TheFriendlyArtificer

@TheFriendlyArtificer@beehaw.org
1 Post – 94 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

If this level of transparency was available for various news and other social sites, I'd be more likely to buy a subscription to them.

The honesty is great and makes this feel more like an actual community or a co-op.

I'll be curious to see how these numbers change, both the monthly cost and the amount of contributions, as more and more people join up.

If you thought you hated Ubuntu, lemme introduce you to Ubuntuce!

The same shitty, anti-FOSS hyperfocus on Snaps, but now bundled with your favorite evangelical nuttiness!

I'm guessing that zombie processes automatically get born again.

I think the Venn diagram between Christofascists and Linux OS developers is one person.

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It takes nearly as long to decrapify a new Firefox install as it does to compile Librewolf.

Install uBlock.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Disable "sponsored" stories. AKA, listicles designed to draw in idiots who want to see which 8 child actors from the 90s turned out to be the tallest. Alarmingly close to the tacky crap that you might see on a fresh Windows install.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Now disable Pocket. Remembering to go into about:config to really disable it

Disable telemetry.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Remove Amazon, Bing, et al. from the search engine list.

Remove "suggested" and "sponsored" autocomplete.

Tell Firefox that you don't want to sync at the moment.

Remind yourself that, despite this crap, Firefox is still a better browser than any Chromium knockoff.

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I have to disagree (but won't downvote!)

AI porn is creepy. In multiple ways!

But it's also a natural evolution of what we've been doing as a species since before we were a species.

Does imagining a different partner while having sex or masturbating count? I would imagine most people would say, "no".

How about if somebody draws a crude stick figure of somebody they met on the street? Unless you're Randall Munroe, this is probably harmless too.

Now a highly skilled portrait artist paints a near replica of somebody he knows, but has never seen in the nude. They never mention their friend by name, but the output is lifelike and unmistakably them.

Maybe a digital artist finds a few social media pictures of a person and decided to test drive Krita and manipulates them into appearing nude.

Or, and this happened to me quite recently, you find your porn doppelganger. My spouse found mine and it ruined her alone time. And they really did look just like me! Taking that a step further, is it illegal to find somebody's doppelganger and to dress them up so that they look more like their double?

Like you, I don't want people like this in my life. But it feels like this is one of those slippery slopes that turns out to be an actual slippery slope.

You can't make it illegal without some serious downstream effects.

If you did, the servers will just get hosted in an Eastern European country that is happy to lulwat at American warrants.

I don't have any answers, just more Devil's advocate-esque questions. If there was a way to make it illegal without any collateral damage, I'd be proudly behind you leading the charge. I just can't imagine a situation where it wouldn't get abused, a'la the DMCA.

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It'll only affect 32bit systems with ancient operating systems storing dates in epoch time.

Not a small number. But nowhere remotely near what Y2K could have been.

Hopefully by the time we need to account for a 64bit rollover, I'll be comfortably retired. But by that time, proton decay may be a more worrisome problem.

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I'm not saying that he has late stage syphilitic dementia. But if he doesn't then I'm somehow even more confused about his recent actions.

Unless those working people happen to be LGBTQ. Then red and blue does matter.

Same goes for: The educated. Brown folks. Black folks. Women. Post-birth children.

Huh... Turns out that both sides are not the same after all.

The term, "enshitification" is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn't you like a stepping stone.

Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that's not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.

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Find yourself a partner who cares as much about your genitals as Evangelicals and you'll never be lonely.

My own anthropological pet theory.

Dunbar's number is the concept that a person can only have so many meaningful relationships. Another way of thinking about it is that we, as a species, feel most comfortable in tribes with a certain number of people.

Which makes sense. I hated, hated the little rednecky town that I grew up in. But when I moved to a larger city, the first few weeks were spent overcoming the loneliness of not knowing everybody around me.

What massive online social media does is essentially short circuit the behavior that we developed when we began urbanizing.

Now a person can be a member of twenty tribes without ever needing to leave their homes. If we are, in fact, only capable of a finite number of close friendships then every close relationship that you have online is energy that won't be spent on a physical one.

True story: I left Facebook in 2016. I had been miserable but didn't even think to relate the two. About a month after I jumped ship I got adopted by a group of fellow nerds nearing midlife. We hang out at least twice per week. Pub trivia, bowling, hiking. Those interactions are so much more meaningful than anything you can get on social media. By our nature, humans crave physical company.

