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  • 7 Posts
  • 321 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 14th, 2023

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  • Things never just worked all the time and I don’t expect they ever will.

    My preference is that I don’t need perfection, but if something doesn’t work, I’d like some kind of indication why and what I as a user or someone of advanced competence can do about it. (See Linux vs. Windows for example)

    The issue you are facing about lagging and not responding tech is threefold:

    1. Microprocessors can do so much more than electromechanical parts of old, for much cheaper and take up far less space. The downsides are that they are embedded on a board and can’t be replaced without specialized tools, and second is that some companies (looking at you, Apple) bar the chip manufacturers from making replacement parts or put onerous software blocks so that independent technical experts cannot repair it themselves even with the skills and know-how.

    2. Personal appliance device makers, to save money, use the cheapest processors they can get away with, which are slow compared to the software they are expected to run. So they lag, and they need multiple taps to respond.

    3. Software makers tend to have high end hardware for developing and testing, though some product makers will have test devkits to emulate hardware. Like the makers of an app for Google TV don’t have every specific model of TV. When they update they have to make assumptions about hardware performance, or they just don’t care and ship something unoptimized.


  • This literally happened for me with the movie(s) Wicked. I didn’t watch the first part just to have it end half way through the story and be told to wait until next year. Then the second half comes out, and after the opening weekend where a couple downtown theatres had busy double feature special events, Part 1 was playing in theatres literally nowhere in my city. And no way I’m signing my life away for Bezos BS just to watch this. (Does a stream even earn the movie studio anything significant? The theatres get nothing…)

    I only bought a ticket to watch Part 2 because I viewed Part 1 by other means. The theatres missed out on an opportunity for me to watch the first one in succession with the second. And if I didn’t watch the first, then I wouldn’t have watched it at all and the theatres and publishers would have missed out on a sale.

    If the copyright industry calls missed sales “stealing”, the theatres and publishing licensors steal from themselves by making it difficult to view the full story.


  • I watched it yesterday and only a couple things I have to add.

    First is that the bipartisan CHIPS act basically shovelled taxpayer money into Micron’s pockets to increase their manufacturing, but they are reducing their consumer output anyway, so Steve’s point is consumers are not getting anything out of the subsidy they made.

    Second is, since any potential increase in production is to cater to their largest data centre customers only, Steve is suggesting that this could be part of a push to move people to subscription-based cloud computing by making personal computing tha you buy and own unaffordable.


  • Rentlar@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlBash scripting question
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    1 month ago

    Edit: I think there are better answers downthread than mine, but I hope my first comment spurned them on.

    Not the most experienced bash guru at it but let me see…

    • does the while condition have to be within [ ] brackets?
    • Also I can’t figure out what your condition is, it seems to have an unclosed quotation mark.
    • Most bash while-do-done loops I’ve made have a comparator like -ne for not equal or -le for less or equal to. So for example: while [ $variable -ne 5 ]; do


  • I think much of the gatekeeping is over concern that if you mess up, you could unknowingly be allowing a sophisticated hacker to access all the data on your network, without any obvious signs. And maybe some people don’t want to field noob questions like “I clicked something and now the GUI gives a 😕 and doesn’t work anymore, what do I do?”.

    There is a skill floor, I would say similarly that you wouldn’t be ready to install Linux yourself if you don’t get suspicious when a .iso download gives you a .exe file instead.

    I think Yunohost is a decent solution for beginners that avoids as much of the nitty-gritty as possible. Louis Rossman has made a massive guide that’s about as close as an IKEA step-by-step as you can get with this stuff. We should be encouraging people to learn, but there is a sense of reticence to have people get too in over their heads due to cybersecurity reasons.

    Edit: linked the guide





  • Rentlar@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlCloudflare bankrolls fascists
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    4 months ago

    If we want to use the Nazi bar analogy, Cloudflare is like a company that bought up so many bars in town that some end up not vetting for Nazism well enough, letting it slip through, not necessarily playing favours towards or against fascism but they would technically be a ‘Nazi bar’ under the analogy’s definition. Cloudflare is so big that they probably don’t have controlling interest about the pet projects they kick some pennies towards.

    If you want to boycot Cloudflare itself, that’s fine and noble and all, but also staying away from anything they’ve ever donated to, you’ll put yourself in a bind. Like if Cloudflare donated to animal welfare, should one be against animal welfare simply due to second-order links to fascism?

    Also there is a lot of reading into the comments used to link the two projects to the fascist regime. Very much a stretch.




  • I think this is a great unpopular opinion. TL:DR; In a similar sense to Lemmy/Fediverse vs. Reddit, the diversity of setups and software with some common elements is part of the point.

    the rest of my long comment

    Many of the dev teams have different philosophies and aims, and they aren’t being paid to work together, let alone if they’re receiving any money at all.

    Ubuntu kind of was the normie out-of-the-box distro previously, but people always had a bone to pick with Canonical, be it with systemd, their Amazon ad stuff or with snaps.

    On the gaming side, Valve helped immensely with the commercial aspect, boosting tireless efforts by community developers of projects like DXVK and Wine to make Linux gaming viable. Valve was trying long before the Steam Deck. In 2013 they released the Linux Steam Client and their port of Portal. Later they released the Steam Machine which wasn’t too successful but along with the Steam Controller was a precursor to the Deck. Now with arch-based HoloOS, Proton, as well as the sandbox system, games built for Windows can easily be made to work on most Linux distros without worrying about library dependencies or other issues that were common from the way various distros are built and managed.

    My main point of contention is that having everything around a handful of distros makes it vulnerable to single points of failure and more of a target for malicious exploits. See how the Crowdstrike incident bricked a huge number of servers and stopped many vital buildings from operating for a few days? Linux, even it its current state, is not immune to that, as some important and widely-used libraries have been targeted by malicious actors and nearly succeeded.

    From an enduser perspective, as long as you can access the apps you want and do the things you want to with your computer, it’s mostly the look of the desktop environment rather than anything under the hood that matters to most people. The big ones are GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE. Perhaps user guides could be made to better transition people to not feel lost, but there are both legitimate reasons (like accessibility) and others as a matter of taste to select a particular desktop environment.



  • Rentlar@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlDonmala Trarris
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    7 months ago

    No, if a Democrat president had done something remotely resembling one of these things: media, courts, Congress would be in a frenzy to stop it, before you could say executive order.

    I mean I can understand the “controlled ineffectual opposition” narrative, but I don’t buy the “Democrats’ inaction means they are just as evil as Republicans”.


  • Rentlar@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlDonmala Trarris
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    7 months ago

    In addition to siccing the military on protestors…

    • Harris would totally apply tariffs to every country in the world.
    • Harris would totally pardon everyone who paid her enough and said good things about her.
    • Harris would fire huge chunks of the government recklessly without any regard to what they do.
    • Harris would push for a Big Beautiful Bill to withhold funding from judges that would try to hold her administration in contempt.
    • Harris would start a cryptocurrency token designed solely to enrich herself.
    • Harris would get into rapid back and forth arguments on Twitter (or BlueSky I suppose) with other influential people.
    • Harris would try to make every issue about herself, including Canada’s election.

    She would totally do all of these things in the first few months, because both sides are definitely the same.