Why are you trying to convince me that cars are awesome and for adults that needs to get stuff done?

You think I go shopping using a kayak? There are literally the biggest retail stores of my country a few street corners away from where I live. There is a grocery store on the other side of the street.

And you know, people without cars have nothing to do all day. They don’t work and don’t do anything important. Only people with cars are busy people getting stuff done. It’s impossible to get stuff done otherwise.

Not to mention that peole without cars will never feel like real adults.

I’m not an adult and I don’t get stuff done because I don’t have a car? I can’t go shopping? WTF?

Keep your “freedom”. I don’t want it. There’s already enough cars in the streets. You don’t want me driving. Stop trying to convince people that don’t want to drive. You have nothing to gain. Everyone already loves cars. I know that.

I’m glad that you love your car. You’re not the only one. Now can some people actually want to live without one or are you going to force yours into my living room to tell me how useful it is, and how it makes you feel mature and important?

And people actually use that as an insult. “You’re not an adult until you own a car”. Which is a sad way of seeing millions of people that have been living without a car for their whole life.

And the freedom feeling depends mostly if you live in a region that is offering you ways not to be car dependent. Where I live, we have a very decent network of bike paths in the city but also going into the countryside and traversing the province. I live on the island of an archipelago and can pull my inflatable kayak with my bike trailer, explore the islands around, access nature nearby. I can also go camping and hiking and into the wilderness 200 km away by using this cycling network. I often go visit my parents and family 140-170 km away by cycling there. I could have start to drive and bought a car 25 years ago but I moved somewhere I wouldn’t need one, and my bike represents freedom. I’m free from having to pay big oil to fill a tank to go anywhere. I’m free from monthly parking fees. I’m free from paying the plates and the insurance.

Over the years, what I learned about cars don’t make me see them as freedom. I see them as a way to keep people perpetually paying for gas, sending billions to big oil. I see them as an endless sea and stream of pollution. They pollute the air and the sound. They are bad for mental and physical health. They take an ungodly amount of space. They kill about a million people every year. On the planet, every 30 seconds someone is killed in a car related “accident”. Every year, two billion animals (yes, billions) are killed by cars.

Going to see my nephew for his birthday in the suburbs where my sister lives is comical. Twelve people invited to go park their cars around a house that only has space for the cars of the occupants. You have to find parking everywhere you go for this thing, then whine that there’s no parking anywhere. Going to a funereal is also depressing, but even more so because you can see the traffic and congestion created by someone that died.

Cars are a horrible for humanity. They’re like a drug that everyone tells you to try. You’ll see. They’re so useful. Of course you can’t go back.

Yeah. I moved into a city and region with enough transit for my needs but my family still lives in a place where there hasn’t been a coach or trains in 30 years. There were before but not anymore. And going to other regions or cities without a car is also becoming more and more difficult, if not impossible.

Unfortunately my province and country only care about cars. I really don’t want to drive but I fear that I won’t have any other choice at some point in the future because my other options are actively deteriorating.

A car. Gas/petrol for a car. A parking spot for a car. Car insurance. A driver’s license. Winter tires for cars. Anything car related.

It’s so ridiculous to pay for a mobile living room that needs to be parked everywhere people go with it.

My cynical ass tells me that if we can grow storage devices, the tech is gonna be bought and patented by a giant corporation so they can charge us a hefty price for it.

A bicycle. No gas to pay, no parking fees, no insurance, and I can do most of the maintenance.

I grew up with DOS and used Windows 1 (barely, DOS was better), 3.1, 95, 98, etc… But curiosity made me try a bunch of OS in the beginning of the 2000s, like BeOS, QNX, and Linux (Kheops, Mandrake, SuSE). I dual booted for many years, keeping Linux as my main OS but having to boot Windows for games. I preferred Linux but I was pretty much OS agnostic for a while. I even worked as level 1 tech support for many years, helping people with Windows and Office products.

But then came Windows 8, 10, and now 11, + Office 365 + OneDrive. It’s very difficult to stand any of those new versions, with the ads, the constant peddling for Microsoft products, the “forced” login with a Microsoft account, the updates whenever they feel like it if you don’t pay enough for Windows, if the updates are not breaking something. A few years ago I was helping a friend and discovered a version of Windows 7 where you can’t even change the wallpaper.

TBF, I knew it was coming. Anyone in IT knew for years that Microsoft planned of having everything subscription based. To me, every new versions of Windows or Office, or Teams, is now more intolerable than the previous one.

Anyway, at some point I stopped gaming/dual booting and pretty much kept exclusively on Linux. My workplace used Windows, and I use Linux at home. I’ve been using Debian for 15 years now and despite minor issues with sound recently, since pipewire, every time I use Windows, I’m reminded of how much worse it could be.

Recently I quit my job as a level 1 tech. I can’t help people with Microsoft products anymore. Having calls from people telling me they cannot delete files from their OneDrive when it tells them it’s full, then discover it’s a bug and users with their drives full cannot delete anything, is just disconcerting. Before all that, I could at least see/understand the reason why things were working like they did; I could help and explain it to the users. Now, I’m as frustrated as they are when I use Microsoft products.

