I mean to a lot of people a parrot isn't much of a step below human due to their extraordinary intelligence. There are a considerable number of people that if they were trolley problemed against a parrot I would likely save the parrot.
We captured them against their will and put them into an artificial environment where they can't even survive without direct constant human help and they live for many decades and have a high emotional intelligence, the least we can do is care for them half decently.
This. Sometimes I hear people saying random stuff about the US and I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm aware of food deserts, but that aside, I could find fresh food in most grocery stores in the many places I've lived in the US. When I say "most", I'm excluding places like Dollar General that explicitly aren't about fresh food.
After FIRE I started building my own small to medium projects. Emulators, tools, games, some available to the public. I tell people I'm a full time software developer who does remote consulting gigs (the last not true but justifies my FIRE income)
If you want something to lust after, I recommend you find a project you care about getting involved in right now, literally today. The things that make us happy are doing something we care about every day, not seeking long-term goals.
Oh I have a lot of projects in my spare time already that I get fulfilment from. Just the 9-5 that doesn't do it for me. My original comment was a bit tongue in cheek though, I don't hate my job. It pays the bills and then some, and doesn't ask too much of me.
47. I didn't wait for FIRE to plan the projects, I had a notebook of ideas I collected over the years and had studied the necessary skills to put them in action throughout my work life.
Additionally, I could see myself going back to work at a company if I saw a truly exciting project. But that excludes around 98% of the jobs I see out there.
No, the next generation of privacy management experiences that will impact billions of users configuring their privacy settings isn't interesting.
Nothing will make a boring corpo job not-boring, but one thing that can help mix it up is to change which boring corpo job you're doing once or twice a decade. Five years is a decent stint at one job. Worth taking a look around and seeing if an opportunity catches your eye.
I'm not doing FIRE, I have children and just live below my means. I'm hoping to retire around 55 assuming the AI bubble doesn't nuke everyones portfolio.
The typical FIRE requires compounding growth. You start with portfolio worth 25 years of expenses but if expenses keep on growing due to inflation and portfolio shrinks because of expenses and zero growth, it can get hairy quite fast.
There are various ways to look at numbers but my thumb rule is 4% inflation 9% growth keeps you perennially happy with some choppy years of course. 4% inflation 9% growth implies you can withdraw 4-5% every year and still have equivalent portfolio in inflated money.
Typical FIRE also requires access to affordable healthcare. In the US that is going away with ACA subsidies.
Five years ago I paid for “market rate“ insurance through my business for my family because we did not qualify for ACA subsidies. The cost was about $40,000 per year.
Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as you say)
I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)
This could turn into the online video equivalent of the Burma Shave road signs.
> Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product.
Note to people on this thread: the impression the discussions give is that Linux isn't ready for prime time desktop use. I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it.
Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026. If you are a Linux on desktop advocate, read the comments and see why so many are still hesitating.
>I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it.
>Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026.
Quite ironically there're people refusing to leave Windows 7, which has been EOS since 2020, because they find modern Windows UI unbearable. Windows 11 being considered that bad that people are actually switching OSes due to it. Have seen similar comments about OSX/macOS.
The big difference between those and Linux is that Linux users have a choice to reject forced "upgrades" and build very personalized environments. If had to live with Wayland could do it really, even if there're issues, but since my current environment is fine don't really need/care to. And it's having a personalized environment such a change is a chore. If was using a comprehensive desktop environment like GNOME (as many people do), maybe wouldn't even understand something changed underneath.
> Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026.
LOL
I installed a new windows 11 yesterday on a fairly powerful machine, everything lags so much on a brand new install it's unreal. Explorer takes ~2-3 seconds to be useable. Any app that opens in the blink of an eye under Linux on the same machine takes seconds to start. Start menu lags. It's just surrealistic. People who say these things work just have never used something that is actually fast.
I am not sure how people get all these issues. I installed fresh windows recently, and I don't see noticable any slowdowns.
