Really my biggest frustration is that it isn’t transparent what’s generated and what’s not. If a human wrote the code, then I want to teach them, especially if there’s glaring logic issues in the code.

But at the same time, the most likely cause for glaring logic issues, is if they generated the code. And then it’s just a complete fucking waste of my time to try to teach them.

A few years ago, I found Kaffeine and was so surprised that I never saw a video player before with controls in a collapsible sidebar.

Old screenshot, but this is what it looks like when a video is playing:

It seems like a rather obvious idea, but I guess, it doesn’t get copied much, because most video players don’t have a ton of controls to begin with…

Well, there was an effort to solve it on a technological level, via the Do Not Track header (DNT). The idea was that when users actively signal they don’t want to be tracked, then even in weaker jurisdictions, you can’t justify doing it anyways.

But Google and Facebook said outright that they would not honor DNT, which meant virtually no webpages could honor it, since Google Analytics and the Facebook Like-button were omnipresent on the web at that point.
And then Microsoft killed it off for good by enabling it by default in Internet Explorer. That meant the DNT header did not anymore necessarily represent a user actively choosing to not be tracked, so it became meaningless in court.

Well, and after that had failed, the EU came about with the GDPR to solve it with laws.
But here it also needs to be said that a cookie banner is effectively only required, if you implement tracking.^[1]
But of course, the ad industry did not want webpage owners to realize they could avoid needing a cookie banner by removing ads or going for non-tracking ads, so they spread a whole bunch of FUD.

And now we’re here, with cookie banners virtually everywhere, which are often not even GDPR-compliant either (like the PC Gamer cookie banner here), since it’s supposed to be just as easy to decline, as it is to accept. If it is not, then that’s not legally consent, because consent has to be freely given.

TL;DR: Ad industry bad.

There is also pre-made blocklists for uBlock Origin for Cookie Banners, which you judt have to turn on.

Combine with e.g. Cookie Autodelete to automatically remove cookies, and it’s effectively as if you declined.

I’d say we’re not there yet, but yeah, LLMs and image generators have accelerated it to the point, where I expect it to only take a few more years.

Gonna be interesting. There’s definitely going to be some enclaves, like invite-only places (in particular messengers), and potentially the fediverse won’t be worth targeting directly. But we do get lots of second-hand content here from places which are worth targeting, so yeah, will probably still notice the change here in one form or another.

Yeah, I often hear that. A few years ago, I tried to get into Krusader, because I also liked some of the features it has, but after two weeks or so, I realized that I don’t use the file manager nearly often enough to make progress in learning a different workflow. 😅

Well, and I also kind of had the problem that navigating into directories is quite fast on the terminal, especially with Fish shell, so I often do that there and then run open . to launch the GUI file manager for the thumbnails or dragging into other GUI applications.
And that Frankenstein workflow is kind of diametrically opposed to dual-pane file managers, where you really need to navigate to different locations in the respective pane from within the file manager. 🫠

on a machine that I ran for years, i basically did kde but with a different file manager

Might’ve been PCManFM-Qt, which is also used by LXQt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCMan_File_Manager
At least, that’s another Qt file manager I know of.

Well, or it was Krusader: https://krusader.org/
But Krusader is funky, i.e. similar to Total Commander and GNU Midnight Commander…

You can do that where I live, but you can also borrow musical instruments in the library here, so no idea, if that’s universal…

I’ve only heard of them being trash so far. I was hoping they’d still have some resemblance of fun. But if the small fraction of folks who’ve upgraded to a Switch 2 actually were to play more than those on Switch 1, then that would be a pretty clear sign that it just isn’t fun on Switch 1.

But yeah, I’m not yet taking that for granted from this piece of news. I would assume, they wanted to drop the Switch 1 so quickly, because then they can start extending the game in ways that use more resources, which might be fine on their other supported platforms.

Damn, really makes it feel like they were waiting to drop that platform ASAP. I doubt, they have more players on Switch 2 at this point, well, unless the Switch 1 version is really terrible to play, I guess.

