My understanding is that Android emulators primarily exist for mobile development and app testing and such-like, and maybe secondarily, to play mobile games.

I want to explore the possibility of using them as a, basically, full-time replacement for installing apps on my phone. More and more apps and services have no "desktop/laptop" version, and no website version. Installing the app on your phone is starting to become a non-negotiable requirement ... one that I'd like to find a work-around to.

So, yeah ... I guess that's the question. Is this a 'thing'? Has anyone experimented with--or flat-out used--an emulator on a desktop/laptop to run their banking app and the like? Is this even possible? Can you connect an emulator to an app-store and just start downloading/installing stuff?

Thanks.

A long, complicated story, summarized: (apart from Tildes, on which I lurk) I swore off all social media years ago. Then my job required that I have an account on LinkedIn. I reconsidered, and attempted to make the least disclosive account possible in an effort to protect my privacy. Things aren't going well. Despite logging in with the correct credentials, on the same device, using the same browser; and with access to my signup email, and access to the phone I used to enroll, LinkedIn has flagged my account the second time I tried using it and now requires me to upload images of myself and my government ID to regain access to their cesspool. Are you familiar with their protocols and can share insights, so that if I start again I don't face the same problem?

I have read what LinkedIn says and I have read discussions on Reddit on the topic. LinkedIn says you can opt to "use your work email" or mail them an affidavit. These options were not given to me. Everyone else I have seen reporting facing this seems to have triggered the system by losing their login credentials or moving countries; what brought this upon me and can I avoid it?

1. Is it that I use a VPN, and it may have routed through a different IP address on the second login?
2. I use an email alias. Is LinkedIn purging accounts with email domains that offer aliases?
3. Is it a result of clearing cookies?
4. Is it easier to maintain a Google account (!) which LinkedIn allows as login without this ID thing coming up?

Please be gentle with your advice as I am kind of panicking.

I need you to do me a favor: please keep an open mind and reserve judgement until after you've thoroughly digested the ideas I'm presenting here. These are not my ideas, and I have no connection to this project. I hope to do them justice in representing them accurately and as clearly as I understand it all.

Please don't be dismissive. Please don't jump to conclusions. I would not be posting about this if I did not believe it has tremendous potential to reshape the digital economy, and therefore everything that governs how civilization progresses in the next century. Dramatic, much? Yes, but I hope I have your attention.

I'm not posting this as a plain link, because the website looks incredibly sus. Just trust me for a few minutes. Links are at the end.

(No generative AI was used to write this post.)

What is PrizeForge?

PrizeForge is a financial service that can be best thought of as "Representative Crowdfunding" (my term, not theirs). Like direct crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter), it lets people pool their money to support expensive projects that would otherwise be impossible to fund. Similar to Patreon, it can also be an effective tip jar for much smaller things that would otherwise go unrewarded.

The innovation is two-fold: first, contributors never move alone. As a contributor, you set a ceiling on your weekly payment. This is the "enrollment" amount. However, the actual amount of money disbursed each weekly cycle is the amount that is successfully "matched" with other contributors. In the simplest example, if I wanted to enroll for Tildes at $20/week, and one other user enrolled at $5/week, the disbursement would be the sum of the matched funds: $5 + $5. In this way, nobody ever pays an unfair proportion of the total, and small donations become an integral part of funding allocation. Additionally, like how philanthrophists often match charitable donations to meet a fundraising objective, matching provides a powerful incentive for individuals to contribute by making individual contributions feel more significant, since any money you part with can be doubled by another contributor. The more you put in, the more others will too. (PrizeForge calls this algorithm "Elastic Fund Matching". The full algorithm gets considerably more complex, but they have a neat visualization on their site and videos.)

Second, unlike existing crowdfunding and patronage systems, creators and companies do not receive fund disbursements directly. Rather, representatives ("Delegates") send the money to the people and organizations that should receive funds to deliver value to the stream's contributors.

"Won't delegates just siphon funds to themselves?" you ask. Well, yes, that will 100% happen at some point. Corruption is a human problem that can't be solved with technology alone. PrizeForge aims to provide mechanisms to allow the community to be very dynamic, so contributors can easily switch to a new representative—for any reason. Additionally, tools for transparency in how the money moves would go a long way in keeping delegates accountable.

In the context of open-source software, delegates should be experienced power users who are well equipped to evaluate features and bugfixes, and then can award the prizes to developers according to their best judgement.

The use of a representative has many advantages over direct crowdfunding. Someone highly invested in a software product has valuable experience and would be more effective at setting priorities for features and bugfixes. An experienced and trusted delegate would save developers time having to parse the requests (...demands?) of individual users who may not be able to articulate what they really want. Also, if a developer or company stops doing what people want (providing value to the people who care), then funds can flow to competing alternatives in a very granular and dynamic way, as the delegates shift funding and/or new delegates arise.

If we could pick a delegate here for Tildes, would anybody really object to @cfabbro?

These trusted delegates already exist, everywhere! We just haven't been able to cooperate in the right ways to delegate our individual power, so they can truly move the needle on funding the projects we care about. PrizeForge is, I believe, the first truly sustainable funding model for community-owned and directed open-source.

Addendum

Watch this video first! Before you get scared away by the terrible scammy-looking website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO46oEdlkY8

The FAQ: https://prizeforge.com/faq

The company's github page: https://github.com/positron-solutions

Looks like just two people, with Psionikus doing all the promotion and running accounts. The company is incorporated in South Korea. They've got a bunch of emacs tooling, and I believe the PrizeForge concept originated out of a desire to improve the funding/development process of emacs, then the lem editor. They also apparently have a bit of beef with the FSF due to emacs politcs. Check out the last FAQ for a fun easter egg.

The sub-reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrizeForge/

The Hacker News comment that took me down the rabbithole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036360

Bonus thoughts:

• What's really crazy is that this is not a crypto or blockchain project. You can do a simplified version of the elastic fund matching with just money, pen & paper.
• This financing scheme is basically an idealized utopian voluntary tax system. I can imagine a granular delegate system being extremely effective at making politics incredibly boring. Imagine electing a local representative only to have potholes fixed in your area, using only the funds earmarked for fixing potholes. It would be so much simpler to keep them accountable. Either the roads are crap or they aren't! Where's the money, bub?! Why've you got a fancy new lawnmower?! I want my $2 back!
• If this reaches critical mass, it ends surveillance capitalism and digital feudalism. I don't want to live in Black Mirror, and this seems like the way out of that future.
• I would really love it if we can establish a funding stream for Tildes. I know I can donate to Tildes directly, but it would be a great test run to help PrizeForge get operational and build credibility. I only need one other crazy person. Isn't the internet great? (My credit card has not been stolen btw)
• The password login is still in development, so you have to login via Google SSO. I absolutely hate using Google SSO but I get it from a developer perspective. Proper auth is hard and companies like Tailscale took the same path and still don't support password login. (My google hasn't been hacked either fwiw)

I joined their waitlist last month and still didn't get an invite, now they even have mobile apps but still invite-only... so any chance I can get an invite code from someone here 👉👈. I just want to try and see what it's like

Edit: I didn't expect so many comments, I hope everyone gets an invite! but I just want to say, it seems it doesn't work the same way as tildes and from what I can tell, you need to be a "Groundbreaker" to create invites and only 2 invites can be created? (would appreciate if someone can clarify that in the comments) and I'm personally not able to create invites from my account unfortunately, otherwise I would've sent an invite to everyone who commented. :(

so Google's AI Studio used to have an option to finetune gemini flash for free by simply uploading a csv file. but it seems they have removed that option, so I'm looking for something similar. I know models can be finetuned on colab but the problem with that is it's way too complicated for me, I want something simpler. I think I know enough python to be able to prepare a dataset so that shouldn't be a problem.

My elderly father has an android phone and so do I. Is there a reputable remote assistance app that we can both install so I can help him with basic phone stuff from far away?

It has to be as easy to use as possible: it won't work if he has to open an app or toggle settings or punch in a buncha code. He doesn't even know how to take a screenshot and send it over WhatsApp. Ideally the app would just be sleeping until I send him a request, it'll have a pop up to allow, and he just has to click yes. I won't need full control, just be able to see what he sees and tell him what thingy to click.

On the desktop front, I'm considering getting Mint for him to upgrade. All he wants to do is open browser and go to bookmark sites. Is there a Mint compatible remote assistance app that's super easy? Again I'm okay with minimal control trade off with ease of use from his side.

Thanks Tildes :)

Hello, Tildes Tech Support Team,

I'm doing some Homelab stuff. And I'm looking for a way to set up an inexpensive back-up Internet connection. Less about having a connection when I'm home and Internet goes out (Phone hotspot works in a pinch), but more about getting in and getting statuses of stuff when I'm not home and Internet drops.

For background, I have a Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine Pro that can do WAN failover. My primary Internet connection is through Verizon Fios. The UDM and the Fios ONT are directly connected via ethernet; I'm not using Verizon's crappy home router. Also, I rarely lose Internet connectivity. This really is just a Homelab experiment to see if it can be done.

I've seen some stuff about getting a cheap, refurb smartphone and a cheap MVNO plan like Google Fi that nets me a handful of GB a month, and then tethering the UDM to the phone somehow (maybe through some cheap router in bridge/passthrough mode like a GLinet travel router). Has anyone had any experience doing this?

But...I actually have a secondary Internet connection already. My apartment complex has WiFi across the complex and for each unit. That I unfortunately have to pay for, even though I don't use it -- I want FULL control over my home network. But since I do have it, is there a way I can take advantage of this? I'm thinking something like a reverse AP, if that exists. But it has to pass through the IP from the apartment WiFi.

I know there will likely be issues with double NATing. But depending on the services/things I'm trying to access or keep access to, that may not be a factor. Like my Unifi hardware talking with the Unifi cloud access stuff. I think double NAT shouldn't matter.

Anyway, appreciate whatever you all got!

The internet is starting to feel smaller and smaller, or at least the content I find is less interesting or created with the goal to be sponsored.

Nowadays, I basically consume downloaded content, books, shows, mainly old stuff found on the internet archive

Which other sites do you find interesting and worth it?

I recently found myself on the other side of what might be a generational divide:

I was talking with two younger family members, and they were talking about being mildly annoyed at sharing their location with the friends via their phones -- as in they could mutually see where everyone was at any given time.

My husband and I were utterly baffled. Giving friends permanent access to our current locations felt unbelievably invasive.

They felt that way a bit, but they also mentioned that it was a way of keeping up with one another and seeing what people are up to. They'd often see they were at a bar and send the other a text telling them to "enjoy the drinks!" or "have a good time!"

I can kind of understand the appeal of this, especially as a step away from the pressures of social media. Instead of having to take pictures at the bar to put up on Instagram, you can just be at the bar, and if someone thinks that's interesting they can let you know. In a weird way, that does actually feel healthier?

They also said that not sharing your location can be seen kind of negatively -- as being aloof or closed off. This gave me even further ick, because it made it seem like there was a strong social pressure to share (similar to the "if you have nothing to hide..." argument).

So, my question is basically: what's the social landscape of location-sharing like these days? Is what my family members do common, or is that an oddity specific to their friend group? Is it actually a generational thing, or am I overgeneralizing based on my one conversation?

For reference, I have next to zero knowledge of building electronics. I've replaced the joysticks on two Nintendo joycons (which I actually found pretty fun), and that's it. I also have no experience with 3D printing or designing specific products.

