Windows will be the default until suddenly it isn’t. Valve is doing amazing at destroying the core of Microsoft’s support. This story would be different if this was a decade ago, but these days most average people do their computing on phones and tablets. The ones sticking to traditional PCs are mostly gamers and now more than ever Linux is a viable alternative to Windows. Vanishingly few games can’t be played perfectly fine on Linux. Once enough gamers are using Linux it will become the default choice, and once it’s the default choice for gamers it will become the default choice for most people, at least the ones not on phones and tablets.

It’s very popular to the point where multiple other distros are starting to offer its patched kernel on their distro. It’s very focused on gaming performance, particularly around Steam and Proton.

Yeah that should be completely fine then. Try dual boot, if you don’t have any issues you can always go 100% Linux at some point in the future and in the meantime the old Windows partition can provide some amount of reassurance if something does go wrong.

Is it a newer Nvidia GPU? If so I believe it pretty much works the same these days. It was mostly the older Nvidia GPUs that seemed to have a lot of problems.

Cachyos seems like the general recommendation. Haven’t used it myself, but I’ve used its kernel so I guess that counts for something.

They don’t even know how to use a gamepad nevermind a keyboard and mouse. If it doesn’t have a touchscreen and big shiny icons it’s too complicated for them. One step closer to Idiocracy.

Seems like a lot of the early LTT crew were chaffing a bit under the LTT contract for a variety of reasons and opted to leave and start their own channels. I hope most of them succeed because honestly I always liked the other hosts on LTT far more than Linus who usually came off as more comic relief than actual tech news. As the old technical crew left I’ve found myself watching Linus Drop Tips very rarely.

as you know, with tariffs, everyone’s coming into our country.

Say what? Pretty sure there’s record numbers of people leaving the country right now, and tourism is down across the board so people aren’t even coming in temporarily never mind permanently. If we needed any more proof Trump was delusional this is certainly it.

You’re absolutely right, there’s no way Canada wants anything to do with the absolute cluster fuck Trump has turned the US into.

Fully expecting chip makers to just manufacture a bunch of cheap garbage here that eventually ends up in a landfill in order to avoid the tariffs on their expensive chips. With a 100% tariff and prices per-chip in the $300+ range if they can make a chip for less than $300 even if they immediately chuck it in the garbage they’re saving money. Imagine a whole tray of cheap 500nm chips that are full of defects because they were made with wafers that failed QA. They manufacture them, document that they exist, dump them in a bin in a warehouse, then just throw the bin away in a year as unsold inventory and write it off as a business loss.

Reported view counts are also important for sponsorships as sponsored video payouts are often tied to hitting specific view counts, and even getting sponsorships and their rates are also typically conditional on view counts. So yes, even though it doesn’t directly impact ad revenue it still directly impacts total channel revenue for anyone that accepts sponsorships.

All that said, Google caused this entire mess by bundling their view counting in with their telemetry. If they just reported the raw download stats for the streams instead of trying to determine every last detail of who is watching the video (for all that juicy advertising data) this problem wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Basically Youtube instead of counting views via actual requests for the videos instead uses a separate call that essentially says “hey, someone watched this video”. All the ad blockers rather than use a hard coded list of URLs to block which would quickly go stale instead use one of a couple different 3rd party lists the most popular of which is EasyList. EasyList decided to block the URL that youtube uses to register views on the principal that it was a privacy violation because it not only registers “hey someone watched this” but also captures exactly who watched it which allows Google to track your viewing habits.

Literally the only reason old school gamers play on CRTs is because old games were designed for the blurry low resolution displays they provided and so look kind of bad on modern crisp displays. You could just smear vasoline on a modern LCD and get roughly the same effect, but using a CRT is less messy.

It’s also utter garbage. We abandoned CRTs because they sucked. They’re heavy, waste tons of space, guzzle power, and have terrible resolution. Even the best CRT ever made is absolutely destroyed by the worst of modern LCDs. The only advantage you could possibly come up with is that in an emergency you could beat someone to death with a CRT. Well, that and the resolution was so garbage they had a natural form of antialiasing, but that’s a really optimistic way of saying they were blurry as shit.

They’re terrorists because they indiscriminately bomb civilians. If they were an official army they’d be war criminals the same way the IDF are war criminals for also indiscriminately bombing civilians. Anyone who bombs civilians (on purpose) is either a terrorist or a war criminal. People seem to be struggling with this concept that everyone in a conflict can be wrong, even if they have some legitimate grievances with each other.

Israel is absolutely stealing Palestinian land and has been for decades. They need to be evicted and that land returned to the Palestinian people. Palestine needs to be an independent country, Israel has demonstrated that they’re incapable of leaving Palestine alone and a hard border between them is the only approach likely to fix that.

