fernandofig

Look, I despise Google as much as anyone these days, and I'm glad they're taking a beating this time around, but at the same time, it's also kind of bullshit. And it's not even because you can sideload apps, or have alternate appstores on Android, but because we have yet to see the same standards being applied to Apple.

Maybe I'm bitter, and I know a lot of people wouldn't agree with this, but honestly? I think the non-corporate part of the Fediverse should just assume malice from the get go and preemptively defederate from whatever Meta put out. That way nothing's changed - Meta would essentially have a private / proprietary / isolated network, as far as users are concerned (much like Facebook already is), and even if the Fediverse will see less growth in the short term because of that, there will be no confusion on where everybody stands.

E: Well, thankfully and as expected, I'm not the only one to think this way: FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta’s ActivityPub Platform

The same as Steve Jobs and even Bill Gates.

In my opinion, not the same as these guys. Jobs and Gates were assholes because they got fuck you money and power, so they were assholes for being assholes' sake. Linus was an asshole, but he usually had good reasons for acting like that, usually technical, common sense and no-nonsense driven. Sometimes I miss the time before he got therapy or whatever. It was amusing and cathartic to see him roasting some guys because he was right more often than not.

Glad we can celebrate a system that just isn’t quite there yet.

What are you talking about? I mean, if you mean Linux on the Desktop, sure, but nobody who uses Linux on the IT sector cares too much about that. Linux has won on the server arena for a long time already. E: And then there's also the mobile and embedded market. If you think about it, desktop is the only part in tech that Linux has yet to gain ground.

This sounds like dev sour grapes but what the company was asking them to do seems better from the customer pov and for cyber security I'm general.

As a developer myself (though not on the level of these guys): sorry, but just, no.

The key point is this:

[...] we did not issue CVEs for experimental features and instead would patch the relevant code and release it as part of a standard release.

Emphasis mine. In software, features marked as "experimental" usually are not meant to be used in a production environment, and if they are, it's in a "do it at your own risk" understanding. Software features in an experimental state are expected to be less tested and have bugs - it's essentially a "beta" feature. It has a security bug? Though - you weren't supposed to be using it in a security-sensitive environment in the first place, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it should be addressed in a normal release as opposed to an out-of-band one.

We can argue if forking the project is or isn't extreme, but the devs absolutely have good reason to be pissed. This is typical management making decisions without understanding technical nuances and - from what is being told by the devs - not talking it through before doing it.

If Signal didn't alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.

This. I hate Whatsapp, but I have to use it because that's what everybody else (where I live) uses, so either I cave, or be Incommunicable by everyone and get used to explaining why while sounding like a dork.

I used Signal because, although a very small set of friends used it, I had an excuse to keep it because it handled SMS, and so I could keep it in the hopes that eventually WA would shoot itself in the foot and people would finally migrate, but since they removed SMS, why the hell would I hold on to it if I'd have no reason to other that I like it?

There are a few more layers to this problem that no one seems to acknowledge.

What if someone DID come out of the woods and provided a Chromium fork that put Mv2 support back in. Then what? How do you install those extensions? Google won't be allowing Mv2 extensions in their store anymore. Supposedly you'd need to download it directly from the developer and install it manually. That's not great UX.

Maybe if the dev community came up with an alternative web store implementation that allowed Mv2 extensions, but that comes with a lot of other problems, to name a few: dev effort, costs for hosting the web app for the store and hosting the extensions themselves (which wouldn't necessarily be expensive, but wouldn't be free either), approval workflows for the extensions, etc. Thing is, though, all of that would require from devs a clear roadmap and a level of coordination that from my seat here, I don't see a hint of it happening.

All of the above: either having a Chromium fork that allows installing Mv2 extensions manually, or implementing an alternative web store, is not a trivial effort, and then how many people will actually benefit from it? Those really concerned with effective adblocking, like us, are a tiny minority of the user base. Would the effort of maintaining a Chromium fork and/or a free(dom) webstore be worth it if very few people will actually use it?

I hate to say it, but yeah, Mv2 is doomed. I didn't want to go back to Firefox, but I guess I'll have to.

