The original series is all I’ve seen but its legit hilarious and definitely still worth watching. Many of its storylines have been revisited/retold over the decades, but the plots maintain their charm and originality. It’s campy as all hell, but the campy atmosphere of the show elevates it rather than aging it in a bad way.

This may be specific to my sector (government), but every job posting requires a highly detailed cover letter that addresses numerous specific criteria outlined in some departmental rubric. It takes forever and requires sifting through verbose, corporate-slop documents to grasp their internal jargon and values, etc etc

data protection is at risk of becoming an oxymoron

For sure, and even though I know that I have to put myself first I still hate lying and I feel like im being forced to. This is apparently what is expected of us for certain jobs now. It’s quite aggravating!

Oh man story time, I just went through this yesterday.

I applied for a government job posting. I have 8-years experience in this particular role, and I’ve trained hundreds of coworkers for the job — I’m a dream applicant. They request in the posting that I read through their department’s rubric on their values and cater my cover letter to it (e.g., demonstrate examples of showing service excellence, sound judgment, creative problem solving, yadda yadda yadda). Takes me an hour or two of what feels Iike writing a college thesis.

I get an offer to advance in the interview. I book off an hour of work for the first round of the interview, lying that it was a Doctor’s appointment; then, I come to find it was actually a mandatory presentation asking people to not apply for the job unless they “really want it” because it’s emotionally difficult. I consider it a waste of MY time.

Second round they offer me to take their ‘2-hour virtual exam’, only offering it during business hours. I lie to my boss again and attend the session. After showing up on time, waiting for the Microsoft teams invite and getting nothing, I email the talent acquisition person: they are out of office.

The following Monday the lady is back in office, emails me, and offers me another virtual exam slot: 4 hours from now, again during work hours, and again requiring me to request time off from my current job.

Wtf? Is there another stage after the exam? An interview? How ridiculous have job searches gotten where we are expected to jump through endless hoops to satisfy prospective employers. Nobody has time to do this for every single frigging job they apply for.

The more shit you buy the more your shit owns you

www.lemm.ee has been the only place I’ve enjoyed using lemmy

Friggin love this meme template. Why was that little boy so mad? What did he want to do that day instead of getting his pictures taken? I relate, little dude.

You just taught the next generation about compatibility layers! Well done my man

Yeah mine was called the [City Name] Tool Library, and it was a non-profit that was independent of our local library. I imagine that they receive donated tools from contractors and companies around the city.

As an example, I googled a random city name (Calgary) and found one for them as well: https://calgarytoollibrary.org/

There are likely tons of similar organizations throughout Canada (and probably your country as well!)

Have you looked at local LLMs? You can download and run them off your own machine - no connecting to an external server. They aren’t any more power intensive than a lot of video games. I downloaded a DeepSeek model and I use ComfyUI to operate it locally

On a whim I googled my city’s library and “tools” and I found a non-profit society that specializes in lending of hand and power tools! This is incredible and I wouldn’t have known about it without this prompt: thank you!

Outside of steam will be a case by case basis. I wouldn’t expect a lot of luck, and it may require that you use a compatibility layer like Wine.

I genuinely find LLMs to be helpful with a wide variety of tasks. I have never once found an NFT to be useful.

Here’s a random little example: I took a photo of my bookcase, with about 200 books on it, and had my LLM make a spreadsheet of all the books with their title, author, date of publication, cover art image, and estimated price. I then used this spreadsheet to mass upload them to Facebook Marketplace in bulk. In about 20 minutes I had over 200 facebook ads posted for every one of my books, which resulted in getting far more money than if I made one ad to sell all the books in bulk; I only had to do a quick review of the spreadsheet to fix any glaring issues. I also had it use some marketing psychology to write attractive descriptions for the ads.

The thing that I appreciated most about Lemmy and my transition from Reddit is how cordial everyone has been. Even if a comment is taken out of context, people tend not to jump down each others throat and assume the worst, or make bad faith arguments full of fallacies. I’ve had legitimate back and forths with people, something that basically never happens on Reddit.

I find this interesting as I’m a beginner with only about 3 months of Linux use under my belt, whereas Ive used Windows since I was like 5 years old, and I found Debian to be a really good introduction to Linux. I was originally recommended Mint, like many are, and I found the experience to be a negative one as opposed to my later experience with Debian. (Note I have no experience with Bazzite or any other distros).

The additional ‘bloat’ in Mint obfuscated from me various aspects of Linux. It insulated me from learning how Linux is different from Windows, and that actually hindered me from understanding the OS. By starting with Debian I got a feel for using the CLI, setting up my drivers, package installer, and desktop environment. And, while those aspects can be complicated for new users, i think its somewhat necessary that they get a feel for them if Linux is going to be recommended as their OS.

Most of those points are why I mentioned that setting up the iso on a removable drive is probably the hardest part. If you can boot to it then the rest of the installation process at that point is pressing ‘next’ through the W10 initialization.

But I’ll also concede that an average mom and pop likely can’t handle opening powershell to run massgravel and activate windows, even though it’s as simple as copying and pasting, then pressing ‘1’

So Mint is the ‘distro’, which is actually based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. In simple terms, a distro is a bundle of programs and configurations assembled for you. Basically, Debian is a stripped down version of Mint.

A ‘desktop environment’ is a separate program(?) that changes what your desktop looks like, and they can be downloaded on any distro. So you can try out KDE Plasma on your Mint installation! The one that you’re likely using right now is called ‘Cinnamon’, which I personally didn’t like and turned me off of Linux my first time trying to switch over years ago.

Something cool about KDE Plasma is that you can download themes and make your desktop environments look really cool. For instance, sometimes I like to rock this Windows 7 theme: https://www.pling.com/p/2142957/

Have you ever seen how to draw a circle in GIMP?

It’s super easy, particularly if you follow a guide your first time. Your parents could absolutely do the install if you set up the USB for them. The hardest part is finding a safe download for the OS (they are .iso files) and setting it up on a USB stick (I recommend using a program called ‘Ventoy’ to do this).

I know that it’s a fediverse sin to post reddit links here, but there’s a genuinely superb megathread for Windows 10 LTSC IoT available that I recommend:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsLTSC/comments/15rfdjo/windows_ltsc_megathread/

In terms of actually installing you can initiate it by plugging the USB stick in and going through the start menu settings; or, when you boot up the computer you press F2/F12 to enter the BIOS screen, and you select the plugged in USB stick as your “boot drive”. This makes the computer open the USB stick instead of your already-installed OS.