I am also sick of touch screen keyboards on phones, do not like any of of the phones that do have keys or the Clicks phone case (why is it on the BOTTOM—), and currently have a lot of free time.

So my question to you: how would I go about designing my own slide out case with its own keyboard?

Because that is my ideal solution at this point. And in fact, it turns out someone DID make a 3D printed "slider terminal" this year. Except it's for the Note 10 (I have a Galaxy S9), and seems to be used as a full-fledged replacement for a desktop experience with a trackpad. That's neat and will probably appeal to a lot of people here, but personally, I just need physical keys.

Along with the keyboard used for that terminal, I also found this other tiny keyboard which doesn't have the trackpad and is about the same dimensions as my Galaxy S9. Actually I found that first and was trying to figure out if there were any cases that could store and pop that out. The biggest issue is that it would cover my camera except maybe when it's slid out, but screw it, I want a damn physical keyboard.

I do have access to 3D printers (yay public libraries!) and I'm willing to learn Blender in order to make this thing. I just need advice on where to begin and how to tackle this. In particular, I have no clue how to go about the slide out part. I feel like I should be able to figure out how to make a case that fits the dimensions of my phone and the keyboard fairly easily, but no idea where to begin with researching the sliding component.

Besides that, I also know that I'm not alone here in my frustrations with phone keyboards, so I'm hoping we can pool together ideas on how to do this. As far as I can tell there's not really a "one size fits all" solution that would work for all phones (well, except perhaps a foldable case instead of slide-out), but maybe we can at least share decent starting points for people to design their own. For instance, the slider terminal uses a keyboard that came with a remote, and it would never have occurred to me that could be used for this sort of project. And there are a lot of potential workarounds for the camera placements, so Person A may have an idea that doesn't work well for them, but does work better for Person B than their own original idea.

So yeah. Advice, ideas and general brainstorming are welcome!

I’m curious to get a read of where people’s heads are at regarding defence - be it innovation, funding or working in it in general (in particular in Europe but please contextualise with your country if you’re commenting).

Still five years ago, most people’s view was rather negative on it. I’ve seen attitude change significantly but I’d love hear opinions.

This is always weighing on my mind and is coming after this comment I wrote.

The tech sector, especially the hyper-online portion of it, is full of devs who were doing some random shit before and shifted to AI the past few years. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those: In much the same way, very shortly after the release of ChatGPT, I completely changed my own business as well (and now lead an AI R&D lab). Sure I had plenty of ML/AI experience before, but the sector was completely different and that experience has practically no impact aside from some fundamentals today.

The thing is, LLMs are all in all very new, few people have an active interest into "how it all works", and most of the sector's interest is in the prompting and chaining layers. Imagine network engineering and website design being bagged into the same category of "Internet Worker". Not really useful.

Some reflexions on the state of the business world right now...

In most SMEs, complete ignorance of what is possible beyond a budding interest in AI. Of course, they use ChatGPT and they see their social media posts are easier to write, so they fire some marketing consultants. Some find some of the more involved tools that automate this-and-that, and it usually stops there.

In many large companies: Complete and utter panic. Leaders shoving AI left and right as if it's a binary yes-ai/no-ai to toggle in their product or internal tools, and hitting the yes-ai switch will ensure they survive. Most of these companies are fuuuuuucked. They survive on entropy, and the world has gotten a LOT faster. Survival is going to get much harder for them unless they have a crazy moat. (Bullish on hardware and deeply-embedded knowledge; Bearish on SaaS and blind-spend; Would short Palantir today if I could)

In labs just like mine: I see plenty of knowledgeable people with no idea of how far-reaching the impact of the work is. Super technical AI people get biased by their own knowledge of the flaws and limitations so as to be blind to what is possible.

And in tech entrepreneurship, I see a gap forming between techies who have no respect for "vibe coders" on the grounds that they're not real programmers, and who don't end up using AI and fall massively behind since execution (not code quality) is everything. And at the same time I see vibe coders with zero technical prowess get oversold on the packaging, and who end up building dead shells and are unable to move past the MVP stage of whatever they're building.

And the more capable the tool you're using is, the more the experience can be SO WILDLY DIFFERENT depending on usage and configuration. I've seen Claude Code causing productivity LOSSES as well as creating productivity gains of up to 1000x -- and no, this isn't hearsay, these numbers are coming from my own experience on both ends of the spectrum, with different projects and configurations.
With such massively different experiences possible, and incredibly broad labels, of course the discussion on "AI" is all over the place. Idiocy gets funded on FOMO, products built and shut down within weeks, regulators freaking out and rushing meaningless laws that have no positive impact, it's just an unending mess.

Because it's such a mess I see naysayers who can only see those negatives and who are convinced AI is a bubble just like that "internet fad of the 90s". Or worse, that it has zero positive impact on humanity. I know there's some of those on Tildes - if that's you, hello, you're provably already wrong and I'd be happy to have that discussion.

Oh and meanwhile, Siri still has the braindead cognition of a POTUS sedated with horse tranquilizer. This, not ChatGPT, is the most-immediately-accessible AI in a quarter of the western world's pocket. Apple will probably give up, buy Perplexity, and continue its slow decline. Wonder who'll replace them.

Hello Tildes!

There's an open-source app I would like to work on and contribute code to, but it uses a toolchain that I'm not terribly familiar with (Deno), and I'm not a huge fan of letting tools like this have full access to my system and files.

Do any of you use a system to containerize different development environments for software development? I could definitely use a standard Docker/Podman container to run the app, but I'm not aware of a good system where you can edit a program's source in an IDE, make changes, build the app, open a local port, and save your new code, all within a sandboxed environment.

If anyone uses a system like this or something related, I would love to hear about it and share ideas.

Edit: Decided to go with the Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro. Thank you for all the suggestions and advice!

