GenderNeutralBro

@GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org

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‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services ( www.theguardian.com )

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn't want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I had some CD-Rs that rotted within a few years. I was devastated, because at the time CD-Rs were hyped up as the most durable of any consumer media, and storage was expensive. I had tons of stuff that was ONLY on CD or DVD. That's how I archived everything.

There was an old site that did a comprehensive analysis and ranked different brands of CD-R and DVD-R discs into tiers. My main takeaway at the time was Verbatim or bust. There were some other brands that got discs from the same manufacturer, but not consistently so it was something of a gamble. IIRC Sony was one of the better ones, but Verbatim was the safest choice.

I can't say I've tested any of my old discs in the past 10 or maybe even 15 years. I copied my most important data into newer media, but I still have a ton of discs I should probably clone to my NAS. One of these years...

Then came M-discs, which as far as I know are still considered legit. They never really caught on, and production has either halted entirely or is at least limited. I never used them myself.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It's nutty that we haven't had a proper offline mode in like 20, maybe 25 years. This was something every browser had in the 90s. Loading from cache was the default, even. Now it's like, I'm not sure why Firefox even has a cache folder. They bend over backwards to prevent you from using it.

Before you tell me that Firefox has an offline mode, yeah, I know. It's basically useless.

I would love a way to have my browser automatically store a local, static copy of everything I view.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Sometimes it's the other way around. You keep a list until it gets long enough (or you get old enough) that you don't care anymore.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I remember a lot of KDE hate up until Gnome 3, which was controversial, to say the least. It mirrored old-school Mac hate, with a lot of invalid arguments parroted by people who never took time to learn it (or more to the point, to unlearn what they came from).

I've swapped between Gnome and KDE a bunch of times, and it hasn't really made a difference to me in many years. There was a time when running apps built for one on the other was a painful experience either way. Nowadays my DE choice doesn't really influence my application choices.

GenderNeutralBro ,

This is the part that confused me most. At the first mention of web apps, I just thought, okay, if you have a web server you can have it run under a service account that can do what it needs to do. Sure. Kind of beside the point, but sure.

Then this came at the end and and I did a double-take. He's really suggesting a web app as a substitute for sudo in general? Two questions:

  1. Wat?
  2. Wut?
GenderNeutralBro ,

other shells like sh, csh, tcsh, zsh, etc. are the same

Zsh has some important differences in how it handles whitespace and quoting, which affects OP's exact example.

Consider this:

touch a b c 'd e f' 'g h i'
for f in *; do ls -la $f; done

In zsh, this works. In bash, it will give you six errors saying d, e, f, g, h, and i do not exist.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Yeah, Apple moved to Zsh as default some years back, which is the main reason I'm familiar with its differences in terms of parameter expansion. They still ship Bash 3.2 with macOS, but they can't ship newer versions due to GPLv3 licensing, or something like that. So they had the motivation to switch.

In the Linux world, there's no great motivation to change the default, because Bash 5.x is already comparable to zsh in terms of features, and it's what everyone is already familiar with.

Perhaps I misunderstood OP's question. I figured they meant using variables. Otherwise I don't know how to make sense of it.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That will work in either zsh or bash, yes. It's a good habit to use quotes, but I am pointing out that quoting and expansion behavior is not the same across all shells.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I imagine his eyes turned into dollar signs and popped out of his head with a "cha-ching" sound when he saw it.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Everything old is new again. As long as there have been bars, there have been sleezy men lying to impress women in bars.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It's a music player, in case anyone's wondering. More info at https://apps.kde.org/amarok/

In five paragraphs of text there is no description of what the program does in the blog post . Pretty common for open-source blogs and release notes, but I always find it funny. At least this one has a screenshot.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I’m not really into the whole “which DE is better” thing. I think if you like one or the other you should just use it and get on with your life

Totally agree. They behave differently by default, but they are both so customizable that you can make either one behave almost exactly like the other if you want. I like KDE's defaults a bit more than Gnome's, and I like Dolphin more than Nautilus, but I could go back to Gnome and be comfortable within a day. I'd need to spend a little time finding the right extensions and then I'd be good.

It's not like 20 years ago when there was strong motivation to commit to one ecosystem or another. Back then, running Gnome/GTK apps under KDE was kind of funky, and vice-versa. Nowadays, everything is pretty seamless.

GenderNeutralBro ,

For people ages 0 to 2, the model often classified them as being between 12 and 18 years old.

I guess they're just not training with baby pictures then? I mean, this seems like it should be the easiest distinction to make.

Doesn't seem like there's any information on the purpose of this analysis. Google Photos has been doing face recognition and other classification for a long time, and it's genuinely useful because it lets you sort your photo collection by person. It also categorizes pet photos and does a halfway-decent job of distinguishing one pet from another. I'd genuinely appreciate similar functionality in the open-source photo apps I use. This seems like a natural fit for Instagram. Not sure about TikTok, but honestly, I'm too old and ornery to understand how people actually use TikTok.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Doesn't it require jumping through a ton of hoops to install apks from unknown sources on modern Android? How many people are A) capable of doing this, and B) naive enough to actually do it?

