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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Thankfully, I don’t use Tidal for music discovery. I luckily have a lot of people I’ve met over the years that love music, perform themselves, work for venues, or are crew for artists. That plus indie radio like KEXP and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts has kept me exploring for new music via recommendations from those areas.

    I use Tidal for high fidelity music with a more acceptable artist payout than Spotify.

    That said, I’m slowly working towards going back to the old days where my massive CD collection rips (i still have those binders too), direct purchases of high fidelity content sitting on my network share, and records aremy primary source of listening pleasure. The only problem here is acquiring the hardware to scale thanks to the AI boom buying up all the production lines of consumer grade hardware, and business class storage drives having gone up in cost. Technically I can afford it, but I could also spend that same money and buy tickets to several local shows for both my wife and I, which will support the live music industry and artists more directly.


  • You also have to remember that Google has been switching their search tools over to AI search tools and the results have degraded as a result.

    Even before then, there was manipulation of the search algorithm by content creators, even on the YouTube side.

    It’s probably a combination of all factors tbh.

    • Google is slowly pushing on the scale of authoritarianism.
    • Search changes being a degradation in results.
    • Search algo manipulation.
    • Google intentionally showing divisive content due to the higher revenue opportunities
    • And the sheer breadth of right wing grift content.

  • So fighting against this new understanding of the term is either pedantry for the sake of it, or you have some sort of stake in Google perhaps?

    Great use of a bad reason fallacy with a touch of ad hominem in an attempt to discredit.

    Your claim is that the term has been used to mean something negative. You present no evidence to back this up other than your feelings.

    I don’t discredit that major corporations do evil shit.

    However, I presented you with the experience I’ve had with the term dating back nearly 30 years where I, and the people I talked tech with, was sideloading files onto our PDA and Rio MP3 players.

    The term started out as a technical distinction in the circles I ran in (Detroit area) back then.

    Aside from your feelings on the term, I see no valid justification to stop using it when I’m trying to clearly communicate something. I work in tech (and no, it’s not Google or Apple. Fuck publicly traded companies) as a lead on the platform support group, and I need to be able to clearly communicate with my peers and reports. Sideload is a widely recognized term in the spaces I have worked in.

    I’m not going to stop using a precise technical term because some internet strangers have unfounded negative feelings about the possible marketing connotations.

    Present me with evidence that it actually means what you’re saying and maybe I’ll consider working on making the language change. Just like I’ve done with actually real problematic industry terms (master/slave, black/white lists. Etc).


  • I’ve been using the term side loading since the late 90s/early 2000s for installing software or files to a device via a transfer cable. And by the time Android came along, the early app development community was using the term to push the app to your device via ADB. And from there it’s expanded from transfer cable push to download and install from an unmanaged 3rd party source on a mobile computing device.

    So the term has existed in some form throughout the tech/power user community before modern mobile computing. Now did Apple and Google usurp the term? Ehhh, possibly? I’ve yet to encounter somebody that uses sideloading to mean something negative, but I’m sure there is a group out there that does. I’m not convinced that group is large enough for me to stop using language I started using nearly 30 years ago to mean something specific. “Why use more, less precise, words when this single term says it already?”





  • You have to view this from outside your tech knowledge bubble.

    I have friends that are “stuck on windows 10 because fuck windows 11”. I urge them to give Linux a try via Live USB and they’re hesitant to even do that.

    The paid support path is there for people that want to try and escape and need the comfort of that safety net. They don’t feel comfortable trying to figure out even where to search for information. And if they’ve gotten that far, having various instructions for different distros can make things confusing because they probably did a generic “my issue, linux” search or just did a “my issue” search and are seeing cryptic answers, including Mac and windows. If somebody needs that paid safety net, ZorinOS for an existing machine is great, System76/PopOS for something new.

    If there is something that provides value (customer support or even the OS equivalent of a hat cosmetic) to the user, I have no concerns at all with that being sold. If that optional value could easily be done yourself with effort, those of us that know how to put in that effort ,are willing to put in the effort, or not afraid of the effort when unknown, will continue to do so. Those of us who don’t match those criteria at least have an option.


  • Be forewarned, Bazzite has some install issues and can lock up or appear locked up during a painfully long install process. Also, VR support is meh on Bazzite and their immutable distro and managed packages make it more challenging to get non-managed solutions rolling.

    As somebody running Bazzite and loving it on their HTPC, I am looking at switching to CachyOS using the Handheld (SteamOS) Display Environment or launching directly into Kodi.









  • The AI bubble is being supported by NVIDIA. They’re investing in the majority of the companies that are then buying chips or services from NVIDIA/Partners (that they’ve also invested in).

    The demand for the chips is out-pacing the actual product, AI products & services. And the major players in this space are not making money. OpenAI would have to do a 10x minimum price increase to even begin having a chance to start reporting profits.

    Unless some serious outside investments come in, some serious sales of AI services and products, or some creative scammy pivot (crypto?), we’re about to live through another market bubble collapse. Unless