Hey Tildenauts,

I'm planning to help a local nonprofit replace their aging hardware firewall pro bono. I have a fair amount of experience with networking and security, especially where web servers are concerned, but I haven't setup a hardware firewall recently enough to know off the top of my head which are the best options here.

The organization is fairly small but on its way to medium sized, around 30 employees at the moment but will likely expand to 50+ in coming years. So I'm looking for a solution that will comfortably scale up to 100 employees. There is remote work, accessing their local server via VPN, so something that comes bundled with a user friendly VPN client would be ideal. I haven't seen their physical setup yet but I know their server gets a lot of use. Not all employees use it remotely on a regular basis but many do.

From past experience I know that Cisco, Sophos and SonicWall are potential options. Cisco seems to be pushing their Meraki platform pretty hard but I don't think this organization needs a subscription based solution.

Anyone have recommendations for hardware firewalls I should consider? Any potential footguns I should know about?

Thanks in advance!

First, I am emphatically not talking about LLMs.

Just a shower thought kinda question. For most people, the primary issue is anthropomorphizing too much. But I think programmers see it differently.

Let's say someone comes up with something that seems to walk and talk like a self-aware, sentient, AGI duck. It has a "memories" db, it learns and adapts, it seems to understand cause and effect, actions and consequences, truth v falsehood, it passes Turing tests like they're tic-tac-toe, it recognizes itself in the mirror, yada.

But as a developer, you can "look behind the curtain" and see exactly how it works. (For argument's sake, let's say it's a FOSS duck, so you can actually look at the source code.)

Does it ever "feel" like a real, sentient being? Does it ever pass your litmus test?

For me, I think the answer is, "yes, eventually" ... but only looong after other people are having relationships with them, getting married, voting for them, etc.

Ok so I have a Google account for an organization. But when I have that account logged in on my phone some of the security restrictions impact all accounts on my phone. I have a pixel 7a with Android 16 if it matters.

I would love to have access to this gmail account, with notifications, on my phone without forwarding the emails to one of my personal accounts. Any way to do that within the Gmail app itself, or if I need a different app, any recommendations?

In my perfect world I'd have OneDrive access too, but I can use a browser window there if needed.

My understanding of how large language models work is rooted in my knowledge of statistics. However a significant number of people have never been to college and statistics is a required course only for some degree programs.

How should chatgpt etc be explained to the public at large to avoid the worst problems that are emerging from widespread use?

My parents are about to get a new TV because theirs is faulty and they don't seem interested in repairing it. I'm going to be taking the faulty one from them and, because it's ridiculous that the TV only worked normally for 3.5 years, am very tempted to try a repair. It's an LG CX OLED from 2021, here's a description of the issue:

• When plugged into the mains, the standby light will come on and the TV can be powered on and used as normal. However, if too much time elapses after plugging-in without fully powering on (I don't actually know how long, somewhere between 5-10 minutes), the standby light will switch off and the TV will become unresponsive.
• When the TV is in this "unresponsive" state, the only thing that will bring it back to life is to unplug it from the mains and wait a bit (again, somewhere between 5-10 minutes), then plug it back in and turn it on. This happens every time the TV is plugged in, with no variation.
• The TV is fully functional when it's turned on, and there's no other issues with it at all.
• If the TV is turned back off (back to standby mode), the clock starts again until it becomes unresponsive.

So clearly there's some problem with standby mode. Some searching has indicated that other customers are frequently having this issue, and that replacing either the PSU or Motherboard of the TV will solve the issue. It's out of warranty, so I'm going to be spending money if I want to fix it. Replacement PSUs are about $250, and replacement Motherboards are about $350. I can only really afford one of these parts right now, so it's a gamble if I can't figure out a way to isolate the issue to one of the boards. I don't own a multimeter to test power, nor do I know anything about electronics, so I'm slightly fumbling around in the dark on this one.

There's always the alternative of getting up and switching the power on and off every time, which is significantly more convenient for me than it is for my parents because of room size and outlet placement, but I'd like to be able to use the remote as intended (and, as I mentioned before, it's ridiculous that the thing is falling apart after only a few years, it's a very expensive TV!). I could also... find an IR controlled outlet or something? I don't know if that's a thing, but you know what I mean.

I will end up using this TV regardless of whether or not I can get it fixed, because OLED is unbeatable, and it's not every day that my parents will replace something that isn't outright destroyed, but if you have electronics experience, or have had this problem (it seems like it's super common) any recommendations or help would be appreciated!

I have updated the Portuguese section of my blog with many posts that I scavenged from past blogs I've had since 2005. In order for everyone to be able to go through them chronologically, I gave them their original dates. In the end of each of these posts there is a link to the original publication, many of which came from the Internet Archive itself.

One of my oldest blogs was removed from blogspot decades ago either by a hacker or something obscure about blogspot. So I had to use the archived version to reconstruct my history. I was very surprised to find it there because it was seemingly archived a decade after blogspot removed it. I have no idea what happened but I was so glad to find it!

I have been trying to archive that page for days. The posts within that page are archived but not the page itself. The current August 2025 snapshot is not shown, and if I click on the link that they give me after the archiving process is done, I am directed to a snapshot I did back in May. I have no idea why this is happening, and the "help" section of Wayback Machine doesn't seem to have anyway for me to talk to someone.

Can someone help?

This is the page: https://daviramos.com/br/. It is also available at https://daviramos.bearblog.dev/br/, and yes, I tried archiving that one too.

Thanks!

Howdy fellow humans. So I need help finding ways to teach my technophobe mother how to not get caught out by scam websites and how to just generally navigate the internet like a tech savvy person.

