In places with a strong Apple presence, maybe. Android, and Samsung specifically, are very much in a position of absolute dominance of the market in many regions. Samsung phones have no "selling points", they are the default choice.
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The future of what?
I mean, most people won't know or care, and there are plenty of worse things Samsung has done in the past decade. I stopped buying their stuff for those reasons after the S10. I'm sad to report they don't seem to have noticed or shown the adequate amount of remorse.
If the class and test is the entire intended application then what's the point? I mean, at least throw personal growth in there or something. If going to the gym made you fat and unhealthy we wouldn't go around telling people to exercise.
Look, my point is that you learn about things when you use that knowledge repeatedly. It's a chicken and egg situation and you do have to start from memorization (you wouldn't expect a medical doctor to look up the names of body parts until they just naturally stick, and you WILL have to learn some vocabulary from scratch to learn a language), but by and large if something is written down and you have access to it that's probably enough to learn it over time.
There's a bit of a sense that study has to be pain and work because... well, old people like to see young people suffer like they used to suffer, whatever. But man, I can tell you I learned far more from the teachers and professors that gave us something to do and the tools to do it than from the ones that showed up with a power point deck and asked us to memorize bullet points.
As for what AI is useful for... I mean, yeah, it's not a lot. That was my point. AI is decent at reminding you of things you sorta vaguely know but can't recall, does ok at summarization and at some coding tasks. Some of that is useful in school (I certainly would have spun up a OCR system instead of giving myself carpal tunnel cleaning up notes), but it's not much use for you if your job is to go to a lecture and... you know, learn from it.
I will say that they are not terrible teaching aids, though. Stuff like explaining language stuff, or answering specific, precise questions that you can otherwise verify are not terrible uses. And, as a very much amateur coder, AI haters may have to accept that I've actually gotten better at coding by myself via using a chatbot to fix my problems (if only because the chatbot sucks at doing the thing from scratch, so I still do the parts I can do). You can use reference and technology to learn stuff on your own, it doesn't matter if it's a chatbot or Wikipedia. It won't do you much good to try to have it replace you at doing the work if the point of the work is to teach you how to do it, though.
There's a difference between knowing things and memorizing them, though.
I agree on the broad notion that using reference is perfectly fine at all levels of academia. You memorize information by putting it to use. Repetitive reading with no application intended just for memorization is a massive waste of time.
That is fundamentally different to attending lectures, reading books or paper and definitely not the same as putting in the work of writing your own or doing your own research.
My concern with this idea is the same as my concern with every other attempt at a "disruptive" AI product: you can already do all the valuable parts of this with existing tools and the novel things this can do aren't particularly useful or something that chatbots do well.
By all means use AI tools to do schoolworks if and when they're useful. It's just that this doesn't sound like it is.
That'd be me.
For the record, I disagree with nothing that Gerstmann is saying on this one, in case the more upbeat tone makes it more palatable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHrYhUOqZ7c
I just sound angrier because he's checking it out and seeing it moving in the right direction while I'm trying to main. All the speedbumps are actually annoying if you're not just tinkering for fun.
I absolutely don't understand Calibre at all. That's been my point all along.
I can tell you that I've actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I'm currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.
Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn't have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.
Because that's how it still works as of today, as it turns out.
And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than... I don't know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I'm being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.
Hah. I'm old enough to watch the norms play Street Fighter II The World Warrior.
All my joints ache. Even the ones you didn't know were joints.
I don't know how you walk into a store today and buy any OLED display without HDR. Every OLED panel I know of currently in production hits all the requirements.
For the record, the average gamer uses a Switch or a PS5 and a phone. The Switch 2 is moving fast, so the average gamer has HDR/VRR support across the board, or will very shortly if they're on Nintendo's ecosystem.
Nope. The entire point is I don't want an alternative, I want the one thing to work.
Hah. You get the "FOSS gets to be crap because you can't do it yourself" cop out often, but rarely when you haven't actually complained about it.
I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don't get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don't even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It's like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.
