BananaTrifleViolin @ BananaTrifleViolin @lemmy.world

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647

Joined

2 yr. ago

I use Firefox and Librewolf.

I've used Firefox for a long tine, and I strongly favour it as the only true independent browser engine left. Everything else is under Google or Apples control, and many of the various chrome forks are commercial and compromised. I dont trust Brave or Vivaldi in terms of privacy. And google has severely limited privacy options in chromium based browsers with its recent changes.

Mozilla is far from perfect and I'm disturbed by some of its actions but it remains the least bad option. Librewolf adds a layer of privacy and separation that I like although its not my main browser. I main Firefox with lots of privacy extensions.

I do have chromiun and chromium ungoogled installed and exclusively for streaming video. Not because Firefox isn't capable but because I have loads of extensions in Firefox so its easier just to contain all my subscribed streaming services in its own browser and not have to faff with DRM or ad block issues. I watch YouTube in Firefox, but use Chromium to watch BBC, Channel 4, and Netflix (when I had it). I use Jellyfin media player to stream my own content.

It's a javascript app that uses the react library - which is an open source library originated by Meta. It's supposed to be easier to maintain and port cross platform apps. However it is not as efficient as a native app and given the Start menu is so frequently used it's probably not a very efficient way to program it (or parts of it - I think the start menu has reactive native components rather than entirely made in it).

Yeah this is inbuilt (not an extension) and very similar to Windows fancy zones.

Yeah, I have MiniPC running Nobara. I'm interested to see of SteamOS would work even if i have no intention of switching.

But gaming mini PCs with steamOS preinstalled might be a future product range that comes along so its interesting to see how close steamOS is to that.

The gaming focused distros are great and won't be harmed by that, but steamOS might grow the linux desktop further by being a viable windows alternative for people who want a bit more power than a steamdeck and want an off the shelf low or mid range gaming PC. Steam Machines may now actually be viable thanks to how far Proton has come. The original machines were probably 10 years too early.

Yeah its wine/proton and linux together. Wine/Proton efficiently handles translating the Windows programmes API calls into POSIX calls while Linux seems to offer a lower OS overhead so there is more system resource available for the games.

I do think Proton gets a little too much credit. Its wine plus faudio, dxvk and other open source projects combined. Proton is great but it is standing on the shoulders of giants.

I work in healthcare in a specialist field, and the best are not the ones who get recognised. The ones who get recognised chase respect and fame - in healthcare that is going to conferences and speaking, and writing as many papers as possible.

But the best people in my field are the ones who do the actual job each day at an extremely high level. They go unrecognised except by those of us who understand what it takes to be good. They're humble and focused. Some of them for sure go and speak at conferences and publish papers etc but its not those things that make them the best, although those are the only those things that make them "visible" outside their place of work.

The same goes for music and actors. The most famous are not necessarily the best. They are the ones who people like or are the most commercial etc. The best singers are not necessairly world famous - they may be working professionally in less popular sectors such as opera or classical music or choirs, or they may be totally amateur. Similarly the best actors may be strutting a stage somewhere and never seen in a movie or tv show by the majority of the world. And even then they may be the "star".

Fame and notoriety has get little to do with talent - some famous people are undoubtedly near the top of their field but it is far from required.

Stack Overflow, like Reddit, derives its value entirely from its users—it's just a host. Now that users (and their knowledge) are moving elsewhere, the platform’s importance is fading.

It’s odd when people worry about Stack Overflow’s decline. Online communities have always shifted: from BBSs and newsgroups to forums, chat, Yahoo Groups, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. Each had its time.

The next gathering spot for tech-savvy users might be the fediverse, but who knows at this point. AI isn’t solely to blame for the shift—people moved to Stack Overflow because it was better than what came before. Now, as it declines in quality thanks to general enshittification of services as companies try to monetise uaers, they’re moving on again.

I'm not against AI itself—it's the hype and misinformation that frustrate me. LLMs aren't true AI - or not AGI as the meaning of AI has drifted - but they've been branded that way to fuel tech and stock market bubbles. While LLMs can be useful, they're still early-stage software, causing harm through misinformation and widespread copyright issues. They're being misapplied to tasks like search, leading to poor results and damaging the reputation of AI.

Real AI lies in advanced neural networks, which are still a long way off. I wish tech companies would stop misleading the public, but the bubble will burst eventually—though not before doing considerable harm.

Maybe I'm cynical but I feel like this is suspicious timing to release this information a day after videos of his memory issues in 2023 surfaced. Feels like a cynical attempt by his PR team to change the narrative.

In all honesty, an 82 year old man having prostate cancer is not very surprising. It is a personal issue and I have sympathy but it's frankly not important to the world. A US president with memory issues concealed from voters and his own party in 2023 when it could have seriously changed decisions about the Democratic party nominations is surprising. That is an issue for everyone and very important to the world.

It doesn't need any organisation; there are plenty of right wing apologists and zealots who are motivated enough to vote. People can't really vote "against" Israel so it'd be very easy to distort the vote if even a minority of people are focused enough to vote for one country. Israel's song wasn't terrible but it was pretty bland ballad and the televote result was patently ludicrous. But also none of the other songs were that great this year which would make it even easier for a concerted effort to win the televote.

Extreme example in the other direction is when Ukraine won in 2022. The song wasn't particularly good but Europe coalesced around voting for Ukraine. Even the Jury voting that year was distorted in Ukraine's favour. It didn't need any organisation.

