Australia?

I didn’t want anyone to think I’m actually from that shithole state, Mississippi.

It’s close enough that counting Mississippis is still roughly accurate.

(for non-US people, we sometimes estimate seconds by counting 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi… just because it’s a long word that takes about the right amount of time to say)

I think you misread that. This poster’s experience isn’t from 2016. They installed a program called “Outlook 2016” recently.

That happens a lot to Google products.

At which point do we acknowledge the cure is as bad as the problem?

Didn’t we all do that when we stopped using Norton Anti-virus?

SmartTube is back up this morning after an update.

I’d be surprised if Chase actually did this. This is just ammo for pro-corporate politicians and lobbyists. “Government rules are going to make it worse for people, see? Stop making rules or all the banks will have to do this!”

It’s bullshit. Keep making rules. Big banks are dangerous.

Interesting. I’m running it on a Celeron N4020 with 4GB RAM right now. This system was allegedly shitty in 2019.

I replaced my Chromebook with Elementary OS. On it’s face, it’s a lightweight, web browsing OS with a limited “App Center” of approved apps (similar to ChromeOS), but underneath, it is a Debian-based distro that you can do anything you want with.

Spreadsheets are life. I think in spreadsheets. I hope it comes soon.

If you use Debian-based linux (Ubuntu, Minut, others), Mozilla recommends getting the package directly from their respository rather than flatpak or other repos.

Personally, I saw a major performance increase on my low-powered laptop when I switched from flatpak to the Mozilla package.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/4-reasons-to-try-mozillas-new-firefox-linux-package-for-ubuntu-and-debian-derivatives/

Dell Latitude 5000 series are usually bought by corporations for employees. They are made of sturdy metal, and have features like backlit keyboards and physical trackpad buttons. Then, after 2-3 years, or if they have some minor problem, they end up in a giant stack that either never gets diagnosed, or just gets sent to recycling.

I have had fantastic luck getting a couple of these either direct from the company I’m working for, or from ebay or a company that recycles laptops. They usually don’t actually have a problem, and if they do, parts are readily available on ebay. You can end up with a high-spec laptop from just a few years ago for practically nothing.

I’m really interested in Graphene and Google privacy, but what does it mean when you say "Sandboxed? Like… I want to use Google Maps, does Google still track me? Maybe only when the app is open, and not when it’s closed?

I work for a company that does marketing, and they are seriously struggling right now because TV and Social media ads are getting more expensive, while at the same time becoming less effective.

Yes. This is true.

Because ads suck and people hate them. Whats the new way? Be good at what you do so people talk about your brand. Show up in searches when I’m looking for you. That’s it.

Oh good. Because if there’s a profile of my advertising preferences out there, it knows that when I am forced to view an ad, I look away from the screen, turn off the volume, sigh dramatically, and say “Fuck <this product> right in the ass.”

Personalize away.

TurboTax lets you go through the entire process of entering information and telling you your refund amount before charging you.

I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself with the free system, so I did my semi-complicated taxes through TurboTax until I reached the payment screen, and then went and did them in the free system and confirmed that the dollar amounts matched. Then I submitted through the free system.

Next year, I’ll probably just trust myself more, so Intuit doesn’t get my data.

That was my thought. I’m not sure if it’s based in science, but I remember being a huge fan of Windows 2000 back in the day, and Microsoft pushed a final service pack that made it highly unstable in 2005, and refused to update/fix it. My theory was that they were trying to push everyone to Windows XP, but I’m prone to thinking the worst of large corporations.

Holy crap. Other people have heard of Discuit.

This was happening to some extent 10-12 years ago when I first signed up for Facebook. There would be an ad for Target and it would say “Your friend Jimmy Smith likes Target”. And then I’d ask Jimmy if he follows the Target account on Facebook, and he’d say hell no.

This always seemed shady as fuck, and that was before Facebook got much much worse.