Notices by Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social), page 4

If you want my *specific* linux recommendation, I've been happy with Ubuntu Mate because it's been the same old familiar shit for like fourteen years now

Specifically, it came about because Ubuntu changed from having a slightly shit interface to having a REALLY shit interface back in 2010, and so Mate came along as a continuation of the old GUI that was only a bit shit. It's been getting updates twice a year since then and instead of RADICALLY OVERHAULING THE INTERFACE they've just made it... slightly less shit

Like... if you look at Ubuntu Mate from 2010 and Ubuntu Mate from today, it uses a slightly easier-to-read font now? The colours are a bit nicer? The icons are better? But everything's still in the same place, I haven't had to re-learn anything.

Instead of spending ten years falling over themselves trying to Innovate and Revolutionize and Reinvent, they've just been slowly and carefully sanding off the rough bits, and hoo boy, you spend ten years sanding the same wood, it gets niiiiiice

I've heard good things about Linux Mint also, and I think you can choose to have Mate as the interface to that as well.

The Thing: you can choose an interface. That's a thing that makes Linux both brilliant AND shit, because first thing going in you've got to make a decision with basically no information or context. JUST LIKE YOU DID WHEN YOU JOINED YOUR FEDI SERVER, HAHA! And you wondered why there were so many Linux weirdos here, didn'tcha!

There are three ways you can deal with this decision:

1) Spend hours meticulously researching each one because you like spending hours meticulously researching things (this explains why half of Fedi is The Way It Is)
2) Blunder on YOLO style with one that has a cool name and see whether or not you regret it later (this explains the other half of Fedi)
3) Bounce off the decision entirely because it's self-evidently an unreasonable thing to ask (this explains the world outside Fedi)

Ooooh should Pinball Dad stick his toe in the Linux Discourse

I've been on it since 2010, I guess I should maybe?

How about I stick my whole entire foot in, maybe if I poison it with my footstink then it'll die down a bit

Linux is a bit shit sometimes,

There's your headline. I don't care whether you use linux or not; ten years ago that might have mattered, I might be trying to get more people to use it so that adobe or whoever would put more effort into supporting it, but that doesn't really matter anymore, these days everything either Just Works or there's a native equivalent that's better and I've no selfish reason to recommend linux anymore, so if you're happy with windows stick with windows.

If you're *not* happy with windows, here's the other half of that sentence at the top of this post:

Linux is a bit shit sometimes - but when it's a bit shit, it's a bit shit in the way of a cat who watches the mouse run across the living room floor, not in the way of a cat who suddenly decides to bite you for no reason. It's not *actively malicious,* it's just a bit shit sometimes, which these days is tbh pretty damn good compared with a lot of stuff.

Like, it's not bad because it's being hollowed out for investors, it's not bad because it's spying on you to make more money, it's not bad because its makers know you've gotta take it anyway, it's not bad because it knows it can get a lot worse before you look elsewhere, it's just... bad. But bad in like a normal way, like a bike with a wonky gear shifter and tyres that keep going soft, not like a bike that shows you adverts.

There's my linux recommendation.

LINUX: It's A Bit Shit Sometimes™

🦆🐰🐺🐇🐭🐨🐴 we're all gonna visit 🐧's site at once to make a link preview
🦝 ooo, you shouldn't do that
🐧 I'm going to serve each of you six whole damn megabytes
🦝 ooo I've got another shouldn't just for you
🐧 maybe I should post about why is my site so slow
🦝 *furtling for crumbs at the bottom of the Shouldn't Bag* ooooo
🦊🦅🐗🐫 let's post about how none of this is actually a problem for anyone
🦝 *turning the Shouldn't bag upside down and shaking it* oh god hang on one at a time ONE at a TIME

1. LLM-generated text reads, at its absolute best, like lifeless overwritten gunge
2. computers can't tell LLM gunge apart from actual writing and will never be able to
3. humans CAN tell LLM gunge apart from actual writing, because of point 1
4. humans increasingly fucking hate this shit and don't want to read it
5. it takes much longer for a human to realise that they're reading LLM gunge (and close the site obvs) than it takes for the computer to vomit it up

Given 1-4 of the above, the first person to create a working LLM blocker or LLM-free search engine or browser will make SERIOUS BANK

But also given 2, they won't be able to, at least not without hiring an army of human readers

Given 5, a new type of job will appear, and a LOT of people will need to do this job

Given 4, and also 5, nobody will actually want to do it

Bonus: writing that's so crap it's indistinguishable from LLM vomit will also get flagged and flushed

People telling me this is a ridiculous take, pls refer to deadDoveDoNotEat.jpg

Seven year anniversary of that "Six reasons Mastodon won't survive" article

Fedi: 🚲✨🦊🏳️⚧️ haha we showed him
Also fedi: 🚲✨🦊🏳️⚧️ haha only six wow we've found WAY more since then

Helping out a mate set up her #gameDad recently. She got to a page asking a question and prodded the buttons without reading. I went "Wait hang on what did that say," we never found out but it was Probably something about updating a list of ports? Who knows! Anyway it started up fine, but... like, twenty years ago I would've gone, like, "Mate what are you doing," but these days...

