You’re using a weird definition of profit, which to most people is some sort of financial gain. Saving money isn’t the same as profiting. You’re not turning a profit when you use a $1.00 off coupon on a package of Oreos at the grocer just like you’re not turning a profit if you download a movie.

Also, go look up criminal copyright infringement. That’s what is defined as a crime legally, and downloading a movie or a CD doesn’t meet that threshold unless maybe you’re torrenting it and therefore distributing it. Morally, well you can argue that, but not everyone is going to agree with you.

Well, you can think that but realize that you’re in the minority if you think breaking copyright for personal consumption is the same as breaking copyright for profit. That’s like saying stealing a loaf of bread because you are hungry is exactly the same as stealing a car so you can strip it for parts for resale.

Also, despite what the RIAA and MPAA would like you to believe, downloading a CD or DVD for personal use isn’t illegal, which is why it’s a civil matter when someone is busted. There’s a line that needs to be crossed before the criminal justice system gets involved, and it’s above that sort of thing.

That may be how you see it, but that’s not how the law works.

The pirate is looking to save money with their copyright infringement.

These AI companies are looking to make money from it.

Your average pirate isn’t looking to profit from their copyright infringement.

In a similar way, someone getting busted for downloading a movie is a civil matter, but if they get busted for selling unauthorized copies on DVD then it can become a criminal matter.

As far as I’m aware, they had to stop doing that some time ago.

I personally find the my cognitive load with Linux is much lower now that I’ve switched over.

First of all, the Windows 11 UI is awful and ugly. The Windows 10 UI was never that great and only looks good as it ended up sandwiched between 8 and 11. I’d have to go to Windows 7 for something that’s decent. Admittedly the polish on a lot of Linux DEs and applications can leave a lot to be desired, but I have a choice between multiple DEs and many of those DEs are highly customizable. I’d have to go back to Windows 7 for something that’s better polished and works as good for me as XFCE does.

Then there’s being in control of my own computer. I control when it does its updates. My computer respects my settings and preferences and doesn’t randomly change or reset them. It doesn’t randomly install unwanted software on it’s own, or reinstall stuff I explicitly removed. It doesn’t place ads in my whisker menu or on my desktop or lock screen. There’s no telemetry being sent home to the mothership. With anything past Windows 8 I’ve never really felt like I’m in complete control and Microsoft can just do whatever the hell they want.

While there are the occasional issues as someone who is familiar with Linux it’s typically not too difficult to track it down and fix it. Though there are exceptions of course. At least if I have to edit some files in /etc they tend to stay that way as opposed to having to edit the registry with regedit.exe only to have Windows randomly undo what I did with the next update. And while PulseAudio is notorious for causing all sorts of havoc, it seems like it’s finally gotten to the point where it finally works and I haven’t had any issues with the volume control for a while now.

As for games it obviously matters what games you like to play, but the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to play any game in my Stream library beyond enabling Proton so far is zero. Which has been a very pleasant surprise and honestly I’ve been pretty impressed with that.

My guess is one of the upcoming major updates will either refuse to install, or will try to install and fail, if you try that route.

Something like that happened with a 2006-era laptop I have with Windows 10. It ran Windows 10 fine for several years, but finally one of the big updates decided it no longer liked some of the Vista-era drivers I was using. The update would try to install, fail, and roll back. And since Windows doesn’t let you turn off or disable updates, a few days later it would try again only to fail in the exact same way.

Any new computer sold that has a copy of Windows preinstalled means Microsoft is getting a cut.

I can see it. My corporate work laptop is locked down with their security and monitoring software, so I’m not using it for personal things, even if it is allowed for some limited things. And there’s company resources that I can only access through the machines under their control, so I couldn’t ditch it either. And using that laptop for a second job would be a big no-no.

I can see the school laptop being similar, though my experience is that they tend to not be locked down quite as hard as the corporate machine, unless you do boneheaded things with it and piss off the school’s IT department.

So I can see the need for a personal computer, plus it’s always nice to keep that well separated to avoid things like incidents hooked up to a projector and screen sharing.

I’d be fairly certain the washing machine has a few sensors and a fairly simple computer program (designed by humans) that can make some limited adjustments to the wash cycle on the fly.

I’ve seen quite a few instances of stuff like that suddenly being called “AI” as that’s the big buzzword now.

I’d argue there was a fourth serious failure, and that was Intel allowing the motherboard manufacturers to go nuts and run these chips way out of spec by default. Granted, ultimately it was the motherboard manufacturers that did it, but there’s really no excuse for what these motherboards were doing by default. Yes, I get the “K” chips are unlocked, but it should be up to the user to choose to overclock their CPU and how they want to go about it. To make matters worse, a lot of these motherboards didn’t even have an easy way to put things back into spec - it was up to you to go through all the settings one by one and set them correctly.

Github Copilot is about the only AI tool I’ve used at work so far. I’d say it overall speeds things up, particularly with boilerplate type code that it can just bang out reducing a lot of the tedious but not particularly difficult coding. For more complicated things it can also be helpful, but I find it’s also pretty good at suggesting things that look correct at a glance, but are actually subtly wrong. Leading to either having to carefully double check what it suggests, or having fix bugs in code that I wrote but didn’t actually write.

I feel lucky too. I have a 14900k that’s stable. I did have some minor stability issues after I built it, but dialing back the motherboard’s idiotic default settings plus a few BIOS updates cleared that up. With that said, if I had to do over, I’d build an AMD system. One of the big reasons I built Intel is that historically my Intel builds have been much more stable and less problematic than my AMD builds.

The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn’t a problem, as back then it didn’t really matter that the time was different in every little burg.

Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I’m sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.

So the solution is just go back to the 1800’s and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.

The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.

The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.

Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.

If you’re comfortable with swapping out components in your PC, just buy a second SSD. Remove the Windows drive, put Linux on the new drive. If Linux doesn’t work out for you, just swap them back.

You could also run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick, or potentially install Linux onto a USB stick or SD.

It’s been a while since I’ve used Gnome, but back when I did I also felt it lacked a lot of configurability much like the Mac.

In comparison, KDE felt a lot more like Windows (or how Windows used to be in the past) where you could configure and tweak all sorts of things.

Finder? Polished? Even compared to Windows Explorer, Finder is terrible.

Not too long ago, on a Slackware box I needed to manually change glibc to another version. No problem, I thought, just remove the version that’s there and install the package for the version I needed. So removepkg glibc and then immediately dawned on me… oh wait I really didn’t want to do that… Of course, after that installpkg and pretty much everything else was broken since pretty much everything either depends on glibc, or has a dependency that depends on glibc, so I couldn’t install the new package or do pretty much anything other than smack my forehead.

Wasn’t actually too big of a deal to fix. Used another computer to create a bootable USB stick with the Slackware installer, booted the computer with the USB stick, and did some chroot trickery to reinstall the old glibc package again. Then booted it back up normally and used upgradepkg to change glibc like I should have in the first place.