Unless you're Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don't see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I've seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I'm not sure he'd take it as an insult and I don't mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn't made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.
But since I'm at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it's FOSS. If you put it out there don't be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don't need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that's annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.
I know how flatpaks are updated, thanks a bunch. Not that it matters particularly on Bazzite these days, because Bazaar will do that for you on the gui, too. Gear Lever will handle your appimages, if you're lucky. We could have a conversation about how much sense it makes to have updates happen in four different places and how much sense it makes to advise people to stop using their pre-bundled "update everything" script and start updating each of those separately to avoid a troublesome updated driver as a permanent solution.
In any case that's not the only part of your software that comes with a system update. The list of end-of-life features and warnings I see reported on OS updates has been steadily growing as my install ages, which has been interesting to see simmer, given all the "it's foolproof" talk about immutable/atomic distros on the internet. I have to assume some of those will get sorted out in future updates, but so far the list has been moving in the wrong direction.
Honestly, when I do have the time and motivation I will likely just rebase to a whole different branch and go from there depending on what fixes itself or breaks. I assume that will get rid of a bunch of stuff.
But that's already waaay past what an average user should have to do to their OS. Especially in the time this install has been live without a rollback or rebase (and it's had some, because it's not the first time it breaks). I'm not even sure Bazzite shipped a broken update. It could just be an issue on KDE's side. Or on Nvidia's side. Who knows. Being able to roll back my system to a point where it worked is not a fix, it's a troubleshooting step. Having to troubleshoot IS the problem in itself.
I mean, unless you broke something yourself, I suppose. But you're also supposed to not be able to do that in an atomic distro, if you believe what people will tell you.
For the record, as I told someone else, I didn't choose Bazzite because it was an atomic distro (in fact it's kind of a pain in the ass that it is, KDE really doesn't like it when you try to customize stuff in one of those and doesn't handle it gracefully at all). I chose it because I had a hell of a time finding a distro that would pick up my sound hardware properly (sound on Linux is yet another rabbit hole) and still have proper HDR and VRR support with my display setup. The list of distros that did not do both of those things at once before I landed on Bazzite includes Manjaro, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora Workstation and a couple of others I didn't test for long enough to remember.
That's a lie. Manjaro aaaalmost got there. It worked for a while. I kinda forget what broke that made me try something else.
You can see how that entire ordeal is... not mainstream-friendly in aggregate, though, surely.
To boot into a semi-functional but not updated Bazzite, probably. Takes 5 to get to Windows, though.
To get my system up to full functionality and up to date... their history with massive, feature-breaking issues, and they do have one, is maybe a couple of weeks for a patch and then some time seeing what the fallout of the broken stuff is around your software in general.
Although that's on a good day. Bluetooth has been entirely nonfunctional on this Bazzite install for months and going by how long ago people have been mentioning it with this specific hardware I don't think that one is going away anytime soon.
Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it's old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.
It's not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there's all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.
I've been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it's weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.
FFS. I mentioned G Sync because they have a logo. VRR is so common an ubiquitous that there is a VESA certification for it now and a default standard for it for both HDMI and Display Port, no Nvidia required. It doesn't matter if you have G Sync, AMD's Freesync (which is an open standard) and can be used by any brand of GPU or generic VRR, it.
You having had your head in a hole about what the average display features are in 2026 for even an entry level gaming display doesn't mean they aren't common, important or widely supported. When Nintendo has adopted a universal technology and you haven't you know you're behind the tech curve.
For the record, plenty of Linux distros have full support for HDR and VRR. Mint just happens to... not.
There's a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.
A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it's inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.
See also: Gnome.
It's probably worse than it's been, less bad than people around here think.
One thing MS does is they have a TON of silent channels and branches, so every release they do is a rolling release. As a result, when you see in the news that they fucked up again and messed up a bunch of something somewhere it tends to be relatively contained still. I think the latest was a bad patch breaking a bunch of stuff that required a couple of emergency patches and I think there may be more to go.
