Thats assuming you already regularly install Windows, which most don’t. It should be the median install, by a normal user. In the same way, I wouldn’t count the experience of a veteran distro-hopper as the standard for setup time on Linux.

To find and quickly vet a cleanup script on Windows, I’d say half an hour to an hour is a fair estimate, esspecially given that there are a lot of fake or outdated ones out there. On top of that, there a bunch of other settings these scripts often ignore, like web search in start, so I’d say up to another half hour for that is reasonable, esspecially if you weren’t thorough when searching for your initial script.

I mean, 10 minutes is pretty optimistic even for a relatively savy user. It took me somewhere around an hour to find and fix everything. On the other hand, it took me and a bunch of people on the Linux support subreddit around 20 hours of troubleshooting to get Linux into a mostly functional state on my PC, at which point I and everyone else had given up, so…

Its been nearly two years since then though, and given what a nightmare Windows 11 is, I guess I’ll have to give it another shot.

I went down this rabbit hole about a year ago, and didn’t have much luck. In the end, the best results I was able to get were from Steam’s Big Picture Mode on a Windows device, mostly launching Firefox (might have been Chrome?) with different launch arguments to immitate a smart TV.

Most available software either doesn’t support Linux well, doesn’t support streaming services and outside software, or doesn’t support non-kb&m input methods. You can get two, but never all three. You could try SteamOS, now that its out, but unfortunately my hopes wouldn’t be high for it to have all the apps you needs functioning.

You seem to be missing what I’m saying. Maybe a biological comparison would help:

An octopus is extrmely smart, moreso than even most mammels. It can solve basic logic puzzles, learn and navigate complex spaces, and plan and execute different and adaptive stratgies to humt prey. In spite of this, it can’t talk or write. No matter what you do, training it, trying to teach it, or even trying to develop an octopus specific language, it will not be able to understand language. This isn’t because the octopus isn’t smart, its because its evolved for the purpose of hunting food and hiding from predators. Its brain has developed to understand how physics works and how to recognize patterns, but it just doesn’t have the ability to understand how to socialize, and nothing can change that short of rewiring its brain. Hand it a letter and it’ll try and catch fish with it rather than even considering trying to read it.

AI is almost the reverse of this. An LLM has “evolved” (been trained) to write stuff that sounds good, but has little emphasis on understanding what it writes. The “understanding” is more about patterns in writting rather than underlying logic. This means that if the LLM encounters something that isn’t standard language, it will “flail” and start trying to apply what it knows, regardless of how well it applies. In the chess example, this might be, for example, just trying to respond with the most common move, regardless of if it can be played. Ultimately, no matter what you input into it, an LLM is trying to find and replicate patterns in language, not underlying logic.

The LLM doesn’t have to imagine a board, if you feed it the rules of chess and the dimensions of the board it should be able to “play in its head”.

That assumes it knows how to play chess. It doesn’t. It know how to have a passable conversation. Asking it to play chess is like putting bread into a blender and being confused when it doesn’t toast.

But human working memory is shit compared to virtually every other animal. This and processing speed is supposed to be AI’s main draw.

Processing speed and memory in the context of writing. Give it a bunch of chess boards or chess notation and it has no idea which it needs to remember, nonetheless where/how to move. If you want an AI to play chess, you train it on chess gameplay, not books and Reddit comments. AI isn’t a general use tool.

Is it just me being set in my ways, or does this look terrible? It seems like its going to make it harder to use URLs and clutter up what was previously clean, functional UI just to highlight rarely-used commands.

Edit: Also isn’t hiding the url a security issue? How else do you recognize phishing sites?

Do you have a source for that graph? I’m interested in the study, but couldn’t find it with a web search.

Play audio through my mobo’s built-in 3.5mm jack (without a significant delay). For whatever reason, Mint just really didn’t like my mobo, and no one was able to figure it out.

And after hours of troubleshooting, you give in and join the Discord where you’re promptly ignored.

Or if you’re really lucky, people are willing to help, so you spend hours more troubleshooting, often repeating many of the same steps, only for all of them to give up too. (As was my experience when I tried to switch to Linux Mint.)

Unfortunately, neither fixes this. Grayjay seems to work, but its inconsistent in my experience, often repeatedly returning to the beginning of the video part-way through.

I mean, the information was published. People could have shared it more if they cared. Most users don’t. Just look at the backlash he got for comparing ad block’s impact to that of piracy. I still see people citing that as a reason not to trust LMG. If people are that offended by being asked to consider the effects they have on creator income, you really think they’d react well to being told their discounts are hurting creators. They’re already seen as whiney, pro-corporate shills. They’re not going to go out of their way to shout from the rooftops criticism for a company that helps consumers (or was thought to at the time).

