I recently learned that in my car the same light is used to indicate that the parking brake is on and that the brake fluid is low. Nothing bad happened, and it’s getting worked on, but my first thought was that the sensor on the brake must be broken. It’s poor design, seemingly without reason.

Use infinite monkeys.

I have a fairly new, expensive (not $5000 expensive though) laptop from work. It’s quite a high powered laptop. It’s full of administration crap that constantly runs in the background using 8 GB of RAM and at least 20% of the CPU, nonstop. Daily I run out of RAM and it freezes. I have a 15 year old laptop that, without exaggeration, is faster to use and can run more programs without running out of RAM.

Never heard of Android I guess?

Require all LLMs to provide answers in the form of haikus.

Google is genuinely bad now. I switched to Ecosia which is just Bing with a simpler front end and they use their profits to plant trees. I don’t think Ecosia is particularly special though. Duck Duck Go, Bing whatever, they’re all better than Google.

Whenever I set up a new computer then search for something, I’m always surprised at first seeing the awful layout and quality of the search results before I realize that I haven’t changed the default search from Google. It’s awful now. Seriously, how are people using it?

My new favorite way to search is perplexity.ai. It’s an AI search tool that summarizes the loads of crap out there so you don’t need to read through the junk that people write. It provides sources, unlike using ChatGPT, which is incredibly valuable. All AIs make shit up, so having links to double check it is a must. Unlike Bing Chat, or whatever Microsoft calls it this week, you can ask follow up questions to home in on what you want.

I think the only way to get surround sound is in the desktop program. I don’t know if that’s a limitation of browsers or if the Netflix guys are just assholes.

The only thing I value in Windows 10 or 11 over 7 is better multi monitor support, and even that is not a giant issue. It’s faster, uses less resources, is better organized, and looks nicer, especially nicer than 10 that looks like a lazy highschool kid spent all of a day on it.

And you’re claiming that people can’t expect to use it for free, because they need to pay those costs, which is nonsense. If they have enough to pay a CEO $300k in cash each year in addition to stock options, they are making plenty to cover their operating costs. Thus there’s no reason users, who are already brining value to the platform, should pay more in addition to the value they bring. Asking for people to contribute for free and then pay to access what they’ve built is a crazy business strategy that’s bound to fail.

It’s not free. Moderators spend their time keeping things sensible and users spend their time creating content, by posting, commenting and voting. Millions of people contribute tiny amounts, giving the community great value. They’re the reason the site has any value at all. In comparison, the operating costs, and whatever work the company execs perform, are small compared to the not-at-all free work people in aggregate put into the community.

There are small annoying differences. The way it handles downloads is irritating. The settings menus are not well organized. There’s a big stupid Bing button unless you remove it. It randomly fails to honor the option to open PDFs in an external program. It’s nothing big, but if you’re forced to use it for work, it’s constantly annoying.

People are giving some advice but it doesn’t seem appropriate for an absolute newbie. Here’s what I’d say. Absolutely do not run telnet. Because it’s so insecure and everyone knows that, it’s usually not on by default, and you would have had to start it yourself somehow. It’s unlikely that you did that, but you can check to see.

If you’re new, you very likely don’t need an SSH server running. Unless you’re logging into that computer remotely, you don’t need it. It’s probably not running, but it’s conceivable that it could run by default. Check to see and disable it if you don’t need remote login.

If you do need remote login, use SSH and use a very good password. Ideally, you’d need to leave newbie territory and use public-private keys instead of a password. It’s also not a bad idea to use a nonstandard port, instead of 22. That doesn’t beef security much, but many scanners are going to look for 22 and nothing else.

Firefox did this 4 years ago and didn’t replace them with an alternative tracking method.

Haha, “bothered to upgrade”. What upgrade?

Am I blind? I don’t even see where it names the study. It just says Pew, who publishes many studies. Does medium expect me to search for their sources?

If I’m in the mood for better sound quality I do. Bluetooth has noticably poorer quality on anything but the worst equipment.

I also use the headphone jack when I don’t want to deal with the inexplicably still not addressed after decades terrible Bluetooth connectivity issues.

Wood is already stronger than glass. If you read the article, what they say make sense, but this title is silly.

I don’t have an Mac. How much RAM does it use just to turn it on? Windows 10 needs an astounding 4 GB just to see the desktop.

SMS is truly open and isn’t overseen by any central authority. Although obviously your carrier needs to support it, you aren’t forced to choose from among a few SMS providers. As I understand, RCS is a partially proprietary protocol under the guise of an open standard. As I understand, your carrier doesn’t handle RCS. Instead it’s routed through an RCS provider, and that provider is currently an extension of Google.

To me it seems like RCS is just Google’s attempt to take over text messaging, and even though SMS has some serious flaws, I feel like a corporate controlled system is even worse.

Am I wrong about RCS? Is it really an open standard? When I search for details, it’s mostly about how SMS is bad with pictures and thus RCS is great, but nothing about how RCS makes its way from one phone to another.

You have this wrong. The problem isn’t the age of other people on the Internet. It’s that you don’t understand that anecdote and limited knowledge are not a basis for judging the feasibility of a technology or making conclusions about what’s useful for broad swathes of people.