Art can be made out of literally anything. Trash, pieces of fabric, some chalk on a sidewalk, spray cans, arrangement of random objects, sea shells, etc. People will still love to look at shitty sketches and cute chibis and eagerly repost that art. Your medium doesn’t have to be just paper and pencil, nor just an expensive digital screen and a paid paint program, but even then digital can be free. Kritia, MS Paint, Sketchbook, IbisPaint, Fossify Paint, and many more are free and easy to download on Android. Procreate is cheap and loved by many. There are people doing this shit on their phone with their finger and a lot of determination.

None of these artists started out making masterpieces, they had to take the time to get to where they are and learn. Thousands of free tutorials are online, on both YT and other social media platforms, for any kind of art medium. Years of work and practicing every day. Even for those who are making masterpieces now, they take probably days or weeks to finish off a major project, they can’t just pump that shit out.

If you can’t draw or photoshop images well, that’s fine, as not everyone is able to do that skill. I want to learn to draw, but I can recognize that I probably don’t have to time right now in my life to do that, nor will I likely be able to reach the level I dream of, and I accept that. But the moment you decide to get mad at the people opposing AI art and using AI to Photoshop, or you yourself ever use AI to do such acts, then I will gladly call you a lazy bastard. You can’t have your cake without the effort that others put in to do it, and if you’re doing it for commercial purposes, you should be dragged through the streets.

Art is art because a human put their thoughts and feelings behind it. It causes discussion, whether good, bad, happy, angry, etc. AI art is only amazing on the surface, “wow, we have the tech to do this” and then it stops being amazing. Either way am artist/digital designer or don’t make whatever it is you wanted. Using AI to make art is embarrassing.

Anki (and AnkiDroid):

The gods of learning and studying with flashcards. You will never want another flashcard program, especially if you were still using Quizlet (so enshittified now…) because Anki uses SRS (spaced repetition system) which makes you review things right before your brain forgets it to reinforce the subject material.

Add-ons: Bread and butter of Anki, I use several to make beautiful automatic flashcards of reading material/videos/games when I study Japanese. There’s an add-on for literally anything.

Cross platform: Free on desktop, cost $25 on iOS, and free on Android, although Ankidroid is an unofficial app. Still great though!

Cloud: Syncs your anki database across devices. If you don’t use anki for a while, will delete from the cloud, but as long as you have your own local database intact, you can reupload again later.

Sharing Decks: If you don’t feel like making your own decks, download ones that others shared for free.

Anki is used by language learners, college students, med students, etc. If you need to memorize it, use Anki.

Not original comment but I use it to not directly go to Twitter, Reddit, and sometimes YouTube (ReVanced or FreeTube for me). They have a shit ton of services that can be redirected, although you have to worry about the proxies that are dead (Instagram, Tiktok). Even then, you can use it to avoid directly visiting the real site if you miss-clicked.

Okay, is there like good ways to discover music via the Fediverse? Cause like, forgive me for still clinging to YT Music, I like finding new music and it gets stale every now and then since I don’t have history turned on for recommendations.

At this rate I’m gonna start making daily/weekly Mastodon posts about what I listened to in hopes of someone just commenting similar sounding artists.

• Dubstep is nice, not my fave EDM sub-genre tho (DnB, Breakcore, and Jungle all the way!)

Me having to do fuckass crazy shit to get two apps to run at the same time in Lutris to play Japanese VNs while selecting text 😭

I miss just opening the game, and opening Texractor. Now I gotta follow a guide from another distro to a T, pray I typed a / correctly, make .bat file, and run a whole other mini-OS in the background.

Eh, I think outside of potential language/accessibility/hardware incompatibility issues that I’ve read on blogs/comments, Linux works for the “average” user. It’s the slightly “advanced” user like me who struggles, and the “truly advanced” who swim like a duck in water in any distro. Like the bell curve meme.

I say this cause if I literally only needed some apps and the browser, I wouldn’t struggle. But I do tinker with things and end up needing slightly uncommon software/features that require me to use the CLI (and my dumbass can’t remember commands), even though I’m mid at using the CLI. Meanwhile, people born with a usb-stick in hand love the CLI and use it for everything, even things I would try to avoid unless I felt it was easier.

A kid I know has put his grandparents on Fedora, and has no issues. It comes down to the person. If they can click some buttons and read, and only wanna use office, browser, and a app or two, they’d probably live. Yeah, you might have to tinker how it looks for them or put the apps on the desktop, but outside of that, it’s simple.

Windows definitely doesn’t “just work”, I had to figure out Windows decided to kill my Wifi adapter whenever my laptop would go in sleep (god… why???). OneDrive is an ass, devices not wanting to connect (Bluetooth controllers), printers, etc. I’ll give you that Mac works pretty well for those who like it, but I hate Apple and never got used to Mac. I still can’t remove some shitty old virus scanner that doesn’t work anyway and it can’t update anymore, so it just rots on our computer. So like, Mac has their off-days with me too (one time FF nuked itself…)

Yeah, my grandma had to call my mom and I to help her with Windows to stop uploading everything to OneDrive, and even I fucking hate fighting Windows over OneDrive. I think she could live with Fedora or Mint and be okay, unless there’s a specific app she needed.

My grandma actually used to be a computer professor back in the 80s or so, but I guess use it or lose it lol.

