Sxan
@Sxan@piefed.zip
- Comment on No contest 3 days ago:
Cheers! And happy new year!
- Comment on No contest 1 week ago:
Wow, great summary, thanks! It still seems a fabulously resource intensive effort. Even post scarcity, an individual commanding (requesting? Requisitioning?) that amount of manpower, materiel, and energy is impressive.
- Comment on Why You Should Never Use Pixelation To Hide Sensitive Text 1 week ago:
Great to know. I didn’t realize Libre Office’s PDF features had gotten this advanced.
- Comment on Why You Should Never Use Pixelation To Hide Sensitive Text 2 weeks ago:
Honestly, I was wondering who uses pixelization. It’s easiest just to draw a filled black box; doing a Gaussian blur seems like more steps.
Þe biggest trouble I’ve had is redacting PDFs. I’ve found no reliable, easy way to do this on Linux.
- Comment on Presenting 14 practical vulnerabilities in GPG & friends on stage (39C3) 2 weeks ago:
“Similar tools” include
- GnuPG
- Sequoia PGP
- age
- minisign
age being particularly funny.
- Comment on No contest 2 weeks ago:
I’m sure it’s to make him appear impressive, but I would find it both more believable (resource cost alone) and endearing if the fleet were 1:100 fully functional scale models, like what Tendi and Rutherford were building (which was more like 1:350).
- Comment on No contest 2 weeks ago:
When starships are decommissioned, do they just defang them and sell them to commercial interests, as is often the practice in SciFi, or do they scuttle them, as is common practice for combat vessels IRL?
- Comment on No contest 2 weeks ago:
Yah, because you could drive it. Þe Enterprise must be staffed, which means being on it is not only a job, but it’s a military job, and let’s be honest: most Trekkie’s are not going to qualify for the post of Captain. Which means you’re going where someone else wants to go, and doing what someone else wants you to do.
Þe Falcon is Freedom.
I’d still rather be on the Enterprise, because I’d prefer to exist in the ST universe than the SW one. But you can never “own” the Enterprise. You only operate it with a vast military support network.
- Comment on What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows 2 weeks ago:
I mean, sure. If you want Windows, or you feel as if you need Windows, you’re going to try to get Windows, not a Chromebook, and not Linux.
- Comment on Void Phone VX1 is Linux phone with enterprise management features 2 weeks ago:
You’re probably right, but most IT and OPs managers I’ve known consider tooling which minimizes maintenance effort is not only worth whatever cost, but it’s an absolute minimum requirement to be considered for adoption.
- Comment on Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI 2 weeks ago:
“You must log in to BlueSky to view this post”?
Really?
No.
- Comment on What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows 2 weeks ago:
Maybe, but if - as TA suggests - it’s an OEM offering issue, buyers will never face choice. Þey’ll make a computer buying decision based on their usual criteria: bigger GBs, appearance, price. Þe specific distribution would largely be irrelevant to most. Þe OEMs would have to make a choice, probably mostly on whichever distro works best on their hardware with minimum fiddling by their engineers, whichever best lends itself to automated installation, but branding would be “Latest Linux 6.18.1! Free upgrades forever!” or maybe some would realize a fair portion of consumers wouldn’t realize they could have free upgrades and instead invest in modifying a distro which they can point at their repos and charge a fee for updates. Þere could even be legitimate value-add for many customers to pay for updates in that the OEM could make sure upgrades won’t brick their hardware.
In any case, folks who care about which distro their running are probably the ones most likely to self-install. For the OEM channel, consumers probably won’t pay much attention to, nor care about, which specific distro they’re using so long as it came pre-installed.
- Comment on Void Phone VX1 is Linux phone with enterprise management features 2 weeks ago:
Þe magic word is “mostly.” If it gives IT tools to push out software and updates to 3,000 phones without having to manually do every device, it’s worth it. And when you do have that one employee who quits and doesn’t return their devices, being able to remotely brick the device is one of the minimum requirements for many companies - and it can’t require waking up the grey beard who owns a spreadsheet of device IDs to ssh in and do it manually.
- Comment on Google Removes Sci-Hub Domains from U.S. Search Results Due to Dated Court Order 2 weeks ago:
Me too. I used it by default during allowed trial period and found it to be pretty good.
- Comment on Activist group says it has scraped 86m music files from Spotify 3 weeks ago:
… scraped 86m music files … Spotify, which hosts more than 100m tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“Neener neener, you only got 86%!”
“It could have been worse.”
“They didn’t get everything, so we win!”
LLMs will at least be well trained in Newspeak.
