Did you love it?

You are correct! My client screwed me up. Thanks for helping to explain my mistake.

I was actually wondering, when the previous commenter referenced the setup menu, if the shift+F10 thing still worked. I know it brings up the command prompt in the install interface, but in case you didn’t know, it also brings up the command prompt in general use Windows. (Or it used to. Again, I’m very out of date on the subject.)

I think “not hard, just annoying” means that anything tech related is out of reach for most people, unfortunately. Plus, to be honest, most people probably won’t care about or see a problem with Microsoft forcing an online account on them. I’m happy they’re happy, but their privacy ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

Similar concept. Your theory has merit.

I forgot I had made this post and was … Thoroughly confused by this response.

Ah, fair enough.

I haven’t used, or especially installed, Windows in years. Wasn’t sure if what I described was still the case. Good to know there’s still a way, though, in case I get desperate!

This may not still be true, but previously if you disconnected or removed the NIC during installation, after some haranguing you could setup a local account. (Note that this is still obviously bad, but if you need a solution, it might provide one.)

I would have guessed “bro for fucking real” or something like that … But whatever I came up with would have just been a guess.

“Philomot” was always pretty charming. “The color of a dead leaf.”

Not sure this is true … But mainly due to nuance.

I think everyone who has reached adulthood has done bad things worthy of atonement (not because minors can’t be bad, just to set a line), regardless of whether that’s because they’re a bad person or because they made poor decisions. I think of myself as a good person - because I try to better the lives of those around me - but I can think of plenty of bad things I’ve done (primarily out of ignorance or foolishness - I don’t think I’ve ever acted with the intent of hurting someone).

I’m not trying to atone for those things; once I realized they were bad things, I did my best to fix them and once I did everything I could, I moved on (and hoped the other participants did as well). In some cases, continuing to try to atone for bad acts would have exacerbated the consequences if the other party just wanted to move on.

My mom, who was a big fan of aphorisms, used to say “if you mess up, apologize if you should, fix it if you can, and move on.” I try to live by this.

So, to reiterate the nuance: I try to fix bad things I’ve done if I can; I try to learn from them so I don’t do them again; but I don’t live my life trying to atone for them.

I do like the sentiment behind your post, in case you think us philosophically opposed.

Well, fair enough that you were exposed to them. I didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not those even remotely into any kind of tech, as a kid; I think I first heard of trackballs from a programming teacher in about 1996 and bought one to try out of curiosity. Ever since then I’ve used one whenever it was an option.

I’ve even mostly used the same model. If you look in my comment history, you can see I recently mentioned that most of what I use is Kensington Orbits. I’ve tried other models, but they don’t work for me.

The one PC gaming exception for me is Minecraft. In that game you have to right-click a lot (as I’m sure you know) and I guess I haven’t developed the muscles for that because it makes my wrist very tired very quickly. Still, I play a lot of FPS games and have no problem holding the right click for zoom and such; only quick, repetitive right-clicking causes problems for me.

edit: To address your original comment, I have one friend who uses a trackball at work but a regular mouse for anything else. Other than that, I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of them, let alone used them, let alone consistently done so.

I’ve self diagnosed with face blindness, but I tentatively recognized his hair lift.

The references confirmed it.

Apparently, some politician tried to shutdown the patent office in the nineteenth century because “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

edit: no need for “I” there.

On PC, I game exclusively with trackballs and have since the nineties. I’ve never not been given the side eye when someone found out that’s how I play.

When was this magical time during which they were popular?

It’s been a year or two, but I had no issues with Star Citizen in Linux. IIRC, I ran it through Lutris.

I like the dichotomy between the two currently existing responses to this post.

The person perhaps (eventually) most qualified to answer this might be Graeldon, who is on a quest to play every Steam game in alphabetical order.

Ancient video time!

https://youtu.be/yWYvl_AIIbU

My pleasure! Glad it helped. Also, I like your username.

I’m still not sure how much to fear AI, as I’m not knowledgeable on the subject (never even intentionally interacted with one yet) and have seen conflicting reports on how worryingly capable it is. Today I did see this video, which isn’t explicitly about AI but did offer an interesting perspective that could be compared to the paradigm: https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

(Warning, the video was interesting, but I got invested about halfway through when I started comparing it to AI, then was disappointed in the ending)

I saw an interesting video about this. It’s outdated (from ten months ago, apparently) but added some context that I, at least, was missing - and that also largely aligns with what you said. Also, though it’s not super evident in this video, I think the presenter is fairly funny.

https://youtu.be/L6mmzBDfRS4