I own a MacBook Air basically for GarageBand and other DAWs. I know how to get Jack to work. Pipewire made life easier. Still, music production on linux still sucks butts.
Too many butts for me to do anything other than other computer things and programming.
I have been rekindling my patronage to my county’s libraries and archive.org.
Sure, these are DVDs, but they can be upscaled and are easily backed up.
I buy a crap load of books like I have a spending problem, but I get them used from bookstores and thriftstores. Libraries will always have something I can’t find, with the added glory of browsing serendipity.
Sure, I like to pirate, but there is more treasure at your ports than you think.
For like a month or two I decided, screw it, I am going to use all the programs I cannot use on Linux. This was mostly games and music making software....
That is what I am starting to realize. Every paid program that I used to desire is now subscription based.
Also, I am coming to terms with how truly powerful FOSS programs are. People seem to pay for the workflow, the user interface, more than the capabilities. At least I feel that way with DAWs. Ardour does everything. Vital makes every sound. I can be happy with that. I need to focus on making music.
This is solid. I am so happy for this advice, never heard of Yabridge. I am willing to mess around if it actually means I can use my plugins with Linux!
Everything you typed out was a painful rediscovery on my part. I basically had to ignore my principles at every moment, but using Windows eventually became too gross, I had to get out.
For the money I spent experimenting with proprietary software, I could have donated to projects making the alternatives.
I am finally getting around to doing this! I will admit, I had Windows on all of my machines… I first rehabilitated my laptop, and I finally brought back my main desktop from hell.
Running the script. Let’s see what my computer becomes!
I’ve seen many people have insane setups to download things automatically and NAS’ with tens of terabytes of capacity, which i don’t understand at all....
Honestly, a terabyte can be filled up pretty quicky just with video games. High resolution films add up quicker than you think.
The library is good if you have the hardware to rip.
Not to mention stuff from the Internet Archive, which has all the things you definitely have never seen. It is nearly bizarre the gems one can find in the public domain.
What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it’s own way i feel…
I have been using AI chat exclusively for searching for at least the past 3 days.
It is so much better in every possible way for simple factual questions, especially ChatGPT and Google Bard. Great for shopping. Microsoft Bing is okay, but you have to choose the right personality.
Sidenote: I KNOW using Google, and the other companies I will mention, is the antithesis of freedom and privacy. Yet, they are incredibly powerful tools that are getting implemented everywhere, so my curiousity has led me down an honestly fun rabbit hole.
The other AI that really surpised me is Opera Aria. Like Bing, it is using ChatGPT-4 and integrating real-time information. It just feels smarter, or perhaps more professional?
The caveat with all these except maybe Bard which, uses its own system, are very good at shutting down questions it does not want to answer. It feels weird and wrong when it happens, like it just saved you from asking something immoral, or at least too many questions about the tech.
Strange experience overall.
TL;DR AI chatbots are great at parsing the internet to get you answers with reasonable accuracy and relevancy when old-fashioned search can be tedious or fruitless.
I had the same experience when choosing between the Intel or AMD versions of a prebuilt. Went with Intel due to having comparatably better specs at the price. Theading is better on AMD (as a rule?) but I can only have so much fun running multiple VMs.
I get that too drom Bard sometimes, but it is for specific queries. I think the key is working on the prompt until it gets it. Sometimes you need to start over with a new chat.
Bing does not work like ChatGPT despite having the same base, even in creative mode. No idea why. However I like creative mode when I don’t just dont want to see links embedded. I also love taking advantage of free Dall-E.
Bard is great for anything that can be put into a list or chart, like comparisons. Literally put in a chart.
I am dissapointed in that I have not been able to get a single mathematic equation produced (like famous ones), but I know they can?
If you get the chance and willing to download a full ass browser, Opera has Aria, which is like the cleanest version of ChatGPT I have seen. Just the formatted answers with hyperlinks are worth it. It is good. It is hard to explain, but Aria mostly just works. It is closer to Bard in responses, and does what you want out of Bing without messing with convo styles.
Whatever prompts that Bing put for the convo style may be messing with the results.
All things said, I switch between them often, depending on my needs. It takes some time but I have built my intuition of which one will give the best response for the prompt, but I often just search the prompt in all of them.
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
Vote with action. Capitalism is the shit we are in, but everyone acts as if we are in a death march.
Maybe we are? Maybe nothing matters?
Or it does matter, and we need to be smarter about how we make changes in the world besides urging people to use technology that does not match half of what they are used to.
There is a concept called nudge that can work here. It is easier to change behavior by making the “right thing” the default. Make it easy for people to switch off the big corporate tech. Yelling never did anything.
In the meantime, yes, vote with your dollars. Don’t give money to the things you hate.
I have come to agree on you with this approach. Education is important, no matter what form it takes.
My only issue is something I have obsereved and lamented, which is that humor done excessively seemes to have an inoculating effect.
Think of all the crap president the U.S. has had and all lampooning that was done to denounce them. While we mocked them, they continued their reign and carried creating and enforcing bad policies, as getting away with atrocities while the few qualified people with any legal power struggled to take them down. It doesn’t work.
