archonet

I got up to 125 in my car one early, dry Christmas morning. Nobody out, a clear couple miles ahead with no emergency turnout for cops to hide in, decided "let's see where I get uncomfortable"

Turned out, right up to 110, my car felt solid, at 125 it started getting squirrelly and I decided the exercise was over. Dumb, yes, but nice to know how far you can push it in dry, ideal conditions.

if you say so, whatever makes you happy.

I'll concede the data plan dent thing; I hadn't done any math regarding that. Thanks for clarifying that to me and everyone else!

I accept your concession, better luck next time.

But you did say "none" so I just pointed out the fact that it's not none. It's some. I wasn't wrong to point that out. No matter how much of a stickler you find me for that.

pedantry is pedantry, if you interject with "well ACKSHUALLY" over literally a couple kilobytes of data in this, the Year Of Our Lord 2025 where common storage device sizes are in the multiple terabyte range, and 100mbps down/10 up is exceedingly common, expect to be called one. It is functionally none, because it is not 1993.

Autistic or not.

can't even come up with your own insult for me, just gonna steal that sad attempt at bait from the other guy? how... underwhelming, must do better. 🤡

what a rude thing to say, especially considering I wasn't talking to you.

I'm gonna keep it that way, best of luck baiting someone else champ.

lol

furthermore: lmao.

you've got to try a lot harder to "rustle" me, but I like your moxie for thinking you did, sport

doing the math, even the cheapest phone plans that don't explicitly exclude data, nowadays include at least 1GB of data for free. Usually more. Almost any reachable amount of outbound requests to click on ads would barely put a dent in your data allowance.

by their very nature, they are not sentient. They are Markov chains for words. They do not have a sense of self, truth, or feel emotions, they do not have wants or desires, they merely predict what is the next most likely word in a sequence, given the context. The only thing they can do is "make plausible sentences that can come after [the context]".

That's all an LLM is. It doesn't reason. I'm more than happy to entertain the notion of rights for a computer that actually has the ability to think and feel, but this ain't it.

"AI freedom"

listen I am 100% here for the rights of non-human general intelligence, but no I will not entertain that kind of crock from an overambitious form of autocomplete.

Okay, fine, not enough to matter. Are you satisfied with that?

so use a VPN? if you're the sort of user using AdNauseam, and is concerned about tracking, you're probably also the sort of user who already uses a VPN.

1. not in this way
2. not enough to matter

the way it works is sending an HTTP request that registers as a "click" to the advertiser (thus costing them money), but then doesn't actually let the browser download any content and fetch the webpage, basically pi-holes the destination site and any attached tracking cookies. Combined with the fact that it does this to every ad, it would basically poison any click tracking.

edit: pedants

and before I get any more of you, this is just what I remember reading about adnauseam, do not take it as gospel, go look at AdNauseam's FAQ.

Mike Johnson being a petty, whiny removed? Next you'll tell me it's a day ending in y.

my friend, I want to impart something on you. I write this with the sincere hope it changes your mind.

The average user of a computer does not want to even think about the operating system it uses.

Most people, myself included, want to work on our computer, not work on our computer (which is why I use Mint). An operating system should be the software version of a motherboard -- an invisible plinth upon which all the other things you actually care about, sit. In a hardware context the things you care about are all the components plugged into the motherboard -- your GPU, CPU, RAM, storage devices, and so on. In a software context, this is email, web browsing, video games, and office software, the programs the average user actually gives a shit about. Notice: Nowhere in that list does it say getting up into the systems guts via terminal or command prompt or whatever flavor of blinking cursor you prefer. Most users just want their programs to run and to never think about the underlying system, and that is okay. Not everyone needs to be technical, and shouldn't have to be to use a computer and reap the full benefits of using one. I choose to be because I'm a fucking spaz, but that doesn't mean someone who doesn't want to be should instead be condemned to inferior offerings from the likes of Microsoft and Apple. If Linux were, indeed, the best -- as Microsoft seems determined to prove via Windows enshittification -- then it should be, ideally, just as easy for nontechnical people to pick up as Windows. If it isn't, that's a problem with Linux that is yet to be solved, not a problem with people.

Fortunately, my experience using Mint for the past year has been largely exactly that. It's very close to that ideal, if not already there -- I've had a few very minor issues, but, nothing I was unable to fix via a quick internet search.

I say all this in the hope you'll understand, if you want Linux to take off, it needs to be accessible to the average idiot. It must be, because I don't know if you've seen the news, but we are not cumulatively getting smarter.