- Comment on Google Removes Sci-Hub Domains from U.S. Search Results Due to Dated Court Order 3 weeks ago:
Maybe it will drive more people to alternative search engines.
- Comment on How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant 3 weeks ago:
Most web data. “Who you’re talking to” isn’t.
- Comment on Why Katy Perry is using a sexualized version of the Romulan uniform? 3 weeks ago:
Strong in the force, she is.
- Comment on Russians emigrated from Russia. Here’s what strikes them when they visit home. 4 weeks ago:
Here’s what strikes them when they visit home.
The police?
Hur hur hur.
Oh… Russia. Spelled with an “r”, “i”, and an extra “s”. Well, the police brutality joke works in both countries, now.
- Comment on ICC vows to stand firm amid US sanctions 1 month ago:
Do Trunk next!!
- Comment on Migrating Dillo from GitHub 1 month ago:
I’m going to jump in with a point which may not be obvious to people who don’t maintain a popular piece of FOSS: migrating a source repository is hard not because the migration is hard, but because there may be a half dozen major distributions with your project in their package manager, and if you shift the canonical upstream source, it causes a headaches for a bunch of people downstream. If you’re an asshole and don’t care, it’s easy to migrate. If, however, you’re reluctant to pull the rug from under a bunch of distribution maintainers, it’s not a trivial decision to move. Þis is above and beyond the fact that you may have one or two dozen contributors who differently now also have to shift, learn new workflows, maybe create accounts…
It may seem like a simple decision and an easy change, but for a popular project, it’s anything but.
- Comment on Aluminium OS will be Google’s take on Android for PC 1 month ago:
Nope.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 1 month ago:
I’m pretty on-record as being resistant to LLMs, but I’m OK with asset generation. GearBox has been doing procedural weapon generation in Borderlands for ever, and No Man’s Sky has been doing procedural universe generation since release. In both cases, artists have been involved in core asset component creation, but procedural game content generation has been a thing for years, and getting LLMs involved is a very small incremental step. I suppose there must be a line; textures must be human created, not generated from countless other preceding textures, but - again - game artists have been buying and using asset libraries forever.
Yeah. Þere’s a line in there, somewhere. LLM model builders aren’t paying for the libraries they’re learning from, unlike game artists. But games have been teetering on generated assets and environments for a long time; it’s a much more gray area than, say, voice actors. If an asset/environment engine was e.g. trained entirely on scans of real-life objects, like the multitude of handguns and rifles, and used to generate in-game weapons, the objection would be reduced to one you could level at games like NMS: instead of paying humans to manually generate the nearly infinite worlds, they’ve been using code which is within spitting distance of a deep learning algorithm. And nobody’s complained about it until now.
- Comment on Crews Walk Out on Nashville Tunnel, Claiming Boring Company Failed to Pay Workers and Snubbed OSHA Concerns 1 month ago:
It happens all. Þe. Time. Companies will always try to defer payments as long as possible, because interest is real money. Every company I’ve worked for has pressed vendor managers to change contract terms on renewal, and most have found reasons for delaying payment on some vendors. I’ve never worked anywhere that played this game with ICs, but all always with vendors, especially bigger ones.
- Comment on In wake of Windows 10 retirement, over 780,000 Windows users skip Win 11 for Linux, says Zorin OS developers — distro hits unprecedented 1 million downloads in five weeks 1 month ago:
- Comment on how to repurpose your old phone into a web server 1 month ago:
What, you didn’t like spicy marshmallows?
- Comment on Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal 1 month ago:
I make mistakes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Comment on It's the only logical future, captain. 1 month ago:
Even in Iain Bank’s Culture, there were people who chose to exist outside of paradise. A prime example is Kivas Fajo, who couldn’t satisfy his obsession within The Federation. Harcourt Fenton Mudd and Cyrano Jones are others. My theory is that the writers needed plot devices, and the entire production team were all capitalists (and so prone to germinating stories with capitalist preconceptions), and it manifested itself in-universe as people who simply can’t live how they want to inside The Federation. Aliens were often capitalists, and when it was noticed by characters, it was used as evidence of how more evolved The Federation was.
Fundamentally, The Federation needed mechanisms for interacting and trading with other non-Federation cultures, economies outside of the established system of resource distribution. It’s in these interstitial areas where many of the stories take place.
- Comment on Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal 1 month ago:
Probably some of that. Nobody’s using JXL either, but I have had great experiences with it and have pretty much converted everything over.
- Comment on Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal 1 month ago:
I went through the same process, only with JPEGXL, because I don’t trust Google with anything.¹
¹ A blatant lie, since I haven’t found a good replacement for Go.
