I will make certain my next laptop has an AMD graphics card. NVIDIA graphics cards have caused me so much pain and frustration on Linux. I should have known better than to go with NVIDIA for this laptop, honestly. I don't know what I was thinking. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, had it right years ago.
I've heard that NVIDIA drivers for Linux are improving with the growth of AI, but it's too little too late. Besides, I have no doubt NVIDIA will stop working with the Linux community as soon as the benefits to their company become less obvious.
I want something stable that just works, and that's AMD.
Never install the Google Photos app on an Apple device, like an iPhone or an iPad. The app slurps up all your photos and videos, even though they were probably automatically backed up to iCloud already. Then, Google complains that you're out of Google cloud storage space, and services like Gmail stop working. (Well, they stop working exactly the way they should. For example, you may not be able to receive any more emails.) You can solve the problem by paying Google for more cloud storage space, but that's bullshit. There's no reason to pay them, because they had no legitimate reason to steal your data in the first place. Fuck that. Thankfully, there is an alternative. You can uninstall the app, then delete all of Google's copies of your media through the Google Photos website on another computer.
That's all a very technical way of saying the following: never install the Google Photos app on an Apple device. If you already installed it, uninstall it, then delete Google's copies of your photos and videos through the Google Photos website on another computer.
There may be a workaround. There may be some kind of button that instructs Google not to steal your shit and charge you for the privilege. If there is a solution, though, it must not be obvious, because practically everyone I know with an iPhone has faced this problem. Therefore, the easy solution is the best one: never, ever install the Google Photos app on an Apple device.
Vitalik Buterin's excellent essay What do I think about Community Notes? is one of the very few articles about social media that has left me feeling extremely optimistic.
Even if less than one percent of misinformative tweets get a note providing context or correcting them, Community Notes is still providing an exceedingly valuable service as an educational tool. The goal is not to correct everything; rather, the goal is to remind people that multiple perspectives exist, that certain kinds of posts that look convincing and engaging in isolation are actually quite incorrect, and you, yes you, can often go do a basic internet search to verify that it's incorrect.
It's clear Community Notes is imperfect, and X does incalculable harm, just as pre-Elon Twitter did. Still, this project is genuinely impressive: a smart, thoughtful, verifiable open-source algorithm that aims to reduce misinformation and that actually stands a chance of decreasing political polarization. As terrible as X can be, I don't see this happening at Meta or ByteDance.
Why do non-technical people sometimes dramatically underestimate the time, money, and effort required to build software? I think it’s because they only see the end result: the app, website, or other product.
What makes me “good” with computers? I've wondered and written about this in the past. Recently, I remembered another habit that helps me learn.
When I make a mistake, I try to start over and make it again. That may be unintuitive, but there's no better way of learning how to avoid it. I don't recommend repeating a mistake if doing so would cause additional harm, of course, but even catastrophic mistakes can be repeated safely with some creativity. If you accidentally delete an important file, for example, create an unimportant file and try to delete that one in the same way.
Righteous indignation powerfully affects the world. For that reason, we need to be sure we're actually right before we act on it, or for that matter, before it acts on us.
Here's another mobile game that doesn't suck: There Is No Game: WD. Great graphics, lots of humor, and extremely creative gameplay. The story is surprisingly sweet, and you get to “play” classic games along the way. It even parodies games that are ruined by micropayments. Yes, please!