This is what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification", and it's part of the reason I'm on Mastodon and Lemmy now.

If you want to use gimp as an ALTERNATIVE and go in without the bias, you’ll likely learn your way around a LOT faster.

I think this is the key phrase -- do you want an alternative (where you might have to learn new ways of doing things), or do you want a clone? GIMP is not a clone, but an alternative.

I also think this gets to something I was told loooooooooong ago, when I was a young lad asking what was the best computer to buy. Someone told me, "Find all the software you want/need to run, and get the computer that will run it all."

In other words, if you need to use Photoshop, then maybe you don't use Linux -- maybe stick with Mac or (shudder) Windows.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains.

The stains become a warning.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion

Not just parents -- my wife has an unhealthy mobile game addiction. We've talked about it and talked about it, but it's still a heavy draw for her.

Not sure if it counts, but obsidian for notes and my daily journal, and latte-dock to replace the stock KDE app bar.

Oh, and emacs with doom for general text editing and most coding tasks.

There was a story once that said if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare.

So far, the Internet has not shown that to be true. Example: Twitter.

Now we have an artificial monkey remixing all of that, at our request, and we're trying to find something resembling Hamlet's Soliloquy in what it tells us. What it gives you is meaningless unless you interpret it in a way that works for you -- how do you know the answer is correct if you don't test it? In other words, you have to ensure the answers it gives are what you are looking for.

In that scenario, it's just a big expensive rubber duck you are using to debug your work.

I just hopped both my laptop and desktop from Manjaro to Endeavour - so far, so good. I'm still restoring files from backup and installing stuff, so it's still early days, but already things are feeling better.

Look forward to seeing the HiDPI scaling work on my laptop - tired of my login screen looking like crap...

My first reaction would be to acknowledge them as a fellow geek, but that's because most of the people who live near me would hurt themselves trying to open Notepad. Anyone who knows enough to start hacking my config files would be a welcome guest in my house.

Then I'd kill them with a hammer. :-)

emacs with doom FTW.

Looking forward to learning how to get tree tabs in FF.

+1 for btop - so much easier to find and kill runaway processes.

My EndeavourOS (and the prior Manjaro distro) had all of them installed.

All. Of. Them.

I am so tired of having to scroll through hundreds of Noto fonts to get to the later ones, but I'm afraid, if I uninstall one, something will break on reboot.

There's a great dissection of this whole thing by Legal Eagle on YT from last week, if you don't mind going there.

Same here, never had any problem.

https://superuser.com/questions/318555/where-are-man-pages-stored-in-ubuntu#318559 has your answer.

I moved from a major metro area to middle of forking nowhere several years ago. I kept my library cards from the metro area, which still work for Libby ebook and magazine downloads, while the local rural library is tied into a regional system for the occasional dead tree book.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Just writing a cheque to the charity for $43k would have done as much or more, but since their real goal is goosing sales numbers not donating to charity that would run counter to their goal.

This -- it's virtue-signalling to raise sales numbers. If I make a big public statement about my charitable giving, it's seen very differently than when a big corporation does it.

Another question I have: is anyone changing their purchasing choices because of this? Would you choose a Pepsi fountain drink or a Gatorade instead of a bottle of Coke just because of this? Or add a share size Snickers bar to your gas purchase which you wouldn't otherwise?

I use these too, and Fira Code and Hack for coding.

Way-neet Joo-are-ease

...there is a big, big difference between calling someone homeless/addict or saying “experiencing homelessness/addiction”

I agree with this -- my point in bringing this up was to highlight the differences in the language we use and the images and ideas those words conjure in the reader/listener. Your experiences are much more direct than mine, and I appreciate the insight.

... I don’t think the author intended to degrade people with their wording. ... I think we do a disservice to the people directly suffering from homelessness/addiction/mental health by misdirecting our frustrations towards the journalists increasing awareness of the problem.

I see your points. However, had the director of the facility also used the term "homeless", I would have never posted this. Its the changing of the word from what was said to what was written that gave me pause.

On the other hand, you have also given me some other ways to think about this story and how it was presented. Thanks for forcing me to confront some of my biases.

Me too - I'll use Konsole if I need to have the results up all the time, but Yakuake is my main terminal.

Fair point, and thank you. Let me clarify a bit.

It wasn't my intention to say ChatGPT isn't helpful. I've heard stories of people using it to great effect, but I've also heard stories of people who had it return the same non-solutions they had already found and dismissed. Just like any tool, actually...

I was just pointing out that it is functionally similar to scanning SO, tech docs, Slashdot, Reddit, and other sources looking for an answer to our question. ChatGPT doesn't have a magical source of knowledge that we collectively also do not have -- it just has speed and a lot processing power. We all still have to verify the answers it gives, just like we would anything from SO.

My last sentence was rushed, not 100% accurate, and shows some of my prejudices about ChatGPT. I think ChatGPT works best when it is treated like a rubber duck -- give it your problem, ask it for input, but then use that as a prompt to spur your own learning and further discovery. Don't use it to replace your own thinking and learning.

Define "buggy". I've still got a problem where occasionally when I mouse over the dock, it redraws the icons, but I'm living with that until it hurts enough for me to figure out why.

Kum & Go isn’t a charity, yet they found a way to go from zero charitable activity to nonzero. That’s a plus.

So you're saying the ends are what is important, not the reason the action was taken?

To me, there's an important philosophical question here -- if the right action (or a demonstrably good action) is taken, does it matter why? I think it does.

Let's say my neighbor doesn't maintain their property -- they don't mow or clean the landscaping. I decide to do this for them on my own, with their permission of course. There is a difference if I'm doing this to be a good neighbor, as opposed to making sure the neighborhood looks good because I'm selling my house. My actions are the same in both cases, as are the effects and side effects -- only the motivation differs. Therefore that motivation deserves to be interrogated and explored.

If you honestly see that as a negative, you should take it as a wake-up call that you’re using an irrationally pessimistic lens to view the world.

I don't see myself as a pessimist, but I'll admit this observation is probably correct.

There's the problem of filtering as well -- if I jump into a thread that's a few hours old on Reddit, there may already be hundreds of replies. How do I filter this? How many discussions have you been in where there were several different people all with the same response, simply because someone else had the same opinion 30 minutes earlier?

On the flip side, if you're in a small local sub, how do you get new ideas injected? It's the "joke #243" problem, where everyone's heard everything already. Until more people arrive with fresh insights and ideas, the community can become insular.