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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.

    Yep. Lightroom is the one piece of software I tolerate paying a subscription for. Alternatives do exist, but they all suffer from the typical FOSS problem of never having had a designer look at them and help them build UI that’s meant to be used by humans.

    I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to learn Darktable, and at the end I still couldn’t arrive to the same results I could in Lightroom by watching a 5 minutes tutorial and adjusting a few sliders. Not to mention that searching for a few of the issues I had led me to a bunch of threads of people complaining about the exact same issues only to be met by a developer telling them “if you don’t like the UI use another tool”.


  • And it’s not like the output is saved for the next time; you need to do it every time.

    You can cache transcoded content in Jellyfin. So use a large enough cache and you basically only have to transcode once for every resolution. It’s easier for me to set up transcoding than it would be to manually figure out which resolutions I’ll prefer having around and transcoding them. Most of my stuff exists in 1080p, with 4k files for stuff I REALLY like, but I sometimes find myself watching on very low resolutions on my phone when away because I have pretty limited data.

    I find that in a few movies the 4K versions have a generally better image quality and are worth it even if you are sitting far away or not watching the content in 4K resolution at all. But like you, I only keep around 4k files for stuff I really like.

    EDIT: I’ve also run into problems with codecs on other people’s devices when not transcoding. I could keep my files in whatever the most compatible codec is nowadays but having the ability to transcode on the spot is easier.




  • Boring answer, but I play on the PC exclusively. When I’m not playing, I’m usually already using the PC for other stuff, so it’s a faster switch than jumping to some other device. I thought about getting a Steam Deck for a while, but I gravitate so much towards the PC that I think I’d probably put it down after a while.

    There’s usually “routine” games I’ll play during the week when I have little time - which are usually games that are unlikely to receive any big updates - and I’ll leave new games to moments when I know I can sit down for a long while without worries.

    The PC I use for gaming is practically only a gaming box, though. I don’t tinker with it nearly as much as I used to. And I’ve started using a controller more, when that’s an option.





  • I typically only buy games on discount some years after they’ve launched. I’ll sometimes make an exception for indie games that come out which seem like exactly my kind of game. And I made an exception for Battlebit as well - I bought it immediately after I saw the first person playing it because it seemed like ultra fun, and I’ve probably already played more of it than all Battlefield games combined over the years.


  • Ask the hundreds of millions of corpses in Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Grenada, Iran, etc, etc. if they think liberalism ‘won’t actually try to kill them’ if they have an opinion that isn’t aligned with capitalist interests.

    Yeah, sorry, I’m gonna pass. Like I told the guy above, I’m sure whatever definition of Liberalism you use fits whatever point you’re trying to make, but unless you have a specific point to make, I’m not going through all of these countries’ histories in search of how “liberalism” has led to hundreds of millions of corpses. Especially because I see Brazil in that list and I’m familiar enough with its history to bet your definition of “liberalism” is actually fascism, so I’d rather not bite.

    ’Tankie’ is literally the word your sect uses to describe Marxist Leninists

    I don’t use tankie to describe marxist leninists. I’ve made that very clear in my comment above. Like the person above, you seem to be trying to mix concepts in order to attack points I haven’t made. I also wonder what sect you think I’m a part of. I’d ask you to at least pretend you’re arguing in good faith and, if you truly want to argue, argue against the points I’ve made, not the strawman you’ve made up in your mind. Thought that would probably mean veering off the pre-approved script.

    Such as? By the way worker’s rights and socialism cannot be attained simply by voting

    The communist party in my country is very fond of aligning with the new far right party when it comes to women’s right - which aren’t an issue according to the communist leader, as only workers’ rights are a true issue - and minority rights in general. It was a bit surprising to some when they decided to walk that path, but I guess we should’ve known.

    As for workers’ rights, a combination of voting, strikes and protests have worked fairly well for my country’s history. A lot of unions in the past 20 or so years have steered away from the communist party, given their alleged attempts at suppression, and have become independent. The communist party has been continually losing votes as it clings to fringe topics such as the defense of dictatorships and often attacks unions which try to act in a democratic manner and pick leaders among the workers, instead of accepting the outside leaders the Party had decreed.

    But what would you propose as an alternative to voting and protesting? Terrorism?

    Examples?

    I don’t know if you’ve accidentally only cropped part of what you intended to. Do I really need to show you examples of the far right trying to sell the idea that everyone to the left aligns with dictatorships? You can just look up any interview of any far right leader in europe and you’ll probably find your example. Thought I’m confused why you need examples of that.