There’s all kinds of injuries or fatigue symptoms that may mean you can move your legs and sit, but you cannot stand…

Was queuing at the checkout in the grocery store today and realized I wasn’t going to be done putting my foods onto the conveyor belt by the time the cashier would be done with the previous customer. Then a guy comes in to queue behind me and in the corner of my eye, I could tell that he only had three items or so. So, I turn to him and tell him that he can skip ahead of me.

At that point, I see that it’s a bouquet of flowers and a greeting card that he’s holding. He looked a bit embarassed, but then also somewhat touched, because he wasn’t sure, if I was being nice, because he’s carrying his emotions out in the open.

I wasn’t. 😅 I mainly just did not want to cause unnecessary delay. But was an unexpectedly wholesome encounter anyways.

I’m of the opinion that one should recommend distros that you’re familiar with, and ideally use yourself. Because they will have questions and particularly, if you actively use it yourself, you’ll also be able to test whether stuff normally works, which is broken on their machine.

I’ve heard the theory before that the collapse of cryptocurrencies was a larger factor, since you suddenly had lots of cheap GPUs on the market. If anything, I would guess that the pandemic slowed that down, because relatively many people got into gaming and we did have the chip shortage from factories being locked down…

Well, specifically because the conversions are so trivial, decimeters aren’t inherently more useful than specifying tens of centimeters. And with measurements of smaller lengths, you usually do need centimeter precision, so 57cm is simpler than 5.7dm or 5dm 7cm.

Well, and sometimes you also need millimeters, so 57.5cm is still conceptually simpler (57½cm) than 5.75dm.

All these combined mean that centimeters end up being used much more often. And then decimeters fell out of use even where it would still be a fitting unit (8dm instead of 80cm), because our brains work in patterns and will retain those patterns better that are used/trained more often.

I know conceptually what decimeters are, but if you tell me something is 8dm long, it does take a splitsecond for me to mentally convert that into 80cm, which is where all my brain’s patterns have been trained on. I have an intuition what “80cm” looks like in the real world, whereas I don’t for “8dm”, not without mentally converting it to cm.

In my experience, this happens in two ways. Yeah, sometimes a senior just overdoes it due to a lack of experience or shitty requirements or whatever.

But it also happens a lot that juniors just don’t understand why the layer makes sense to introduce. For example, juniors will readily intermix IO and logic, because they don’t yet understand that this makes code untestable and adds a load of additional complexity into already complex logic code. From that viewpoint, pulling all the IO code out will look like unnecessary complexity, when it’s not.

I find that it depends on how niche the distro is.

Somewhat obviously, niche distros don’t have as many resources out there to begin with.
This also means you’re unlikely to be told to research yourself.

But users of niche distros also made a conscious choice to be on that specific distro and therefore tend to be more enthusiastic. Both, about helping others who made the same choice, but also about fixing problems or at least documenting a workaround for the distro that they plan to stay on for the foreseeable future.

Well, and due to survivorship bias, folks on niche distros tend to also be Linux experts, who can solve virtually any problem, given enough motivation.
If you find a kind soul, they will walk you through hell and back, which is worth so much more than any documentation in the world.

Python without UV/Conda is always somewhat of a pain on Linux, well, if you need a specific version that is. It comes pre-installed on virtually all distros, because the distros use it themselves to script stuff in the OS. That also means, if you install a different Python version OS-wide, you can break those OS scripts.

Admittedly, it is somewhat of a larger pain on Debian, though, because it will stay behind on older Python versions for longer than most other distros. After the Python 2→3 transition, they also continued to alias python to python2 for quite some years (I’m actually not sure, if they alias to python3 by now)…

Yeah, I mean Cinnamon matches what Windows does really quite closely, down to even the default keyboard shortcuts being virtually the same.

KDE doesn’t match it quite as closely, but it’s just power-user heaven…

One time, I got delivered teaspoons instead of spoons, because I couldn’t tell the difference from the picture (and the description did not bother mentionuing that at all).

Another time, I got delivered light bulbs the size of a toddler’s head, because the manufacturer decided to use a picture of a regular-size bulb. Well, and in the online store, the size only got mentioned as actual width/height values in the details.

But yeah, we do already have the technology to place a banana next to your product, and to take photos from all angles. Manufacturers and stores just don’t see enough of a benefit from actually doing that, so have a singular picture in a white void, which shows a different product. You’re welcome! 👍