There was a time when Ubuntu was the distro for the masses. It was the one that “just worked.” It was the one you could use for school. They distributed marketing material with a bunch of diverse young people holding hands.

Now Canonical’s website is, by area, mostly corporate logos. They’re B2B now, we have lost them, and it shows in their engineering.

If the system you’re shopping for an OS for isn’t installed in a room with halon extinguishers in the ceiling, you shouldn’t even be thinking Canonical’s name.

My recommendation would be to find a local ham group and see if anyone will let you use their equipment. In my experience, hams are very often excited to do this, they have a new buddy to play radio with. Many radio clubs have club equipment for members to use and often gather and set it up during events, especially ARRL’s Field Day. There’s nothing like getting hands on with working equipment set up by an experienced user to see what you really like.

Licensed hams can supervise non-licensed users, so you can get on the air before you have a license if you have a buddy with a callsign willing to let you at the controls.

Especially since OP asked about having a “radio buddy,” I think this is the way to go about that.

1: I bet sometimes you do. If you’ve been driving on US-1-15-501, and 1 splits from 15-501, you may ask which highway to keep following. I know of several junctions like that where “go straight” is an ambiguous instruction, especially if one or more lanes just become an “exit.”

2: In many cases I doubt it’s about you. It’s a layered problem.

First of all, you have the United States Highway “system.” 50 state DOTs each doing things their own way with their own goofy ideas and quirks, some roads designed in the 1740s designed by British or Dutch farmers for pedestrians and horses, some roads designed by wildlife that used to walk through the forest that used to be where this town is now and the people put the roads where the tracks were when they put a village in the forest, some roads that are the way they are because they used to follow a railroad that used to be here, some roads designed by people in the 1950s who were going to revolutionize travel for the atomic age, so your nuclear powered car could whisk you down the highway at 190 miles per hour. And every single piece of this for over 3 centuries now has been done as half-assed as possible, each new layer connecting to all the previous layers as an afterthought.

Describe an entire continent of the above fuckeduppery in software please. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s only 300 million people in the United States, please implement this for Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia while you’re at it in the same software.

And remember, you’re designing this software for EVERYONE. You’re designing a system to be used by my uncle who has a hatred of Sheetz that borders on religious fervor because you order food in there with touch screen menus. You’re designing a system for the idiot who drove into a pond because the GPS told him to “turn left immediately.” You’re designing a system for the professional driver who knows that I-295 is an auxiliary interstate that diverges from I-95 that will eventually rejoin I-95. And you’re designing a system for people who mostly know their home town and could get most of the way there but they haven’t been out to the warehouse district a lot so you’ll have to give them directions from the highway to the UPS distribution center.

Everybody from the iOS native zoomer to my 1960’s uncle uses Google Maps. You can’t design things that make sense to both of these people.

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So some drivers will want some information some of the time. So at the city limits of Daytona Beach, your phone will mysteriously tell you to continue straight on State Route 92 because that’s where it stops being called International Speedway Boulevard. Because the non-sentient algorithm deciding when to issue verbal directions often can’t tell the difference between a name change and an intersection of two roads. Or even when it can, it may still offer that change to prevent confusing drivers later, because “Turn left onto International Speedway Boulevard.” 20 minutes later “Continue following State Route 92.” “Wait! I thought I was on ISB! How’d I get on 92? *looks down at phone for 3 entire minutes trying to get the least optimized software in history to scroll the map in a way that makes sense, running over every single toddler in Volusia county in the meanwhile.”

So occasionally it will err on the side of caution and tell you something you might not need to know.

A bigger problem I have than occasionally hearing “Keep straight on Highway 20” is “Keep straight on US-20, US-94, US-1, US-15, US-501, US-99, US-98, NC-24, NC-27, NC-17, PG-13, PS-5, N-64, I-95, I-85, I-40, Bragg Boulevard for 1.3 miles.”

It puts the instruction at the beginning, and then it talks so long you forgot what it told you to do. It’s how you stack overflow a human.

I used to hold up Squad and Kerbal Space Program as the gold standard of early access campaigns, but Coffee Stain Studios blew them out of the water. The update trailers alone have been worth the price of the game.

I’ve seen it do that for decades now, and in at least two cases I see it happen is when a highway enters town and gains a name, like how Florida Route 92 becomes International Speedway Boulevard when you enter Daytona Beach. Or, when another route joins the corridor you’re on, like throughout North Carolina US-1, US-15 and US-501 weave in and out of each other a few times along with a few state routes joining and leaving.

So I think when it hits points like this, it sometimes interprets them as intersections rather than junctions, and its programming requires it to issue a direction for an intersection. YOU might not see it as an intersection but IT does.

