uralsolo [he/him]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • I don’t remember which Surface I have, but power issues are the biggest bugbear that have followed me with it the entire time I’ve had it. Firstly chargers for the thing are really fucking sketchy - if it’s not in basically perfect, out-of-the-box condition it simply refuses to connect. And even if the little indicator light turns on that doesn’t mean that the bios “sees” it, which is pretty annoying.

    Lately it’s been doing this thing where when I try to wake it up from sleep it takes about a full minute to turn the screen on. This wasn’t an issue until like a week ago, I’ve tried updating everything, reverting back to windows/stock settings - nothing.

    Nowadays my surface is just a second screen on my desk that I use to run Stremio, because it just can’t handle anything else - and this is after me being pretty positive on it for most of the time I’ve had it. I guess I’ve had it for a few years, but damn if it wasn’t such a compact design I could probably swap out the power supply or something.





  • I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux

    I had a guide and it was still a big learning curve. Linus had a guide and he still bricked his machine trying to install Steam. Imagine your parents or grandparents being told without context to mount an ISO to a USB and set up their BIOS - for 90% of people there is no way in hell they’re installing Linux without a guide unless they can double click an exe and have an install wizard do it for them.




  • To be fair, in the US we did ban admission of polygraph evidence in court, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems they and other psuedoscientofic “investigation” techniques create.

    I think that while a lot of reasonable people know that lie detectors are bunk, a surprisingly large number of people don’t know that at all - and many of the people who seemingly know better still haven’t actually confronted what that knowledge means. Like if you say to someone, “I took a lie detector test”, it lends credibility to what you’re saying for a lot of people even though it shouldn’t lend any at all.

    Take this out to the whole world of phony pauedoscientific criminal investigation techniques, and the number of people in a world poisoned by shows like CSI who would rightly support banning such things is going to be shockingly low, even though everyone with knowledge on the subject can probably tell you that’s what should happen.

    So that’s why there’s no public pressure to do it really. Add to that the fact that law enforcement doesn’t want their psuedoscience taken away from them because they see it as a useful tool in getting convictions, and any politician who tries to take this issue on is going to be acting alone against entrenched power for basically no political gain.




  • This is something I’ve thought was true for a while, but your comment made me go back and look for decent sources and while I found a few articles bemoaning tech in schools I also found a lot of good-looking scientific studies saying that it’s fine or even beneficial, so I deleted my comment.

    AFAIK now, the negative outcomes are when it’s home schooling or COVID-era distance learning and the kid is only doing work on an ipad, so the problem isn’t the tech itself it’s the absence of a structured school environment with a teacher.