That said, I don't use Chrome so I've never seen that incredibly shady-looking real update notification they showed in the article. If Google has indeed trained users to expect and accept something like that, then shame on Google. I can't blame users for thinking the fake one is legit. It looks very similar (and it seems like it would be trivial to make it look 100% identical). But still, how does the apk actually get installed?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Do a religion tier list next.

Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps ( www.404media.co )

Instagram is profiting from several ads that invite people to create nonconsensual nude images with AI image generation apps, once again showing that some of the most harmful applications of AI tools are not hidden on the dark corners of the internet, but are actively promoted to users by social media companies unable or...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thank god Amazon only allows bots to publish 3 books per day. They saved humanity!

GenderNeutralBro ,

Agreed. I mean yeah, image generators are still very limited (or at least, difficult to use in an advanced, targeted way), but there's a new research paper out every day detailing new techniques. None of the criticisms of Midjourney or Stable Diffusion today are likely to remain valid in a year or even six months. And they're already highly useful for certain tasks.

Same with LLMs, only we've already reached the point where they are good enough for almost anything if you care to write a good application around them. The problem with LLMs at this point is marketing; people expect them to be magic and are disappointed when they don't live up their expectations. They're not magic but they are extremely useful. Just please, for the love of god, do not treat them as information repositories...

GenderNeutralBro ,

Parasite SEO

Is there any other kind?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Lemmy and similar are not inherently more resistant to this. Actually, they are probably less resistant from a technical standpoint, since there is virtually no barrier to creating an account. I didn't even need an email address to sign up, let alone a phone number like the corporate sites require nowadays (not sure about Reddit, but Google, Facebook, and Twitter all require phone verification to register last I checked).

I fear that we are not ready for the wave of spam that will come as soon as the fediverse becomes mainstream.

On a more fundamental level, I don't know how to reconcile the competing goals of accountability and privacy.

Realistically, there is no way to distinguish AI comments from human comments. Not in any way that wouldn't become obsolete the day after it was implemented.

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GenderNeutralBro ,

Is there an easy way to run Android in a VM?

It's been a long time since I looked, but I never had great success. The only AMD64 builds I could find were ancient. Getting apps installed was difficult. And my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that Waydroid delivers apps in windows without a whole Android UI around them.

The best option I found was using the Android Studio simulator.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thanks for the link! Latest version is based on Android 13, which is not bad at all.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Not really. I tried in AQEMU and also VirtualBox. I got the installer to run, but I never got it to boot into a GUI, either in the LiveCD or installation. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Maybe I should try the stable 12L build instead of 13.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I've never found a problem that can't be exacerbated with Microsoft Access.

GenderNeutralBro ,

What's special about 37? Just that it's prime or is there a superstition or pop culture reference I don't know?

GenderNeutralBro ,

Thanks!

GenderNeutralBro ,

Additional context: https://libera.chat/guides/matrix#wheres-the-official-matrix-bridge

I'm not 100% sure how this relates to Beeper, but from what I gather it's based on Matrix so I guess it's the same deal.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'd spend a lot more money on TV and movies if I could get them without DRM and in high quality. No question. Both in streaming and in disc form.

GenderNeutralBro ,

AFAIK there's still no way to dynamically link to posts or comments on Lemmy. :( You can only link communities or users.

Anyway, totally agree. Being technically able to bypass DRM doesn't make it okay. I'm honestly not sure how to rip a Blu-ray on Linux anyway. I haven't looked into it in years so maybe it's easier now than I remember.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It's so silly but I love multiple reactions in Slack and Discord. Signal's reaction system feels half-baked in comparison.

I'd also like custom reaction, though I'm not sure how that would work on a direct messaging platform.

GenderNeutralBro ,

It's especially annoying when it's on a subdomain that has no links to the primary web site. e.g. when clicking the company logo in the header of a blog entry at blog.<company>.com takes you to blog.company.com instead of www.company.com.

Edit: Sorry, didn't occur to me that that's a real web site and it would be auto-hyperlinked. I think I fixed it.

GenderNeutralBro ,

The Debian web site needs a good UX overhaul. Prioritize the things people are most likely to want, make them prominent and uncluttered, and present a logical flow from one task to its follow-ups.

Just a quick glance yields the simplest example: the download link is not the first or most prominent thing on the main page. Clicking "download" gives you the netinst AMD64 ISO, which is reasonable enough, but there is no indication of how to install it. Clicking "user support" takes me to a page with extremely verbose descriptions of IRC, usenet groups, and mailing lists. I think the fastest way to get installation instructions is to click the tiny "other downloads" link (after I've already downloaded the one I want!), and then a link to the manual from there.

This is not a good UX. This is a demographic filter. You can argue that's appropriate for a technically-oriented OS. 9front explicitly makes itself unapproachable to dissuade casual users, but I think Debian can and should be more appealing to mainstream, casual newcomers.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Why not? It's a great general-purpose distro.

My point is that 9front's user-unfriendliness is a feature (explicitly intended), whereas I think Debian's is a bug (not intended or desired). I'm not psychic, though, so I could be wrong about the Debian team's goals.

