Installed Pop!_OS from Windows 11 two weeks ago myself.

And misses others you didn’t think about.

Regex should generally be avoided wherever possible.

I looked at kagi but I don’t want to pay for it because I’m a cheap bastard.

I am moving to Germany next year. Even though I was born there and my mother taught me some, and I learned it in high school, and I also studied in college in the USA, I cannot speak it worth shit. I’m hoping I pick up some more when I move, but if not maybe my kids can teach me.

I find that I’m just trying to pick up things through osmosis. I watch German youtubers and try to watch a German movie or two every now and then. And then sometimes when I’m talking I try to directly translate what I’m saying in my head, and assuming I know the words, I usually fuck up the order, article, or tense.

I say all that to say that my current workflow is already overwhelming and I’m on a bit of a time crunch. I do really need to surround myself with native speakers and listen to them more. I will reach out. Thanks!

I use perplexity.ai more than google now. I still don’t love it and it’s more of a testament to how far google has fallen than the usefulness of AI, but I do find myself using it to get a start on basic searches. It is, dare I say, good at calorie counting and language learning things. Helps calculate calorie to gram ratios and the math is usually correct. It also helps me with German, since it’s good at finding patterns and how German people typically say what I am trying to say, instead of just running it through a translator which may or not have the correct context.

I do miss the days where I could ask AI to talk like Obama while he’s taking a shit during an earthquake. ChatGPT would let you go off the rails when it first came out. That was a lot of fun and I laughed pretty hard at the stupid scenarios I could come up with. I’m probably the reason the guardrails got added.

Thanks for clarifying. Seems I misread your intent. Apologies for that. Take care.

I think your characterization is probably somewhat incorrect. I care, and I have seen other parents care. Maybe single childless people don’t care, but this is not always the case.

I care about other people’s kids. I want them housed, fed, clothed, etc.

I want my tax dollars to improve other’s lives so they have what they need to be self-actualized human beings.

I won’t let them get hurt at the playground if I can help it.

I watch them when they cross the street to make sure they do it safely.

I have little ones myself and I believe it takes a village. I’m also 37 and a German/US dual national. I was raised to care, and the societal standards for the US are not a one size fits all definition globally. My wife is Latina and her family is friendly to all children and show lots of care. Germans watch out for others’ kids as they walk to school or play on the playground. It’s disappointing to hear that the fake niceness of the US really is fake here but not very surprising. You truly can’t relate to each other. I am glad I’m moving out next year.

Yes yes. I know this is the internet and kids bad, but I do enjoy when a child smiles or has a small victory. And I enjoy seeing my friend’s children be friends with mine and grow up together.

TLDR some of us care and love to see pictures and hear about your kids.

I bought a 2080ti for $1200 right before covid and everyone gave me shit about how I was wasting my money because the 3000 series had a lower MSRP which then ballooned to $2000+.

So while everyone else was struggling to get a graphics card due to supply chain issues and prohibitive costs, I was gaming in 4k resolution throughout the pandemic. To say that this was clutch during a time I couldn’t really do much outside of the house with other people would be a massive understatement.

I usually would not have spent that much on a card, but I won a hackathon cash prize right before so had some money burning a hole in my pocket. The card is still going strong and is still my daily driver, so I can’t say it’s been a bad purchase at all.

Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.

Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.

A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.

“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.

And what happens if Joe dies in his sleep before election day? No one is talking about this as a liability but given the speed of his cognitive decline and the stress of the job and schedule, why is it outside the realm of possibility? Trump will of course live to be 180 years old since he’s literally a conglomerate of McDonalds microplastics and literally one of the worst pieces of shit to walk the earth in the post modern era. Why would anyone want Trump over Kamala outside of being an impotent right wing Russia cuck?

Kamala sucks but she’s the contingency plan. She’s part of his admin that passed the IRA, CHIPS, etc. and trying to put forth executive action that would seemingly be beneficial for the American people. Presumably she’d continue many of the same policies as her predecessor. There is no perfect candidate in a FPTP two-party system.

So because I’m in a first past the post system over here, how does that work? You will still have other parties that can form a coalition against the right at that point? Assuming they don’t get 50+% of the vote, correct? The courts here are already fascist and preparing for the takeover due to Trump’s judge appointments during his term. Congress is deadlocked and useless as usual, and Biden is circling the drain figuratively and literally. There is no run off here. No coalitions to be had. Trump gets 47%, Biden 46%, and Kennedy 7%? Trump becomes president even though over half the country doesn’t want him. What’s worse is that he only needs percentages of the electoral college and not actual votes.

Germany, at least from my outsider perspective, seems to understand its history enough to be minimizing the right wing to its true proportions. But yeah, I’m well aware the developed world is going to shit. I’m not really sure what to do about it or where to go. The USA feels like ground zero for this shit due to Trump being in Russia’s pocket. That propaganda op worked better than anything they’ve ever done in the past. Even they probably can’t believe how successful they’ve been.

We looked at Spain, but ultimately the salaries are so low that we wouldn’t be able to afford to fly home to visit relatives and friends assuming we can still do that post Trump. I guess I’m not writing off the US entirely just yet but it’s not looking too great.

Thanks for your advice and well wishes. I hope to vote against AfD if/when I get there.

I’ve been saving for a down payment for a house for two years. It would appear my money is not wanted in the USA. I also have dual EU citizenship. My plan is to improve my spoken German and take my family overseas.

As an atheist married to a Salvadoran woman with whom I have two hispanic children, I feel like after they run out of illegal immigrants we’ll not be far down the “committing suicide with two bullets to the back of the head” list. Or maybe we’ll just get sent to a camp that treats ADHD if you catch my drift.

I visited Germany in 2022 and was very impressed with the walkable/bikeable infrastructure and ICE trains even if they were late on occasion. The food wasn’t my favorite but the culture and people were kind and they still seem to value rule of law and societal decorum to a certain degree. The idea that making a nazi salute in public is jailable/fineable is really how it should be everywhere but “free speech” yadda yadda…

I have wanted to leave the US since 2003. Just didn’t have skills or money until now. I’m still going to struggle with a language barrier and finding a job with A2 level German. That’s my biggest issue right now I think.

My mom moved to the US not knowing English. How the turntables have turned.

We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.

It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.

Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).

There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.

I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.

I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.

Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.

And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.

Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.