Recently, she got caught out when applying for the Thai Digital Arrival Card. She paid $80 for the "service". She only realised afterwards that this should not be the case. This angered her and reinforced her thinking that she can't do these things online and will always say she doesn't know what she is doing etc etc. When I googled the thai DAC the first hit on google was the official site and I had to go out of my way to find the one that she got. As I mentioned before she is a technophobe but then won't take the time to learn how to properly navigate the internet or improve her media literacy skills at all. I am also sure that there may be some other more personal issues around her refusal to learn how to use tech but thats a problem for another day.

Anyway so far Iv found 2 crash course series that would most likely help but if anyone else here has other resources for me to suggest to her id really appreciate it.

I feel like writing another rant, why not.

I guess it visibly started about the time Windows 10 released and probably earlier with smartphones but it is really going into overdrive lately. Especially with all the AI(it is like exponential being used to mean a lot, really. Words have meanings, being minimally precise is not waste of time) being shoved into everything.

Statistical based autocomplete being added everywhere whether it makes sense or not or whether the user wants it or not. They will get it anyway. It makes sense somewhere, in some situations when the user deliberately invokes that.

Settings that really should be standard user accessible are just not and in very lucky cases there are not too painful workarounds. Just several examples. Search bar in address bar(I could write a rant on this alone, is having to decide before using one or the other really that inconvenient?). Forced internet search in Windows start menu search. Automagically starting downloads without any user involvement. Also defaults such as hiding extensions automatically on Windows explorer.

Constant ui reshuffles, generally for the worse(at least from the point of valuing utility and good sized monitor). Less information, straight up insulting language. Uh, oops something broke. This is prevalent even in Linux on some distros. What the hell, why? What broke? Would it be that much effort to link high level overview and logs locations? Or at least start treating the user like an adult again?

Search engines straight up ignoring the actual query entered. I can get any amount of low quality and irrelevant results(not even one or the other, they have to have it both ways) I want but a relevant result on the first page is a miracle regardless if it is actually useful or not. My guess is they simply throw the text into the nearest mainstream bucket with zero regard for nuance and specificity.

Algorithmic content recommendations. That is to say black box content reshuffling made by entity concerned with ads and engagement. Hiding crowd sourced signs of content helpfulness(dislikes).

Forced internet connection, forced online accounts, forced permanent or regular internet connectivity. Forced updates, forced telemetry.

Inability or strong discouragement to take control of the user owned devices. Smartphones, consoles, smart things generally.

Zero chance of being able to read and understand all of the TOS that are thrown everywhere but a strong pressure to accept them anyway. Sometimes after the end user paid already.

It is not hard to see the benefits for one side but I don't understand end users who embrace this. Do they really think it benefits them? It does not take all that much effort to be a generation or two behind the latest user hostile trends even if opting out completely is next to impossible.

Sometimes I feel like there's something wrong with how I use technology, or I'm just incredibly biased and predisposed to cynicism or something, so I wanted to get a pulse on how everyone else feels about AI, specifically LLMs, and how you use them in your professional and personal lives.

I've been messing with LLMs since GPT-3, being initially very impressed by the technology, to that view sort of evolving to a more nuanced one. I think they're very good at a specific thing and not great at anything else.

I feel like, increasingly, I'm becoming a rarity among tech people, especially executives. I run cybersecurity for a medium sized agency, and my boss is the CIO. Any time I, or any of her direct reports write a proposal, a policy, a report, or basically anything meant to distribute to a wide audience, they insist on us "running it through copilot", which to them, just means pasting the whole document into copilot chat, then taking the output.

It inevitably takes a document I worked hard on to balance tone, information, brevity, professional voice, and technical details and turns it into a bland, wordy mess. It's unusable crap that I then have to spend more time with to have it sound normal. My boss almost always comes up with "suggestions" or "ideas" that are very obviously just copy pasted answers from copilot chat too.

I see people online that talk about how LLMs have made them so much faster at development, but every time I've ever used it that field, it can toss together a quick prototype for something I likely could have googled, but there will frequently be little hidden bugs in the code. If I try to use the LLM to fix those bugs, it inevitably just makes it worse. Every time I've tried to use AI in a coding workflow, I spend less time thinking about the control flow of the software, and more time chasing down weird esoteric bugs. Overall it's never saved me any time at all.

I've used them as a quick web search, and while they do save me from having to trawl through a lot of the hellhole that is the modern internet, with blogspam, ads, and nonsense people write online, a lot of times, it will just hallucinate answers. I've noticed it's decent at providing me results when results exist, but if results don't exist, or I'm asking something that doesn't make sense, it falls flat on its face because it will just make things up in order to sound convincing and helpful.

I do see some niches where the stuff has been useful. Summarizing large swathes of documents, where the accuracy of that summary doesn't matter much is a little useful. Like if I were tasked to look through 300 documents and decide which ones were most relevant to a project, and I only had an hour to do it, I think that would be a task it would do well with. I can't review or even skim 300 documents in an hour, and even though an LLM would very likely be wrong about a lot of it, at least that's something.

The thing is, I don't frequently run into tasks where accuracy doesn't matter. I doubt most people do. Usually when someone asks for an answer to something, or you want to actually do something useful, the hidden assumption is that the output will be correct, and LLMs are just really bad at being correct.

The thing is, the internet is full of AI evangelists that talk about their AI stack made up of SaaS products I've never even heard of chained together. They talk about how insanely productive it's made them and how it's like being superhuman and without it they'd be left behind.

I'm 99% sure that most of this is influencer clickbait capitalizing on FOMO to keep the shared delusion of LLM's usefulness going, usually because they have stake in the game. They either run an AI startup, are involved in a company that profits off of AI being popular, they're an influencer that makes AI content, or they just have Nvidia in their stock portfolio like so much of us do.

Is there anyone out there that feels this technology is actually super useful that doesn't fall into one of those categories?