I had the same experience as OP when I tried Matrix a few years ago. No hate on it but it was not easy and I gave up because I already had a simple IRC setup that’s working for me and my friends.

Some IRC clients are now web based and it’s been enough to keep a few of my friends there instead of Discord. We use The Lounge. It can keep a history, display images, videos, play mp3s, and show previews of most URLs. Like, we can simply copy/paste images into a channel and they are uploaded on the server and displayed in the chat. There’s also push notifications and it’s mobile friendly.

Convos also does something like this. Apparently it can also do video chat but I’ve never got it to work.

I’ve recently been thinking about giving Matrix another try but I’m pretty sure my friends are going to stay on “modern” IRC anyway.

Email and IRC push notifications through The Lounge. The rest is disabled. Even amber alerts, because my government uses them for everything. It’s “illegal” to disable them here but with a few commands on adb its possible to disable the service and never have to hear that end of the world alarm for an elderly person missing 200 km away from me.

A decade ago I was whining to my friends that I didn’t like Steam because I was using Linux and Steam was really shitty on that OS at some point. I remember not being able to get the correct keyboard layout in chats, and tons of little annoyances, like not being able to choose where you install games. It was disappointing.

As someone that loves FOSS, I never really liked the model of “not owning my games” but I must admit that it works for most people that don’t care about such things. Valve made huge progress with Steam for Linux over the years, and Proton was indeed a game changer.

I have to tip my hat to them.

Sadly, it’s been a good part of IBM’s business model for years. They call it Capacity on Demand.

Inactive processor cores and inactive memory units are resources that are included with your server, but are not available for use until you activate them.

I learned this when I moved into a corporate IT environment with Power servers. I couldn’t believe that some companies would pay a quarter of a million for a server that is intentionally stunted/limited unless you pay even more.

But cars are computers now. “Everything’s computer!”. So they will follow that subscription model.

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Just not Bell anymore. I’ve tried enough to know how it will turn out and there’s no need to try again.

Plus, I really hate the fact that they send people knocking on my door, or wait for me and my neighbours by the elevator. As despicable as the others are, they are not doing this shit.

NIE. WIEDER. BELL.

Bell Canada. They have salespeople doing door to door. They also “partner” with landlords to setup little kiosks with salespeople in the hall of big buildings. Like, you’re getting home, pass the RFID lock for tenants only, then there is a Bell representative waiting for you next to the elevator.

But with Bell it’s not just their marketing. Once they sell you something they change the terms and/or charge you a different amount than what was agreed.

If you discuss this with one of their salesperson, they will claim that Bell has changed and promise everything will be fine this time if you take a new contract with them. But spoiler, they don’t change and are always just more aggressive with their marketing.

Sometimes I feel a bit bad for the salespersons because they are often immigrants or young people that have not been fooled by Bell yet. They are enthusiastic but end up getting told to fuck off by people that have experience with Bell. I’m usually polite but very firm with them.

EDIT: Same with Hello Fresh. I have never used them but since some salesperson knocked on my door to try to sell me their services, I will make sure to never buy anything from them.

But it was maybe a few months old at best. Maybe it had a defective battery from the start but I contacted Xiaomi and I’ve been told it was “normal” in “winter”. Then when I looked online for this issue with Xiaomi phones, the people on the forums said it was “normal”, and that I expected too much.

In the end it was probably a defective battery. I couldn’t believe that they were selling millions of these and that people always just kept them warm all the time. Like, they have a proper winter too in some parts of China, and I can’t imagine millions of people having their phone dying on them as soon as we get into sweater weather.

But obviously this left a bad taste in my mouth. This and having to ask permission to root my phone.

I decided not to buy another Xiaomi phone when the one I previously had would turn off when it was a bit mildly cool outside.

Like, I would take it out of my pocket to look at bus schedules but it would turn off after a few seconds of being exposed to 5°C, saying the battery was dead. Another time I had it attached to my bike handlebar and it kept turning off because apparently 13°C with the wind was also too chilly. Every time that fucking Xiaomi phone was feeling a bit chill, the battery would just die. And not even in freezing temps!

I looked online and everone of the fanboys on the forums kept saying that this is normal, battery performance degrades in winter, that iPhones do the same, and apparently all other phones do the same. In short, I had unreasonable expectations.

Yet, all my other phones’ batteries didn’t die within seconds of taking them out of my pocket, even in winter.

So, I don’t have to bother with their names anymore.

Por que no los dos?

I was using E16 years ago and liked it but eventually switched to Gnome (2, I think), after waiting for E17 for too long.

What made me quit was the wait. All the other DEs at the time were releasing new versions frequently but Enlightenment took forever.

I usually do. This was from my google news feed, which opens in Chrome. I could have opened it with FF, which has uBlock origin, but it’s not worth it.

I just got mildly infuriated when this crap appeared.

I though this was the place for this but apparently not. I’ll delete the post and never try posting anything on lemmy again. Have a nice day.

I’m not a cable expert by any means and can’t answer all the questions, but I can tell you that the protocol used by cable is called DOSCIS. So it might guide you into some of those answers.

And the coax cable itself doesn’t go very far now because it’s connected to a fiber network somewhere in your neighbourhood.