Russ

Hard to think of one on the spot, but I have an unintentional one/mistake.

When I was a kid, my mother had a digital camera that broke. It had a mechanical lens (or I suppose “lens housing” that would extend when powering on, then retract when powering off. I guess somehow the lens got stuck in between states, and so the camera would refuse to fully boot up. A bit after that happened, she got a new digital camera.

Me being the tinkerer I was, I asked if I could mess around with the old camera and was basically given it since it was useless (or so she thought). While messing with it, I accidentally dropped it - it somehow fell at just the perfect angle and “knocked” the lens back into place (without breaking anything). Camera worked perfectly fine after that!

Unfortunately while I was still allowed to keep it, that never really “kick started” a passion for photography in me. As far as I recall I got bored of it pretty quickly.

Yes you are, they are advertising their platforms like you are free to comment anything and most people beleave that.

I hate to break it to you, that’s your fault for making an assumption (and a bold one at that) or you’re just quite naive. Most places that you sign up for will either have you agree to a Terms of Service, or they’ll make you agree to the rules. I have even more bad news for you: Advertisements usually try their best to show only the “good” of what is being advertised (such as how an advertisement for a toy doesn’t usually make it very clear that batteries are required to use it).

Ask anyone if they think youtube will delete their commen even if they didnt offend anyone and they will tell you no way!

No, they might be angry that their comment was removed, but it’s a pretty common understanding that moderators will remove content at their discretion, even if people don’t necessarily agree with the decision.

I’m not sure why I’m even engaging in this, usually it’s pretty clear when someone gets upset that their “free speech” (that they were never entitled to) is being violated that their intent is to spread hateful content.

Perhaps that isn’t you, but nonetheless that is the group you’re putting yourself in (even if unintentionally) whenever you ride under that banner.

It would also be worthwhile double checking what actual “Freedom of Speech” is and what it covers. Assuming you are referring to the US’ first amendment, it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone other than you and the government (and even then it has its bounds).

As an example, let’s say you’re a writer for a newspaper. The government cannot take down an article that you write in which you criticize them (because that would fall under protected speech, unless you are making direct threats towards someone), but your boss could absolutely say “No way, we’re not publishing that” as they are not a government official.

This doesn’t even just include “Freedom of Speech”, as another example, with the right to assembly you can publicly assemble and protest the government - but it wouldn’t allow you to start a protest on someone’s private property.

Okay, who is promising you free speech then?

Can confirm the same thing, there have been times where I’ve gone in, checked in, and speaking to the doctor within 20 minutes of stepping in the door - whereas other times I’ve waited 5+ hours to even be given a room to sit in (and then wait another couple of hours for a doctor to see me).

On most platforms, you were never promised “free speech” or entitled to it.

Oh interesting, it’s been a while since I have tried to use Apple TV (roughly 7 years or so - I don’t use any Apple devices anymore), this wasn’t available at the time so I’m glad to see there’s finally some native support.

I always assumed it was more or less targeting the federation of issues/MRs.

The git side of things is already distributed as you said, but if you decide to host your random project on your own GitLab instance you’ll miss out on people submitting issues/MRs because they won’t want to sign up for an account on your random instance (or sign in with another IdP).

This is where a lot of the reliance of GitHub comes from, in my opinion.

I think they meant Apple’s “tvOS” - which powers the Apple TV set top box.

There’s no client for it, if I had to take a guess it’s likely due to the costs of doing so.

Edit: Whoops, it appears I’m a bit out of date on this.

I’m quite confused by some of the pain points that the author mentioned. For example, the Dolphin view switch icon - you absolutely don’t need to click on the dropdown to change the view, you can click the icon itself and it’ll change (and I’m pretty sure this is why the button is “two buttons” and has the divider next to the dropdown icon).

For Spectacle, regarding the extra mouse clicks - most of the functions include a (global) keyboard shortcut by default and for the few that don’t, you just need to set one.

Floating panels: Whether you like the design of a floating panel or not is of course subjective. However the author mentions that you need to “aim like an idiot and waste your time hitting the ‘floating target’” - except no, you don’t. They can “slam their mouse into the screen corner” because the target zone for the applets extends below and to the corners of the screen. If you want to open the Application Launcher for example, you can “slam” your mouse to the bottom left corner and click - it will open. Same with every applet (I do not believe this to be something the applet controls, but rather the panel itself so it should work with any applet).

Kubuntu’s “anti-user move” is not controlled by the KDE team. Not sure how much control Ubuntu spins have over their packages, but it is either a Canonical move or a move by the Kubuntu team - regardless, its not something the KDE team mandated (AFAIK they are not removing X11 support). The only thing the KDE team has done is make the Wayland session the default.

Regarding the bugs they’ve found, I hope they reported those on the KDE bug tracker.

This line in particular made me laugh a bit though:

… plus “simple” interfaces is NOT going to win the hearts and minds of the common people. That’s not how it works.

Yes, it does. A “common” person does not care in the slightest that libmyfancylibrary was updated to version 1.2.3.4, I mean I’d argue they don’t care in general about updates but I digress.

Your son and daughter will continue to learn new things as they grow up, a LLM cannot learn new things on its own. Sure, they can repeat things back to you that are within the context window (and even then, a context window isn’t really inherent to a LLM - its just a window of prior information being fed back to them with each request/response, or “turn” as I believe is the term) and what is in the context window can even influence their responses. But in order for a LLM to “learn” something, it needs to be retrained with that information included in the dataset.

