Cool, everyone who has submitted their resume in only PDF format dodged a bullet.

That, and also to ensure they can open the document. I don’t use word processors in my daily job, yet I do interviews, so if someone gives me a Word Document or similar, I’m going to be put out to read it. PDFs, on the other hand, render just fine in my web browser.

You don’t even need a dedicated PDF reader, many (most?) browsers have a PDF reader built-in. You need extra software to see word processor documents, you don’t to see a PDF.

If a company is so incompetent that a PDF isn’t sufficient (or even preferred), that’s not a company I want to deal with anyway.

When people say “DRM,” they almost always mean the check when the game launches, not the one-time license check when you download a game. Whether they use their Steam platform or a webpage, I honestly don’t see much of a difference, provided you end up with a DRM-free product at the end.

But yes, technically Valve is verifying that you own the game, but it’s not really what is meant when the average person says “DRM.”

Exactly. Don’t use Manjaro, I argue that it’s less stable than Arch due to how updates are managed.

So y2k actually was a problem. It wasn’t the date crisis, but it does seem to be digital (i.e. SM seems to normalize larger body sizes).

Yup, people call me “skinny” and I’m right at the borderline between normal and overweight. I could lose 20 lbs and still be in the healthy range. In fact, I’m trying to cut about 10 lbs just to make sure I don’t creep up into the overweight range.

Idk, it was a thing in the early 2000s as well. I remember my friends sharing flip-phone quality videos with me of concerts they went to, so sharing experiences via digital recording isn’t anything new.

I also think it’s dumb, but it’s not particularly new.

In my area at least, affordable concert tickets are still a thing. I see something like $30-60 for most acts, provided they’re not mega-popular like Metallica or Taylor Swift. If we look at inflation vs, say, 1995, we should expect things to cost about twice as much, and that seems to pretty much right (e.g. a $20 ticket in 1995 would be a little over $40 today). I went to a Dashboard Confessional concert in the early 2000s, and I think it was something like $40, so today I’d expect that to be $80. I see Dropkick Murphy’s tickets (I think similar popularity?) for something like $60-70, which is about right. And before you get into income discussions, wages have been beating inflation (this graph is from COVID, longer term has a similar trend), with the main exception being the year and a half or so of massive inflation.

So I don’t think tickets have necessarily gotten more expensive relative to inflation, they’ve always been kind of expensive. What does seem to have changed is the price ceiling for events seem to have gone up substantially. I don’t think I had ever seen single-ticket prices go as high as current Taylor Swift tickets go for, so it seems people are more willing to pay a premium than they were before.

Demonization of “fat” in foods

Yeah, this is the worst. When someone asks for dieting advice, I recommend high fat and high fiber, because both will help you feel fuller on the same amount of calories.

Hyper processed foods being cheaper than whole foods

I don’t think that’s actually true. It does seem to be true for restaurants and packaged foods, but cooking is almost always cheaper than buying the equivalent product in a highly processed form. The problem is that people seem to want easy, fast solutions, and buying something is easier than cooking.

Which gets into…

Sedentary lifestyle…

This is the real killer. We seem to put way too much emphasis on sedentary activities and time saving instead of doing the things that our bodies were designed for. We drive to work to sit on a chair, and then we eat already prepared food in front of a TV or desk to play games or watch something. There’s almost no walking anymore, much less running.

Consider replacing sedentary activities with enjoyable, active ones, such as:

• cycling instead of driving to do errands - maybe work is too far, but most live within a couple miles of a grocery store, library, or some other destination
• instead of watching TV, consider listening to an audiobook while walking/jogging/working out
• consider a standing desk for work/play; at the very least, get one that’s configurable so you can alternate

I thought my area was different, but then I checked the data and we’re not too far off the median. The CDC states something like 30% of my state (Utah) is obese, which is quite surprising given how outdoorsy we are generally in this state.

I don’t know the solution here, other than not becoming obese myself. I personally am right at the border between normal and overweight, and I’m trying to drop a bit to stay on the healthier end of the spectrum. What’s odd is that most people call me “skinny” or “thin,” when I’m actually almost overweight.

Yup, I’m all for pushing against “body shaming,” but that doesn’t mean we have to just be okay with so many of our friends living unhealthy lifestyles. Encourage those you care for to live a healthier life.

Exactly. I’m quite happy, and I also like rebellious, anti-machine music. I still listen to Rage Against the Machine, and I’m in a pretty stable life situation, not a minority, etc. I just really don’t like people who abuse authority, and I don’t see that changing regardless of how happy I am.

That’ll be… quite the Leap. I haven’t done an Arch install, but the last time I did, it required a fair amount of reading since the installer doesn’t walk you through everything. It’s not hard per se, but it does take some time for the first install.

If you’re not super familiar with Linux, I recommend holding off on Arch. This isn’t coming from any form of elitism (I don’t use Arch anymore) or lack of experience (I used Arch for > 5 years), just from reading between the lines of what you said, which indicates that you’re probably not super familiar with Linux.

If you really want to do it, go for it! I think Arch is an absolutely fine distro, and I think there are a lot of good reasons to use it. I just don’t want someone who may be new to Linux to get frustrated and end up not having fun. So don’t let me discourage you, but also know what you’re jumping into: probably a couple hours of getting the base system installed, and maybe another hour or two of installing packages to get to a usable system.

Exactly. I ran Arch for over 5 years, and the only “instability” I had was:

• Nvidia drivers not matching kernel drivers - also happened on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and has more to do with Nvidia’s driver being closed-source than anything Arch is doing
• systemd and usr merge - this was many years ago, and the only reason I messed it up was because I didn’t actually follow the instructions; and this was an absolutely massive change
• I did something stupid - sometimes this is uninstalling the display manager or some other critical component

That’s really it. I’ve since moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed and an AMD GPU, largely because of built-in snapper support and their server-oriented distros (Leap and MicroOS), and it wasn’t because Arch was “unstable” or anything like that. In fact, I had far fewer issues with Arch than I did with the other distros I used before: Ubuntu and Fedora. It turns out, as you understand Linux better, you tend to mess things up less.

And even if they had a monopoly (which I agree that they don’t), they have to actually abuse that monopoly to be a problem. Last I checked, the only requirement Valve has for games distributed on Steam is the devs can’t sell Steam keys for less elsewhere, but they can sell as many Steam keys as they want outside of Steam w/o paying Valve anything. They can also generate keys for other distribution platforms and price them however they want.

That’s extremely fair, and the fact that they’re able to maintain a dominant position in the PC games distribution market without any exclusivity agreements or anything of that nature speaks volumes to the level of service they provide for both users and publishers/developers.

even free games on steam require the steam client to install

That’s not exactly DRM though, that’s just only supporting one distribution method.

You have to use GOG’s servers to get games you purchased from them as well, that doesn’t make that DRM, it just means that’s the only distribution method they support.

To me, DRM has absolutely nothing to do with delivery, it’s all about use once you have it.

You can use Parabola instead, which is basically FOSS-only Arch. This funding would likely also benefit Parabola indirectly.

They kind of tried with UWP apps in the Microsoft Store, but they didn’t catch on.

And for Valve, producing SteamOS images could be easier, meaning they can focus their dev efforts on something else.