Ah yes, the Bobby Tables approach.

~19 years of marriage ended late last year due to mental health issues + NPD. I'm still trying to get over it, but it's tough; she just won't leave me alone.

Did you read the tweet from Brendan Eich linked in the OP? According to him, Brave already is a fork, and he provides a link to a (surprisingly) extensive list of things that are removed / disabled from chromium on their browser.

Or... you know, maybe because of that little gadget that Valve has been selling like hotcakes?

Not to take Reddit's / spez side, but to clarify, that's not actually what he got in cash - what he got in cash on 2023 was something around 600k.

Those 193mil was in stock. Which kind of explains his drive to monetize users and kick out third-party apps: that piece of paper is only worth that much as long as he can keep the stock value afloat.

Probably never. The dev seems intent on keep drinking the reddit kool-aid and push subscription to users. It's too bad, there is a gap for an app with the same polish for lemmy (although I have yet to try Sync)

Someone apparently doesn't know how Bill Gates actually got his start or how Apple started. "Money and power.". Bill Gates snuck into a library to learn about computers. Apple started with a group of people in a damn garage.

How one started is irrelevant to the discussion. A lot of big companies out there had humble beginnings. It's about what those guys turn into once they hit it big. And the thing is, Linus never really hit it big, not in the way that Jobs or Gates did, because he was always content to be the tech / architecture guy instead of moving up to more higher-level management roles, which is where the money tends to be.

For all their humble beginnings, Jobs and Gates were ruthless when they hit it big. Go read one of the biographies of Jobs - he was a notoriously difficult guy to work with, and was needlessly an asshole very often. Also remember that Apple wasn't just Jobs; at least half of its early success is due to Wozniak, who is still beloved by everyone to this day, because on top of being a brilliant hardware and software engineer, he isn't and wasn't a dick.

I'll cut some slack to Gates though - as ruthless as he was on his days as CEO, with his philanthropy on the past decade or so he has been at least trying to atone.

Apparently not good enough that Linus thought it was good enough to continue being an asshole. Pat on the back to him.

He didn't. Did you miss the part where I said he got therapy? He even went so far to apologize, which is more than you can say about most of those tone deaf, narcissistic sociopath CEO types.

Great? Ask enterprise companies and hospitals how secure and reasonable Linux seems for their business models.

I'm not even sure what's your point here. Sure Linux isn't applicable to all kinds of business or how they're built. How that invalidates what I said about the server market?

Yeah this one is a joke. Linux is far from ready for the mobile world at least for phones.

What? So you're completely ignoring that the largest mobile OS on the market is built on Linux?

Yes, you are right, on all accounts. Pretty much all of cloud infrastructure is built on Linux, including Microsoft's Azure, except when you have apps deployed there that are based or dependent on legacy (.NET Framework and older stuff) or proprietary (AAD and stuff like that) Microsoft tech, but again, those are becoming more and more the exception rather than the rule. On-prem setups tend to be more mixed between Microsoft and "other" stacks, but Microsoft hasn't had the lead for a long time even there.

And you're absolutely right, Android runs on the Linux kernel; although the userspace is not pure GNU, the fact that Android runs on Linux is 100% relevant to the discussion since Linus is the lead maintainer and creator of the kernel.

The OC clearly has some bone to pick with Linus, I'm outta here.

You have plenty of time to fall madly in love, get married, fall madly out of love, get divorced, and repeat.

As a 43yo, fuck did that hit hard. Well, except for the "repeat" part. I have a lot of issues to work through before I get to that, if ever.

I think what he's getting at here is people asking him about building an alternative platform to Reddit - much like Lemmy, Kbin, Tildes, etc. are - as opposed to an app serving as the frontend for an existing alternative platform. I've seen poeple buzzing about that on some of those threads about Apollo on Reddit. Those people are so in denial, and there were so many of them, that I couldn't conjure to effort to point how ridiculous that idea is. Some people did, and were quickly shut down with the usual complaints (fediverse is confusing / doesn't work, etc.)