So, while I appreciate the satire, at this point I find it an exhausting medium. People really do enjoy the taste of onion.
Been looking for RPI4 CMs for ages now and they’ve been sold out for as long as I can remember. Same with full size RPI4s and some Odroids. Is this just the new normal or are SBCs and CMs going to show up on the market again at some point?
I recently listened to a “tech” podcast host drone on for 45 minutes about the “Elon vs Zuck” cage match and this piece perfectly captures the frothing, screaming stream-of-conciousness in my brain at the thought of seeing another discussion about Twitter vs Threads/Insta/Face/burning-sh*itpile. I felt some small amount...
I was about to ask if Kagi is worth paying for, but their website does a tremendous job of selling it. I am going to have to give up a subscription to afford it, but I think it will be worth it. Actually… maybe not. I pay for everything annually when I can. Too bad they don’t have that option, but it makes sense when their are hard limits to searches and features between tiers.
I am currently using Linux Mint (after a long stint of using MX Linux) after learning it handles Nvidia graphics cards flawlessly, which I am grateful for. Whatever grief I have given Ubuntu in the past, I take it back because when they make something work, it is solid....
Whoa. I had not considered backing Home that way! That is slick.
Honestly, reinstalling or moving to a new distro is such a bear precisely due to the time setting up my environment and all the software. I KNOW I can script all this, or at least have a list of packages I use, but it does not really work when different package managers use different naming schemes.
That is actually pretty cool. I know about portage, but I think it defeats the point of gentoo. Compiling from source is the point, right? That way the user gets all the speed benefits and optimization for their particular hardware.
Flatpaks are a great preview to see if the compiling is worth the time! Or a permanent solution for some software. I am happy that people don’t seem to have qualms about mixing software managers.
That makes sense. Thank you for clarifying my misconception. I think I will set that up. I have a couple of Dell Optiplexes that are bumming it out right now. I can put one to work with Gentoo.
This has officially won me over. I am not a minimalist, nor do I have some principled view of package management. I care about computing, and I am all for anything that makes it easier. I am the kind of person who wants all the software I will ever think to use already installed. I see my computer like a library. It is a castle, not a tiny home. I don’t give a shit about “wasted space.” I can always buy more.
Containerization is awesome, and I will embrace it.
Sure. I personally have not noticed a difference. Then again, I recently got a new computer, and all my other computers are over a decade old, so everything feels luxurious.
I think what it means is that your OS layer is totally isolated from your User layer. So, installing software won’t directly mess with your system, possibly breaking things.
Everything is isolated, so it is easy to add thing or roll back with practically no obstacles or consequences.
I cannot count the number of times I installed seemingly well documented software only to have it kill my system. Snaps, the very thing that would prevent that kind of misery, has inexcusable behavior.
Yeah, Flatpaks are great. Although I will say I am pretty agnostic, I don’t need my computer to follow some kind of paradigm for anything other than the comfort of organization. In fact just now I installed software through a PPA, because that is the official way for my system at the moment. Not the greatest, I think I could have chosen a different way in a drop down menu, but it detected Ubuntu (Mint), so whatever.
All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology....
What makes you not want to use Linux anymore and maybe move back to Windows, MacOS, or TempleOS?
Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?
I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name....
The way of the Blockbuster 2: Electric Boogaloo ( sh.itjust.works )
Back to linux!
For like a month or two I decided, screw it, I am going to use all the programs I cannot use on Linux. This was mostly games and music making software....
Help Me Come Back to the Light...
TL;DR I am using Windows and I want help setting up all the conveniences I enjoyed back into Linux... specifically an alternative to OneDrive....
How do you find media to watch?
I’ve seen many people have insane setups to download things automatically and NAS’ with tens of terabytes of capacity, which i don’t understand at all....
How Stuff Works replaced writers with GPT-generated content and laid off editors ( mastodon.social )
Google doesn't work anymore ? ( www.youtube.com )
What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore? Are there any better search engines? Why did the quality of search results go down? I honestly stumbled onto this question through this music video, what is ironic in it’s own way i feel…
ELI5: Why are SBCs nowhere to be found?
Been looking for RPI4 CMs for ages now and they’ve been sold out for as long as I can remember. Same with full size RPI4s and some Odroids. Is this just the new normal or are SBCs and CMs going to show up on the market again at some point?
Mark F***king Zuckerberg Is Not Your Friend ( catvalente.substack.com )
I recently listened to a “tech” podcast host drone on for 45 minutes about the “Elon vs Zuck” cage match and this piece perfectly captures the frothing, screaming stream-of-conciousness in my brain at the thought of seeing another discussion about Twitter vs Threads/Insta/Face/burning-sh*itpile. I felt some small amount...
Anyone else starting to favor Flatpak over native packages?
I am currently using Linux Mint (after a long stint of using MX Linux) after learning it handles Nvidia graphics cards flawlessly, which I am grateful for. Whatever grief I have given Ubuntu in the past, I take it back because when they make something work, it is solid....
[Question] Does anyone run their own email server?
All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology....