Apparently decades of science-fictional takes have not been able to make people understand why this is a Bad Idea and we shouldn't even be talking about it except to say, "Absolutely not!"

I honestly didn’t realize Threads’ federation support was this pathetic.

Maybe they noticed that a lot of servers in the wider Fediverse had preemptively defederated from them, and decided it wasn't worth their time.

They're widely variable. PyPI gets into about as much trouble as npm, but I haven't heard of a successful attack on CPAN in years (although that may be because no one cares about Perl anymore).

Y'know what's worse? When there's no dot. Worse than that, it's an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒

I seem to recall that scarring around the electrodes, which eventually causes them to stop functioning, is a known failure mode of older experiments along similar lines. It's one of the reasons I didn't hold out much hope for this iteration.

I just hope the patient doesn't take any long-term damage from the implant.

Linux, and much of the open-source software that goes with it, has been multi-architecture for a long time. If you take something that already runs pretty decently on x86, x86_64, PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, and Intel Itanium CPUs, porting it to yet another architecture is, while not trivial, at least mostly a known problem.

Windows, by contrast, was built for descendants of the Intel 8088, period. It's unsurprising that porting it is a hard problem and that results aren't always satisfactory.

(Apple built on top of a modified BSD kernel, and BSD has also been ported around quite a bit, so they also have a ports-are-a-known-problem advantage.)

Fake celebrity porn has existed since before photography, in the form of drawings and impersonators. At this point, if you're even somewhat young and good-looking (and sometimes even if you're not), the fake porn should be expected as part of the price you pay for fame. It isn't as though the sort of person who gets off on this cares whether the pictures are real or not—they just need them to be close enough that they can fool themselves.

Is it right? No, but it's the way the world is, because humans suck.

Anyone who is actually surprised by this has not been paying attention.

This is why you don't train a bot on the entire Internet and then use it to offer advice. Even if only 1% of all posts are dangerously ignorant . . . that's a lot of dangerous ignorance.

Fortunately, this particular piece of bad advice is unlikely to poison any fool who goes through with it, since PVA glue is not considered an ingestion hazard, but "non-toxic" doesn't mean "edible", it just means "not going to poison you when used in the intended manner". "Non-toxic" can still be quite dangerous if you mistake something intended as linoleum pigment for a dessert topping.

GIMP has the closest thing to feature parity. If you're looking for similarity of UI and workflow, you're not going to get it. Adobe throws millions of dollars that open-source projects don't have at streamlining their UI. UI specialists that will work for free are unicorns, so most open-source UIs are designed by volunteer generalist programmers. Which means that said UI gets the job done, but isn't optimized for the workflow of people who don't think like the original programmers.

Personally, I might shift the same picture through Darktable, GIMP, Inkscape, and even Scribus, depending on what I was trying to do with it. (Text on a path -> probably Inkscape, then export as PNG and import into GIMP as a layer.) Is that less convenient than performing all the operations in one program? Possibly, but since I don't like Photoshop's UI either, I'm willing to give up on "one-stop shopping".

(So who, for my money, had the best UI? Probably Paint Shop Pro, twenty or so years ago when it still belonged to JASC. Of course, it was a simpler program too, and so had less junk in its interface.)

Fact is, if you're a pro, you've invested years into learning Photoshop's interface and how to get the best results out of it. You're in the position of a baseball player who's decided to start all over again with basketball. Any attempt to transition to other software is going to be really, really frustrating for you, and likely drop your productivity into the toilet for a few months at least. Plus, you're going to need some features that average users don't care about, especially if you're preparing work for print.

I hate to say it, but you may honestly be best off running Photoshop in a VM rather than trying to move to other software, at least until you can set aside a couple of months where you have no urgent projects (if that ever happens).

Short version: some people (I'm one of them) object to systemd on grounds that are 75% philosophical and 25% the kind of tech detail that's more of a matter of taste than anything else. The older sysV init is a smaller program, which means that it has a smaller absolute number of bugs than systemd but also does less on its own. Some of us regard "does less" as a feature rather than a bug.

If systemd works for you and you don't know or care about the philosophical side of the argument, there is probably no benefit for you in switching.

Bunch of things going on here.

On the one hand, Snapchat shouldn't be liable for users' actions.

On the other hand, Snapchat absolutely should be liable for its recommendation algorithms' actions.

On the third hand, the kid presumably lied to Snapchat in order to get an account in the first place.