Social media isn't going to "break" us. But, if nothing changes, it will further dramatically alter society.

Shortened version: Snap, snap, snap. Snap snap snap. Snap. Snap.

Seriously, Canonical. Having software that automatically updates itself without user consent or the ability to opt out is so laughably against the open source ethos that it makes me sick.

Patching prod servers without the consent of an admin or following the strictures of a deployment strategy?

I genuinely, genuinely do not know why Ubuntu is even seen as an option by server admins. They try to upsell you more than a fast food mobile app and suffer from NIH to an absurd degree.

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Gotta mention Pop_OS! as a fantastic beginner distro. My 72 year old mother refuses to use anything else. It's simple, has automated backups and disaster recovery, and installs non-free drivers for graphics cards.

I don't personally use it since it doesn't yet support Wayland and my gaming rig has a HiDPI screen and X11 doesn't support fractional scaling. Or per screen scaling.

I'm legally obligated to inform you that I run Arch.

Imagine if slavery were left up to the states...

My argument is thus:

LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They're good at rephrasing things so that they're easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she's rockin'.

I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, "type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!"

But if you're using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you're going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.

Janeway would straight up murder them. She's done worse for less reason.

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The accuracy required for the ink droplets just isn't there for prosumers.

I can (and have!) built multiple extruders for a variety of 3D printers. Some of my own design.

Sadly, the tolerances for an inkjet are at least an order of magnitude greater.

I have zero doubt that a few clever hardware hackers could design an open source inkjet printer. But A: They'd get sued back to the mesolithic by every printer company with a patent. And B: the process would likely involve micro machining your own hardware.

I've just said, "fuck it" to the entire industry. I'm in my early 40s and I'm reasonably sure that my Brother laser will outlive me. And possibly the heat death of the universe.

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Pinterest can eat every dick or dick-shaped object that has ever existed in the multiverse.

I would happily, happily give up months of my life to build a robotic body for each of their servers so they could dig their own shallow graves. Where a line of image searchers will kick them unceremoniously into their unmarked holes.

An America-centric one. I've stopped tipping altogether. When the credit card reader at my grocery store deli suggested 15% I snapped.

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Blacklist the Nvidia driver and un-blacklist nouveau. I'm going from memory, but I think if you can get to GRUB, you can append 'single' to your kernel parameters. That should get you into a system with minimal drivers loaded.

It's more than just centralized control.

They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

That's right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don't worry your pretty little head off. We know what's best.

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I'm confused here...

The "horse and sparrow" types have been telling us to not spend money unnecessarily. This will lead to being able to afford more bootstraps.

Soon we realize that children are crazy expensive. Doubly so here in Freedom-land where you're lucky if you get more than a few weeks off of work and a $75k hospital bill. Which your insurance company will fight to the bitter end.

So we decide to be responsible and postpone family plans until we can afford it without going into debt for the rest of our lives.

And now there's a moral panic about that?!

Pick one! Give up your monthly mega-yacht and allow the breeder class to get caught up financially, or stop griping about millennials postponing having children.

Greatest state if you're a white cis male bath salts enthusiast.

For the rest of us, it's just another place to avoid like it's riddled with the plague. Which was also one their aims.

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I still go to Reddit for American politics, my cities sub, and /r/nfl.

But I haven't made a single comment and treat it more as a news aggregator than a proper community. And even that is happening less and less as I get more comfortable with the pacing of the community here.

On Reddit you can make a clever comment at the right time and get thousands of upvotes and sidebar conversations. It's great for a shot of that sweet, sweet dopamine.

On Lemmy, I rarely get more than 5-10 upvotes, but the conversations are meaningful and nuanced.

People are realizing that Lemmy is not a 1:1 drop-in replacement and are adjusting their expectations and behavior accordingly. Hopefully we'll hit a critical mass soon.

I want Proton to evolve to the point where my CAD/CAM software works flawlessly.

I'm trying to adapt to FreeCAD, but I have so much muscle memory invested in Rhino that it feels like being a beginner again.

My off the cuff thought is that it may be used to change the content on the tags. Show it a specific QR code and it updates the content.

They cynical side of wants to believe that it's being used to gather shopping analytics and correlate it to facial data.

They say that history is written by the victors.

But what the idiots in charge of Florida, Texas, et al. forget is that it can only be written by people who have the ability to write.

People still buy Lenovo laptops, Sony music, use Microsoft products and Google services.