GenderNeutralBro ,

I mostly agree. I usually recommend Mint to new users, largely because their web site and defaults are very beginner-friendly. Mint is the modern version of what Ubuntu used to be 10-15 years ago. At this point I don't think Ubuntu has tangible advantages over Debian for new users.

I really like Slackware's site. It's not sexy, but it's functional, organized, and easy to navigate. The Zsh site is counterintuitive to me with that sidebar-that's-not-really-a-sidebar, and hyperlinks whose text requires the context of a header that is not aligned with them.

I just checked out Ubuntu's web site for comparison, and...uh...now I feel like I owe Debian's web site an apology. I guess the consumer desktop Ubuntu distro doesn't actually have its own web site anymore? I mean, you can get to it from there, but it's hidden under menus, and seems almost like an afterthought. Ubuntu's main web site is bizarre right now, with a prominent green "Download Now" button that does not lead the user anywhere close to downloading Ubuntu, but rather directs them to one of a rotating selection of signup forms to download various technical whitepapers like "A CTO’s guide to real-time Linux". That's a radically different target audience than the last time I went to their web site (and also a weird design anyway).

GenderNeutralBro ,

I'm not really familiar with Automattic or any of their acquisitions (I know Tumblr and Pocket Casts, but I'm not a regular user of either). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic#Products

What's their track record here? Should we expect anything they acquire to be gutted and squeezed like they're Broadcom, or do they actually develop the things they acquire in a way that serves their users?

GenderNeutralBro ,

The way I see it, this is an addition, not a replacement. I mean, the MIT license has existed for decades. Plenty of time for any interested human singer to have done it.

We're going to see a lot of amusing ideas brought to life that would otherwise have simply not been worth the person-hours.

GenderNeutralBro ,

That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is that we've had image macros and memes for a long time, and part of the charm and success of the format is precisely that it requires very little effort, anyone can do it, and there are a million variations. I don't have a problem with the same idea in audio form.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Pretty happy to axe the dock and put the Firefox search widget right at the bottom. I don't understand why so many browsers, launchers, and apps only let you select from a few hardcoded search engines instead of just letting you add your own with a URL pattern.

Widget resizing actually works now, whereas it used to be weirdly dependent on your home screen grid size settings.

Only issue I've found so far is that increasing your home screen's row count completely removes all your icons. That's a big bummer. It was always pretty flaky with arrangement shifting but this is a new one on me.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Cloud cloud cloud, cloudy cloud, cloudy cloudy cloud cloud.

-Management

GenderNeutralBro ,

I wouldn't say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don't prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.

Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn't until Catalina's release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.

That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That's gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it's already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.

GenderNeutralBro ,

"Experts Exchange" is like the opposite of "cellar door" — the two most rage-inducing words in the English language.

GenderNeutralBro ,

There was a bit of a scandal when they started merging their Chinese OS with their American OS. I think they were called Hydrogen and Oxygen. I haven't used a OnePlus phone since then so I'm not totally sure what their software is like nowadays.

They're pretty mainstream in the US now.

GenderNeutralBro ,

If you don't already, consider using an ad-blocking DNS server. That blocks ad domains systemwide, not just in your web browser. Mullvad, Adguard, and some others have public DNS servers with adblocking. You can use them on both iOS and Android.

GenderNeutralBro ,

A DNS server is what converts a domain name, like google.com, into a numeric IP address, which is required for Internet traffic. Think of it like the mail room in an office building. They get mail for Bob in accounting, but the mail only has the name and the building's address. The mail room staff (DNS) knows what floor and desk Bob sits at.

Since many ads are hosted on their own domains, like doubleclick.net, you can block them at the DNS level so your device never actually connects to the ad server.

By default you're probably using your ISP's DNS server, but you can customize it.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Not yet. I'll give it another go when I get Plasma 6 (I'm on Debian, so either I'll switch to Sid or just wait a while).

Last time I tried it, it mostly worked, but mpv had some issues and missing features on Wayland. I haven't kept up with the mpv developments since then so I'm not sure if that's been addressed upstream yet.

GenderNeutralBro ,

A theme is software and software has bugs

I honestly did not know that KDE themes contained executable code. When I think "theme", I think of cosmetic settings that plug into an existing program, which I would hope sanitizes its input and does NOT execute arbitrary code. I don't think "arbitrary executable code running as root".

I'm assuming KDE warns you about this when you try to install a theme, right? I'm not at my KDE system to test at the moment. I did try downloading a theme tar from the web site, and it doesn't seem to contain any code — just SVG files, a colors config file, and a metadata file.

GenderNeutralBro ,

F-Droid has verified and reproducible builds.

On the Play Store or iOS App Store, though, anything goes.

GenderNeutralBro ,

Also, this is the west coast we're talking about. They don't go hard in general. :P

Seriously, though, I felt like a wallflower on the east coast and then a Tasmanian Devil on the west coast, when my own behavior didn't really change. The energy is different!

Edit: I was referring specifically to my experience at metal concerts, but now that I think about it, also in general.

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