Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I’d be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don’t really remember too many people using AIM.
Downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, we don’t see them even on communities on other instances. I find it makes it a much more pleasant experience.
They deteriorate with time but that said I have tapes from the 80s that are still playable. I’m not sure if there’s a worse rate for that timespan compared to disc-rot for CDs, or failures of digital drives. What ever the format I guess the key is to do backups.
Although I don’t use them day-to-day any more, cassette tapes are what I have the most warmth and nostalgia for because they’re what I grew up with. Messing around with tapes and making mix-tapes were a big part of my childhood and teenage years, difficult to sell to those who never experienced it but I can’t think of any other format that allowed that same level of playfulness and creativity.
I’m surprised at that, from my experience I think it’s still more normal than not to have analogue clocks at home, and I would always prefer an analogue watch.
I was mildly interested until I saw “designed for creators”. Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.
I really think that’s a separate issue, which needs to be discussed as a completely separated issue. I agree ads by their nature are manipulative, they serve the website and the advertiser not the user. I think that once ads are non user-tracking then we can have a discussion about advertising ethics and deceptive advertising (online ads have always been terrible even before they were privacy invading) but you can’t have that discussion when it’s mixed in with privacy issues. Only once you take away the privacy issues then we can have the conversation about ad-pollution versus website revenue.
I really wish people would stop calling them adblockers too, they’re wide-spectrum content blockers, and they’re not blocking ads, they’re blocking malicious ad-networks which is necessary for user security. Given the prevalence of online spyware it should be a basic feature built in to all web browsers.
It just gives spyware-promoting sites the ability to say “but you’re hurting our revenue” which is a completely separate issue.
Or could it be that it might bother them but they just keep quiet and put up with it, assume that it’s part of owning a computer and feel powerless to change anything?
Admittedly I do have the bias of experience which could blind me to the difficulties, when I phrased my first two sentences as questions they were genuine questions. Between work and personal life I must’ve installed Linux in some form at least 200 times over the last 20 years, so I’m not most users.
I’ve also not used Windows in many years, the last I think was when I had to use Windows 7 for work about 10 years ago and I found it extremely difficult to get it to do what I want. If it’s improved then it’s improved.
On the other hand a novice user can ask somebody to install Linux for them, what about that? That’s what my non-techy parents have done, and it’s easier for them to use Linux (they say so) and easier for me to provide technical support for them.
Also yes, avoid Nvidia.
How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?
I’m talking drivers, audio, networking, libraries, DNF, repositories, plugins, runtime dependencies, …
Is proprietary software any easier than that though? Don’t you have to put in much more time removing all the spyware and bloat they put in and then spend all your time perpetually fighting against forced updates and applications being installed without your permission?
Whereas with Fedora my experience is more or less install it and forget it.
The “it’s easier” argument for proprietary software I think died at least 15 years ago.
Choice of applications is a different argument.
I had one of those printers in the 90s.
Most people aren’t professional musicians though.
Missed out OpenTTD, that’s my go-to game these days.
I don’t understand why people are so cynical about this, it seems like a harmless demonstration of the current state of the technology.
Essentially yes, I would give the person using AI to generate an original image the credit as the image’s creator. I’m willing to bet that anything “good” AI generates is a result of many attempts and refinements and a human selecting the best result, and to me that makes it a human-driven creative process using a tool, the same as using a random number generator.
I’m deliberately not saying “copyrightable” because I don’t personally believe that digital files should be copyrightable (since recognising a copyright of a number is insanity), but it should be copyrightable in a society that recognises number copyrights.
My thought on that is if you generate multiple images through a random number generator and find one that’s interesting or aesthetically pleasing, then you are the creator since selecting it, while low effort, is the creative process.
Been on several interrail trips and would consider doing it again. Do check the prices and any extra charges for what you want to do first, to make sure it’s really your best option. But travelling around Europe by rail is fantastic.
Not within Lemmy, but if you were on, for example, a federated Mastodon instance it’s perfectly possible to boost that comment that would appear like a retweet to Mastodon users.
Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.