Is that what that was? I got a grey box with no text in it that popped up over Satisfactory and my mouse control went from the POV to moving a cursor. I was building and it was a brief interruption. I got the actual text via email.

I’m riffing on The Rattlin’ Bog.

A sort of folksy children’s song that builds to a silly degree with each verse.

Linux for 10 years now.

I’m saying it now: Get an amateur radio license and pay ARRL dues. We’re going to need to protect that bandwidth.

1. am I the one doing that? And 2. Is it the bulk of the problem?

Me personally, I have no particular need for legislated prudishness. I don’t see much of a difference between the Taliban requiring women to wear a headscarf than whatever red state requiring women to wear a top. A lot of that nonsense is done to enforce a particular religion, and I personally want all religions to be thrown in the toilet with all the other worthless assgarbage.

There was a point in time when things such as bikinis and miniskirts were seen as scandalously immodest. The people who saw them that way are mostly dead now and we can move on, which is what will ultimately happen here. Some women will start going topless to the beach, the newspapers will write some stories about it, there’ll be some arrests, there will be some court cases, there will be some laws passed, and then it’ll settle in as just a thing people do sometimes.

The problem I have is that I think people with cameras are going to be punished for incidentally filming topless girls in ways they’re not for incidentally filming topless boys. Shall I illustrate with an example?

Consider this video of a walking tour of Panama City Beach, Florida. . There are a lot of videos like this, tours of various places around the world, they’re filmed in public places, often from streets, sidewalks etc. There’s a lengthy segment where the cameraperson walks down the beach and records several boys and men without shirts on. The video is on Youtube, uncensored and monetized. No one anywhere has a problem with this because we categorically do not consider male barechestedness to be nudity.

The argument here is women and girls should be allowed to be barechested anywhere men and boys are. Okay, so the instant we make that change, we also need to change the rules that say it’s not okay to see, photograph, record or broadcast barechested women and girls. It needs to be equally okay to upload pictures of barechested women and girls to Youtube without censor bars or blurs. Because then it becomes “when he does it it’s not nudity, when she does it, it’s not considered nudity but it is still in fact nudity.” You don’t get to require people in public to avert their gaze.

Not just the state. Due process does not exist here, the accusation of sexual misconduct is often enough to destroy someone’s life. So it’s anyone who chooses to accuse him of something.

The term “child” is ageist, the preferred term is temporally different.

As in, would type up a memo in Excel? Woof.

Sometimes I want a more free-form tool that can be a journal or a checklist or a spreadsheet so that I can plan and calculate and such. My personal journal sometimes reads like The Martian, “Okay, my solar panels make 165 kilowatt hours per sol, and I need 47 of it for my project, meaning I have 108 kilowatt hours per sol left over…” But I look at things like OneNote and fall right off them.

Reminds me of something…I think it was Stormy Daniels or some similar figure talking about her first time working in a strip club, and a local law said that nude performers had to be on a “stage,” but there were no technical specifications for said “stage” so they had small raised platforms not dissimilar to a cargo pallet for the girls to dance on near each table.

Does “in a sexual context” have a falsifiable definition? I mean, here’s an article from the American Bar Association journal about a man who was arrested and deported for “child sexual abuse” for having photos printed of himself kissing his infant daughter after a bath.

The accuser was the photo lab tech. After the man was arrested and deported, his wife was arrested, their child was removed from them, then the investigation took the whole roll of film into consideration and found there was no child abuse, this was photographic evidence of loving parents caring for their child. “Sexual context” indeed.

I envision a future where a business owner puts up security cameras around his shop, those security cameras send their video to “The Cloud,” an underage girl walks by topless in view of those video cameras, as is her legal right to do so, a closed-source unauditable CSAM detection algorithm running on “The Cloud” flags the video as CSAM, and the business owner gets arrested, his business and/or home destroyed or even killed before an investigation determines no wrongdoing. Because we put the time for reasonableness after the bodies have cooled. We check to see if it’s a false positive after the “arrest” has been made. THAT’s the ultimate problem I have here.

I have an “umm what about” regarding “of all ages.”

Say a 15 year old girl decides to walk topless down main street. Is everyone on that street who has a security camera running going to be convicted of making child porn?

I don’t trust the legislature to have been competent enough to edit the rest of the code to reflect that change nor do I trust the thin blue line punisher sticker crowd to pass up something they can portray as a crime.

There’s a man in the hole and a spider on the man and a frog on the spider in the bog down in the valley-o!

I have pretty thoroughly stopped caring about movies.

The only movie in the last 15 years I’ve wanted to sit down and just watch. By myself, not as a thing to do with friends or family, not as something to have sound in the house while I do something else, to sit down with a bowl of popcorn and a beer and WATCH, was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. So we’ll go with that I guess.

I won’t reveal this secret but I will tell you it’s large and prehensile.