Yup. Toys R Us still lives and it’s still going strong in many countries like Canada and many European countries

Portugal still has multiple very successful Toys R Us stores, most of them more than 20 years old at this point

While editing my comment I deleted it by mistake lol. Here is what I was trying to post:

Don’t buy a Tesla or BMW. Done.

Edit: im joking, but you can just not connect your car to any internet. Most casual brands have literally zero outgoing connections if you don’t add or connect them to a network. Androd Auto and Apple Carplay are just displaying what your phone sends to the screen, the car itself doesn’t access the internet through those. Think of android auto and carplay like “HDMI monitors for your phone that have touch too”. Your phone does everything the car just displays it.

Connecting via bluetooth should also not be any problem since bluetooth doesn’t include internet access (unless you activate that ok your phone but Im sure the car will not use it). Bluetooth only sends and receives small bits of data that your phone chooses to send, not what the car chooses. Contacts names, phone numbers, audio and microphone are the only few data that gets sent to your car and only during phone calls or audio listening.

In the end, just avoid cars that have always connected systems like Teslas or modern BMWs or similar cars. Most Volkswagen, Audi, etc etc are 100% offline cars when you don’t connect them to a network. Most now can do it, but most its a subscription service that you can just not buy, and some even need SIM cards to work, that you just not use. Unless its a Tesla, those are connected even if you don’t pay the subscription.

Test drive the car. Disconnect it from all networks or don’t turn them on. Try to use all features. If the car constantly complains that it has no internet access for all of them, thats good.

Note that GPS access is always on and doesn’t require any subscription, so maps and navigation will still work. However that is not really a privacy violation by itself because GPS on cars and phones only receives signal, doesn’t transmit anything. You wont have traffic information or weather or anything tho. If you have traffic info, the car is connecting to some network, find how to deactivate that.

Many modern cars are too connected, thats true, but with the exception of a few brands, most cars go 100% offline the moment you disconnect them from their data services or don’t pay for that upgrade/subscription. So you will be fine even with a modern car.

deleted by creator

So you were the “horse armor DLC” of car insurance companies. Congratulations

has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup

Tell me you are an nvidia user without telling me. Either that is hard to believe. I use KDE daily for more than 8-9 hours a day, sometimes my pc goes for a full week without geting turned off, multiple apps tabs and servers on, themes installed, widgets on the desktop, I am such an extremely heavy KDE user you have no idea. Still, zero crashes. Sometimes something goes a bit “wut” like moving a window around gliches a liiiiiiitle bit, but it instantly corrects itself and goes back to being stable. And I am on Plasma 6.0.3, funny enough has been more stable than Plasma 5.

Update your KDE or use a distro that has better KDE support. Some distros fck up KDE packages and get it unstable. Fedora KDE is rock solid for example. Nobara has been great too and its now KDE by default.

Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.

First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.

Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.

A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch…) which might speed up its adoption too.

Its a huge deal. If X desktop is the default, it shows that the distro developers and maintainers usually test and optimize more and better for that specific DE so your experience with the default DE will always be more stable and polished than non-official ones. Extra GUI tools that the distro makes usually are also better tailored to the default distro. Like Manjaro and all of their locale, kernel and other packages that are integrated inside the KDE settings. Or popOS and all of their utilities being integrated into Cosmic. Etc etc. More money and dev time is invested into the default DE.

Meanwhile I CANNOT be productive in GNOME. There are hundreds of maybe thousands of KDE features that make IT and dev work so extremely easy. I could make a 50 page comment just listing them. I can start with how horrendously basic and generic the default gnome terminal is.

But then KDE also is in fact good for average ex-Windows users because it has stuff where people expect it to, has features that people expect too (cough minimize/maximize buttons cough) and well yea KDE is better for average users.

So KDE is better for IT users and developers, and is also better for average users. And since it supports vsync off, VRR and HDR it is also better for gaming.

So wait is KDE better for literally EVERYONE? 🤔

Being a developer I slowly noticed that 99% if the people in this world don’t even think for a single milisec how anything in tech came to be. They use extremely advanced smartphones, apps, huge servers, games, everything. And no one ever thinks “huh, how did they made this?” They literally think making a whole OS is like making a pancake, 5 steps and 5 minutes and you are done. Or heck, they don’t even think that, they don’t think anything at all about it. They just… use it. Like it magically appeared there and they can now use it. They have absolutely zero idea how much effort the simplest things they use daily took. Some don’t even think about the fact that stuff like Facebook is a company and needs to make money. They just know that Facebook is magically there and works. How does it work? “Well, you open the app and click buttons”. But they never think about how the app and buttons came to be.

Stuff like “what is a cloud? What happens when you put something on the cloud, like Google drive?” They get absolutely broken and cant answer because they can’t even understand what a cloud is and why the files are accesible from everywhere.

It gets to a point where people get “shocked” when you tell them that Android or macOS has hundreds or thousands of developers working on it daily. They literally think Android just happened to appear out there and brands just decided to pre-install it on the phone they sell, like it was something that you “just install”.

Well, long story short, this eventually comes back to bite devs in the ass when we try but fail to explain to a client that “creating an AI that takes stuff from a database and magically creates new stuff” takes more than 2 days. Client gets mad when we say something is impossible in the hours budget that we got.

Simon Riggs like many other people literally make our world turn but people will never know who they are or why they are needed. This world biggest heroes often go unnoticed.

Sometimes I feel like the managers of my company and many others companies like these are just a bunch of clowns, that keep getting fcked my MS but keep paying them Enterprise licenses that are sometimes thousands of $$ per month. If a service costs thousands per month, it shouldn’t be stressful to use and give so much headaches… I just think some CEOs don’t know that a company can function (sometimes better) without Microsoft products. From Office to Windows to Azure, many companies nowadays think they can only function if they pay Microsoft. And MS knows and likes this.