Have you read past that screenshot of the code, though? It says the problem was not limited to Firefox, it seems Edge users reported problems as well. Anecdotally, I did experience that delay problem on Thorium this weekend as well. I have seen a variation of this problem almost a month ago, where sometimes the video would take a long time (like, over a minute, sometimes) to load, or often just not load at all. So I just chalked it up to Youtube having done something stupid on their end.

To properly qualify how groundbreaking Elite was for the time, for those who don't know it: it was a space sim that simulated 8 galaxies with 256 star systems each, each system with a star, a planet, and a space station each. All of that was wireframe-3D rendered, had a lot of complexities like different ship and enemy types, different playloops like trading, mining and combat, and it was one of the few games of that time that pioneered open-world gameplay.

This was initially released on the mid-80's for 8bit computers of the time, which had anything between 48Kb to 128Kb of RAM, and thus, the game binaries was also that small - they accomplished that by also being one of the few games of the time that pioneered procedurally generated content.

The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details.

I don't think that makes sense, or at least it doesn't properly qualify the problem. BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware is. In fact, many of the more simple systems (like 8 or 16-bit consoles) have their BIOS emulated. But for more advanced or poorer documented systems, there are, in my view, two problems with that:

• If your reversed engineered version of the BIOS has bugs (and during early stages of development, it would have a lot), the ways in which these bugs could present themselves makes the situation ambiguous, because it may be hard to know, from the symptoms, whether the bug is on the BIOS or on the hardware emulation. So developers just use the official BIOS because then if you see bugs, you know for sure the problem is on the hardware emulation. And also, reverse engineering the BIOS would require a lot of effort that developers would probably rate as low priority given they could use a perfectly functional BIOS and avoid a whole lot of other technical problems as per above. I mean, for many systems, hardware emulation is a problem already complex enough;
• Depending on the system, the BIOS code could be so simple that a reverse engineered version of it could conceivably be so close to the actual official code that it could, yes, trigger a copyright suit from the creator.

To the extent that a boss demanding sex in exchange for career advancement, I agree that makes them sex offenders. But those women still have a choice. They making the wrong choice doesn't mean they aren't the victim, but they still should be accountable for their choice.

Just FYI, Barrier has been abandoned / unsupported for awhile. Although the last release mostly works, don't expect future support.

Its successor is https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap, and although there have been some coy maintainance on it, they have yet to provide an installable release, due to "reasons".

I use Synergy myself, which is the ancestor of both of the above. Although it started as open source, it has been turned into a commercial product a long time ago, which is why I'm not providing the link here. It's still maintained, for better or for worse, but in the latest release-to-be they revamped the UI and for some reason I couldn't get it to work at all on my setup - it seems to rely on some auto configuration / autodetection gimmickry which simply is not working here. To make matters worse, the new UI is essentially an electron app, which means it has become a lot more bloated. And then there's also the telemetry thing. I've been using the old 1.1 legacy version, holding out hope that input-leap eventually lifts off.

If I understand correctly, the concern is not for the users on Meta's "Threads". It's the fact that the content you create on Mastodon or whatever fediverse part with which Meta federated would eventually reach users on Threads, and thus "you" (on the fediverse corner outside of Meta) are indirectly monetized.

Hold on, is that for real? Like, for Unity games developed years (maybe over a decade) ago, developers would need to start to pony up if they're installed now? I thought that pay by install thing was just for licensing contracts from now on (not that this isn't bullshit too, but at least people could just move on to another engine).

Marketing-wise, I believe it's very hard to make a name for a product/service/platform/app/whatever that has (or sounds like having) more than 2 syllables catch on. I mean, mas-to-don doesn't quite roll off your tongue like face-book, twit-ter, you-tube, lem-my, etc.

In that sense, I agree with the OP in that "Mastodon" was a poor name choice (and as opposed to him, even if there is an explanation for it), and may well contribute to hurt its adoption by the general public. It's the kind of name you sometimes see FOSS enthusiasts come up who can write great software but has poor knowledge (or downright disdain) in marketing, product management, and other business aspects.

