If KDE had a toggleable tiling feature like PopOS it would be the perfect DE.

Zoomers are in their 30s now? [insert Matt Damon ageing GIF]

Goes to show how impossible it is to get an Italian to stop talking.

Classic. The Monroe Doctrine exists to ensure only the US can meddle in the Americas.

Inflation is arguably down solely because of susterity measures which have not addressed any fundamental problems, only kicked them down the road.

Except, if we were to read the article, things are materially worse than when he took office:

Milei had predicted a V-like recovery with the creation of new jobs in a more prosperous and stable economy. Instead, the economy stalled out, declining in the second quarter compared with the previous three months. Unemployment is at 7.6%, up from 5.7% when Milei took office. And Argentina has about 200,000 fewer jobs since he took office, government data shows.

I wonder if this ties into our general disposability culture (throwing things away instead of repairing, etc)

Eh, she’ll probably just be Abe 2.0, but without the exhortations for people to fuck more.

No, I excluded India because they only intermittently had great power status. Iran was one for 2000 years and China for… 3000 or so? India was too at times but not in a consistent fashion - it wasn’t even really unified for at least half that time.

Tagging @BeefandSquints@lemmy.dbzer0.com as well as this is in reply to them.

Iran is a country with remarkably smart people.

It always has been. Look at the Islamic golden age for example - so many of the great artists and polymaths were Persian. They have such an incredibly rich culture with a VERY long history, easily up there with China who I’d say is their only real competition in that regard.

Should cable subscribers be counted 200 times, once for each channel?

True - I guess it depends on whether we’re defining “subscribers” as people or total paid accounts.

I don’t think those numbers are additive like that - you’d be double-counting people.

If my googling is right, in total there are ~207 million subscribers.

This says 128M, which seems far more plausible. https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/disney-stop-reporting-subscriber-numbers-disney-plus-hulu-espn-1236480413/

Yeah, but it’s always other people getting thrown in the meat grinder, it would never be me!

Depends how attractive it needs to be. “Entry level” could be an old PC you kave kicking around.

Maybe this article was written by a bot to distract us from the bots talking about other bots. Maybe I’m a bot. Hmm…

So perhaps the real story is simply “lots of tech marketers don’t understand their audience”. Which I think is true. When companies put their spec sheets and feature lists front and center, I’m definitely more likely to pay attention than if I have to dig through screen after screen of meaningless fluff to get any relevant details. So that’s something marketers could (but generally don’t) do to influence me.

It depends on the brand and who their target market is. I’d argue that Framework, for example, market in this way.

Excuse me but “it” is not my preferred pronoun. That’s pretty disrespectful.

First off, thanks for the thoughtful and detailed reply.

Which raises another point: there are no monolithic demographics of any significant size. Anytime you generalize about “nerds” (or any other group), nothing you say will be 100% correct across the board. Generalizations are still useful when viewed in terms of trends and distribution curves. It’s fair to say that men are taller than women even though there are short men and tall women. It would be more precise to say that the height distribution for men skews taller than for women, but I think most people intuitively understand the truth behind the simple, plain English generalization anyway, even if they don’t think of it in precise terms.

Of course, and marketing itself works with generalizations about demographics and targetting etc. As in anything there are extreme outliers, but there’s definitely a bell curve, and I doubt most people are as near the poles as they think.

The way it looks: yes, absolutely. My current box is metallic black with a window. If I could’ve bought a functionally equivalent one with no window at the same price, I would have. If I could’ve bought a functionally equivalent one in hot pink for cheaper, I probably would have. (There is a functional aspect to appearance as well, since it’s in my field of vision and bright colors could be distracting, so I’d have to think about the pink. “Black” and “no window” are on my wanted-features list for this reason, but other factors can override those wants.)

Sounds lke you’re primarily a value shopper in this case, which is fair, but for every one of you there’s a r/battlestations poster who spent more for something aesthetic - and unlike others here I won’t start “no true nerd-ing” those people away out of convenience. I to a certain degree am one of them, and I’m definitely a nerd (as is everyone on Lemmy). I’m sure there are different things you choose to splurge on.

I feel like at this point we should talk about the oft-neglected difference between marketing and advertising. There is an aspect of marketing that directs product development down a path toward what they understand people actually want. When done well, this is good. It should be the marketing department’s job to learn what problems people have with products in the field, and make sure those problems are addressed in future products. Advertising is a subset of marketing that tries to directly influence consumer behavior to buy whatever they’re trying to sell.

In the industry we’d rarely refer to those people as marketers (more like “market research”, basically statisticians and much less cool) but you’re right that it’s on the same continuum. Focus groups fall in there too. I wouldn’t really count it in this argument though because for most of us it’s a fait accompli when we’re faced with whatever is on the store shelf. It isn’t something we can be “immune” to in any meaningful way, short of becoming a self-sufficient hermit.

But I’m no more likely to go into Dunkin or Starbucks just because they are advertised incessantly. You might find that hard to believe, and I wouldn’t blame you! I can’t prove it to you. And I understand that among the general population, repeated exposure affects perception, and by extension behavior, in subtle and deeply-rooted ways. I don’t imagine that I am immune to the effects that, for example, cause preschool children to prefer the same food from McDonalds bags vs unbranded bags (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17679662/). But we are more than our base nature, and these effects can be negated in practice. I suspect tech nerds in general have internalized stronger countermeasures than the general population. Not full immunity, because reality is too messy, but a notable resistance.

But do you have a favourite coffee place, or restaurant? How about a favourite hotel chain? We often don’t realize all the subconscious triggers we’re subjected to.