Hum if you jailbreak/root you always could and will always be able to use any third party app store. 17.4 didn’t change a thing for jailbreak users

Apple: we now allow third party stores! You just need to pay us 1 million $! (We hope no one does it). And you need to use your developer account, but its easy!

Epic Games: we paid the 1 million, we are gonna make a third party store!

Apple: bans epic games developer account “Epic Games is not trustable!”

Apple really looks like a 5 year old kid with its own make-up rules based exclusively on their interest and gets mad when those rules that they themselves created are still not enough for them to win.

It will only change if the developer goes ahead and makes a special EU version for the app. And many wont, because that takes too many human resources to do and maintain. This was a rule made by Apple on purpose, together with all their other malicious compliance moves: they made it hard for developers so devs will just keep everything as it always was and not use the new EU exclusive things

Thats mostly because of the overload quantity of ads, trackers, plugins, integrations, etc all websites have now. Using an adblocker halves your bandwidth usage. If you have a data cap, an adblocker is a must.

And then, optimization. As an Angular developer, knowing many websites nowadays are Angular or similar, the lack of optimization is a big problem. Most don’t even use lazy loading, not to mention managing the module imports into different components. They import everything into the main component and don’t do lazy loading leading you to websites that have 20-40MB (!!!) of initial load (when you open the website). This is so common that I think junior angular devs will slowly just kill angular popularity and give it a bad look. Takes work to optimize Angular, and many devs don’t care enough and just rush it. And then there are companies that don’t understand that web frameworks need optimization and just underpay devs or rush the dev time.

Please don’t use Angular (or similar complex web frameworks like Vue or React) if you don’t know how to correctly optimize it, or don’t have time or care for it. And don’t overload your pages with ads and integrations. You are ruining the web.

Reminds me on how they forcefully started slowly upgrading everyone to the new Teams app, that doesn’t support half of what the previous one did. For example, the company I work at actually used the “Wiki” on Teams to create very long and detailed (many hours of work) important documentation for projects. It was not my choice, but it was how the company decided to work. Well the new Teams app killed the Wiki. We lost access to a lot of documentation and the managers took a long ass time to understand our problem and only did when their own Teams also updated. We had to revert back to the old teams and constantly click ignore on the upgrade notification, while at times mistakenly clicking accept and having to revert back again, until we copied everything out of Wiki and to another platform entirely. We lost a lot of (paid) hours to just copy and reformat the whole wiki from many projects into a new platform. All this were paid hours, and money that didn’t need to be wasted if it wasn’t for Microsoft complete retardness. This together with other retard moves on other office apps is slowly convincing my company to completely get out of the Office 365 for Enterprise, including Azure and other stuff just because Microsoft is really getting on our nerves lately.

I don’t understand how can Microsoft do so much shit and still be so widely used and so many companies absolutely depend on Microsoft. If Microsoft sneezes, half of the IT world shakes. But those who suffer just keep paying anyway. Are we all clowns?

Streisand effect is currently very active on this one. Thousands of news outlets, many extremely casual and geared towards average joes who never new emulation existed, are now all being told that “this thing called yuzu can play switch games for free”. Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot. Even if Yuzu dies, it will get forked and people who never knew emulation existed, now do, and look for alternatives.

The Ray Tracing argument and 4K are both shit arguments. On the PS5 most games are not 4K native, those that are, are locked to 30 which is an horrible experience. Ray Tracing is the same thing, and not only is PC Ray Tracing much more advanced and better looking, but it also locks you to 30 fps modes on PS5. I doubt the PS5 Pro will change that. If you forget the 30 fps sad modes that have 4k/ray tracing, suddently you can actually build a PC yourself that plays the same games for $600-800 (bit more than a PS5 but ITS A FULL PC, does everything, not games only) that for that price can play 1080-1440p games with ease at 60 fps with graphical fidelity similar to the PS5 if not better since you can better fine tune the graphical settings of all games. Ray Tracing will kill it, just like it kills the PS5.

In my style of life (PC-first) I myself consider a console to be one of those extra expenses that you have only if you have free money to spare. Having games on your couch and big TV is amazing, but if you need a PC anyway for daily life, might aswell waste a bit more and get a great PC for gaming too. If it’s a powerful laptop, it can also be your living room “console” just by plugging some cables anytime. Having a console after having a good PC feels like luxury to me (in a bad way), and very optional.

However if your PC is absolute trash but you see no reason at all to buy a new one, because your life style rarely needs to use it, and you absolutely cannot be bothered with Windows configuration and all its BS, then a console is 100% justified. Consoles are great for people who just don’t care and just want to play a game a few times per month.

True, Apple even stops supporting macbooks software-wise in just 5 years. The new macOS sonoma is only available for macbooks after 2018. While I have a toshiba at home from 2008 running Windows 11 (16 years old, upgraded with more ram and SSD). Macs and longevity can’t be in the same sentence.

Buying macbooks is the stupidest idea ever if you want longevity. Heck they even stop supporting them software-wise in just 5-6 years. I still have an old Toshiba from 2008 that is now running Windows 11 fully upgraded, with more ram and an ssd, and is being used by my parents daily. Tell me any macbook that not only can be improved hardware wise (upgraded) but also be kept fully up to date software-wise in almost 16 years. None. The latest macOS didn’t release to macs before 2018. That’s only 5 years of software support for 3000-4000€ laptop. Sorry but, macbooks have the worse longevity of any other brand. If you want longevity, you just did an immensely stupid purchase, sorry to tell you.