The reality is that more and more web users are phone and tablet only.

Phones and tablets are consumer devices and most users are consumers rather than creators. This is especially true outside the Anglo-sphere and in developing countries.

All this to say it’s going to get worse and may never get better.

Let me give you a bit of the outside of the story as well.

For sure tiktok and meta and Google want you in their walled Garden for all the obvious reasons. However, and it’s gotten even worse as of late, if you have any kind of computationally expensive but desirable content/data the crawlers/scrapers/scripters will pummel your site. Despite how annoying you find the captchas and bot detection a computer doesn’t give too shits about it and at this point they basically serve as a rate limit or effort to make your content too computationally expensive to scrape and be worth it.

While accounts don’t necessarily solve this problem they do help as another impediment.

The Linux version of a printer is just buy a brother color laser (or non color). I bought one for 85 bucks like 15 years ago and it still chugging along

Consumer cards are often actually bigger than the datacenter counterparts.

Most CPUs and GPUs in a rack just have low profile heat sinks and depend on the chassis to move the air. Since a datacenter doesn’t care about noise the chassis will just have a shot load of fans running full tilt over the fanless components.

Though when you get up to the large ML cards from AMD for example they have like Kleenex box sized heatsinks on them.

That or a tacit " I’ve seen this"

If the house of commons was comprised of the popular vote of the country maybe but it isn’t. The vote splits in each riding and on the riding level they lose and it becomes a conservative seat. In deeply liberal ridings like downtown Toronto the NDP and liberals might trade places but anywhere where the vote is close they both lose.

That is why FPTP trends towards two parties. That is why there isn’t the Canadian alliance and PC parties anymore.

Those are not usually real gold though.

It’s not really an “of course”

Some countries don’t tax lottery winnings, Canada for example. Though for Canada game shows are a bit more nebulous.

Doesn’t matter what they want.

The only real option for right wing voters is the conservatives so they will keep voting blue.

The only real option for liberal voters not happy with the current state of things is the NDP.

So the NDP pulls votes from the liberals and the conservatives will be in power.

Canada has only put it off for a few years. The liberals have been in power for a long time and people were already itching for a change.

It isn’t like the conservatives did poorly They turned out tones of votes, the only reason they are not in power is because the left United to keep them out, essentially decimating the other left wing parties.

The next election we have will very likely go to the conservatives when the left splits again.

The reality is that there is no tax break large enough to make up the difference in costs for a lot of things. Even with tariffs China is still cheaper.

No, no it is not.

I mean they were built to make money, the fact that you can send them a national security letter is just a happy accident that keeps the NSA from having to run more datacenters.

That’s true and not true at the same time. The one advantage Windows has in this regard is that everyone is working on the same “distro” as it were. With Linux the various components can vary enough to be confusing. I think that is why it’s important to choose a distro with a sizeable community.

Something like Ubuntu, or an arch derivative like endeavouros are a good choice for that reason.

I would also warm against the copy paste of commands that you don’t know what you are doing with. The one nice thing is that in 2025 you can drop a command into your choice of LLM assistant and get a pretty good description of what it does without breaking out the man pages.

Cameras are there to lower insurance premiums. That’s why for years and years every security camera video looked like it was filmed on a potato because there was no incentive to upgrade. The rise of phone cameras has caused the price of 4k cameras to plummet though so they are getting better.

Yeah most self checkout at grocery stores is hot garbage for all the reasons you mentioned and more.

My favorite self check out experience is at Uniqlo. You walk up to what is effectively a plastic bucket with an iPad attached. Toss your shit in the bucket it shows you what it thinks you put in there and you click ok and tap you CC. It takes like 30s.

Grocery stores are just cheap and won’t put the 5 cent RFID tag on things.

I mean… That is effectively what Instacart and Uber are.

Honestly in an office situation there is no excuse not to have a super automatic espresso machine. They cost like 1500 dollars and you don’t need to buy the damn kcups.

I mean it can.

You’ll just have to go and download your data again from the public disclosure (assuming they disclose all of it)

Fake it for a bit till you have some training data and then train a penis Pokemon net