Hamas on the other hand has spent decades killing Israeli civilians and even if there was a two state solution would continue to stage attacks on Israel as a significant portion of their members are Islamic extremists (further complicated by support from neighboring Islamic countries that hate the idea of a Jewish state for religious reasons). The problem Palestine faces is that Hamas is the only force they have access to that can do anything against Israel even if that thing is to launch terrorist attacks.

There are strong parallels between Hamas and the IRA, another terrorist organization, but also stark differences. Both organizations have or had legitimate grievances they were responding to, but both also engaged in indiscriminate violence that did little to advance their stated goals. If by some miracle this current war is resolved without the genocide of the Palestinian people (a genocide the current Israeli leadership seems dedicated to) hopefully Hamas disbands the same way the IRA did, but I’m very doubtful of such an outcome, there is far too much religious and ethnic animosity in that region.

In a perfect world Palestine would be its own country, have its own army, and Israel and Palestine would work together to stamp out Hamas. If Israel tried to push into Palestinian territory the Palestinian army would push them back and if it came down to it the Palestinian military and IDF would fight each other. What the Palestinian army wouldn’t be doing is murdering random Israeli civilians the way Hamas is (and if they did Palestine would face sanctions for those war crimes the same way Israel should be currently).

All of this is of course made significantly more complicated by the US primarily but also other countries supporting Israel because they have a terrible relationship with the Islamic countries in the region (for both good and bad reasons) and want a friendly country to use as a military outpost. The US has been far too involved with Israel for decades now and they’ve become far too invested in propping up the current administration (also the US has its own significant issues with its current administration).

Other countries need to stop supporting Israel and sanction them for both their war crimes and their decades of stealing Palestinian land. Hamas needs to be wiped out the same way ISIS does, but not by the IDF who have shown they’re incapable of doing so without engaging in even worse atrocities than Hamas commits.

Blowing up random civilians isn’t an act of vengeance, that’s exactly the sort of atrocity that Israel is committing now. If Hamas restricted themselves to blowing up IDF bases and attacking IDF soldiers there would be no question that they’re in the right, but they’re mostly killing Israeli civilians which is just as wrong as when the IDF does it to Palestinian civilians. Just because one side is significantly more powerful than the other doesn’t negate that. If the roles were reversed and it was Hamas who was committing genocide against Israel would you still be making this argument?

What’s needed is an independent 3rd party. Israel needs to be forcibly removed from Palestinian land and the IDF disarmed until they can show they can do their job without murdering civilians. Hamas needs to be rooted out and Palestine needs an actual military that will be able to stand up to the IDF. None of that is going to happen under either Hamas or the current Israeli government, both of them would rather just keep murdering civilians.

Hamas is a violent terrorist organization, it just happens to also be the only one even remotely attempting to fight back against Israel’s attacks. There are no “good guys” in this war (barring the victims just trying to live their lives), just bad and worse. Israel has been attacking Palestine both physically and via illegally seizing their land for decades, while Hamas has been staging terrorist attacks against Israel for just as long. It’s hard not to fault the Palestinian people for supporting Hamas when they’re the only ones that are doing literally anything to fight back against Israel, but that also doesn’t make Hamas good. At best they’re a necessary evil.

Hamas doesn’t want peace, they want victory, but Israel doesn’t want peace either, they want to finish the genocide they started decades ago. The only ones that actually want peace are the civilians that are stuck between Hamas and the IDF. Unlike Hamas though the international community supports the IDF even though the IDF is just as guilty of staging terror attacks as Hamas is.

Also what the fuck is a “tariff investigation”? It’s hard to believe he’s shying away from saying he’ll raise tariffs again, he’s certainly threatened it often enough, but maybe the TACO title is starting to bother him. Maybe he’s trying to figure out a way to threaten tariffs that won’t look so obvious when he inevitably backs down.

This is such a strange concept. Like fundamentally a subscription is just a mechanism to allow a viewer to easily keep track of new content on a channel. By viewing the channels contents you’re engaging in 100% of the interaction you should be expected to have with a subscribed channel. If Google really wanted to address the problem of old subscriptions people are ignoring they should just prompt people to unsubscribe to channels that they haven’t watched any videos from in a long time. Instead they’re fucking with view counts because that saves them money. The whole thing is fishy, but Google has always treated being inscrutable and capricious as if those were virtues.

Same, but it depends on the goal. If the goal is to have an excuse not to pay creators while still cashing paychecks from advertisers it seems like a pretty smart move. A dick move certainly, but seems to be working exactly as intended.

The problem is that there aren’t any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It’s a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they’ll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there’s only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you’re looking for you can find something to watch. It’s a one stop shop for AV content.

Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn’t even a direct competitor because they’re pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.

To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn’t going anywhere.