pixelscript @ pixelscript @lemm.ee

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I do honestly miss the level of artistic and aesthetic polish that a multi-billion dollar corporation can afford to field that no Linux distro really can.

Linux as a rule is and always has been generally quite "Guys Live In Apartments Like This". Often utilitarian to a fault. UX design by backend devs, because actual frontend devs cost money. No one wants to pay the "beauty tax" for software. DEs like KDE and Gnome are trying very hard and have made great strides, but it's very slow progress.

And I imagine this comment will be a magnet for power user types who will flock to my post and retort something along the lines of, "All that stuff is bloat/a usability nightmare/clutter/gets in my way/comes at the cost of features", blah, blah, blah, waaahhhh boo hiss... Yes, it's all true, and yes, I understand. But Linux and the free software it surrounds itself with tends to be crusty, clunky, and god-awful ugly, and I'd be lying if I said that didn't frustrate me a bit now and again. Does it bother me to the point that I don't want to use it? Fuck no. Windows isn't worth the bullshit. But they do at least know how to make an OS slick and beautiful, when it works, anyway.

I'm sure people will also cherry pick examples of FOSS software that are quite ergonomic and lovely to feel. Yeah, there are many examples that exist, but they tend to be diamonds in the rough rather than exemplars of the ecosystem. For every one dev in this community who actually has a fucking clue how to make smooth-feeling and aesthetically pleasing software, there's a score of devs who slapdash together their programmer-art-tier UIs and call it a day, and a thousand other dev-brained users who look at it and go, "this is fine". And yeah, it is fine. But sometimes I want more than fine.

It's a divesting of unwanted responsibility.

If any change can break something then all broken bits will need fixing.

Right. So the less decrepit, old code that contains annoying little time bombs, the less time spent fixing things.

But that's true of all code in the kernel. [...] Why not remove all drivers in case an update breaks them.

And how many people actually need these ancient drivers maintained? More than zero, sure, but how many more than zero?

Maintenance effort is a finite resource. Choosing where it gets spent is an executive decision. Every dev hour you assign to debugging some ancient driver that one or two enthusiasts might still want someday is a dev hour not spent on development of some new feature, or fixing a problem affecting thousands, potentially millions of known, current, active users.

We can't maintain all code forever. At some point the theoretical value it may have is outweighed by its cost to keep alive, and it gets cut.

A driver can be complete and only need updating if someone else breaks stuff, so leave it alone until then and only remove it I'd no one comes to fix it.

That's sort of where we're at now, in a way.

Yes, all of these drivers presumably are still fully functional at the time of cutting. But the devs have essentially all decided, "We are not fixing these anymore" already. If any of these break for any reason, they would all be immediate candidates for axing by your system.

The reason they aren't just left in with a "we'll just run it until it dies, then!" mentality is because a project like the Linux kernel doesn't want to be full of software with undefined mystery behavior where they can reasonably avoid it.

A chunk of code being part of it at all is an implicit promise of, "This is intended to function as-documented. If it does not, we are responsible to fix it." But we already know no one will fix it. So instead it just becomes, "This chunk of code may or may not work. We don't know and we don't care, lol. Use at your own risk. If you can prove it's broken, we'll just remove it".

The Linux kernel does not want to be full of code like that. All of its code should be reliable to build things on. If it's coming out, it needs to be announced in advance so users have time to migrate. A "we will run it until it suddenly breaks" system doesn't afford that. The feature ideally has to be sunset while it's still functional.

"Unstable code, use at your own risk" projects are better relegated to optional packages. If someone wants to bundle up these ancient drivers and offer them as an optional package, they are free to do so. If there ends up being zero will from anyone to do even that, I guess it's more evidence to how little the functionality was actually demanded.

Patrick Warburton is the only one on that list who was actually on board with the film in its small budget phase. The rest came aboard after the Weinstein Company stepped in to be the distributor.

Picking up movies that were already finished for cheap and then using industry connections and capital to forcefully inject more star power into the voice cast is apparently something the Weinsteins did several times. They did the same thing to The Magic Roundabout (marketed in America as Doogal).

Funnily enough, getting the Weinsteins involved with Hoodwinked! in the first place was a chance encounter made possible by Robert Rodriguez's wife.

The scenes of Clooney as the President in Spy Kids 3 were allegedly shot by Clooney in a day in his own living room with a camcorder he just had lying around.

At least in the case of fumos these days they're made-to-order. Buying 10 of them isn't snatching 10 of them from the carts of other potential buyers, it just means 10 more fumos will be made. If anything it's strictly increasing the supply and making them more accessible to people who couldn't make the preorder window.

This was absolutely not the case a few years ago, though. And just because you're technically not scalping doesn't mean you can't still wildly overcharge.

This thread alone is showing me how divisive this question is for a lot of reasons. Just the meta-question of "what's the definition of 'free speech' in this context?" on its own makes it a shitshow to answer, let alone the rest of it.

It says in the name. 'Free', 'speech'. If I can say it, you can't silence it. Anything more restricted is not 'free'.

If that's what it means to you, then no, "hate speech", whatever it may be, is included by definition. There is no ambiguity. But that's a pretty inflexible answer that doesn't satisfy.

Well that's a stupid and useless definition of "free speech". Obviously some things that can be spoken aren't 'free speech', because they aren't constructive, they're not good-faith conversational, they are a form of harm, etc."

Sure. Under that definition, it's totally possible.