Found the post

I guess it’s a drink + a (Travis Scott themed?) Labubu

Just liked a post like, 10 mins ago that was Travis Scott x Erewhon Dubai Labubu Chocolate Matcha Latte in Production or some shit and the OOP said "this sentence would kill a Victorian child’

Yes! Another Splatoon player on the Fediverse! I’ve seen like 2. Tbh I barely play the game after the Final Fest but, still love the series.

Also yeah wish Matrix and SimpleX didn’t suck, they have some awful groups 🤢

I think the main thing to focus on is govs should realize they need to ditch Windows, cause what’s stopping dumbass America (Tr*mp) from filling a sanction against a country he doesn’t like that week?

Meanwhile my ass is in tears every time I have to do a fucking “click all the squares that show a motorcycle” prompt. Maybe I should just join the bots.

I started using a VPN after my friends/classmates told me about them in my Sophomore year of HS, mostly to get around the Wifi banning us from accessing certain apps (social media). Now, like all the other dumb kids, I used whatever they recommended, which was some shitty “Free” VPN that was probably stalking my data. But by Senior year, I smartened up and learned about online privacy and got myself a Proton VPN subscription after using the free version for a bit.

So yeah, I could totally believe middle-school and up are using VPNs, cause that’s what we literally did.

I’m upset, the tech and privacy communities need to step it up cause I’ve never seen this fact. I kinda knew URLs had a lot of junk, but I never knew what could be removed.

I gotta start P3R. I finished Fantazio and then dived head-first through every piece of KH media so now I’m a little fatigued from RPG media…

Man, that graph and website is amazing. Simple, but gets the point across. I’ll share it from time to time.

Starting this by saying: Using tracking apps to see what someone’s doing 24/7 or worrying about them cheating is insane and is a solid NO, full stop.

But I do understand why people use tracking apps, and I wish we had good FOSS alternatives. A tracking/location sharing app where the trackee can turn it on/off anytime they want (after using a password/biometrics, to prevent others from messing with it), so loved ones can be sure you made it to your destination.

I don’t want people stalking their kids, judging their friends for the places they go, surveiling if someone’s a cheater, or worst of all, having their data be sold by the shitty companies that run these services.

I’ve read stories that have scared me and made me wish I could do something like that when I’m out late. I had to (unfortunately) use Live360 during a field trip in another country cause the teachers needed to keep track of us. I understand safety-wise that these apps are vital

Media codecs and formats

Got burned by this recently, was trying to use MPV for playing a YT vid, and it had no video but had audio. Turns out Fedora comes with an open-source or smth version of H264 encoders, so I had to uninstall those packages for the official Cisco ones. But I was on atomic and it wasn’t fun so I ran to forums for help.

Driver availability

Not sure if it’s the driver or the kernel (maybe dual-booting? But it worked on both partitions originally…) but my Bluetooth is nuked on my Linux partition. I tried to do rfkill, btusb, systemctl, etc. and the only solution I got was to rollback to an older release of Fedora atomic because it’s most likely a kernel issue. That just sucks man, having to be stuck on an older version to get my earbuds to work lol. I didn’t like atomic and now I’m on reg KDE Fedora, so I’m truly fucked as that’s not a rollback distro.

I still love using Fedora (every time I boot into Windows I cry) and it just makes me love my laptop like it’s brand-new. Tinkering is fun to me, I’ll literally sit at my desk and starve myself while trying to get something to work. But some days, I want my stuff to work with minimal tinkering, and not have to worry if it’ll break when I really need it down the line.

“It just works” only works for very basic normie stuff.

I think that was @Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world’s main point. Apple is great if you’re a normie, but if you even think about tinkering with things, have an unusual issue on your system, or creatures forbid… want to play games, you’re fucked.

My mom is an Apple diehard who has used Android and Windows in the past (2000s), but got burned by Window’s shitty security and really only switched to iPhone due to iMessage being more reliable than SMS at the time. She knows a little bit of tech stuff (I guess I get it from her), but overall, she’s a “normie” compared to me, so Apple (90% of the time) does what she needs.

It simplifies a lot of things

If this was me about 3 weeks ago, I wouldn’t have debated this as hard. But recently my grandma had to call my mom and I to help her get her iPhone pictures to work on her Windows laptop, and she almost thought she downloaded a virus when trying to get an HEIC app. Apple’s asinine proprietary file format is a plague on society, and I hated when I had to send pictures from my iPhone to my Google drive for school in HS. That’s not simple, and now we have to help grandparents understand that they need to screenshot their camera pictures or else literally no website will take their damn photos.

The little things add-up for me, and so yeah, it’s nice having something that “just works”, but only if you literally accept everything and never complain about any of their choices.

I recently decided to switch from using Atomic Fedora to reg KDE Fedora (cause tinkering and bypassing atomic features got on my nerves), and I almost went through with wiping everything and only having Linux installed. And then I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to do some tests for college cause they use anti-cheating software (lockdown browser) which they probably wouldn’t like if I ran it in a VM or wine…

But man, once I’m out of college, I’m probably wiping Windows for good! Also gonna factory reset that partition so it at least takes way less space on my drive.

(Side note: the other hesitation is that I’m 90% kernel updates nuked Bluetooth for me around March (It worked when I rolled back to January/February releases) and I do have zoom classes sometimes. Like, do I just have to buy a Bluetooth dongle to deal with this?)