Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?

Unfortunately, there's still that one guy in the comments trying to say that hypothetical, largely unproven solutions are better for baseload than something that's worked for decades.

ChatGPT: Your argument is invalid because it doesn't change the legal reality of things.

Me: The legal reality needs changed.

Additive Manufacturing

FreeCAD Linkstage - RealThunder's fork of the FOSS CAD package is less buggy, has improved rendering, and is much easier to use.

PrusaSlicer - A snappy alternative to Cura for slicing 3D models for printing. A lot of awesome features and it's constantly under development.

Blender - I've done a little here and there with Blender, but Cycles works great for product renders. It's such a vast and amazing program that can accommodate so many different use-cases.

Music Production

LMMS - An FL Studio-like DAW with a simplified workflow and robust features. Lackluster plug-in support out of the box, but the addition of a VST host and waveform editor make it a fully-featured way to make music.

Element - Fully open-source VST host with support for VST3. Also works as a standalone application, which means you can create plug-in chains without touching your DAW. You can also save presets of those chains, and do crazy signal routing with the two-dimensional geometry nodes-esque UI.

Vital/Vitalium - It's literally FOSS Serum. You can follow Serum tutorials, and have them turn out. A wavetable synth that's so darn easy to use, you'll never want to use anything else. This is the quintessential FOSS future bass producer's synth.

Dexed - DX7 cartridge manager and emulator. It sounds like an awesome 80s FM synth; what can I say? Must-have for synthwave and noodling around with new sounds.

Sforzando/SFZ - An open standard and a free player for said open standard. Allows for what are essentially lossless, unzipped soundfonts.

VSCO/VSCL - A few decent symphonic instrument libraries based around SFZ. Both are CC0.

Freepats - A decent place to find more SFZ instruments. A few classics like a dry Tele and a few CC0 pianos live here.

Audacity- The only FOSS waveform editor worth using. It's extremely flexible, has a ton of useful built-in effects, and makes for a great companion to LMMS when you need to make more in-depth edits to samples.

Cardinal - FOSS fork of VCV as a VST, which enables you to create crazy virtual eurorack creations and play them with MIDI. You can also use it standalone, and the sheer number of built-in plug-ins basically guarantees your dream of automatic music generating machines are only a few clicks away.

MusicGen - A recent ML tool by Facebook that can be run locally; essentially SOTA on few-shot text-to-waveform music generation. If you have a somewhat-high-end GPU, it will probably work for you. A great tool for sampling into weird ambient tracks.

RVC - A recent tool that is fast to train and provides extremely realistic voice-to-voice conversion, especially for vocals. Ever see those AI SpongeBob singing memes? This is probably how they did it.

Photo Editing/Design

PhotoGIMP - While I'm still using Photoshop, PhotoGIMP is an add-on for GIMP that attempts to port the Photoshop UI to... GIMP. It's mildly successful, and potentially can ease the pains of transitioning to a new program. I'm honestly too lazy to switch at this point, but it looked promising when I peeked the last time.

Inkscape - I suck at vector anything, but this program proved to be useful on occasion. I believe it's a serious competitor to Illustrator if you bother to learn how to use it properly.

A1111's Web UI - Now totally FOSS, this absolutely insane piece of software integrates with so many different useful plug-ins to accomplish basically any conceivable image generation or AI-with-images task imaginable. You can literally do anything from normal text-to-image generation to upscaling or colorizing, and even img2img; it's multi-modal to no end.

EDA/PCB Design

KiCAD - Hands down the best EDA package I've used. Granted, it's the only one I've used. Still, this is how FOSS software for engineering purposes should be designed. I wish they would send their UX people over to help FreeCAD out. If you need to design a PCB for anything at all, use KiCAD, period.

Programming

NodeJS - The sole reason JavaScript is worth learning for more general computing tasks; with the sheer variety of packages on NPM, it feels like you can do anything.

VSCodium - All of what makes VSCode worth using, and none of the creepy MS telemetry.

General Computing

7zip - The one program to conquer all archive formats. It works, and it's absolutely tiny. I've even installed this on Windows 2000, and of course it worked fine.

LibreOffice - Occasionally buggy, but certainly the best FOSS office package currently available. LibreOffice Writer and Calc are especially usable and work great.

