No thank you

Thou shalt not browse The Internet

I understand that people feel strongly about Snaps, but I don’t know about saying that they’re a security vulnerability on the basis of offering automatic updates.

Safari refers to it as “Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement”, and Chrome includes an option as part of its “Privacy Sandbox.” Please have the decency to do a basic google search before being an asshole :)

Literally every browser has this option, and it gives users a choice. If you use an ad blocker, it has this option as well and has had it for several years now.

End-to-end encryption stops being secure… at the end… Who would’ve thought

Reader view

I think that a lot of the recent GNOME design choices are merely because they’re trying to improve usability on mobile devices. It also just so happens that Apple is trying to make the macOS desktop closer to iOS to encourage people to move from Windows. They have similar goals, which leads to similar design choices. And all design is derivative, anyway. Who cares.

This is what I do. It’s still nice to a have a digital content stream, but it’s more meaningful when you curated it and aren’t distracted by comments

It’s sort of annoying that they removed that feature in the first place. Recently, I’ve been using the Nala frontend for APT, since it maintains history similar to DNF/yum, so I try to install all packages through the command-line. The Ubuntu App Center has always been a mild disaster…

I work in semiconductors, and I don’t think the numbers are necessarily unfair. There are a lot of small companies and academic research labs receiving funding from the CHIPS act, and their work gets done faster when there are fabs in the country to tape out their designs.

I’ve been using AdBlock Plus for at least ten years. Never had an issue

I am not Chinese nor do I claim to be an expert on Chinese culture. That said, my cousin married a woman from China a few years ago and the family insisted upon a traditional wedding. This involved the gifting of bedding, teas, and a dowry.

Recently, I read a historical fiction novel called “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women” that went over a lot of the traditional Chinese wedding traditions, many of which I can only assume are still in practice in some form. Definitely recommend if you’re interested in history, Chinese culture, or feminism.

As an alternative, I suggest ListenBrainz. It is like last.fm, where you install a “scrobbler” to monitor your listening, and then it provides platform-agnostic recommendations.

I never stopped using my iPod Nano 6G. Instead of switching to streaming, I continued to grow my collection of music from purchasing or renting and ripping CDs. I still have yet to listen to every song in my library (although everything fits on my iPod after compressing), so it is hard to justify paying for streaming

There are instances where the user is implied, but there is always a user. As far as Git goes, the user is almost always git.

I can provide my two cents regarding Point One only. Throughout my day, I am likely to read news on multiple devices. I use FreshRSS to keep my subscriptions, read status, and favorites in sync; and I treat it like a backend. That is, I prefer native clients compatible with one of the supported APIs (FreshRSS supports several). On Apple devices, NetNewsWire. On Linux, NewsFlash.

Ollama provides a Python API which may be useful. You could have it generate the story in chunks, having it generate a list of key points which get passed to subsequent prompts. Maybe…

I read a comment on Reddit a while back that pointed out how much of the open source community has no issue hosting projects on GitHub while also lampooning Snap for having a closed-source backend server. However, since Snap (and GitHub) are open source themselves, nothing is stopping curious and concerned users from auditing the codebase or hosting their own servers. I removed Snap from my Ubuntu installation and use Flatpak instead, but I do not hate Snap. And for what it’s worth, I always go for the native DEB when possible…

I run Ubuntu and use the Nala frontend for APT to keep a log of my package installs. That way, I can easily remove everything if I no longer need to work with a particular language or set of dependencies. For anything too complicated, I like to drop into a Docker container (which integrates nice with VSCode/Codium)