Technology advances, something is cutting edge, then the standard, then outdated.

I donated to st Jude for a while, every month I got mail multiple times a week asking for more money along with my “free gift”. Even talking into account buying supplies in bulk and using every conservative low-ball numbers I estimated I was getting around 60% of my donation back every month. I just gave up and stopped donating, and even sent them a letter telling them why I was ending my donation. I still get mail from them at least once a month and it’s been at least 15 years since I last donated.

They are doing something extremely important, but I don’t want my donation being thrown away like that. Send me a donation envelope once a month, that’s fine even though I was making my donation online, but the almost every other day mailing that was packed with notepads and return address labels? Nope I’m not fund that. On the plus side I haven’t bought return address labels since Obama was in office, and I doubt I’ll have to buy any until Chad who just graduated from DeVry, becomes our 64th president.

Yep, been on Linux for 10 or 12 years now, I honestly can’t remember. Distro hopped at first, then I found Mint and never saw a need to change.

I promote the use of AI since I’ve seen massive benefits since I started using it, also I feel like everyone should learn to use it since I believe it’s here to stay. That being said, I do hope open source models, and the hardware to run them become more accessible and we move to self hosting our LLMs and only offloading certain tasks to a providers API when appropriate.

I think we’re on the same side politically, we just have vastly different approaches. You do what you feel is best, as will I.

Just food for thought, I took two days to reply because I saw a wall of text and found it overwhelming. I suspect that is the reaction of most people. If you feel you absolutely can’t leave anything out, consider at least putting a few points in a bullet point list, if nothing else it breaks up the text and makes it seem a bit less overwhelming.

You say you are used to tailoring to your audience, let me share something that it took me far to long to understand. Those that can express their thoughts calmly and concisely, will always be more well received.

On the commercial AI and Epstein class, yes many of the top people in the industry are involved with that. But why limit your self when you have the same tool your enemy has? Is it not better to use AI to develop open source alternatives that will bring them down? Would the irony not be the sweetest if they were brought down by their own tool?

Do with these thoughts as you wish, disregard them if they have no meaning for you.

I completely agree that facebook is an evil company and guilty of most if not all that you have laid out. I qualified that since some of the things you stated I have not heard of since I don’t pay attention to facebook for the most part.

The second half of my comment was directed at your final line “Also this problem is mostly Ais fault.” this just sounds like a broad anti-AI statement and not one aimed at facebook’s use of AI. I was trying to communicate that many people, myself included, have found AI to be very helpful as a tool, and a generalized statement tagged onto the end of your comment could be seen as anti-AI to those who see value in AI.

I fully agree I could have explained that better in my previous comment, that is on me. I do hope this helps clarify my statement, and you can see that, while not worded the best, my intention was only to help you not turn others away from your core argument.

I was with you until the last line. This has nothing to do with A.I. Facebook has been doing this kind of stuff long before A.I. was a thing.

You can be anti-A.I. that’s fine, but don’t conflate the two when one proceeds the other. You’re just hurting your own argument when you throw in things like that.

We’re gonna need a bigger boot!

I’m glad to see others still have the fight in them. I’m in my 40’s, burnt out, no wife or kids to fight for, and my parents are in their late 70’s. I spent a lot of my life fighting to make things better and it’s only gotten worse faster, I’m tired, I’m burnt out, and I just don’t care anymore, I just want to pass the torch to someone who still cares and then live a quiet life.

At this point, they can have it. They just have to figure out how to upload my consciousness to a computer, load that computer into a von Neumann probe, and fire me off into space. Yes I like the Bobivers series. I’d kick back a few rocks to mine on my way out to pay my way, then take off and start exploring.

In the realm of possibility just give me $10 million so I can invest it and live off the dividends. I’ll build a nice three bedroom house and keep to myself and just work on things that actually interest me instead of working to survive. They can have their hellscape utopia, I just want to be left alone.

Yep, separate machines is the way.

My employer provides all of us with laptops for remote work, and management with cell phones. Some of these people (managers included) use the laptop as their sole computer for everything, and most of management takes advantage of the fact that if you port your phone number to the company phone you can switch between profiles and have the company pay the phone bill.

I look at these people and just marvel at their stupidity. My work laptop is on a segregated network and shut down when not in use. And if it goes like it looks like it’s going, when I get a manager cell phone, I’ll be keeping my personal phone separate. Keep’em separate always.

The previous windows install is the only thing I can see as the common denominator, I’ve installed Mint on three computers that started with no OS, and the Lenovo that was a Win 10 computer that I now have issues with.

Sorry I don’t have any real answers, I wish I did since I’m having issues with a laptop too.

Is the computer an old windows machine? I had a Lenovo laptop a while back that was a win 10 machine that I ran DBAN on then threw Mint on. After about a year of slow but solid performance I started having Grub issues and I just got sick of debugging it and gave up on it since it was just a hand-me-down and I prefer my desktop.

Oh the irony of that 80’s commercial…

That’s actually a good idea, just a tiny local model just to help you learn how to work in a terminal. I would have loved that when I first made the jump, the RTFM crowd almost made me give up.

I’ve been running Mint for years and have never experienced this issue. Either I’m lucky or your not. I say give Mint another shot, the devs have put in a lot of work over the years.

Back and knees here, Aleve twice a day, Advil for flare ups. I’m pulling for ya, we’re all in this together.

Just pick one, burn the ISO to a USB stick and run a live version. When your done checking it out, shut down, unplug the USB stick, and boot back into windows. You can do this with any distro you are curious about, and once you find one you feel comfortable with you can install it.

My mom hates windows but is also uncomfortable with moving to a new OS, so this is what I did for her. She settled on Mint and now I’m taking an old laptop my dad gave me and I’m going to install Mint on that so she can use it full time but still have her windows machine for the time being. Once she’s comfortable with Mint I’ll move her over completely with the current windows computer since it’s far more up to date and powerful.

Aleve or Advil for the back?

Hey if YT works for you, then use it.