Linux is faster in some places, maybe. But still with many issues like some applications not being drawn properly or just some applications not available (nice GUI for monitor control over ddc)
Same for Xorg. And Wayland, really. No idea how people get so many issues. Just change distro, or DE, in the end of the day, it doesn't take long. Small changes make small differences.
Another DE or distro will have other issues. Since my comment I found also that my current distro has a bug that removed support for DisplayLink in USB hubs (monitors connected over to hub without using USB alt-mode).
It was easy to fix, but issues like this prevent common folk of using Linux.
Anecdotally, everything works flawlessly on my work machine: Optiplex Micro, Intel iGPU, Fedora KDE 43, 4K 32" primary monitor at 125% scale, 1440p 27" secondary monitor at 100%. No issues with Wayland or with anything else.
Everything actually feels significantly more solid/stable/reliable than modern Windows does. I can install updates at my own pace and without worrying that they'll add an advert for Candy Crush to my start menu.
I also run Bazzite-deck on an old AMD APU minipc as a light gaming HTPC. Again, it's a much better experience than my past attempts to run Windows on an HTPC.
As with everything, the people having issues will naturally be heard louder than the people who just use it daily without issues.
As a long-time Linux user I've also felt an incongruity between my own experiences with Wayland and the recent rush of "year of the Linux desktop" posts. To be fair, I think the motivation is at least as much about modern Windows' unsuitability for prime time rather as Linux's suitability. I haven't used Windows for a long time so I can't say how fair that is, but I definitely see people questioning 2026 Windows' readiness for prime time.
For me, Wayland seems to work OK right now, but only since the very latest Ubuntu release. I'm hoping at this point we can stop switching to exciting new audio / graphics / init systems for a while, but I might be naive.
Edit: I guess replacing coreutils is Ubuntu's latest effort to keep things spicy, but I haven't seen any issues with that yet.
Edit2: I just had the dispiriting thought that it's about twenty years since I first used Ubuntu. At that point it all seemed tantalizingly close to being "ready for primetime". You often had to edit config files to get stuff working, and there were frustrating deficits in the application space, but the "desktop" felt fine, with X11, Alsa, SysV etc. Two decades on we're on the cusp of having a reliable graphics stack.
>I just had the dispiriting thought that it's about twenty years since I first used Ubuntu. At that point it all seemed tantalizingly close to being "ready for primetime".
I feel the same and find it a bit strange. I am happy with hyprland on wayland since a few months back but somehow it reminds me of running enlightenment or afterstep in the 90s. My younger self would have expected at least a decade of "this is how the UI works in Linux and it's great" by now.
Docker and node both got started after wayland and they are mature enterprise staples. What makes wayland such a tricky problem?
But then I try and focus on what each author thinks is important to them and it’s often wildly different than what’s important to me.
But a lot of internet discussion turns into very ego-centric debate including on here, where a lot of folks who are very gung-ho on the adoption of something (let’s say Linux, but could be anything) don’t adequately try and understand that people have different needs and push the idea of adoption very hard in the hopes that once you’re over the hump you might not care about what you lost.
I don't know what "ready for prime time desktop use" means. I suspect it means different things for different people.
But with Linux being mostly hobbyist-friendly a number of folks have custom setups and do not want to be forced into the standardized mold for the sake of making it super smooth to transition from Windows.
I have such a setup (using FVWM with customized key bindings and virtual layout that I like, which cannot work under Wayland), so can I donate some money to Microsoft to keep Windows users less grumpy and not bringing yet another eternal September to Linux. I like my xorg, thank you very much :).
I would argue that they were a lot like Walmart (when Walmart was starting out)... clothes, electronics, sporting/seasonal goods... then they ventured out into additional services like family photography, optometry, pharmacy... really, the only difference was the mail order catalog.
I was there, 3000 years ago when Walmart didn't even sell groceries, I still remember mom commenting "It feels weird buying food at Walmart now and not even going to [regional grocery chain]".
And now, decades later everything is full circle. I avoid Walmart and Amazon like the plague and try to only shop at smaller outlets, whether brick-and-mortar or online. It might be slightly more expensive but I assume that's just the tax you pay to avoid a corporate monopoly hellscape.
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