If so, let me know. Also, let me know what I'm doing wrong. Am I just a Luddite? A crotchety old man? Out of touch? I'm fine if I am, I just want to know once and for all.

Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally rebellious teenager, I agreed with her. Print has used it for hundreds of years, why shouldn't we?

The web has always resisted this development because it was difficult. Yes, the css property text-align: justify exists, but browser were always missing the crucial functionality of hyphenating words. That led to very ugly justified texts and so called "rivers" of whitespace because the spaces got so large. Begrudingly, I got used to it.

I was surprised to learn that all major browsers support the new hyphens css property since late 2023. This one adds exactly that crucial functionality. I was stunned and immediately tried it out and oh look, the web is so much more beautiful now.

You can try out yourself here on Tildes! Just right click a comment, click "Inspect" and then when the dev console pops up, add

text-align: justify;
hyphens: auto:

to p, which stands for the paragraph html tag and in which all text posts are rendered on Tildes.

It looks so much better! But I do wonder why it hasn't spread around more in the web. Am I the only one? Am I nitpicky? I feel like the improvement is stark and very good for functionally no extra work. I even installed a browser extension which augments a website's css so I could automatically do it on most websites.

This is the first time in my career that a Mac is the preferred machine for an organization. I've been using Windows for 30 years. This is a big change for me but I want to learn some useful tips and tricks on Mac os.

This could be "what are some changes you made on the Mac settings to make your Mac experience feel more comfortable?" Or "what tool on Mac can you not live without?"

There aren't any rules really, I want this to be a fun conversation, thanks everyone!

** Please do not tell me how to fix my issue below; this is an example, not a tech-support request **

I have a (LibreOffice) spreadsheet, personal tracking data. The other day, I got a new laptop (Framework), put a new OS (Debian trixie RC2) on it.

Now, on the new machine, when I add a comment to a cell, the background color of the new comment is wrong/different from every other comment in the spreadsheet. When I add a comment to the same spreadsheet, opened on a different machine, the new comment still has the "correct"/standard background color, but any comments I added on the new machine continue to have the wrong color.

This happened once or twice in the past couple of days, and I just manually "fixed" the color of each new comment, but this morning, I tried to figure out what the deal was, how to fix it properly/permanently.

And just like that, my 3-minute daily edit of this spreadsheet turned into a 2-hour wild goose chase. I still haven't fixed it, I still don't know whether to blame LibreOffice, Debian, the new laptop, or some other variable I haven't even thought of. All I know is, someone has stolen 2 hours of my life from me, and I really want to know who that is.

Bigger picture ...

This happens all the time. Every day, often 3-4 times a day, it is a regular point of stress, of contention in my life, deciding whether to devote hours (sometimes days) of my life to strong-arming software into working the way it was supposed to work in the first place, or to try my best to accept that we just can't have nice things on our computers, and move on.

This definitely predates the word "enshittification", but I don't think it really predates the concept. Stipulated -- software development is complicated, and software is used in so many different situations -- different hardware, different OSes, different libraries, different supporting/complementary software, versions, etc -- it is extremely hard to make software that "just works" for everyone, all the time.

Nonetheless, I think the entire software development industry just collectively decided that is it okay to release stuff that doesn't work ... dating back to some point in the 20th century, long before Linux, before the Internet, before smartphones ... this issue--this philosophy--goes waaaay back, and there's just no fighting it at this point.

But also, I do not want to live in a world where I have to surrender hours and days and years of my life, fighting with software that doesn't work, because "that's just how software is".

So, that's my gripe. Is there any kind of viable middle ground here, that is less extreme than "cabin in the woods"? 'Cuz I am (yet again) seriously weighing that option this morning.

I thought it would be fun to explore what people on Tildes use for things like email, file synchronisation, webhosting, backups, streaming, password management, etc.
Are you using a common big tech service? Are you self hosting? Something in between? If you are self hosting what does it look like? Are you running bare metal, using containers, a complete proxmox setup with a legion of VMs? And of course, what software are using on top of it all?
I am also curious to see how satisfied you are with your current setup.

To be extra clear, this is not about the OS you are running on your personal computer, we've had plenty of discussion like that already ;).

And also to be extra clear, this isn't just about self hosting.

Posted in ~tech because I want a broad discussion, not just the ~comp folks.

I'll start

I have been trying to move away from a lot of the big tech services for a few years now. For me it isn't an absolute where I don't want any Google or Microsoft in my life, I just don't want to be reliant on them for what I see as critical parts of my personal infrastructure.

Running servers and maintaining them including infrastructure on top like reverse proxies, docker, Kubernetes, etc is something I am fairly familiar with. But it isn't something I quite enjoy or trust myself to do for a lot of important stuff. Specifically when it comes down to security and making sure backups are in order. This means that for a lot of things I have opted to use other services. But in a way that allows me to move away to a different one quite easily.

File storage & synchronization

For years I made use of Google drive, but after running into various sync issues and the lack of Linux clients (even though I am now back on Windows) it was the first service I moved away from big tech.
For this I make use of a hosted Nextcloud instance on Hetzener's "storage share" plan. Honestly, no big complaints here about the core functionality. Files get synchronized just fine and Hetzner takes care of updates and backups.

Email

For email I make use of my own domain in combination with mailbox.org mail hosting.

Media streaming

I still have quite some music, movies and series on my hard drive. For this I use Jellyfin, which works quite well. Though the native apps have some issues where it will start transcoding things that don't need transcoding at all. This isn't an issue with third party apps. On android, I use findroid. On the ipad of my SO I had to compromise a little bit, the best app there seems to be Infuse which isn't open and requires a subscription for some advanced features. Though for Jellyfin playback the free version seems to work fine so far.

Jellyfin itself is just running on my desktop PC. I have been thinking about a NAS of sorts, but decided to hold off on it for now as my computer is effectively always on whenever one of us wants to watch something.

