Also because that lump sum is all there is. If you take the annuity they put the lump sum into an investment account and then pay you out of the proceeds (from which they take a cut, of course), and you can get the same returns they get, without losing their cut, doing it yourself.
So, your bog-standard ‘we’re improving the company by making everyone do the work of 2 people on the salary of 1’ routine. :P
it makes sense to guide the customer through the most common solutions first, as that will likely solve the problem.
And this why you have to suffer through those lengthy recordings that tell you about a bunch of shit that generally doesn’t apply to your situation before you can even use the menu, much less talk to a person. I am disabled, I have had to be on the phone with the Social Security Administration, Medicare, my insurance company, and various state benefits agencies probably 15-20 times a year for the past ~14 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times those ‘common solutions’ were even remotely applicable. I don’t even need fingers to count the number of times they have actually contained the solution to my issue, because it has literally never happened.
Once you get to a person who can make an assessment about what’s going on it makes sense for them to cover a few basics (I used to do tech support, I know how much time a simple, ‘Are you sure it’s plugged in?’ can save), but replacing customer service with AI means you’re pretty much stuck in those recordings for your entire call. Now to be fair this can be done better than most places do it. I shop on amazon a fair bit (can’t drive so I order most things online) and when I have issues I honestly prefer dealing with the livechat AI than calling because it’s a much faster and smoother experience and they can quickly bump you over to an actual agent when there’s a weird thing going on that’s outside of its scope. But most companies don’t have Amazon’s customer service budget to do shit like that well, so usually what I get is ‘If you’re calling about XYZ, hang up and dial this number. Did you know that if your birthday is on an odd-numbered day blahblah-ad-blahblah? If the crescent moon is waning and the distant hills are draining and the watchful eye is straining…’ etc.
They had to invest how much money into AI to realize this thing that literally anyone on the street would’ve happily told them for free? And they probably paid some consultant even more money to tell them it was a good idea. sigh.
Shiiit, I really don’t want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit. Any other privacy-focused search engines out there that don’t rely on this?
Something something money.
AI is just the latest hype train they’re hopping in the hopes of making more money.
I have to hit F11 to choose to boot the linux partition, at which point I get a grub menu. I don’t recall anything that says Plymouth on it, and I normally don’t get a text screen at all unless I boot into recovery mode, at which point I get the usual linux text-spam on boot.
Booting looks like: POST, F11 Select Linux to boot from (it’s listed as the 128GB SSD because that’s where the MBR/etc is, but linux is on a 1TB NVMe SSD) Get grub menu. Select Ubuntu. Wait a lot on a black screen. Get a brief Ubuntu logo that lasts a couple seconds. Black screen again for a few more seconds. No signal.
Remove other drives: no, that would be a significant pain in the ass. But also Pop worked installed on the same NVMe SSD with the same other drives in the system, so I’m pretty sure it’s not a drive/BIOS-related boot issue.
I’d be happy to chat, though I have no idea what matrix even is. Feel free to DM (does lemmy even do DMs? I’m still kinda new) if you want to try to get something like that set up tho. I’m on discord if that helps?
Probably re:Pop nvidia driver edition.
Monitor: HDMI cable straight into the #1 HDMI port on my GPU. Probably have a DP cable around here somewhere but haven’t felt like fucking with it since it worked fine on an HDMI cable on Pop. It’s a standard desktop setup, not a laptop with a docking station or anything.
Wayland/xorg: no clue, it never asked and I never saw even the first pixel of graphical anything.
Yeah I thought so too re:Pop/Ubuntu, part of the reason I tried Ubuntu is because it was similar but I hoped it would have more stable drivers or the like. shrug
Secure boot: I don’t remember (and can’t reboot to check bios) - I think I remember having to disable it when I installed Pop, but that was several months ago and my memory is shit.
