Things like planned obsolescence and software blocks on things like farmers fixing tractors without John Deere’s software permission almost makes me think the bad guys won the Cold War.

Between me and a mechanic friend, we can fix my car but we can’t turn off the (wholly unnecessary) “inspection needed” noise without me spending $1000 on software. Apparently, the inspection needed warning isn’t even related to anything. It just comes on every x miles. The car doesn’t have a detected issue or anything. That beep is radicalizing me.

These things go in cycles. I remember when “Fedora Core” — they dropped the “Core” part of the name — was the cool new distro. I remember when Ubuntu was the cool new distro. Just ignore it and play around with distros until you find one you like.

In my opinion, new users should use a very popular distro so they have documentation and message boards. After a few years, you get your legs under you. At that point, start distro hopping using weird desktop environments. Then, someday, you get a lot of experience and use a very popular distro because software is a tool and you don’t care. (If something has buzz, I throw it in a VM and go “Huh, that’s interesting.”)

It’s sort of like how the target audience for Nike Air Monarchs is people buying their first pair of Nike Airs and dads who aren’t trying to hear the word “colorway” and just want some shoes.

I was in New Mexico recently and Google Maps gave me a route from Bandelier National Monument to Santa Fe that included a “shortcut” through the Los Alamos National Laboratory campus. I got to meet a security guard.

So, yes. I would say I have experienced this.

I had to move from a dorm to another dorm once and “borrowed” a grocery cart because I had like 12¢ in my checking account and had to just push all my shit in a grocery cart on a major city’s downtown sidewalks on a business day.

I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.

As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.

Medical things, mostly. Everyone experienced the speed that mRNA vaccines can be developed and deployed at scale. A lot is coming from that tech. One of the objectively good uses of AI is protein folding and discovering new compounds. Just being able to target a virus’s weak point is so new, stupid people are freaked out by it.

Consumer tech stuff like batteries and whatever the hype cycle is promoting — crypto or LLMs — gets all the attention but the life sciences field marches on. There are things that are going to revolutionize the way we think about certain diseases. In my lifetime, AIDS went from death sentence to something more like expensive diabetes.

And with emergency care, there are things that even an ER doctor with $200,000 in equipment can only hope to triage today that will be something an EMT can begin to triage on the way to the hospital with something simple. (NARCAN exists now but it’s an example of slow and steady progress. Imagine a NARCAN for heart attack or stroke where we just keep it in our first aid kits.)

My personal opinion (as a dispassionate atheist) is that religion isn’t the problem with human nature. In the U.S., for instance, we have some Christians who have strayed so far, I don’t get how they’ve even seen a Bible verse. But also, basically every major Civil Rights leader was a Christian preacher or woman of faith. There are similar situations everywhere. There’s Buddhists who are so non-violent they wouldn’t kill a fly and other “Buddhists” who commit genocide, which doesn’t even make fucking sense.

So, my view of religion is that it’s mostly not the thing to focus on. People can be organized for good or evil and there’s plenty of secular things where people define an identity. I suspect if religion never existed, we’d have all the same problems. I mean, we have soccer hooligans and it’s not because people object to 22 people getting some exercise on a lovely afternoon. (Or a miserable, rainy Wednesday night in England.)

Do bagels count as cake based on calorie count or bread based on texture/flavor or doughnuts based on shape?

It’s usually just to take a small amount of delicious oil or fat — whatever you have on hand — and saute diced onions with diced bell pepper (or local equivalent) until the onions are slightly transparent. Keep going if you want the onions start being brown and have a sweet flavor. That brown is just the natural sugars coming out of the onion and is what “caramelizes” means. Caramel is sugar. And then add garlic and/or ginger and whatever spices you like.

If you want to, add meat. If you don’t, do not. (Often, that very oil step is done from browning meat and not wasting the fat.)

If you want soup, add a lot of liquid and whatever and cook it slowly. If you want paella, jambalaya, jollof, biryani, or equivalent — every culture has a rice dish — use the rice recipe on the bag as if it were water. (Use stock if you have any but water works fine.)