VLC - Is there anything this traffic cone can't play? Superb video and audio codec compatibility, although it won't play a MIDI unless you feed FluidSynth a soundfont to atone for your sins.

Strawberry - For when you want to listen to tons of music, but you hate the clunky nature of other audio managers. Strawberry basically doesn't use a DB, and instead edits metadata directly. It will also instantly update when you add new songs or change metadata, so you rarely have to restart it. It's the fastest way to manage tons of music I've found.

PCPartPicker - A website, but still worth mentioning. This is basically the only tolerable way to part out a PC, and it makes sharing specs of your recent projects trivial.

Rufus - Someone else mentioned this one, but it's basically the only tolerable way to create bootable installation media. Works well, and it's FOSS.

Operating Systems

Manjaro KDE - The closest you can get to SteamOS's desktop mode. Based on Arch, like SteamOS, and the same DE as SteamOS.

ZorinOS - Tolerable derivative of Ubuntu LTS, especially for Windows natives.

Games/Emulators

Quadrapassel - Best Linux Tetris clone ever conceived. It's in my Steam Deck library, for Pete's sake.

Yuzu - Pairs well with a PC handheld and a "screw Nintendo" attitude. The Switch emulator that is often marginally faster (and often slightly less accurate than) Ryujinx.

OpenRCT2 - RCT, especially the first two games by Chris Sawyer, are some of the best tycoon games ever created. OpenRCT2 is a faithful reimplantation that is going places.

The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.

I still think Reddit forcibly removing the head mod of r/Piracy is peak irony. They can't not have people discussing copyright infringement, even through in years prior they were threatening to ban the community.

I like the part in every interview with u/spez where he says that the API was never intended to support third-party apps but then never mentions that the official Reddit app is based on the source code of a third-party app they purchased. His logic is impeccable.

Well, framework has one cool side-effect of their repair-friendly approach: their laptop mainboard can be used as an SBC. I've seen a few projects use it in this way, and I believe they even sell an official plastic case for it. It's a well-documented piece of computer hardware that is regularly refreshed and can be fitted easily into slim chassis.

Oh, and another cool thing is that their screens have magnetic bezels. ThinkPads are a PITA to fix if you just want to replace an LCD panel; framework makes it trivial to keep the upper chassis and only replace the part that's actually broken. That's the real pitch with Framework: replace anything easily and upgrade your computer for only the cost of the mainboard or socketable component. Some of their newer devices have a socketable PCIe expansion bay, which could be used for things like socketable GPU upgrades.

It feels right to be reading this from the comfort of Lemmy.

Typically, automating or paying someone to manually push out updates to as many channels as possible is the most advantageous option. Realistically, having a website, an associated RSS feed option, Twitter, something like a Mastodon account somewhere, and a text update option would probably cover most of the bases.

Oddysee is built on LBRY, which I believe is the closest thing. I think there's something else called PeerTube, but I'm not sure what it is exactly (haven't looked into it).

I think more along the lines of "copyright isn't ok" rather than whether or not actions that happen outside of it are or are not.

Gentoo with a custom tiling window manager written in x86 assembly in my free time.

Just kidding, I use Windows.

I wish more people would understand the value of letting people make their own life choices, even if you disagree with them.

It always does make you wonder how these people have the time to actively moderate 100+ subreddits without any compensation. That is, unless there are some under-the-table deals that we don't know about. I think moderators have been caught taking bribes before.

Reddit is going to hell.

Lemmy is pretty fun to host. Doubly so if you host a private instance with low latency; you'd basically be defederation proof.

I maintained a fairly neutral position (as a mod) while the blackout was starting, but I'm slipping more and more into the Lemmy rabbit hole. First it was getting my own instance running, but now things are starting to take shape and it's actually a lot of fun trying to keep up with both the server hosting and community building. Plus, everyone here has strong small-Internet-town vibes, which makes interacting with people much more enjoyable than on Reddit. My goal is to get my instance self-funded through donations, but I'm more than happy to keep paying for hosting in the interim. People who talk about Lemmy not being a "viable alternative" probably say so because they don't get it.

I wonder if it's some strategic bullshit to try and scare people. Fuck it, most of those people are the kind who would enjoy using Lemmy anyway.

To be fair, the comments and posts you leave are technically being collected for display across the lemmyverse. In that sense, there's never going to be a zero data collection Lemmy client. Still, Liftoff currently has my vote. A decent little FOSS fork of Lemur, I believe.