When every website you visit thrusts a thing in your face as you're scrolling and you know it's spam so you just hit the heck-off button without looking, never mind reading

When every game you play starts with a bunch of logo videos that you have to mash buttons to skip

When a new game throws some bollocks up about an EULA that nobody expects anyone to ever read

When every three days your computer goes "Hey can I just -" and you read it once and understand that it's asking you to install spyware and then every other time you hit the Remind Me In 3 Days button without thinking or even pausing

When every day you get an email that says "Important information about your account" and it's never important information

When 80% of your physical mail goes straight into the recycling bin without even being opened because, well, it's just recycling

...yeah. It's absolutely no surprise that our default first interaction with a machine is to mash buttons randomly until it stops banging on about whatever and gets on with doing what we bought it to do.

So does your perineum develop calluses or do you just stop caring

Yesterday was a hard day. Got cheered up a bit today by getting a free bike off one of those Buy Nothing groups on Facebook.

When last I visited my family I rode a pushbike for the first time in over twenty years and I'd forgotten how much fun they were, how light, how without the context of being on top of an engine you look behind yourself and go "Wow, I went FAR!" and I said "Haha yeah I'm gonna get a bike when I get back to America." My brother said, as many people in my life have always said, "Dan, never buy a pushbike, people throw or give them away them all the time" and everyone's right of course, they do.

This thing's got two problems, slow leaks in the tyres and not changing gears properly. I've never fiddled with a derailleur before but eh, it's not rocket science, it just goes in and out on a cable; got the derailleur all cleaned off and adjusted up and still no dice so I took apart the shifter mech that lives on the yoke. Symptom was it wouldn't shift down more than a couple of clicks, this is the style where you've got two levers, one has a positive snap and one feels like a ratchet, the ratchetty one weren't ratchetting so I figured its ratchet must be stuck open and aye, its ratchet were stuck open.

Now if only I'd known this thing came apart on a left-hand thread, I might not have stripped that one bolt and be waiting on parts, but in the meantime I worked it a bit and gave it a drop of oil and now the ratchet bit works if you press up as well as in lol, just kinda hold it together with a squeeze whenever you change gears, it's fine

Tyres can wait til the weekend, I'll just pump it up now and then

Also this thing is so high. It's SO. HIGH. I'm 185cm and when I went to see to the bloke giving it away I craned my neck right back to say hello, dude could've been 2m tall. The seat's already down as far as it'll go and I'm 41 so I don't think I'm likely to grow into it. Getting real Penny Farthing feeling tryna ride the thing. Good fun though, and littleun actually managed to Properly Ride her bike today for a few metres, pedalling and everything, so tomorrow's gonna be a dad-and-daughter-and-bike day

Thanks for the replies, I'll see if there's some adjustments to be made to this thing.

Memories of sitting on a motorbike for the first time and immediately going "Yeah pushbike saddles are bullshit"

Other bike-related news, couple park trips ago there was a bloke trying to learn how to ride a unicycle and we chatted a bit

Back in my early 30's I wan convinced unicycles were the way to go, 'cause you don't have to chain them up outside the shop, just pick 'em up in the crook of your arm and carry them in. I mentioned this online and next time I visited family lo and behold, there was a unicycle.

Apparently someone'd found it in some bushes on the common. It'd obviously been thrown pretty hard.

good bloody god it's still january and all the radio's talking about is biden v trump, biden v trump, everybody hated it in 2020 and we've let it happen again, stay tuned for every anxiety-producing infodribble between now and ELEVEN FUCKING MONTHS FROM NOW, it is 100% normal and sensible to spend at minimum a quarter of your life in fight-or-flight panic mode, the polls don't even close until eight but keep refreshing that tab anyway, does it make you feel better to read our guesses about the results, does it give you a feeling of control like you maybe know what's going to happen, will you go off and do something else and think about USPOL or does staring at it feel more concrete, is it like watching an excited clown slowly stripping jolly wrapping paper off a severed head and leaving the face for last and hoping it's not yours as he sings happy birthday to you

🦝 So when's Chuzzles going to actually show the face?
🐧 November, probably
🦝 So he's just gonna stand there grinning and nodding and very slowly tearing off tiny strips for a full year
🐧 Well, no, he typically shows us some of the blood or a hair or two and then he whips the whole thing off at the very end shouting SURPRISE
🦝 can I just come back then
🐧 I mean, you can try
🐧 good luck keeping him outta your dreams in the meantime though

🎤🐰 Primary voters in Scragsbury today were delighted to find on their ballot an option for "I fucking hope our guy has a stroke so we can replace him and have a hope in hell of defeating the other side."

🐰🎤🦆 yeah it was nice to see, really brings the country together y'know

🐰🎤🐀 I thought that Americans couldn't agree on anything, but it actually kinda became a really popular candidate across the aisle

🐰🎤🐴 well I think it's just great, it's about time something nice happened for this town

🐰🎤🦅 STROKE '24 WOO

🎤🐰 well there you have it folks, this is Trunt Kronglesforth reporting live from the gumball man's USPOL horror containment thread, and I think I might just go and have a nice stroke myself

Let's have one more angle from the weird barrel-distortion lens on my phone, then we'll talk about that bloody ceiling.

Yeesh.

So here's the problem with the ceiling.

I'm not even standing all the way up, here. Look how tired I look. Look how tired this room is making me.

The (recessed) light fixture is just behind my spouse's desk so at least twice daily she gets this unlovely sight and hears me going EY UP LUV, DO YE WANNA CUPPA TEA

First coat. Scratch coat, to use the vernacular. The wall is white now, and not as hideously lumpy. We'll do one more very thin coat over this one.

After the second coat of primer, the colour is gone, the texture is gone, the gloss is gone, it's just white.

Smooth, flat, peaceful white.