1. Perhaps 2024 will be the year of the girlfriend

2. Making money over the summer and upgrading to a faster motorcycle

When I get a bit more space to myself, I’m thinking of somehow wall mounting a 42"-50" 4K TV and using that as a work monitor. Or maybe I don’t need a wall mount. I’d have what feels like acres of screen real estate.

My 2nd monitor. It’s some 24" curved 165Hz 1080p monitor that I bought from a guy at my university for $105. While not the best for gaming (noticable ghosting), it’s been incredibly helpful for work as it gets more complicated in university. The extra screen real estate lets me fit so much more without needing to alt tab or click on another window.

I currently use Monoprice BT-600ANC headphones. They’re not too expensive and the ANC punches way above its price class, can be used with a wire if you want, have great battery life, and most importantly don’t require an app.

Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).

This makes sense obviously

I prefer over ear headphones as they tend to sound better, don’t fall off my ears every few minutes, and have better battery life. But that’s just my personal preference.

He said “motorways” which I’m pretty sure is just a British word for “freeways.” He’s not talking about school zones.

Quit work and take lighter loads in school.

Buy a nice house in Maine right on the water.

Buy a supercar, and all the motorcycles I could ever want.

Go on crazy adventures like an Appalachian trail thru-hike.

All this would be less than 10% of my yearly income. The other 90% would go to charity, helping the homeless and bolstering free and open source software.

I’ve heard of it but never actually used it. Is it much faster than Steam?

Oops I should’ve told you that it is the Windows 11 version. That version is like 10-20% of the speed of the Windows 10 version but it has tabs

Discord takes about 6-8 seconds for me, but if you think that’s bad Steam takes 3 times that time for me.

Biggest offenders: MS teams on desktop. And even more so Epic Games store. Just ridiculously slow and laggy even on strong (Ryzen 9 5900HX, 32GB RAM, NVMe gen3 SSD) hardware. They almost take more time to open than Windows 11 (which is also slower thsn it should be). Buggy too.

Software that got much slower with a recent update:

1. Steam. Seriously, it takes almost as much time to open ever since the last UI change as the Epic Games Store. At least it’s smooth once it’s opened, but I seriously want an alternative to launch my steam games.

2. Firefox, specifically to open PDFs. There’s now a 5-second delay when opening any PDF, even a tiny one. It’s really frustrating honestly. It takes 90% of the time to open a 1 page PDF than to open a 10 page PDF.

3. Windows file explorer. On battery on my gaming laptop, there’s a 1-2 second delay when I click anything on this app. Constantly seeing “working on it”. The Windows 10 file explorer was much faster. And the search is atrocious, use Everything by VoidTools instead.

4. Some third party map apps on my Android phone used for public transportation start becoming really unresponsive after 10 seconds. It freezes my entire phone. This did not happen a couple months ago, and it really would’ve made getting around the city much harder if it wasn’t for the motorcycle I recently bought.

I was in college and needed to attend an important virtual meeting about choosing my major. They provided a Zoom link, but when I clicked it, it didn’t put me in a meeting, it said this is unavailable with your free tier. So, knowing this is a stupid idea, I begrudgingly paid this evil company $17 for a month of pro.

And guess what? It still didn’t work. Apparently I needed to sign in with only my school account for it to work. Never utilized the month of pro either. But at the moment, it felt like a gun was being held to my head to pay Zoom $17.

I hate tech sometimes, and despite being a young person I prefer things in person rather than always online at the mercy of these companies.

Poor analogy. The retailer isn’t always adding a 43% (10/7) markup to everything.

Most of the time, I view piracy as a last resort. I’ll try to legally obtain it, but there are circumstances when I do sail the seas:

1. Textbooks. This is a all around greedy industry preying on poor college students like me that barely pays the actual authors. They don’t deserve my money, and I don’t have much of it anyways.

2. Video games/books I already own. I already paid for it, so it’s justifies to me.

3. Old video games that don’t have a real platform that I emulate. I understand that I shouldn’t pirate a 2021 video game, but a 2001 video game that I can’t legally buy on PC/phone is a different matter.

4. Aforementioned skimming through books. I might buy it after doing that.

5. Music. Why? Half the stuff I listen to isn’t even on Spotify or other streaming platforms. Additionally, I can manage my own library, listen offline without having to follow the whims of a streaming app, and even change the pitch and speed of the music!

It’s cool, but there’s not enough content to be truly interesting. When I was on Reddit, I constantly wanted more content about Bob’s+Angels. On Lemmy it’s like that but for the entire game.

I definitely left. I still occasionally lurk on Reddit but I never post or vote anymore. Real shame, because I really want to share my Factorio Bob’s+Angels (much harder and more complicated mod of Factorio) victory on r/factorio, but I won’t because of Spez’s actions.

I’m 19-20 and I’m from the eastern part of the US.

In a car, I have about 8 hours of experience and could do it in a pinch, although I’d feel unconfident with it.

On a motorcycle, I have about 20 hours of more recent experience and I feel fairly comfortable with it.

Generally around 3-4X for me, except if I’m riding a motorcycle or driving a sports car, where the travelling is the main event.