I'm down, Spez. What's bad for Reddit is good for us.

I mean, perhaps in the most general sense that is technically true. For example, there have been cases about this that have come from parents taking pictures of their kids in the bathtub, even if the charges were eventually dropped. If that particular court case had gone differently, it might've set a very destructive precedent that served only to rip apart families.

Still, 99% of the cases that produce this material are done so in an exploitative and abusive context; definitely not arguing with that. No idea what Aaron was talking about in that particular link, but this is the one counterexample that I think of that is valid, assuming it went a different direction in court.

The good ol' Linus parrots. Squawk "Steve Burke is a bad journalist because he pointed out errors publicly that affected consumers." Screech "Linus didn't sell the employees internally on the idea that he and his wife were a substitute for HR, he auctioned it."

Not too pedantic at all; those are indeed two distinct ways of creating similar applications. In my opinion, federated alternatives are more appealing than those based on blockchain technologies. Federated networks are proving to provide a more palatable experience through hybrid decentralized centralization.

You know things are going to shit when they can't even make up excuses for their administrative decisions that align with their policies. "You can't take a subreddit NSFW if it was SFW before, and people aren't expecting it." That is nowhere in their policies, and many of the subreddits held votes to determine whether they should change their communities' focus. I hope all of the new Lemmy instances and their admins, even if they acknowledge the importance of interpreting rules flexibly, realize that there is a finite limit to how far plain meaning can be twisted before you're outright making shit up.

We do something similar over at !mavica@normalcity.life, but with photos. Of course, we're using old floppy disk cameras, so the compression, aberration, and CCD weirdness is indeed authentic.

Ironically, I can almost type as fast on my phone (102 WPM PB) as I can on most keyboards (110 WPM PB), and that's with my weird improper method of touch typing. These scores are for the 15 second word test on MonkeyType.

People were expecting Twitter to go to shit because of bad moderation, but it turns out Elon is much better at adding infuriating features that drive people away in the first place.

There's also always a million reasons why your intelligence test might not be quite accurate, and certainly a person themselves will never be able to accurately assess their intelligence without some sort of test. An objective ruler to measure intelligence by is far from trivial, and essentially impossible. It's especially impossible in the sense that a single test could accurately sum up a person's capacity to be a productive human being as one number.

Oh, and the other mind-bending realization is that our perception of what it means to be intelligent is ultimately influenced by our own intelligence. So, chances are we're all probably conceptualizing what it means to be successful in different ways anyway. In this way, there is a chance that the things you envy, like talent or skills you lack, are something that you can teach yourself. The things you're aware of and can grasp conceptually are probably things you can learn to fully understand. Whether you have the time or motivation to learn new things is ultimately a different question entirely. So, take time to learn new things. In that sense, everyone can always become smarter than they are right now.

I mean, someone else is working on an iOS client inspired by Apollo for Lemmy called Mlem. You can even install it on your Apple device here.

Heck, even my college Sociology textbook from OpenStax basically has nuclear fear-mongering baked into one of the later sections.

🙌

It's a road on a man-made land bridge before and after this aqueduct. In this shot here, it's a bit hard to see, but the road is actually on a slight angle to make more room for the aqueduct. The walls around the road are only for this section, as out of frame the road is almost certainly on top of your bog standard land bridge.

I forgot: are Lemmy's active and hot sorts chronological? They're pretty decent, but I do find stale content does get stuck on one that isn't there on the other.

The little I've seen of Joe seems like this:

Some rich guy you've never heard of: "So, umm, yeah, I've been trying this new form of yoga."

Joe: hits blunt and drinks something harmful "Oh yeah?"

Guy 1: burp "Yeah, and it's really opened my eyes and shit, y'know?"

Joe: "Oh really?"

(This but for who knows how long).

Morton up in here spreading free salt.

What would be pretty awesome is if Lemmy implemented an optional awards feature that could accept donations into a tip jar of some sort. Many of us running smaller instances appreciate selfless donations, but this could be a decent way to make supporting hosting costs more fun.

I guess these guys are just plain old tools.

Must be one of those eReader things.

Infinity is still pretty good, and my understanding is that it could easily be updated to support the free individual API keys Reddit is supposedly going to still support.