Honestly, it sounds like you’ve been spending too much time in some online communities that are doom posting about everything. Do things suck right now? Yes, but they’ve literally sucked for as long as human society has existed. Things can always be better, or always be worse. However you can’t just sit around passively waiting for the times to change, or your life will suck.

The single biggest factor in whether your life is good or not is you and your actions. Don’t let things outside of your control convince you to give up. Do the best with what you have, and I promise you that you can find fulfillment and happiness in the life available to you.

It can be very harmful to act on an uninformed opinion. There’s also simply too much out there to be informed on everything, so logically there should be lots of things you aren’t able to have a valid opinion on.

People frequently get around this by finding people they think they can trust, and borrowing their “informed opinion” on things. But this can also be risky, and easily leads to groups with highly polarized opinions (political parties, etc). Even borrowing scientific/expert “opinions” on things can lead you astray, as we’ve seen with many of the funded studies on food health. Two experts can easily have conflicting opinions on something, with strong arguments/evidence to back up their stance.

So basically having completely uninformed opinions is dangerous, it’s not possible to learn everything well enough to have a good opinion on it, and borrowing others opinions on things only works some of the time. So it’s probably best to accept that you shouldn’t have a strong opinion on most things, and to be always willing to re-evaluate your opinions if you run into evidence that refutes your current opinions.

A bank I used for a mortgage has mandatory text message 2fa if they think you’re on a new device (won’t allow google auth/etc). And web browsers like firefox/brave block enough cookies/etc that it requires the “new device” authentication everytime I log in.

Problem is, for a couple months there was some delay with their text messages. It would take 10-20 minutes to send your 2fa code, and the code would expire after 5 min, meaning that by the time you got the code it was always expired and unusable.

Made it completely impossible to log in to pay my mortgage payments. Led to some really frustrating talks on the phone about how I didn’t want to pay with a credit card over the phone, I wanted them to fix their damn system so I could log in and pay via bank transfer like usual.

Many new PCs (generally the cheaper priced ones) come in S mode now, where you can only install Microsoft store apps. You can turn this off to allow regular PC programs too, but they require you to set up the Microsoft store before you can disable it.

If you’re trying to set up a new PC without a Microsoft account (which is getting increasingly hard), you can’t disable S mode. There was a workaround that involved booting into recovery mode and running some commands/registry edits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has blocked that too by now.

This is also the biggest reason Valve supports Linux and ChromeOS. Microsoft really wants full control over what software people can use on Windows, and Valve is worried about getting pushed off the platform.

Yes I’ve seen it before. Once Microsoft even updated their virus definitions to auto-delete the chrome installer when downloaded. Thankfully they reversed that one pretty quickly, but I had to completely disable all Windows virus protection to install chrome for a relative.

Yeah, I’ve gotten sucked into HSR as well (first f2p gacha game that’s ever hooked me), and I can’t imagine having time for another game like it. The daily content isn’t really any trouble to do, but having to do that for multiple games would get old fast. And the monthly content drops can be really substantial and take a long time to experience all the content.

Sounds like Play Music All Access subscribers are safe for the time being.

Probably just not big enough. Pokemon-like games are very common, palworld was just hugely successful and a lot of the media coverage for it was comparing it to Pokemon.

This will probably be an unpopular take, but this my best guess at why Trump won.

On the election coverage I was watching (ABC), the biggest point they kept coming back to were questions of if people thought that the economy is better now vs when Trump was in office, and if people feel like they’re better or worse off financially that they were during Trump years. If I remember right, the poll data they showed had twice as many people say that things were worse economy/financially then they were during Trump era, vs people who thought things were better financially now.

I know that matches with my personal experience, I live in a rural area, and my company primarily does work for other small businesses. The Trump years had a huge amount of negative news, but my business grew a lot over those years. In comparison, the last 4 years have been very stagnant in growth. We’ve picked up some new clients, but many of the small businesses we did business with have closed down or had to sell to new owners. I wouldn’t say our business is doing worse, but everything costs more and our company profit/wages haven’t kept up. And I know it’s worse for a lot other businesses, at least from seeing how many I’ve seen go out of business.

A lot of the economic troubles came from Covid, so it’s not fair to place them all on the Biden administration. But I think a lot of the country is unhappy financially right now, and they think Trump has a better chance of changing that. I’m guessing a lot of the “undecided voters” that decided the election picked the option they thought would help them financially over all other considerations.

Having a usable product while your opponents continually shoot themselves in the foot is a viable market strategy.

You can probably just use any of the big chat programs, and just start out by telling it you want it to converse with you like it’s just another person.

Gemini has that “live” feature where you can talk out loud and it sounds like you’re talking to a real person. Combining that with pre-prompting for casual conversation is fairly convincing.

Playing with it on my own computer, locally hosting it and running it offline, has been pretty cool. I find it really impressive when it’s something open source and community driven. I also think there are a lot of useful applications for things that are traditionally not solvable with traditional programming.

However a lot of the pushed corporate AI feels not that useful, and there’s something about it that really rubs me the wrong way.

New drugs get a period of time where the company that developed it has exclusive manufacturing rights. The idea is that if anyone can start making the drug immediately, there’s not a good reason for companies to spend money to develop new drugs. However if demand for a drug is greater than the ability of the creating company to produce the drug, other companies are allowed to temporarily step in and make up the difference.

No, because apple’s monopoly doesnt count because they’re upfront about it being a monopoly.

Which is stupid, but that’s how it works apparently

It seems cool. I know I don’t have the time to get into a moba (or moba-lite) right now, but I hope it catches on and does well.

Windows is absolutely abusing their position as the dominant OS to push their other products. The number of “no don’t do that” messages and pop ups when trying to install chrome on a windows computer is clearly anti-competitive, and the only reason microsoft has been getting away with it is because Edge/etc hasn’t achieved enough market share.

Right, but in my case I’m not actually a customer of the local electric company that offers fiber. However pressure from them got my telco company (the only choice I have besides satellite) to offer me fiber, raising my max speed from 3Mb/s to 1000Mb/s.

Do you live off grid?

Definitely seeing that where I live. One of the local electric companies started offering gigabit fiber for $75, where most people were paying a lot more than that for DSL or low quality satellite (which were the only choices before). It’s been a huge improvement for those people, and it’s forced some of the long stagnant Telco companies to actually compete and start rolling out fiber of their own.

I think some people sabotage relationships for the same reason they throw video games. They have fears/suspicions that it’s going to not work out, and rather than be a victim they want to have some control over the outcome. A loss or failed relationship doesn’t hurt as bad if they caused it to end the way it did.

However in your case, it sounds more like a fear of something different. It’s a lot easier to keep things like they are, when a relationship gets too serious or life impacting it can be easy to be scared of the change, and instead subconsciously decide you want to keep things like they are.