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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • I’d give it a -5. I have a chronic autoimmune condition that started very early in my life, and caused me problem after problem.

    Trying to tell all the adults around me that something is wrong, and then being yelled at, being told “it’s all in your head” “you’re just looking for attention”, etc… not great.

    Not saying that this next part would “excuse” it, but it’d be one thing if it stopped after I was officially diagnosed. It did not. Instead, I was told by my father “You’re using your disease as a crutch, stop”… My mom started to turn around for the most part (there were still exceptions, but other than those cases it got better).

    After I moved out, I cut off contact with my father because of the hate I’d get from him. I was hoping that perhaps one day we’d be able to finally turn things around… Last year he died in a very tragic accident. So I guess I’ll never know if amends could have been made or not.

    To this day I still claim that I was robbed at the chance of a normal childhood, although what “normal” looks like… I don’t know. I’d rate it lower, but I didn’t get the physical abuse, just the emotional part of it. My brother on the other hand was the exact opposite. Us combined, definitely makes a -10. There were positives and good moments of course, but the bad really outweighs the good when looking back.





  • If I had to take a guess (which is exactly what this is, a guess) it is because Android doesn’t “know” where the app is from. I assume the Play Store has specific (system-level) APIs that it uses to “tell” Android how it can be restored (or rather, Android can signal to the Play Store to do a reinstall) when you go to unarchive the app.

    It’s been a while since I kept up with the latest in Android’s APIs, I’d heard there were some APIs that third party stores could use to be recognized as a store, but I’m not sure what the requirements are for that (such as being a system app rather than a user app, or signed by the ROM’s keys) and if so, whether archiving even supports third party stores.

    I can’t think of any other workarounds unfortunately, especially if you want to persist app data. Perhaps there’s an app that can make custom widgets that look like an app entry on the home screen (and allows setting an icon/text) but I’m not aware of any, and that definitely wouldn’t save the app data.


  • Hard to think of one on the spot, but I have an unintentional one/mistake.

    When I was a kid, my mother had a digital camera that broke. It had a mechanical lens (or I suppose “lens housing” that would extend when powering on, then retract when powering off. I guess somehow the lens got stuck in between states, and so the camera would refuse to fully boot up. A bit after that happened, she got a new digital camera.

    Me being the tinkerer I was, I asked if I could mess around with the old camera and was basically given it since it was useless (or so she thought). While messing with it, I accidentally dropped it - it somehow fell at just the perfect angle and “knocked” the lens back into place (without breaking anything). Camera worked perfectly fine after that!

    Unfortunately while I was still allowed to keep it, that never really “kick started” a passion for photography in me. As far as I recall I got bored of it pretty quickly.


  • Yes you are, they are advertising their platforms like you are free to comment anything and most people beleave that.

    I hate to break it to you, that’s your fault for making an assumption (and a bold one at that) or you’re just quite naive. Most places that you sign up for will either have you agree to a Terms of Service, or they’ll make you agree to the rules. I have even more bad news for you: Advertisements usually try their best to show only the “good” of what is being advertised (such as how an advertisement for a toy doesn’t usually make it very clear that batteries are required to use it).

    Ask anyone if they think youtube will delete their commen even if they didnt offend anyone and they will tell you no way!

    No, they might be angry that their comment was removed, but it’s a pretty common understanding that moderators will remove content at their discretion, even if people don’t necessarily agree with the decision.

    I’m not sure why I’m even engaging in this, usually it’s pretty clear when someone gets upset that their “free speech” (that they were never entitled to) is being violated that their intent is to spread hateful content.

    Perhaps that isn’t you, but nonetheless that is the group you’re putting yourself in (even if unintentionally) whenever you ride under that banner.

    It would also be worthwhile double checking what actual “Freedom of Speech” is and what it covers. Assuming you are referring to the US’ first amendment, it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone other than you and the government (and even then it has its bounds).

    As an example, let’s say you’re a writer for a newspaper. The government cannot take down an article that you write in which you criticize them (because that would fall under protected speech, unless you are making direct threats towards someone), but your boss could absolutely say “No way, we’re not publishing that” as they are not a government official.