Password management

In the past I have used KeePassXC which with the browser extension works quite well on my desktop. But keeping it synced to my phone as well was sometimes a bit finicky. So last year I decided to switch to Bitwarden with the idea that I can always switch to vaultwarden if I decide to.

Edit: DeaconBlue's setup reminded me that I also use Aegis which backs up encrypted to nextcloud.

Backup

For backups I make use of Hetzner's storage box plans. In order to create the backups I make use of restic, but to make things a bit easier I have opted to use the Backrest front-end for it which basically takes care of scheduling.

VPS for various random scripts and experiments

I am also running a Ubuntu server VPS, also on Hetzner infrastructure, which I use to run a variety of scripts, experiment with stuff I might want to self host, etc. The scripts it runs are mostly related to discord moderation and one I maintain for the /r/history team (even though I am no longer active on reddit).

Webhosting & Domains

While I have a VPS, for simple hosting and since I need to buy my domains somewhere I am making use of a hosting provider in the Netherlands called mijn.host. They are quite affordable and customer oriented.

If you have ever see me share images on Tildes this is also where I have my own image hosting thing running. Which is basically ShareX configured to upload images to a simple PHP endpoint I created that resizes images, strips their exif data and renames them.

Honourable mention: PikaPods

PikaPods basically provides you with docker hosting of a wide variety of open source apps in a very user friendly way. I have experimented a bit with it and while I don't have a current use for it I do think that it is a neat service other people might enjoy.

I'm getting a new phone (OnePlus 13, not that it really matters) and I'm considering the benefits of flashing over something like LineageOs straight away rather than using the stock OS.

Normally, I expect? You'd run stock until security updates stop or something changes where you want a longer running OS, but I'm considering it because I cannot be bothered with all the bloatware they put on modern phones these days.
Plus it should save a heap of battery.

What are people's thoughts on this? Is it something you always do anyway or do you usually run stock for a while?

I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.

For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm considering installing some abandonware games, and, as anyone who trawls the internet for old executables knows: they are often rife with viruses/malware.

It's easy to avoid the ones that are clearly malicious using tools like VirusTotal, but it gets trickier when the "is it clean?" is more of a "maybe" than a "no" because you're not sure if something is a false positive.

I'd rather not take chances and will generally avoid anything I find even slightly suspicious, but it did get me thinking: if I ran the games through Linux instead of Windows (e.g. via WINE or Proton), am I equally vulnerable?

Does something like that sandbox the virus? Is the virus rendered ineffective by being in a system it's unable to exploit as intended?

Or is this wishful thinking and it's still risky no matter what?

I'm not asking this as a "help me play abandonware games" plea (though, if there are best practices out there feel free to enlighten me). Instead, it's a curiosity -- a "help me better understand Linux vs. Windows" from someone who's not super techy.

As a Brit who's now effected by the Great British Firewall I'd like recommendations for VPNs that meet the following criteria either directly or via additional software/Firefox extensions:

• Use VPN only for specific apps on iOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky and Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) but not others)
• Use VPN for specific websites on Windows/macOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky, Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) websites)
• VPN considered generally trustworthy and not an American firm

Personal recommendations that you have experience with only please.

Hi everyone, I'm feeling inspired to start a tool library out of a community space. I am resisting the urge to roll the software myself and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions about existing projects that I might look into, ideally leaning towards the lightweight side of things.

What say you, Tildes community?

Ironically, AI has boomeranged from surpassing human intelligence to having us spot it like a dove in a pond. So now, leave in all the little flubs to make it a bit more clear that a person at least typed this in a keyboard, you know?

Can be viewed here

Is this just the usual pointless Apple fanfare?

I'm not very techy so I'm just wondering why this is a big deal. It seems to me it's just a different theme of sorts? But in this video MKBHD is making it out to be a really big deal. Is it like technologically super impressive? What's the big deal?

I'm starting an archive project of long form interviews with locals in my area. Do any of y'all have advice on what might be the best handheld voice recorder that's high quality sound but small and discrete so my interviewees can forget that they're being recorded?

I was about to recommend wordpress.com (free tier) to someone and realized I have no idea if I should. I am not a tech person but I should have an idea of what to suggest when someone even less technical ask me for advice. Did it all die down? Is Wordpress safe to use now?

I see that in the headline from time to time. Not really sure how prevalent it is and it's pretty disappointing news.

but I also can't help but think:

1. the news articles are probably overblowing it and it's not probably not as prevalent as it's being portrayed
2. that any tech company doing that is shooting themselves in the foot. in total, I was an intern at various companies for a little under 3 years. I don't doubt that the work I did for the majority of the my co-ops were all things that could have been done by a chatBot. writing unit tests and small scripts and etc. but they were invaluable to me (1) understanding what is expected of me in a professional environment and (2) gave me a basic idea of how to code in a professional environment (2) gave me alot of perspective on what technologies and tools I should spend spare time learning cause my university very much focused on dinosaur-era languages, for the classes that did teach any coding related skills. same for the friends I went to uni with. So all I think is maybe in the short term, they are saving money on not hiring interns/co-ops/junior devs to do work that can be done by a bot but I feel like in the long terms that will reduce the number of intermediate/senior devs on the market which means they'll be in higher demand and cost more money.

Most people here dislike AI, more specifically LLM generated content, for reasons such as environmental impact, stealing people's work, etc. Despite that, is there anything that you enjoy?

I've been listening to this artist's music for a while. It's mostly video game music "re-imagined by AI" into City Pop and other styles. Artist says they use AI to generate samples, then do the rest of the work like any producer would. I have no idea if it's true or not, but I gotta admit that most of it is really good.

Today I also watched some "AI ASMR" videos out of curiosity. It's stupid, I know. But watching a knife cut glass can be so damn satisfying. I'm sorry, planet.