Whereas if your kids were to say, touch a sharp object that caused them even slight discomfort, they would eventually learn to stop doing that because they’ll know what the outcome is after repetition. You could argue that this looks similar to the training process of a LLM, but the difference is that a LLM cannot do this on its own (and I would not consider wiring up a LLM via an MCP to a script that can trigger a re-train + reload to be it doing it on its own volition). At least, not in our current day. If anything, I think this is more of a “smoking gun” than the argument of “LLMs are just guessing the next best letter/word in a given sequence”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who completely hates LLMs / “modern day AI” (though I do hate a lot of the ways it is used, and agree with a lot of the moral problems behind it), I find the tech to be intriguing but it’s a (“very fancy”) simulation. It is designed to imitate sentience and other human-like behavior. That, along with human nature’s tendency to anthropomorphize things around us (which is really the biggest part of this IMO), is why it tends to be very convincing at times.

That is my take on it, at least. I’m not a psychologist/psychiatrist or philosopher.

It’s not like they built a new kernel specifically for the steam deck.

I agree that the majority of the impact being seen is from various components that aren’t SteamOS specific, however Valve does actually have a custom kernel for the Steam Deck “linux-neptune” (there are quite a few mirrors for browsing, but this is the official source).

I believe most of their changes are just to drive the deck’s hardware. Every now and then there are some changes that Valve contributes that lands there first before it gets upstreamed, for example the Arch Wiki calls out the Steam Deck’s kernel as a way to fix issues between HDR & VRR (shouldn’t be needed anymore on modern mainline kernels).

IIRC on Bazzite neofetch is just a symlink/alias to fastfetch due to muscle memory and the overall prevalence of neofetch.

No thanks, I think I’ll pass on sending out messages that look like spam.

That would be a reason for the feature not being available.

The feature is there, it just apparently doesn’t always work reliably.

I’d be highly surprised if Wayland actually has a protocol for applications to just type across other applications, we barely even have global shortcuts (it’s getting there but reaaaaaally slowly).

KPXC might be able to get around it by using whichever method ydotool does (by faking a device AFAIK) - probably needs root to do this though, and it would also need to implement the global shortcuts API to be able to respond to a key bind I believe.

So perhaps a bit of column A and column B.

Strange! I quite like Ventoy, but I was a bit cautious to recommend it originally - I’ve seen some distros just flat out not work with it (I just picked up an old Thinkpad and Bluefin would not work via Ventoy for example), and while I assumed Mint would probably work, I couldn’t be sure.

I’ll definitely remember that for the next time I see someone installing Mint though, so I appreciate you letting me know what fixed it!

Hmm, that’s quite an interesting one. The:

Failed to start MokManager: Not Found

Leads me to believe that this is indeed something Secure Boot related (or rather, the system looking for files related to secure boot that aren’t being found). Given that you were able to boot it initially, and then it stopped after booting back into Windows, I suspect some shenanigans here possibly from Windows. When you were freeing up disk space, did you use Windows’ partition manager (I think its just called “Disk Management”) at all and modify any partitions?

Just to confirm, is it just Mint that doesn’t boot, or does Windows also not boot? One of the nicer things about UEFI is how you can have multiple boot loaders installed, where as back in the (regular) BIOS days with MBR, only one boot loader could be installed.

That is all to say, try entering your PC’s boot menu (so the same menu you initially used to boot the Mint USB), you should have multiple boot options from your PC’s drive - though Windows’ boot loader usually identifies itself as “Windows Boot Manager”. If you choose that option (or if its not “clickable”, you should be able to switch the order so that its first - then reboot normally), does it at least boot back into Windows?

Well for one thing, playing online games (that aren’t F2P) on PC does not require me to pay a monthly subscription for the privilege of using my own internet connection that I already pay for. That is the most odd subscription to have to pay for - doubly so on Switch where most games of their FP games are ironically P2P, last I’d heard.

I also like being on an open platform where my games will generally continue to follow me as I upgrade. The only one who actually holds even somewhat of a candle to this is Microsoft with their Xbox backwards compatibility program, but there are no guarantees with that. If I had to pick up the PC I used in 2007 to play Portal, I’d be pretty upset given how hardware degrades over time (especially in the realm of handhelds - ie batteries). If I want to play the Nintendo Wii version of Animal Crossing however on an official supported Nintendo console, I’d have to buy another Wii given that when I moved out I didn’t steal the Wii from my other siblings who were still growing up. Thankfully I can emulate it on PC (such as my Steam Deck), but I wouldn’t want to gamble on emulation being possible, similar to Xbox’s BC program.

The money spent on the hardware in the PC ecosystem also go further than just playing games. I work from home, and am able to use that same hardware to do my job. Funnily enough, I thought I was going to end up having to dock my deck to do a shift due to a failing drive - meanwhile I can’t even open Spotify on a Switch to listen to some music. If I even tried that on a NS2, Nintendo wants to permanently brick the entire device, no thanks.

So no, I don’t need a “Haha! I can have this game and you can’t!” to justify a hardware purchase. There are plenty of reasons for me to justify my purchase of PC hardware that won’t just be used to harm me.

I mean, sure - but if you really don’t trust Apple to keep their word, then it wouldn’t matter if their Health app was FOSS or not. iOS itself is still (and probably forever will be) a closed source operating system. That gives them the power to do anything, including hijack the data from FOSS apps.

I have zero interest in Recall, but I thought it was already done on-device? IIRC it always was that way, which is why it’s only available on new computers containing dedicated “neural coprocessors” I believe was the term.

Now given that it’s closed source, you have to trust that they aren’t silently sending data back to themselves - which is where my problem lies, I don’t trust them in the slightest.