• 1 Pixel 6a
• 1 personal desktop, 1 work desktop
• 1 personal laptop that I never use (9 years old)
• 1 HTPC in my living room
• 1 RPi5 (running home assistant)
• 2 Boox ereaders of different sizes
• 1 Lenovo Tablet that I never use (6 years old)
• 1 Steamdeck
• 1 Google TV stick (rarely used)

All except the work desktop run Linux or Android.

I use OpenSuSe on my desktop and laptop, and Nobara on my HTPC. Rasberry Pi OS on the RPi5.

My desktop is my own build, with a ryzen 7 and 3070 gpu, 64gb ram.

Aside from my phone, I use my HTPC the most, Desktop second (including often to stream games to the HTPC), and the larger boox ereader. Don't use the laptop unless traveling and even then don't always bother to take it; to the point I've decided not to replace it despite its age until it dies. I do take the tablet when travelling but most of the time its unused.

The HTPC I use to game, stream online and home libraries, and browse the internet. Its largely replaced my steamdeck, allowed me to game on my desktop PC from my sofa and largely made my Google TV device redundant.

Many are suggesting deleting the Windows partition and resizing the Linux one, but another option is to back up your data and do a fresh Linux install.

During setup, you can delete all partitions and create new ones—ideal if you want to separate the root system and /home folder. Keeping system and user data on separate partitions makes future reinstalls easier, as your personal files can be preserved.

This misses the step where you delete the windows partition - between steps 4 and 5. You have to delete the NTFS partition and resize your linux partition to fill the empty space.

You can also create a new linux partition if you wanted as a separate space to store stuff.

I'm not sure why this is being downvoted—you're absolutely right.

The current AI hype focuses almost entirely on LLMs, which are just one type of model and not well-suited for many of the tasks big tech is pushing them into. This rush has tarnished the broader concept of AI, driven more by financial hype than real capability. However, LLM limitations don’t apply to all AI.

Neural network models, for instance, don’t share the same flaws, and we’re still far from their full potential. LLMs have their place, but misusing them in a race for dominance is causing real harm.

It is an absolute crock of shit.

There is plenty of research on magnetism and humans and it doesnt need a new title and niche "research" from a frankly failed state like Russia.

We use high Tesla fields routinely every day worldwide in hospitals in Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Safety of this technology has been and is continuously investigated. There has also been extensive investigation of magnetic fields related to power lines and other use cases.

There does remain some uncertainty and controversy around potential effects of long term exposure to low T electromagnetic fields but its long established that short term exposure is safe.

This "research" is more on the realm of autism vaccine science. A lot of money can be made in niche fake sciences both in the industry of research itself and then the crap they can sell to ignorant people as a result.

Russia as a state has been systematically destroyed over the past few decades and most of its institutions have a terrible reputation now. While there are undoubtedly still good scientists in the country, they are working in a gangster state and many of the best minds have long fled for better opportunities abroad.

The rating is only about whether SteamOS will run the game and its middleware. Its not about how well the game runs on the hardware or with the inputs for the device.

Its basically like saying its compatible with Windows or MacOS - it will work with SteamOS if its SteamOS verified. It is an OS compatibility rating; slightly more than it just working with proton or linux to include "game functionality, launcher functionality and anto-cheat support" according to the steam announcement.

Whereas Deck Verified means it specifically works with the Deck hardware too, including satisfactory performance and inputs.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/532097310616717411

I think if Starfield had come out 10 years ago it would have wowed people and been a classic. But now it just seems dated when you have other games doing RPG better (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3) and open world space better (No Mans Sky).

Starfield doesnt do RPG as good as those games, nor does it do open world space as well as No Mans Sky. I've heard it described as being as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, and that doesnt seem far off to me.

I really hope Bethesda have paid attention and dont make the same kind of mistakes with Elder Scrolls VI. Big and empty is not the way to go.

Yeah the poster talking about "coding" is talking a bit of nonsense. "Coding" here is slang for "code blue" which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. "Coding" is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.

And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an "arrest call". It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other "codes" that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.

Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn't have other meanings). I wouldn't be surprised if some US hospitals also don't use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.

Most people expect a GUI interface to get into their desktop. But you dont have to use one if you dont want. SDDM can log into any desktops you have - KDE but also Gnome or XFCE etc. It can also help select X11 vs Wayland sessions.

There are alternatives like LightDM if you dont like SDDM. Or TTY is fine too. But generally they're not large pieces of software and while they are undoubtedly bloated from what they could be, they are still small and lightweight in the era of Tbs of storage and Gb of memory. The savings you'd get in not using them would be small on the scale of the rest of the OS. Obviously they're useless for none GUI machines / servers.

They're called display managers because historically the concept was added to X11 system where you'd have a stand alone X terminal running locally for the end user with an X server which would then connect to an X display manager on a central machine. This was in the Unix days and shared spaces like governments, universities or corporations and the set up was potentially less hardware intensive allowing cheaper X terminals and an expensive central server.

The concept has gone now - PCs are vastly more poweful and can easily run the entire OS locally, and thin clients are the modern set up if you do want terminals/clients and central servers. The most common scenario is now the display manager running on your local PC, alongside everything else and essentially replicates the TTY login in a GUI form. So yes its basically a session manager but the name is historical and probably won't be going anywhere fast.

I wonder why Apache continues to support OpenOffice. Its barely moved since 2014 and hasn't even had a security update since 2023. They could archive it as an active project (keep the code available for those who want it) and redirect most users who land on the OpenOffice site to LibreOffice.