Noted smoked meats enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg has recently been running around collecting ML experts for a project involving an organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is set to feature compute clusters with names like "Prometheus" and "Hyperion", and which will attempt to "deliver" superintelligence.

Isn't this sort of behavior on the list of things people are absolutely not to be allowed to do? Or has something changed and we now feel it's safe for Mark Zuckerberg to be allowed control of a piece of equipment that can outsmart all his enemies and also Mark Zuckerberg? Are we all safely convinced he will fail?

If it cannot be permitted, who is responsible for not permitting it?

Presumably, my understanding of Cloudflare is too simple, too rudimentary, or even entirely lacking in some aspects.

As far as I understand it, the main feature is just faster and more reliable access to sites, right?

If I host a website on a server in New York, and someone tries to look at it in Tokyo ... that's a long distance and a lot of potential hops to retrieve the file(s) directly from the NY machine. Cloudflare provides closer-location mirrors of websites so there is less lag time, plus having multiple copies makes my website more readily/reliably available.

That's good, I get that, especially for big, professional business-critical-type sites/services.

But it's not actually essential, is it? Anyone, anywhere on Earth could still visit my NY website w/o the existence of Cloudflare.

Is there more to Cloudflare than this? I realize they are getting into a variety of 2ndary "value-added"-type features, like their own "are you a robot" tests and probably a bunch of other stuff I don't know about ... but fundamentally, are they actually necessary for the Internet?

Why is Cloudflare such a big deal?

I'm starting to use AI increasingly, and am getting some value out of it. I'm curious if paying for paid tiers of the big players (in particular, ChatGPT and Claude) provides significantly better responses.

I'm aware that the paid tiers offer more features and benefits than just higher response quality. For me, those are just nice-to-haves, and not my primary concern.

My main uses of AI are software development and foreign language learning. So far, I've used the free versions of ChatGPT and Claude, as well as "proxies," including Github Copilot and Duck.ai. For both my use cases, I've found the responses usually good and helpful. I just maintain a healthy skepticism about the correctness of the answers, and challenge, test, and double check where needed (especially testing suggested code when developing software).

Have you found response quality to be noticeably and significantly better with paid tiers? I was just randomly thinking, and it occurred to me that the cost of an AI subscription is in the same ballpark as a subscription to a language learning service like Duolingo. So, if I can get value from AI that approaches what I'd get from a dedicated language learning service (even if it doesn't quite match or exceed it), then also getting the value of general AI in the same subscription should make things quite valuable and worth it. Not to mention possibly getting better software development assistance in the same package.

They aren't a startup anymore, but it seems the current CEO, Tony Stubblebine, got it right, according to his latest (long) blogpost.

Although Medium is in a healthy path now, they burnt goodwill so many times in the past that my trust on the business is absent. I wonder how other people perceive them…

I don't have a lot to say myself, yet. I signed up for the beta mostly because people talk so positively of what Digg was like in the past. I never experienced that, as Digg was already on it's way out when I discovered it.

I'd love to hear from those who remember the golden age of Digg, as well as those just curious about the reboot themselves... What are you thoughts, expectations, hopes and concerns?

My last dashcam was a total dud and wasn't even operational for 6 hours. I'm hoping to get some community recommendations on reliable units with good image quality. If you would also share the approx. length of time you've had/used it that would be a huge help as well. Thanks in advance!

I love reading but lately I've found myself having to sit in front of my 2k monitor to read PDFs because they're technical documents and render poorly on my Kindle, even with using various tools to optimize.

I've been considering getting a tablet primarily for this purpose. My main requirement is that I really don't want Android or iOS devices, leaving me with either purpose built Linux tablets or Windows tablets that I can replace with Linux. I really don't need much -

• Fast enough that there's no significant lag between page turns/scrolls
• 8"+ screen size
• Video watching isn't necessary but a nice bonus
• Wifi isn't absolutely necessary as long as there is an easy way of getting files on the device (USB transfer, SD card, external adapter, etc)
• SD card storage would be nice but I can also make due with just internal flash
• Keyboard is also optional - I wouldn't mind being able to run an IDE and connect to my gitlab instance for some simple coding on the fly or SSH into my homelab
• Cameras are largely unnecessary
• Decent battery life or the ability to upgrade down the road
• Looking for something around 500$ CAD (362-ish USD, 312€, 269£)

I've been eyeing the PineTab2 as it meets most of the requirements but reviews seem to be mixed on its usability. So I thought I would ask here if anybody has had similar requirements and found something that works for them. Or if the PineTab2 software has significantly improved - this reddit post seems to indicate that it is in a decent state now.

If nothing like this exists, I suppose I could settle for an Android device provided it can easily take a custom ROM and be de-googled. I would just prefer Linux as I know it quite well and I much prefer the freedom of it. I've also used a touch screen monitor with Plasma on my Arch laptop and been pleasantly surprised at the experience - the hardware is just a bit too clunky to reliably read with.

Main constraint: The space it needs to fit in is 7¾ in (19.7 cm) high. Width and length aren't a concern.

Primary use: Gaming. Doesn't need to be top of the line or cutting edge. Most of what I play isn't very demanding, though I would like the option to play newer stuff if I find something that interests me.

Budget: Ideally less than $1500, but I do realize that I might have to pay out a bit more because I want something both pre-built and compact. $2000 is the hard limit.

Important: I am NOT interested in building my own PC. (Yes, I have done it before, including one that was in a compact case that was HELL to get right.)

Me being uninformed: This might be a silly question, but can I lay desktop towers down on their side? Any traditional tower isn't going to fit, but some of them are thin enough that, if put in landscape instead of portrait, they would. I've read conflicting things about this online, particularly regarding liquid cooling and airflow.

If anyone has any recommendations, I'd appreciate it!