It's 100% not good, and it almost certainly affected a lot of machines, but it probably got stopped from spreading further. If they had a signed driver update break their entire desktop interface in an update sent to every user they'd be (rightfully) crucified endlessly.
I get that there is a massive discrepancy of resources at play, but that doesn't make it better from the end user perspective. I've been saying for years that the Linux community keeps saying that "you can choose the distro you like" is a feature, but it isn't. Desktop Linux should be one thing. A couple, max. Contributions should be way more centralized and pool resources, like they are on the kernel. Distro choice is an anti-feature and a massive waste of resources.
There were literally huge G-Sync logos in the boxes of the last three TVs I helped people buy. When you plug in a game console and press the settings button on my current display in game mode it pops up a large HUD element that says "VRR" and displays the type of VRR currently active and the current framerate. Every other option and metric is hidden away in a sub-menu.
Not that this matters, because the point of VRR is you don't need to know it's there. If it's working, the drivers and the display should talk to each other transparently. The end result if you have a Windows machine with VRR and a Linux machine that doesn't support it and you plug them both to the same display is, again, that the Windows game will look smoother, regardless of how many fps it's spitting out.
And as always, a reminder I've given many, many, many times in my life, both personally and professionally, "it works on my machine" means nothing and doesn't mean there's no bug or that your code isn't crap. Your anecdotal experience and my anecdotal experience aren't the same, because I have a showstopper bug and your seven friends don't, which still means there's a showstopper bug.
If you just want to boot whatever you were running prior to the last update, yeah, it's typically in the GRUB menu. If you updated more than once (which I believe I did) you need to go find the previous snapshot, but it's not too much more hassle.
That doesn't particularly fix anything, though, unless you're cool with not updating indefinitely the thing you wanted to use or with updating everything else manually until the issue is fixed. If you want to be able to fix the update you still have to go into the logs and figure out what's going on (since the failure isn't universal and I know people are running these drivers without issues this must be possible). And of course all that assumes it was actually the update that broke something and the rollback actually fixes the issue.
Or, hear me out, I could reboot and choose Windows in GRUB instead, and that works for sure and I don't have to think about it.
So Windows it is until I feel adventurous. I owe my Bazzite install zero extra time. If it can't run as conveniently as clicking down one more time to select Windows then it's not running.
As I said elsewhere, people really underestimate the level of stability it takes to be a mainstream option for a desktop OS.
Hey, good for them.
To be absolutely clear, I want to be on Linux full time. I'd love to dump Windows altogether.
But I am an adult with actual shit to do, so working most of the time isn't good enough.
I have zero issues with corpos contributing to open source stuff. And I have zero issues with open source projects having for-profit offshoots. Blender works. Home Assistant works. SteamOS... mostly works, on its very narrow band of specifically selected hardware.
By all means, have Valve keep pumping money into the ecosystem. I'm all for it.
But yeah, the community is so weirdly out of touch and in so much denial about the obvious, ongoing support gaps having been fully resolved. Installing a OS on a clean drive and checking that most of your Steam library works isn't even close to the level of reliability you need for mainstream use on desktop. Microsoft pushed what? Two bad updates that broke systems in the past six months? And they are out there making public commitments to "regain trust" while tech journalists talk about their unacceptable performance and inevitable demise.
If I judged Linux by that yardstick I would have nuked my Linux installs ages ago. If we want it to become a mainstream concern we need to understand why it isn't and what needs to happen to get it there.
I keep thinking back to all the conversations with alleged leftists here on how they were both the same and Biden was too soft on Israel, which disqualified Harris and at least Trump was running on ending foreign wars.
Still haven't seen any "oh, wow, yeah, that's way worse than I thought it'd be, I was kinda wrong on that one", either.
I know I should not be pushing the issue in hopes that they quietly show up for the midterms, but at this point US politics is not worth engaging with and you can only take so many middle class cosplayers smugly calling you a naive centrist for even entertaining a gradient of madness between US political factions before you start getting flashbacks the circling of the drain speeds up.