Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Fossify Messages has a release on Github too.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Kagi is the only search engine I use which has really good results and no junk links. …and you have to pay for it, of course. It’s a meta search engine but they use their own indexes for news results and Teclis, which indexes small commercial sites with fewer than 5 trackers. One of the cool features it added recently was an icon for identifying paywalled articles.

I’d like to recommend Mojeek, my default search engine, but it still has a way to go. If you’re just looking for an “answer engine” rather than a general search engine…I guess an LLM probably isn’t a bad place to start?

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

So if GNOME does something everyone else is not doing, they’re “fucking up”, but if they follow what someone else has done that you like, they’re just creating a “cheap copy”? How do they win?

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

On Arch, I use ffmpegthumbnailer to accomplish this.

Kickass Women isn’t going to see this comment because this user is from lemmy.world, which has blocked my instance.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

NVK is looking to be a viable replacement for general desktop computing in a few months, so long as you don’t need NVENC and any of the other stuff.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Anything that isn’t Arch.

• Ubuntu’s package managers won’t stop fighting with each other so I can’t complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don’t feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
• Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don’t like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
• openSUSE is great, but the package managers won’t stop fighting with each other and it’s lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
• Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
• Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
• Debian’s packages are too old.
• Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
• The packages I want aren’t in Solus. Is this distro even still around?

And for distros I won’t consider trying:

• Gentoo is too much work.
• Qubes is too much work and I can’t play games on it.
• I don’t like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries…

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I have a lot to say about the Pinephone, but in the interest of not re-iterating what has been said before, I’ll just say this:

Correctly inserting the SIM card was the most harrowing experience I’ve ever had with a phone.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

You’ll try it and it’s going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects.

Guilty as charged.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

There’s Lightworks, too, although it’s geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It’s powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There’s no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don’t need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

After he got a handle on it, Torvalds returned to the kernel. He’s been much more mild-tempered since then. As he mentioned in Tokyo, he won’t be “giving some company the finger. I learned my lesson.”

This is probably a good thing.

Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about “artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). I typically say artificial intelligence is autocorrect on steroids. Because all a large language model does is it predicts what’s the most likely next word that you’re going to use, and then it extrapolates from there, so not really very intelligent, but obviously, the impact that it has on our lives and the reality we live in is significant. Do you think we will see LLM written code that is submitted to you?”

Torvalds replied, “I’m convinced it’s gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code.” But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn’t too worried about AI. “It’s clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all.”

Indeed, Torvalds hopes that AI might really help by being able “to find the obvious stupid bugs because a lot of the bugs I see are not subtle bugs. Many of them are just stupid bugs, and you don’t need any kind of higher intelligence to find them. But having tools that warn more subtle cases where, for example, it may just say ‘this pattern does not look like the regular pattern. Are you sure this is what you need?’ And the answer may be ‘No, that was not at all what I meant. You found an obvious bag. Thank you very much.’ We actually need autocorrects on steroids. I see AI as a tool that can help us be better at what we do.”

But, “What about hallucinations?,” asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, “I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that’s why I’m not so worried. I think we’re doing just fine at making mistakes on our own.”

There were no questions about whether maintainers would start utilizing LLMs. The questions were focused on how maintainers would respond to LLM-generated (or -assisted) patches being submitted to them. This attitude seems perfectly reasonable to me, but it would have been more interesting to ask questions about whether maintainers would start using LLMs in their work. Torvalds might have responded with a more interesting answer.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The Linux Foundation and Kernel devs don’t really deal with the OS layer much. This is something that would need to be implemented at the desktop environment level; like GNOME or KDE. Neither LF nor Linus Torvalds has any say over that.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

You’re not going to convince anyone to suffer inconvenience for something that has no tangible benefit in their eyes. The best you can do is give people the option to contact you on Signal and explain (briefly) why you prefer it. After enough experience, you realize there is no argument you can make that will convince people to care about privacy. The people who join you on Signal either already care about privacy (but maybe didn’t realize it) or value your comfort over theirs.

Personally, I would rather send unencrypted SMS instead of using a Meta-owned service. I don’t want to be part of the network effect keeping people on Facebook. Everyone with a SIM card in their phone already has access to SMS, but few use it if they can help it, so I don’t think I’m contributing to a network effect by doing this. The only MMS client I use is Signal, so anyone can contact me over there if they want more functionality. That’s the only tactic I use, and so far, it has been unsuccessful.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Here’s why.

Because I like the 2-clause BSD license. I am not a fan of “copyleft” or forcing obligations on people in general. I want my software to be available for anyone who wants to use it.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

The reasons are made clear on their roadmap.

The GTK3 port is done, and now they need to finalize the new extension API and improve their color space support (particularly CMYK). It would be nice if Wayland had a color management protocol extension standardized by then, but I don’t think it’s a blocker.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I’ve heard some artists prefer FireAlpaca to Krita. Is there anything it does better than Krita?

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I wonder if the same is going to be true of Thunderbird. Thunderbird actually requires you use Mercurial to contribute at all, rather than managing both git and Mercurial.

That being said…it’s kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

Aussies tend to be quite direct. It’s basically our natural state. I get how it can be perceived as hostile, but I don’t actually think Brodie is very abrasive. He seems like a pretty relaxed guy.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

What really needs to happen:

Flatpak packages should ask for every permission they need, and the user needs to approve every one of them.

Right now, we have this weird in-between state where some flatpak packages ship with limited permissions (like Bottles). That’s because every permission the package asks for is immediately granted. The user doesn’t get a chance to refuse these requests. This current model serves to make life more difficult for non-malicious flatpak packagers while failing to protect users from malicious packages.

Also, GNOME needs a Flatpak permissions center like KDE. You shouldn’t need to install a third party program to manage permissions.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

KDE has an overview now too! It’s mapped to Super+W by default. And they’re continuing to make it fancier in Plasma 6.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I don’t work with music at all, so most of this update doesn’t mean much to me. However, it’s nice to see the export window was improved—I want my single-click behavior, damn it.

The telemetry is limited to update-checking and error reports. Distributions will disable update-checking because they already handle updating Audacity. Error reports need to be manually submitted. It’s possible that most distributions just disable networking altogether when building Audacity, if it even exists in their repositories at all. Fedora’s package is waaay out of date. Arch disables networking altogether.

Audacity has still instituted a CLA. This is quite worrying. But nothing has happened yet.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

This is the kind of high-quality technical discussion I don’t understand a word of that rarely surfaced on reddit.