• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • shikitohno@kbin.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What Are Some Things You Regret Buying or Bought but Never Used?
    4·
    8 months ago

    You’re probably selling yourself short on the tech front and over-estimating the difficulty of installing something new. If you wanted to install something like Linux Mint or Fedora, the most complicated step would likely involve making a bootable thumbdrive to load it from. You could check that all your hardware works as intended (ie, can you connect to wifi, does sound play properly, can you watch a video on youtube, etc) without actually modifying your base OS, and if it does, the installations mostly hold your hand and you can get a perfectly sane setup just sticking to the defaults for most things and clicking next. There are plenty of options out there where you don’t need to be a command-line wizard to have a perfectly usable system.

  • shikitohno@kbin.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What Are Some Things You Regret Buying or Bought but Never Used?
    2·
    8 months ago

    I would just say that not everything needs to be a BIFL product, but there can be a tendency to push towards recommending only buying the best of everything. Like, I cook a lot at home, so it made sense to buy a $200 chef’s knife that I’ll get tons of use from and decent sharpening stones to maintain the edge. I listen to a ton of music, so I’ve dropped probably around $1500 into a pretty good pair of headphones, a DAC and an amp. On the other hand, I solder like once every couple of years, so getting my cheapo $40 Amazon special made more sense than dropping $500 on a much better soldering iron that offers features I simply don’t need and won’t benefit from. Sometimes good enough is exactly that, but it can be a nuance lost in these discussions.

    Heck, even though I use them several hours a day, my hearing just isn’t that good for me to justify spending a substantial amount upgrading my current audio gear. Even if there is an improvement to be had, I’m not sure it would be something I could even notice, so I’m not tempted to go down the rabbit-hole of upgrading my DAC, amp or headphones, as it would be chasing diminishing returns that I’m not even sure would be perceptible for me at a simple biological level.

  • shikitohno@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.ml•It hasn't turned a profit in 20 years, it should be a terrible business model, but they are probably going to be bought by the big tech companies to train LLM's.
    5·
    8 months ago

    I wouldn’t jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn’t alienate increasing numbers of their users. It’s basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.

    Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn’t have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn’t really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it’s no longer worth anything.