But congratulations, by restricting what 'free speech' is in any way whatsoever, you've invented an implicit judge who rules what is and is not free speech. (And, likely as well, rules what is and is not "hate speech".) That only kicks the can down the road to the question of, "Is this a fair judge?" And now we are back in the shitshow where we began, we just painted the walls a new color.

"Free speech" as Americans in particular are so worked up about is a nickname given to one of the amendments of their constitution, which is a clause about disallowing the government from punishing anyone for their speech. Any implication of rights relating to speech outside of this context is a gross misunderstanding.

If that's the definition you're going with, then yes, obviously it's possible, because that's where many of us are at right now and have been at for ages. That makes it a rather nothingburger of an answer because it dodges the implicit question of whether we should uphold "free speech" as a principle outside of this context, whatever that may mean.

The way I see it, the two answers on the extreme ends are cop-outs that don't actually help anyone, and any answer that exists in the middle just becomes politics. Is it possible to allow "free speech" and simultaneously stop "hate speech"? Yes, with adequate definitions of both. Will any solution that does so be satisfactory to a critical mass of people, randomly selected from all people? Haha no.

Doesn't necessarily mean it's what users crave, just why they keep coming back for more.

Yes. And they do come back for more. A lot more. More than "genuine content" ever made them do. It is very much the intended effect, and it is demonstrably working as intended.

So why is it that when a platform like Bluesky does gangbusters while Mastodon languishes looking to pick up table scraps, people here treat it like a wild mystery?

The Fediverse is a cure to an addiction very few people actually want cured; at least, based on their actions taken to solve it. That's how addictions work. Even people who recognize the harm and say they want out actively choose to not get out when presented an exit.

The Fediverse would succeed if it was the only choice. But in a head-to-head competition with a competently-built centralized platform that dabbles in all the trapping features its predecessor did, it's severely outmoded.

and don't say algorithms. the general public constantly laments about how algorithms have ruined everything.

Right, right. Much the same way the American public complains that fast food has ruined their health and yet 2/3 of the nation is overweight. Or how chain smokers know full well their lungs are fucked six ways to Sunday but they keep reaching for those nicotine hits. It's almost like people say they hate the things they continue to reach for all the time. Funny, that.

Do I think the Fedi is reasonably within the grasp of understanding for most of the general public? Sure. But do I think anything on the Fedi stands a ghost of a chance in competition against centralized services that cater to the dopamine rush people are already conditioned to expect and continue to reach for even when several of them claim to hate it? Oh fuck no, absolutely not.

In all likelihood that experience will be temporary, in one of two ways. Either Lemmy becomes mainstream enough to enshittify beyond your tolerance, or Lemmy atrophies into obscurity and ceases being a platform with any benefit.

Which will happen, and on what timescale it will happen? Who knows. But I wager one of those outcomes is inevitable before too long. The "chill, somewhat unknown but appreciably active platform" position is long-term an unstable one.

Until then, we're all just in time to bask in the warm glow of this little experiment for at least a little while.

Gimp is for photo editing.

Krita is for digital painting.

Spongify!

Realistically, I'd say my worst in recent memory was nearly getting smoked by a red light runner at some stroad intersection. Only thing that saved me was my own incompetence; I believe I was dicking around on my phone waiting for my turn at the light, and that hesitation delayed me just enough to not get wrecked.

The one I'm more likely to tell people in a casual conversation is nearly accepting a job as a professional Salesforce consultant.

I'd call it a damped spring oscillation. Still goes up and down, but the extremes peter out with time.

It's basically a power strip:

but specifically for cables that carry Internet traffic instead of electrical power.

A more direct analogy would be a telephone switchboard (which is why it is called a "switch"), basically a computerized version of those old-timey operator ladies who used to sit in a room waiting for you to make a phone call, and they'd physically move a plug connected to your phone and plug it directly into the phone line of whoever you were trying to call. That, but for computers trying to talk to one another over network cables instead of making telephone calls.

No homework in detention sounds absolutely fucked.

There were a couple times in high school I actually asked to go to detention after class, just to do homework. Because I knew it was a quiet, distraction-free space where I could concentrate on a time-sensitive task. Baffled the detention supervisor, she probably wondered if I was having a bad situation at home I was trying to avoid, but no, just wanted to protect myself from myself. And it was very effective every time.

It is. But that's not saying much.

I may have had to keep a few of the waypoints of the trail in my head for, oh, a week or so, just long enough to scribble it on a history test. Then that information was immediately cleared out to make way for whatever other junk we had to temporarily memorize next chapter.

Only a vague, blurry notion that the Oregon Trail A) existed and B) was a trail to (presumably) somewhere in Oregon remains with me today. Oregon City is certainly not a part of that notion.

Not to shit on the Oregon Trail or Oregon City in particular, of course. I would be truly baffled to meet anyone that retained, in significant detail, even a tenth of what any grade school history class purportedly taught them.

Choice is an irritating speed bump to people who don't care to choose, which unfortunately is most of them.

Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.

The two apps are identical and built from the same codebase anyway. K-9 is just a branding asset swap.

I've seen conflicting info from Thunderbird devs on how long they actually intend to keep both branding packages active. I've heard no longer than a year. I've heard only as long as it takes to get Thunderbird out of beta. I've heard they have some sort of agreement with FDroid that obligates them to keep it listed for some minimum duration of time (???). I've most recently heard indefinitely, because their build script is just a toggle now and it costs them nothing. Which one do I believe? I have no idea. I doubt K-9 will be kept around in perpetuity, though.

I'd be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don't care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft's market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.