There are dishes that are different. Like fried rice and French Toast use old rice and toast respectively. Baking is a science. But anyone can make a pot of delicious with a few ingredients and it’s a 10 minute, one pot meal.

Learn to cook the base of meals in different cultures. Like a Sofrito.

Most of the best classic dishes in the world really start with three or four ingredients and are just variations. You shouldn’t overthink it or buy rare ingredients. You’re better off picking one and mastering the basic steps. Learning to cook isn’t about learning to recreate a chef-cooked meal. It’s about learning to cook simple, cheap ingredients.

Other people have mentioned phone apps so I’ll add that I got a Garmin device for hiking and it’s got road navigation. It’s better in some cases because the maps are downloaded so if you’re somewhere without service, it can still do navigation.

Obviously, they’re meant to supplement a phone for off-grid stuff like hiking, boating, etc. but the road directions seem perfectly fine. It knows where gas stations are. And some of their models are car-only so I guess they’re also used by drivers in areas with spotty phone coverage.

The downside is, obviously, that you have to update the maps and there’s no traffic details. But I just thought I’d mention it as an option. (You also don’t have to use their maps if you prefer OpenStreetMaps or whatever.)

They don’t exist to answer your questions. They exist to frustrate you into giving up.

I’d definitely fuck with another country. Good Britain. Or maybe Macedonia to fuck with Greece and North Macedonia. (Though bad Britain arguably has 3 countries.) Maybe The United State of America if it’s in the Americas.

Or maybe WaterParksylvania if I the water park budget is where I’d expect it to be.

I technically have both since I’m a developer but my daily driver is my iPhone because when I have an android phone, I constantly want to put different roms on it so it ends up unstable. So, Apple’s walled garden saves me from myself making my phone unstable when I need a phone for calls/messages and not tinkering.

I don’t notice much of a difference these days, though. Sometimes, I charge my iPhone and grab my Pixel and I don’t even notice. Back in the day, iOS was generally more polished and Android was either slightly behind or ahead on specific features but I find that both are pretty much mature at this point. Flagship cameras are both excellent. Accessory ecosystems exist. There’s really not an overwhelming reason to switch, (especially if the Android phone is also a walled garden, which seems more common now).

My favorite drink is usually a crisp white wine like Pinot Grigio but I’ll order a Sazerac or Old Fashioned (or a specialty cocktail) at nice places. At a dive bar or music venue or whatever, I typically stick to gin and tonic or vodka soda, the main reasons being just that they’re simple for a busy bartender to make and also don’t make me as miserable the next day.

In 2003, The Onion had an “article” with no text that was just the headline “Taste Acquired” and a picture of empty beer cans.

I suspect the main upside will be that you can argue shitty regulations aren’t valid. Like if Trump decides to allow the dumping of poison in the waterhole, it’s very clear that the the EPA is allowed to act when somebody poisons the waterhole.

Or maybe it’s just a Calvinball ruling where they decided the Supreme Court is the only branch that doesn’t have checks and balances. It is a mystery.

The perfect plan. The only thing that could screw it up is if the climate somehow changed.

I don’t have Linux on a tablet right now but my first thought was that you might want to check into what Steam Deck users are doing with “Desktop Mode.” It has a touchscreen and virtual keyboard so it’s essentially a tablet-like experience (though it has touchpads and a few buttons, obviously, and isn’t a tablet). It runs KDE by default, which I’m not as familiar with as Gnome, but it might have more users than any other GNU/Linux touchscreen product.

Last time I had a Linux tablet, there were also some Firefox/Chrome/Gnome extensions that made it more touch-friendly. Like instead of selecting text, one finger swipe scrolled, two-fingers zoomed in, etc. like a typical tablet. Not sure if that’s still an issue. But if you do run into an issue, it might already be solved by an extension.

Hopefully, someone has more up-to-date advice. The tablet I had (and probably still have in a drawer somewhere) was an experimental Ubuntu Touch device and there’s been huge strides since then.