On the fourth hand, the kid's parents fail at basic parenting in ways that have nothing to do with Snapchat: "If you get messages on-line that make you uncomfortable or are obviously wrong, show them to a trusted adult—it doesn't have to be us." "If you must meet someone you know on-line in person, do it in the most public place you can think of—mall food courts during lunch hour are good. You want to make sure that if you scream, lots of people will hear it." "Don't ever get into a car alone with someone you don't know very well."

Solution: make suggestion algorithms opt-in only (if they're useful, people will opt in). Don't allow known underage individuals to opt in—restrict them to a human-curated "general feed" that's the same for everyone not opted in if you feel the need to fill in the space in the interface. Get C.O. better parents.

None of that will happen, of course.

For gaming, you should be using the most current version of nvidia's proprietary drivers that supports your GPU, unless that GPU is really old. Have a look at this page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

If your GPU isn't listed there, use the most recent driver you can find.

If your GPU is on the 470.xx supported list, try 470.223.02, as that seems to be the last in the series.

If your GPU is on the 390.xx supported list, try 390.157.

If your GPU is on one of the other lists, it's a really old chipset and you should be using the Nouveau driver that's built into the kernel.

If you're using the nvidia proprietary drivers on a system that also has Nouveau installed, make sure you've blacklisted Nouveau so that you're loading the correct driver.

Dual-graphics laptops are a bit of a bear to work with under Linux generally. Good luck.

Godot isn't even officially supported on ARM, so I don't expect to see it on RISC-V anytime soon. It might work anyway (if you compile it yourself). Or it might work (slowly) via x86_64 emulation in qemu. But if having Godot working is a make-or-break for you, I'd say this architecture isn't appropriate for you yet.

They are not revealing user names on the site.

You mean, "They are not currently revealing user names on the site." This may easily be the first temperature increment in a frog-boiling process.

(Cynical? Yes, but the world keeps reinforcing that attitude.)

"How stupid do they think we are"? The answer is, very stupid. It's sort of an offshoot of Dunning-Kruger: overestimating their own intelligence leads them to underestimate everyone else's.

Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to "buy" or "own" anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you're buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that's what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.

What, you mean 640KB isn't really enough for everyone?

. . . I kid, I kid. Still, the CarThing strikes me as more of an embedded-type system. 512MB is generous for devices of that class, and more than sufficient for a carefully-tailored Linux kernel + busybox + another 100MB+ of running software. Potato, yes, but potatoes are a useful food source—just not as impressive as filet mignon.

Disgusted (mostly at the Russian government), but not surprised. There was no good option for Mozilla to take with respect to this—it was either block these add-ons in Russia, or have the entire browser blocked in Russia, and I'm not sure which would do the most harm in the end.

had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account

Thus proving that they learned nothing from the experience.

This is going to cripple them in the market. Removing features does nothing to make a vehicle more attractive to the average idiot. Maybe GM thinks they can get away with it because the demand for cars exceeds the supply right now, I don't know.

Force them to treat commute time (within reason) as work for which the employee must be paid, and you'll see a bunch of companies blanch and do an about-face on their attempts to get people back to the office.

As for the primary thesis of the article, well, if I go into the office I'm the only person on my floor even if the building is at full occupancy—there are two desks in the basement and the other has been untenanted since a couple of years before the pandemic. I'd still rather stay home, and not waste the time and gas, even though it's only a 15-minute drive along back roads.

Neither. Monetization is the cause. If the standard were still "your site is a hobby, you should expect to fund it out of pocket", none of the rest would matter.

If there's DRM involved, then you're renting, not buying. Take that into account when considering how to spend money.

Security and convenience (not "speed") always pull in opposite directions. The thing is that experts always seem to advise using the highest level of security even for trivial accounts. This creates unnecessary friction, with the result that the average person drops the effective level of security even for important accounts in order to get rid of it. This is not a new problem, just a bad article on an old problem.

(As for cryptocurrency, just don't.)

We've been able to manipulate photos since the early days of film cameras. While technology has made them easier to mess with, they've never been truly trustworthy.

The author of the article can't even be bothered to keep his server up-to-date (my first attempt at viewing the article bounced me with a warning that suggests he only has obsolete crypto protocols available for SSL—why bother with SSL at all, then?). He's quite correct that this initiative is going to come to nothing.

