jordan Peterson specifically volunteered to play the christian in a video that when he agreed to it was called, 1 christian vs 20 atheists) Then later demanded they rename the video.
But further its simple, JP preffers to attack people’s specific stances, from a nebulous position where he never has to give his own stance because he can’t defend his own stance.
- Comment on How do you gently tell someone you only want to keep seeing them if it's on a dating level? 2 months ago:
Honestly it sounds like the opposite. I’ve been there before… having feelings for someone but not being able to act on them. Feeling complete jealousy when she begins dating someone else, it can fucking hurt big time. People can say it’s selfish or whatever, but honestly the feeling can tear the hell out of someone, and it’s better for both parties to cut ties.
- Comment on Can a person use AI or whatever and get rid of their name and history off the net? And can it create a new ident with a bunch of history pictures and so forth? 2 months ago:
Not really, it can try but honestly at the end of the day most things are roughly equivelant to tracking down the sites, and hoping they actually remove things when asked. Some services try this, and do an OK job of it usually, but there will always be bad actors and archives of everything you have.
Creating bogus history etc… very plausible, but also most likely will still be tracable to the idea that none of it was there before a certain date.
- Comment on Into the meat grinder! 2 months ago:
I think the star trek transporter debate is more apt.
- Comment on Into the meat grinder! 2 months ago:
No actually works on more. If you grind a human into a seive into salt water, pour the salt water into a busy walkway.
After forensics is done in there… the cleanup crew also organizes it into sponges, Mops… and all kinds of tools.
- Comment on I mean... I don't see the problem? 2 months ago:
Kind of like Lou Gehrig… lucky SOB did nothing, yet will be forever immortalized.