Yeah, and it's not Mozilla either.

Which one do you think it is, then? Genuinely curious here. I don't disagree with on most of what you said - I find the simping for Mozilla (and sneering towards chromium) here in Lemmy rather annoying. Mozilla and its browser both have shortcomings as well, and choosing a web browser these days is, as most things in life, choosing the lesser of evils vs. one's own needs.

Because this looks and feels pretty much identical to the arcade.

Probably because it shares a lot of the hardware of the original arcade, so the porting probably was straightforward.

Yes, and you have to remember that the situation there is so volatile due to the factors involved.

Fair enough! FWIW, I also think your stance on the matter is fairly level-headed and well thought out, even if I'm more or less on the other side of the fence.

Chromium-based browsers still trounces Firefox on the Jetstream benchmark. I mean, I realize the Speedometer benchmark is supposed to test real-world scenarios, while Jetstream is more synthetic, but whatever work mozilla did to improve performance I'd expect to scale in other benchmarks too, so I'd expect Firefox to at least be bit closer to Chromium, even if losing a little.

Thank you for digging this out. Turns out it's even worse than what I gleaned from my surface-level take.

I think there's more to the coin ship, that unfortunately isn't covered in the article. I know for a fact that the hammer bro on the World 1 map turns into a coin ship if you finish 1-1 with 55 coins AND end the level with time remaining being an odd number.

I don't think this qualifies. That moment you're referring to is more a "breaking the 4th wall" situation for a sort of comic effect, which is a staple on most of the entries on the series, not an actual reversal of a failure state. Something similar happens on MGS1 on the fight with Psycho Mantis, for example.

Same here. In fact, I bought my Legion (which btw I feel like it was a good choice on OPs part because I believe Lenovo's laptops tend to have better cooling engineering in general, for whatever laptop category, compared to other brands) to serve first as a work laptop, and then some gaming on the side, which I'm not too picky about because I don't really play on PC that often anyway. My reasoning for that is that the business laptops I had been looking before going with the Legion were frankly overpriced crap with limited expandability, shoddy components and build, and full of built-in bloatware pre-installed. I find that gaming laptops tend to have higher quality components and slightly better expandability, so it was a win all around.

Yeah, but then we're not talking about social media anymore, but brand and company names in general.

When you want a brand name to be part of people's everyday vocabulary, as is the case with social media, it needs to be succint and easily referred to. Hell, sometimes people even turn those names into verbs (tweeeting, facebooking, etc.), how do you do that with Mastodon without compounding the problem? (E: I know about "toots", but now that's coming up with unintuitive jargon for the platform - which is fine, but shouldn't have been necessary in the first place if more thought had been put into the brand)

there's almost nobody with 3 legs

Hol up there, tell me about those people with 3 legs!

I heard the same - over a decade ago.

Not disagreeing with you, although that information might be outdated. But the fact that you don't see, e.g. , applications that use gecko to embed web content, speaks volumes. I get the feeling that their codebase is very monolithic.

I would really like to hear from a current or former contributor though.

Sorry, but no. Putting that on the users is a no-go.

I agree that Linux is generally stable - when it works (i.e. hardware well supported and the pains of installing and initial setup is gone). But the experience to get to that point is still far from polished, and that don't usually has anything to do with user expectations on how the OS should work.

I've been using Linux on the desktop on and off since 1998 aproximately - way before it was "cool" - and that has always been the case - it was always "almost there, but not quite". That's not a knock on developers either (I'm a developer myself, just not on Linux) - Linux for server stuff is excellent and I've always used it for that, but user experience for desktop stuff always had wrinkles, and I understand how many user experience problems can be hard to solve for developers (who more often than not are volunteers) for many reasons, just let's not put that on the users: things are the way they are for reasons that, at heart, often go beyond users or developers - market, business politics, etc.

Lemmur is unmaintained.

I did it all using this. Took me about half an hour to migrate all my 15-something accounts to KeepassXC.

Be sure to hear the 2000's re-record. It's one of those rare cases where the re-record blows the original (IMHO, at least)