Boot: Yes, the windows boot drive (an old 128GB SATA SSD), but I hit F11 on boot adn selected USB to boot to that to do the install just like with Pop. But again the install worked fine at least on the older LTS version of Ubuntu. And it booted on USB correctly with the later version too, just as soon as it went graphical it b0rked.
Spare laptop: nope. Closest I have is an old headless NAS box that’s running an old version of RedHat I think?, but also it’s been in my closet for ~5 years because I don’t really have anywhere to set it up. So mostly no.
Distros; I mean a lot of years ago i messed a lot with RedHat and before that Slackware, but nothing on this hardware. I have not tried Mint, and I’ve heard good things about it, but I mostly wanted to go with a main-line distro like ubuntu because a lot of the forum posts and such I found talking about how to fix random things seemed to be for ubuntu so it seemed like it’d be easier to get help on.
And no problem, I’m happy to answer if it means I can make this work.
I’ve tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.
PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren’t being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn’t work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can’t even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn’t matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn’t work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.
In case it matters, my specs are: Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I’ve only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that’s ~4-5 years old.
That’s not it at all. You don’t think accountants who juggle numbers and Excel formulas all day couldn’t learn? Lawyers whose entire job involves absorbing and filtering vast amounts of information? Doctors who diagnose machines that are far more complex than computers (people)? Of course they could; I worked around these people in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that despite how stupid these folks seem around computers they feel the same way about your capabilities in their field of expertise, only they don’t have the arrogance to assume that everyone should learn to be a mechanical engineer or dentist in order to understand their job.
What they are is too busy doing other shit that they care more about. They don’t have the time or interest to be farting around with a computer to do anything more than the absolute minimum requirements needed to do the shit they actually care about. Human society functions because people specialize, and people who don’t specialize in making computers go just don’t care enough about them as anything other than as a tool and maybe an occasional source of entertainment to waste their time learning. Just like you don’t waste your time learning about how to run a nuclear power plant.
And I say this as someone who used to love tinkering with computers, turned it into a career, and slowly grew to hate it (never turn your hobby into a career if you want to keep that hobby.) I too no longer care about optimizing or fiddling or tweaking, I just want the magic box to work so I can do the stuff I care about (writing, gaming, etc.)
I actually think there’s some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don’t always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it’s not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don’t have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that’s not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it’s just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than ‘lol buy an AMD GPU’, so the odds are pretty good that I’m not the only person in history that that has happened for. I’ve never had problems like this on windows, I’ve never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don’t have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.
I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it’s not just ‘press button, receive OS’ like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it’s not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.
Then you are not a decent human being? :P
Oh, my bad, I didn’t even notice the ‘no thanks’ button. Thanks.
No one gets thanks for being a decent human being, it’s sort of the standard that everyone is expected to hold to.
No doubt, but as a mechanism of applying pressure to get them to stop invading Ukraine, I think you’ll have to agree that it’s failed miserably. That’s what I (and most people) mean by ‘working’: accomplishing the intended aim. Huge problems or not, the war continues unabated. Why do you imagine doing more of the same would be any more effective?
They could. But you and I both know they won’t because most people don’t care about anything beyond ‘make the magic box work so I can do my job / play my game / etc.’
I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It’s been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren’t going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it’s still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the ‘it just works’ front.
Link just takes me to a website that says ‘Enter your email.’
Respectfully: No.
Why? Primary sanctions didn’t. The US and Europe effectively crashed out of Russia’s economy for the most part; they lost access to Western banking, Western businesses abandoned Russia in droves, and the oil and gas sales to Europe that Russia is heavily dependent upon have been significantly reduced. Yet they seem to be doing fine, so what’s left?
Also, why on earth would China walk away from trade with Russia? It’s pretty clear the US-led world order of trade is falling apart and China hasn’t been the one begging for trade deals over here, they seem fine to just write us off and go on about their business elsewhere in the world, I doubt they would have any compunction about doing the same to Europe if it came to that (which I doubt it will.)
What’s odd is that it’s not in the Wired headline either, this is a direct copy of their headline.