Edit: to be clear, I’m not a fan of LTT, but if you’re going to criticize them, do it for their bias, factual errors, personality, ect. Not because they didn’t go far enough to discourage using coupon codes.

AI content is low-quality slop. That said, sometimes low-quality slop is the best option for what you want, and in that case, it can make sense to use. That slop can also make a useful ingredient for other, better works, so long as its just a small peice used appropriately.

The vast majority of those machines are very rigged, with a configurable winrate. I’m guessing that machine was set to just never pay out the large prize.

But its not even Wednesday?

I’m in Canada rather than the US, but I personally see it very little of it, except for those who are on the tail end of GenZ. In my experience, most of GenZ (with the possible exception of those still in high-school or early post-secondary) are primarily disgusted by the sort of opulent displays of weath common in influencer culture. If anything, I could see the ridiculously high numbers reflecting a distrust in the economy after living through multiple large financial crisis, and even-increasing costs of living moreso than a direct worship of weath. For example, if they assume a 5% annual increase in cost-of-living over the next 20 years, and want to be making the current equivalent of an 100k salary, they’ll expect to need to make about 265k. If they worry that the economy could crash at any point, it wouldn’t be weird for them to feel the need to aquire more weath faster to prepare. Thats not to say there is no worship of weath and fame, but thats also not new. Before the internet, it was reality tv, and before that, magazine and newspapers. I mean, look at Donald Trump even - he got where he is not because of an education or anything but because he used his existing fame to springboard him into power. Even before that, think of the worship of the British monarchy and the facination people have with their drama. The only new part is the algorithms, but their widespread use and monitization only really caught the tail-end of GenZ when they were young and its mostly Gen Alpha growing up knowing nothing else.

A thought I had was, that this might be a paid online poll. The answers might reflect the true feelings of the demographic that makes it a hustle to respond to those.

Its probably something like this, but theres a lot of more significant potential pitfalls with an online poll. For example, at least in my circles, is basically common knowledge that its a good idea to take these polls whenever you get the chance, but answer what they want to hear so you don’t get screened out. Similarly, theres lying about age. Even just how the question was asked could have a huge impact; “How much will you have to earn to be financially successful?” is a different question to “how much do you have to earn to be financially successful?” given that one implies future or continued wealth while the other implies current costs. But again, none of this was specified, so we’re making assumptions - instead we should take only the information that was provided. So little is given, it could have been run by, for example, emailing their mailing list subscriber with the poll and offering a raffle entry for each submission, or hell, even something like a Twitter poll. That would still match their given methodology.

Anyway, from my personal experience, the results are not obviously wrong. I matured before influencer culture became big. To me, it was always people playing pretend; a form of online role-playing; another thing I never got into. I feel that those a bit younger, who grew up with influencer culture, simply did not develop a world model where that distinction exists. Of course, these topics don’t come up in casual conversation, and on the internet you never really know someone’s age.

For claification, I’m Canadian, not American, so my experiences will be a bit different. That said, I’ve experienced this some with Gen Alpha, but not really GenZ. Keep in mind, GenZ is at least age 15, and averaging around 23: still young, but already starting to come to terms with income and costs of living. Most people this age are from before the current influencer economy, and even then, they are going out into the world now and usually learning the value of money quickly. If anything, I think the ridiculously high number given in the poll (if taken seriously) is just as much or more an indication of the expectations for rising costs of living, instability, and inflation. GenZ is old enough to understand these concepts and have seen how they affected the world, likely in 2008, and definately during covid. Its not like this sort of toxic worship of money is anything new or unique either - think of the reality shows that were popular before they moved to the internet, for example, and all the tabloids and drama that teens and young adults followed even before that.

It looks like with some of their other stuff, they do provide more methodology, but given that the only methodology provided here is the fact that it was an online survey, and the sample size was 2203 (of very roughly 300,000,000) it doesn’t give us much meaninful to go off of. Notably, they also exclude anyone under 18 in the polls (or attempt to, given that this is online with no indication of how their sample was selected) which is a significant portion of those the sample is meant to represent. Given that thats all we really know, we can’t really get a meaninful idea of what the original data was, or how accurate the drawn conclusions are.

From what I could track down, here is all the available data on the polling methodology:

The Empower “Secret to Success” study is based on online survey responses from 2,203 Americans ages 18+ fielded by Morning Consult from September 13-14, 2024. The survey is weighted to be nationally representative of U.S. adults (aged 18+).

It also comes not from a polling company, but from a company that provides financial news, and financial services. No potential conflict of interest there…

Basically, the data is near-worthless.

From my understanding, thats also very much not allowed on the app store, and is something they check for.

Well, this takes place in the Half Life/Portal universe where the world basically ended in the early 2000s, so it makes sense.