No matter how loathsome and evil a company has acted towards their oysters, there will always be people who lined up to get shucked.

I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

And owned by Lenovo. Who in the past loaded unremovable bloatware reinstallers into their BIOS so that fresh installs always reloaded their shit.

If you want a Linux laptop, System76 is your best bet.

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Totally agree with you.

I was abused in church but never in school (outside of racial epithets). Sometimes it's easy to forget that not everybody develops a gallows humor as a coping mechanism. Thinking back to those times while in a depressive stage is a recipe for disaster.

But you are absolutely correct. Some things should only be joked about when in a group of trusted people. And I accept your advice in the spirit in which it was meant. To foster a more accepting and safer community for everybody and not as a way of getting a cheap joke.

I'd much rather be gently corrected than to be part of the background noise that might be making people feel uncomfortable.

Genuinely, thank you.

I would trade every half-assed Google feature update for a hosts based adblock capability.

That's the sole reason that I root every device that I own.

And NO. A PiHole is not, repeat NOT a silver bullet. Nor is a local VPN with custom DNS.

I think that it's absolutely fair to jump on Microsoft for this.

There is nothing wrong with this hardware. RAM and CPU clock speed plateaued a long time ago. The overwhelming majority of these systems being thrown away would run Linux flawlessly.

Microsoft has never given a damn about security before. These new security "features" do more to lock people in than they do to keep them safe.

I'm two states away from Utah. But because my data terminates to L3 in Salt Lake, half of the porn sites that my wife and I frequent want our Utah driver's license or passport. For a state that claims to hate stepping on sneks, they do love forcing their "morality" on everybody else.

No. Just fucking no. If I want my morality policed, the last place I'll go is to a religious institution.

Thank jeebus for VPNs.

Hail, SATAN!

PTSD...

I once destroyed a CRT monitor by misconfiguring X11.

Nowadays Linux just works to the point where my 72 year old mother is able to deal with Pop_OS without issue.

But man, those early days of unstable drivers, slow dial-up internet, and navigating through Usenet and IRC for decent support was a nightmarish labor of love.

The silky smoothness that we have now was built on caffeine and the backs of millions of greybeards.

(For the record: "Greybeard" is a nerdy term of endearment that I've seen adopted by people identifying all across the rainbow. Kinda like dwarfs on Discworld).

Don't lump them in with us! I'm a proud member of the Satanic Temple, and I wouldn't touch PHP on my most hedonistic night.

There's the Devil, and there's the Devil.

Depends on how you "broke" it.

First step is to back up whatever data is there. Boot into a rescue distro like GRML dd the block device to an external hard drive.

If you nuked the partition table, there may be additional work to rebuild it if you used GPT rather than MBR. But gdisk should also tell you if there are backups, which would make your life way easier.

If you still have a partition (like /dev/sda1) but the mount command claims that it cannot find a valid ext signature, you might be able to simply use mkfs.ext4. It's counterintuitive, but this isn't destructive and will recreate the filesystem leaving the data alone. And if it does turn out to be destructive, that's why you have your backup.

To recover from the backup, you can use scalpel or photorec from the testdisk package. Photorec holds your hand and can be run in read-only mode. Caveat: These tools work by looking for specific file headers and makes a best guess as to where it'll end (if the format doesn't have a defined footer).

In the car now, but I can respond with more detailed steps if your other options don't pan out.

Oooh! Let me guess!

Every library involved in rendering the screen will now be in its own Snap?

I'm sure you've already been through the usual suspects. So here's my list. Hopefully some more esoteric ones will help out.

  • Our Flag Means Death

  • Star Trek: Lower Decks

  • Los Espookys

  • Good Omens

  • Killjoys

  • Black Mirror

  • The Magicians

  • The Umbrella Academy

  • Sandman

  • The Orville

  • Farscape

  • Love, Death, and Robots

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Once I made the mistake of looking up how to change the oil on my Kawasaki Vulcan without being in incognito. Now half of my recommendations are how to perform maintenance on motorcycles that I'll never own. And ads for Harley Davidson. A company whose business model is converting gasoline into noise.

I just use youtube-dl now and have it go to my NAS. It's not easier then going to the website, per se. But now the video lives on my storage and it won't go away after a corporation's billionth DMCA claim that hour.

Genuinely wish I had done this a decade ago on my favorite articles. Link rot is getting worse and worse and YouTube is the absolute worst.