    This doesn’t even just include “Freedom of Speech”, as another example, with the right to assembly you can publicly assemble and protest the government - but it wouldn’t allow you to start a protest on someone’s private property.






  • I always assumed it was more or less targeting the federation of issues/MRs.

    The git side of things is already distributed as you said, but if you decide to host your random project on your own GitLab instance you’ll miss out on people submitting issues/MRs because they won’t want to sign up for an account on your random instance (or sign in with another IdP).

    This is where a lot of the reliance of GitHub comes from, in my opinion.



  • I’m quite confused by some of the pain points that the author mentioned. For example, the Dolphin view switch icon - you absolutely don’t need to click on the dropdown to change the view, you can click the icon itself and it’ll change (and I’m pretty sure this is why the button is “two buttons” and has the divider next to the dropdown icon).

    For Spectacle, regarding the extra mouse clicks - most of the functions include a (global) keyboard shortcut by default and for the few that don’t, you just need to set one.

    Floating panels: Whether you like the design of a floating panel or not is of course subjective. However the author mentions that you need to “aim like an idiot and waste your time hitting the ‘floating target’” - except no, you don’t. They can “slam their mouse into the screen corner” because the target zone for the applets extends below and to the corners of the screen. If you want to open the Application Launcher for example, you can “slam” your mouse to the bottom left corner and click - it will open. Same with every applet (I do not believe this to be something the applet controls, but rather the panel itself so it should work with any applet).

    Kubuntu’s “anti-user move” is not controlled by the KDE team. Not sure how much control Ubuntu spins have over their packages, but it is either a Canonical move or a move by the Kubuntu team - regardless, its not something the KDE team mandated (AFAIK they are not removing X11 support). The only thing the KDE team has done is make the Wayland session the default.

    Regarding the bugs they’ve found, I hope they reported those on the KDE bug tracker.

    This line in particular made me laugh a bit though:

    … plus “simple” interfaces is NOT going to win the hearts and minds of the common people. That’s not how it works.

    Yes, it does. A “common” person does not care in the slightest that libmyfancylibrary was updated to version 1.2.3.4, I mean I’d argue they don’t care in general about updates but I digress.


  • Your son and daughter will continue to learn new things as they grow up, a LLM cannot learn new things on its own. Sure, they can repeat things back to you that are within the context window (and even then, a context window isn’t really inherent to a LLM - its just a window of prior information being fed back to them with each request/response, or “turn” as I believe is the term) and what is in the context window can even influence their responses. But in order for a LLM to “learn” something, it needs to be retrained with that information included in the dataset.

    Whereas if your kids were to say, touch a sharp object that caused them even slight discomfort, they would eventually learn to stop doing that because they’ll know what the outcome is after repetition. You could argue that this looks similar to the training process of a LLM, but the difference is that a LLM cannot do this on its own (and I would not consider wiring up a LLM via an MCP to a script that can trigger a re-train + reload to be it doing it on its own volition). At least, not in our current day. If anything, I think this is more of a “smoking gun” than the argument of “LLMs are just guessing the next best letter/word in a given sequence”.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who completely hates LLMs / “modern day AI” (though I do hate a lot of the ways it is used, and agree with a lot of the moral problems behind it), I find the tech to be intriguing but it’s a (“very fancy”) simulation. It is designed to imitate sentience and other human-like behavior. That, along with human nature’s tendency to anthropomorphize things around us (which is really the biggest part of this IMO), is why it tends to be very convincing at times.

    That is my take on it, at least. I’m not a psychologist/psychiatrist or philosopher.






  • I’d be highly surprised if Wayland actually has a protocol for applications to just type across other applications, we barely even have global shortcuts (it’s getting there but reaaaaaally slowly).

    KPXC might be able to get around it by using whichever method ydotool does (by faking a device AFAIK) - probably needs root to do this though, and it would also need to implement the global shortcuts API to be able to respond to a key bind I believe.

    So perhaps a bit of column A and column B.