Starship Titanic comes to mind, though the text parser is only used to talk to characters.

You might also enjoy playing around with KathaaVerse. It uses AI (LLM) to turn any book into a text adventure. Last time I tried it, a lot of the time it felt more like playing a fever dream than an internally consistent story, though.

I’ve been using Linux for about 25 years. I completely stopped using Windows at home more than a decade ago.

I do some volunteer work for an organisation that refurbishes old computers and gives them to people who can’t afford one. For the time being we’re using Rufus to bypass TPM and other hardware requirements so we can install Windows 11 on everything.

We’re willing to install Linux for people who want it, but unfortunately I haven’t seen that happen yet. Most of our customers have no idea what an OS is. A lot of people also need Windows for education or work. There’s a free course available that teaches how to use a computer and of course that is also Windows-only.

We helped one of our colleagues to install Mint on his old laptop, though.

Baz Luhrmann - Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen

Any of the large, easy to use distributions should work just fine. I’d recommend a popular distribution because it’ll be easier to get help online. So consider Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, Ubuntu and maybe Pop!_OS.

I think the main consideration should be which DE (desktop environment) she’d like to use. IMO the main contenders would be:

• KDE - Very configurable, nice looking, a bit heavy.
• Gnome - Simple and very opinionated, so not very configurable, a bit heavy.
• Cinnamon - Should feel familiar to Windows users, a bit faster than KDE and Gnome.
• Cosmic - A middle ground between Gnome’s simplicity and KDE’s configurability, pretty fast.
• XFCE - Very fast and light-weight, fairly configurable, but not very flashy.

Based on which DE she prefers, I’d suggest getting a distribution that comes with said DE by default, for the best possible integration. How do you figure out which DE she likes best? Put Ventoy on a USB stick along with a few different Linux ISOs. Ventoy wil let you choose which one to boot from a menu. You could get the following ISOs:

• Fedora or Ubuntu with Gnome
• OpenSUSE with KDE
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon
• Pop!_OS with Cosmic
• Mint or Ubuntu with XFCE

Download an ISO for each, install Ventoy on a USB stick and copy the ISOs to the stick. Boot into each ISO and play around with the desktop for a bit. When she’s figured out which DE she prefers, install a distribution that comes with that desktop.

I installed Windows 11 Pro 24H2 yesterday and the oobe\bypassnro trick worked for me. You just have to make sure no ethernet cable is connected. Then if you tell the installer you have no internet, it’ll let you create a local account.

The SR-71 is really fast and sleek, sure, but how can it be your favourite when it doesn’t even have a massive gun that goes BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT!..?

I don’t think it’s the lyrics that trigger me, though.

As for movies, I can probably relate. I get annoyed when movies try to push my emotional buttons in a way that feels phony or manufactured. A lot of Disney and Spielberg movies tend to have this effect on me.

That also makes me irrationally angry, even though people should be allowed to be wrong…

Seriously, though, I think there’s something about the trick(s) these songs use to get stuck in people’s heads that triggers a very negative visceral reaction in me, like I’m being violated somehow. This leaves me no room to appreciate the songs’ originality or sound design.

A centrally planned economy run by computers, to be more specific, isn’t a new idea. Who knows what would have happened if the Soviet Union had implemented the OGAS system. They had the US government worried, but it was defunded because of bureaucratic infighting.

According to Wikipedia Project Cybersyn had some success in Chile before the Allende regime was overthrown by a CIA-supported coup in 1973.

Similar ideas were explored further by a Scottish computer scientist and a professor of economics in a book called “Towards a New Socialism”.

I don’t know if artificial neural networks (ANN), which is what most people mean when they say “AI” nowadays, would be a lot of help in a system like this. I couldn’t find any papers that suggest they perform better than classical models when making economic predictions. A big disadvantage of ANNs is that it’s almost impossible to figure out why they come to the conclusions they do. I suppose neural networks could be useful for analyzing public sentiments, though.

More generally, machine learning algorithms trend to be really good at optimization problems, which could come in handy when planning an economy.

Historically, I don’t think centrally planned economies have worked very well. If you add computers and AI to the mix, though, who knows! I don’t think it’s ever been properly tried.

“Toxic” by Britney Spears and “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran both make me irrationally angry.

Why do they want authoritarian communism? Well, I haven’t spent months reading Marxist theory, so they probably won’t think I’m able to do their arguments justice. For a “better” (and much longer) explanation, ask at hexbear or lemmygrad.

Their argument, as I understand it, seems to be that the USSR, China and North Korea really aren’t as bad as Western propaganda suggests. American imperialism is much worse, especially outside of the imperial core, North America and Europe. Also, the people that do get oppressed in AES (actually existing socialism) states mostly deserve it for being capitalists or fascists or libtards.

I’d argue that a “dictatorship off the proletariat” inevitably leads to a small group seizing and holding on to power. They seem to believe that eventually the state will wither away and give rise to Real Communism.

If I understand the post by @db0 correctly, the main point is to decentralise power and infrastructure, yes.

Basically communists that support authoritarian regimes. In this case I could also have written “Marxist-Leninists”.

It’s not made by tankies, so arguably less revolutionary.

Yes.

In case anyone else is wondering, but doesn’t feel like searching the web:

Piefed is similar to Lemmy. It federates with the Lemmyverse, Threadiverse and Fediverse. But with some additional features and differences:

• User flair. (Does not federates to Lemmy)
• Hierarchical subjects/magazines. For example, there might be a subject like art with sub-subjects like art/paintings and art/statues. (Should be possible to follow these from Lemmy)
• Instance blocking doesn’t just block communities but also comments from said instance.
• Only supported by Interstellar right now, as far as apps go, but Voyager is also planning to add support. Supported by apps like Interstellar, Summit, Voyager and Boost. Photon also plans support.
• Written in Python instead of Rust, but somehow performs better (for at least one admin).

I’ve never actually used Piefed and most information I could find was three months old. If I missed anything important or made mistakes, please let me know in a reply.

Edit:

• Combines duplicate posts.
• User karma. Users with low karma get a flair.
• Comments with a score of -10 or lower get collapsed by default.

Using the command prompt is not coding.

Ackshually, whenever you write something into the command prompt and it works, you’re writing valid Bash (or whatever shell you’re using) code. Bash is a programming language, so technically you are coding.

For example, try typing the following into a terminal:

for ((i = 0; i < 10; i++)); do echo $i; done

You just counted to nine using a loop and a variable!