Firefox and the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension.

Gets you past most of the paywalls. Thing is, sites like the NYT have plenty of advertising, so just going on the site gets them paid.

Unless you also add uBO.

This is why it’s ever more critical that people maintin their due diligence when it comes to downloading and installing apps - apple, android, windows, linux or whatever. Shit’s getting hairy out there.

Simplest answer… the average Joe doesn’t get blown up or shot at while on the job.

If you go to the lemmy information site, it shows you all the sites in the fedivesre. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list - most people have signed up on lemmy.world, but you can join any one then subscribe to a community (subreddit) on other sites (instances) from the one you signed up on. The posts all cross link to the various instances.

The practical upshot is, if you get banned from one instance, (you’d have to really be doing asshole things, BTW - the site owners and most mods are really laid back - no corporate, censorious, ownership for the most part) you can go sign back up on another one.

This IS it… and it may take you a while to sort out the comms (subs) you want to join.

Traffic-wise, it’s like Reddit used to be, back when I joined it in 2009.

(I got banned two weeks shy of 15 years last October and found this site and have been here since! Ilove it!)

I am on old.lemmy.zip since it’s more technology heavy (and the “old” reddit-style which I prefer) but can link to communities on any of the federated servers… [email protected] is a good women’s group… [email protected]… for general topics…

Music, art, TV shows… It’s all here!

Whereas reddit was one website with a gazillion subs, lemmy is one of many “fediverse” servers (instances) all tied together by a web communication protocol. You may find a bunch of communities you like that are all on different servers, but you subscribe to them andt hey will show up on your feed on whatever server you signed up on. It’s really neat.

Welcome to the party! Stick around and you’ll find losts of comms to read and post on.

Ehh. My dad had been using Windows from when 3.1 came out until Windows 8 and that Metro UI stopped him in his tracks. Had to reinstall Win 7 so he could use it but it really did deflate him.

Thing is, older users whose memory starts to go - it’s absolutely critical that as little as possible changes with a new OS.

I was so furious with MS that he lost the ability to use his computer because of that change. He finally found someone to help him roll back to the older OS, but then it presented itself with a whole new set of problems, mainly the browsers stopped working and of course security.

He was well into starting to fail from cancer, so he was having memory problems when he got one of those scam calls from “Microsoft Windows” that locked him out of his computer and ransomed access for 300 bucks - which he didn’t have.

Was in a nursing home by then.

I sent him a dell Core 2 duo laptop with his copy of Win 7 installed and a bunch of videos to watch (he loved Game of Thrones) but he was too sick by then.

Years later, one of my oldest clients (93 y/o - quite literally) got almost shut down when her system updated from Win 10 to Windows 11. Just the simple change of moving the icons on the taskbar stopped her in her tracks. I had to go set it up with the older left-justified icons she was used to.

When you get to dealing with older people who are starting to mentally slow down, you really see that consistency in the UI becomes an absolute necessity.

The fact that MS doesn’t even give that option on an update - to see the personalization settings of the older OS and to honor them… is really blind to the needs of older users. It’s shitty… it’s ageist.

Apple has been fairly consistent with things like updating an OS will carry ALL the desktop settings - even icon locations on the Desktop, into the newer system. And it’s identical other than a new tint of gray or a radius of a curve on the corner of the windows. (I think it’s been boring as hell, but I’ve always reached to theme or skin the OS to my tastes.)

NGL, I use Win 10 Pro on my gaming PC and as someone that came from Dos-5.0/Windows 3.1.1 and also Geoworks but first used an Apple ][e, yeah, they’re pretty much the same but with different window dressing.

I’m going to leap into Bazzite for the gaming PC once I get more SSDs. Can’t even fnd the HDDs I want for storage of the game installers I have. So I wait.

Can’t speak for the under 50 crowd, but from what I’ve dealt with, people don’t buy apples because they’re cheap. Usually it’s down to getting fed up all to hell with Microsoft and wanting to try something with a friendlier user experience. for the last 20 years (at least) when I was doing housecalls to help people with their systems - it’s almost always been seniors with macs… and the number one gripe WRT printer setups almost always involved HP.

I’m still rolling with 2008 to 2010 era Macs so when these old tanks finally can’t be updated with the unsupported installs, I’ll be switching to linux of some sort.

Indeed, but as a decades-long apple user, I’ve never bought RAM through Apple. Hell, I never even got it through Otherworld, as that was almost as spendy. Ebay… just go to ebay.

I think that is only going to last as long as the AI providers are willing to operate at a loss. The issue is even with the newer higher price points rolled out this year, they’re still losing money. The slower AI machines may be the answer once the REAL profit earning price for the use tokens hits the market. I forsee lots of alternative work going on while the small LLM’s are cooking the data. We will have to see once these machines start to roll out, what the use for LLMs will be and how it’s applied. I am hopeful.

It shouldn’t be, if Apple gets that import exemption from the Chinese memory manufacturer (ChangXin Memory Technologies) they are asking for. Apparently they’re already testing the CXMT chips to put in the phones sold in China, freeing up the orders/stock they’ve sourced already from “safe” sources, to go into their products sold in the rest of the world.

Smart move if they can finagle it.

Hopefully they can get it through before the fuckwits in the administration understand how effectively it can threaten the big AI players that Trump seems to be sniffing around.

You absolutely BET that he will scuttle any trade deal if it interferes with his own personal agenda WRT his investments in AI.

He’s that much a greedy cunt.

One can only hope that it totally breaks the AI/LLM at industrial scale, so businesses can run their own AI systems with their own data sets.

No more of this fucking datacanter horseshit.

I have one word for that: GOOD!

So am I…

Ack! No one has the 4TB Ironwolf Pro drives!

This is bullshit.

F’ckin’ datacenter pricks.

So that’s a console game setup, yes?

I use an older PC so everything is backed up on a storage drive but currently right now I’m stuck with a 500 GB SSD to run the games I’m actively playing. It’s nowhere near enough space for what I want to do. Ugh. Am waiting to see when I can get my mitts on a 4TB WD Gold drive (I have two on my MacPro systems) and slap that into the PC for the storage and then get a similar sized SSD (or an NVME drive in an adapter) to use.

I think when I get that sorted I’m also going to switch up to running Bazzite for the games and bail on the Win 10 Pro…

Am not surprised given how large games today can be. You can have a disk to launch the game when you first get it, but chances are the Playstation will still have to “update” it with the full resources…

I don’t have a playstation, but FFS, I can’t even get the full Halo: Master Chief Collection onto my gaming PC - I just don’t have the drive space. Some game packages are huge today.

I’d say they’re an asshole and leave it at that.

It’s transient at best, with AI. It’s still too new and there will be a ton of ventures tied to it that fail in the long run of it.

People need long term happiness and stability and right now the industry is in disruption mode and creating too much future uncertainty.

That only works as long as you use those login options. If you stick to a PIN code only… well… whoop!

There it is. Too bad, so sad…

Yup. So when you travel, get a budget flip phone that you can load up with minutes and take a proper digital camera.

Last trip I took out west, I took an old laptop and threw a small SSD in it and added a fresh OS install, so the computer had NOTHING but pictures from my camera on it and a hundred+ albums from my music collection.

No logins on ANY sites at all.

(I only have a handful of social media sites I go to and have the logins committed to memory, but when travelling, I don’t need to actually login, since I’m out and about actually visiting and doing shit and not sitting at the computer banging away on it…)

It’s the only way to handle travel safely, so you run no chance of your privacy actually being exposed.

When I got home I swapped the main drive back in and transferred the photos to it.

Happy, happy, joy, joy.