There are currently only four web rendering engines that could be considered remotely usable as daily drivers: WebKit, its fork Blink, and Gecko, with its fork Goanna. WebKit and Blink both have major corporate backing (Apple and Google respectively). Gecko has the Mozilla Foundation paying the major bills. Even Pale Moon's Goanna has multiple people working on it (and since it's my daily driver, I know it has persistent issues with a few sites that have to be papered over with extensions). And the rendering engine is not the only thing you need for a browser, just the largest single part. A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.

All software has bugs in it.

People were using this service to put up money to encourage programmers working on open-source software to fix specific bugs that were especially bothering them. For instance, if text in software X didn't scale properly and that was a problem for you, you could use this service to offer $100 to programmers working on X to fix the text scaling. Once they got it fixed, they collected the money.

The service went bankrupt.

When it went bankrupt, some programmers didn't get their promised payment for bugs they had fixed.

The money didn't get returned to the people who had paid for the bug to be fixed, either.

So now both programmers and users have lost money because of this service, and everyone's ticked off.

Getting there—the last time I checked, Gentoo had enough stuff with ~riscv keywords to produce a KDE desktop with Firefox, a media player, email, and some other useful software. If Firefox is completely functional, that alone would be enough for some people. Still not user-friendly to install, though, because Gentoo. Debian's better at that part. Anyway, if you can get the hardware, the software is edging up on "possible".

Enough people have thought of while (true){ print(money); } for manufacturers to have built stuff into printers to prevent that, alas.

Price, range, infrastructure, in roughly that order of importance when averaged over the population. The article then goes into factors affecting price. (Of course, the article originated with the Financial Times and was only reprinted by Ars, so it makes sense that they would put money first.)

I don't think that's Spanish. Nahuatl, which is an indigenous language spoken in Mexico, does use x- to transcribe the sound commonly written as sh- in English, so that's probably a Nahuatl place-name.

In the case of Xitter, though, the reference is generally to Mandarin Chinese, which uses x- to transcribe one of the two or three distinct sounds in that language that all sound like sh- to Anglophones.

If I recall correctly, the aircraft manufacturer writes the maintenance guidelines.

This could be a Boeing issue, if it's due to something that happened at the time the aircraft was built, or due to a foreseeable gap in the maintenance guidelines.

It could be a Delta issue, if they weren't following the maintenance guidelines, or a maintenance contractor working for them wasn't following them and they didn't catch it.

It could also have been (very small but nonzero chance) the result of physical trauma to the plane that wasn't foreseen, back in the 1990s when it was built, as something that might cause an issue of this magnitude. I haven't yet seen any information on whether this particular aircraft has a history of hard landings or running over debris on the runway. Freak accidents do happen.

All of those have precedents in aviation history.

Advertising copy is likely overrepresented in the general corpus of texts from the Internet that most LLMs are trained on. Plus, it isn't a genre where truth matters all that much. It's intentionally vague and cliché-riddled even when humans are writing it. So it's something that I'd expect LLMs to be pretty good at creating.

"Garbage in, garbage out" is just fine if garbage was your desired output to begin with.

Another good reason to stay away from the US in general and Georgia in particular.

Amazon lost its way when in started acting as a storefront for others, rather than a bookstore. In other words, a good twenty years ago.

Tech gear in particular is one of the things that's extremely risky to order from there (along with food, meds, and anything for babies/small children), as there are a lot of fraudulent or damaged goods mixed into their supply. Go to a specialist supplier instead. Newegg isn't great, but at least they don't appear to mix inventory from different sellers the way Amazon does.

Normally I describe bad APIs as looking like they were written by a committee of drunken orangutans.

This thing makes the output of a committee of drunken orangutans look like art.

Part of the problem is the chip manufacturers. They provide precompiled device drivers for one version of one kernel only, no source, and refuse to update them ever again. It can be a bit difficult to update the rest of the software stack when there's no way to shore up the foundations. Device manufacturers need to start insisting on updated drivers and/or provided driver source code before they buy the chips to put in their phones, tablets, and other systems.

Good luck on that.

Microsoft has essentially forgotten what a desktop GUI is for. It's a program launcher packaged with a set of libraries that make it easy for other programs to do complex things like displaying video in a uniform way, plus some system administration tools. Pack-ins not related to system administration should be limited to very basic software.

There may be something that Microsoft has added to Windows lately that isn't bloat, or evil, or both, but damned if I know what it is.

Tried to register with gitlab three times some months back to file a bug against qemu. It rejected my registration silently every time (as in, it appeared to take it but never sent a confirmation email, not even one that got mistaken for spam). I gave up on filing the bug.