  • This isn’t comparable to my Auschwitz comparison, because this picks two unrelated things. The USSR also didn’t genocide millions of Ukrainians.

    They are as related as your two picks. The meat of the comparison was simply how you cherry pick a bad thing about the horrible dictatorship you dislike and something good about the horrible dictatorship you like.

    I don’t see a difference between Marxist-leninism, “Stalinism” (not a real thing, though sometimes people use the term), and communism. I’m happy to go into the nuts and bolts, if you’d find that interesting. I’ll try to use Marxism-leninism going forward, if that’s easier.

    There is a very distinct difference between Marxism, Marxist-leninism, Stalinism, etc. I couldn’t tell you what communism means in the modern world. Just going through a list of communist parties in europe, for example, they all defend such radically different things that even they don’t seem to agree on what communism means. I appreciate your offer to inform me, but unlike most communists, I’ve read Marx’s works. Cool stuff. Shame many modern day communist movements have completely thrown out that whole part about workers’ rights and class struggles and have gone full into adopting far right conspiracies in order to grab hold of the extremist votes as what used to be their main talking points has been normalized as is mostly still defended by movements closer to the center.

    If these are the reasons you oppose both fascism and Marxism-leninism, do you oppose Liberalism the same amount?

    I don’t oppose Marxism-leninism. Tankies are by definition not marxist. I don’t understand why you keep shifting the conversation to try and mix tankies with actual communists. It’s usually the far right who tries to argue that people who might be favourable to marxist rhetoric are the exact same as people who condone genocides commited by states which defined themselves as “communist”, so it’s extra weird to have to defend this notion from a supposedly marxist-leninist.

    As for Liberalism, like with Communism, I don’t really know what it actually means. What americans call Liberalism is practically the opposite of what is described as Liberalism in European politics, which itself is fundamentally different from something like classical liberalism, so you’d have to be more specific. Having said that, none of these groups usually defend genocidal actions, so I don’t “oppose” them in the sense I oppose fascists and stalinists. I might disagree with everything they stand for, depending again on the kind of liberalism we’re talking about, but at least I know they won’t actually try to kill me.




  • “People who built the Volkswagen, people who genocided millions of Ukrainians, what’s the difference?”

    Just thought I’d turn your line around. It’s fun to reduce the atrocities of a movement to a good thing they did. Though the OP didn’t even mention communists at all, he mentioned tankies, as in the people who actively deny the atrocities of stalinism and maoism. It’s weird that you’d jump to defending communism.

    You’re right that there’s a difference between fascists and tankies/ stalinists. And if this were a discussion in an academic setting, that might actually matter. But in an online discussion about the evils of both, it sort of doesn’t really matter. They both have a track record of authoritarianism and mass genocides, and I don’t get along well with people which defend either.


  • While I understand the sentiment, I hate this trend that whenever someones talks about how soulless the internet has become, the answer is always Web 1.0.

    I don’t want web 1.0. I like having CSS and Javascript around. I use them to build things I couldn’t with HTML alone, and I’ve seen countless incredibly creative websites which fundamentally couldn’t have been built without Javascript. It’s weird to me how the article mentions the creative aspect of the old web, versus the commercial aspect and “sameyness” of the current web, only to then toss out tools that allow for even more creativity and personalization in the current web.

    Whenever I finish reading one of these articles it always feels like it’s mostly nostalgia and not much else.


  • I used to be an Arch guy, I had a pretty stable setup for a couple of years, until I had some problem with a printer and I just decided to toss the whole thing out and just go for a distro with neat defaults in which I wouldn’t be having problems with printers.

    I’ve been using Solus since then and it’s been fine. Even during the “bad times” of no updates, my laptop kept working fine so I didn’t bother switching to something else and I keep using it since it’s been more stable than distros I’ve used in the past which were supposed to be stable. I’ve seen mentions of the possibility of it eventually having an AUR style thing which would honestly make it the perfect distro.



  • I’d love to say the same but on my Lenovo laptop I get frequent disconnects with bluetooth earphones on Linux alone. Apparently it’s a firmware problem with the AX200 board, but even after having updated the firmware and following all the online fixes I still have the problem.

    My whole use case for my laptop is getting away from my desk when I want to read something and listen to music at the end of the day, but it’s annoying to have to reconnect the earphones every 10 or so minutes. Like everything Linux, it’s incredible as long as you have supported hardware and you don’t bump into some weird edge case.


  • I don’t understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their “photos” were made by AI, it’s only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.

    As for your friend’s comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who’s butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn’t produced some pretty decent work.