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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • shirro@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlHow bad is Microsoft?
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    24 days ago

    I don’t think about Microsoft at all mostly. I supported their stuff professionally in the past and friends/family but otherwise total avoidance. They own some big game studios so I probably use some of their products like Minecraft but I haven’t used their operating systems or applications for decades and I dislike and distrust cloud services and theirs is no exception. All big companies tend to be the same. Try not to depend on any of them.




  • I have been wanting to watch this since release but it isn’t showing anywhere near me or streaming or available to purchase and ironically I haven’t pirated because I figured everyone was in the same situation so good quality rips would be scarce. This movie is a spectacular example of all that is wrong with geographical distribution rights. I will probably still wait for a legit stream on this one because I want to send a positive signal if any service grabs the rights but I can’t blame people for making other choices. Copyright is supposed to protect the rights holders so they can profit from their work but in cases like this it just stops them connecting with their audience and they get nothing, neither money or exposure. I don’t think piracy is harming anyone in this situation.



  • shirro@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlUsing ChatGPT with Linux
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    3 months ago

    I apologise for the language but I am fed up with this shit.

    I don’t think promoting OpenAI/Microsoft services is very compatible with the open source/free software ethos.

    OpenAI pretend to be a non-profit but are controlled by billionaires and Microsoft. I am not going to take up a subscription and have my personal data mined by a company so I can have the arch wiki and man pages developed with millions of hours of volunteer labour served back to me.

    I used to attend Linux/free software conferences decades ago and there would always be that one person who thought Facebook or Google were brilliant and that adding everyone’s lives and personal data to gmail or facebook was totally fine because the APIs were cool and big companies are totally ethical, “Don’t be Evil” etc. I thought they were foolish then and I think time has shown they are even more foolish now.

    Every news site and forum I go to, even very non-technical ones, has people appear out of nowhere exclaiming with enthusiasm how OpenAI/copilot solved all their problems in great detail. Whether they are genuine or are just on the hype train created by bots and paid influencers I am at my breaking point with this shit. It is worse than the crypto bros with their NFT monkeys and get rich schemes. It has nothing directly todo with Linux or open source software. I escaped reddit to avoid all the influencers and people peddling shit but it is here as well and people can’t see it for what it is.




  • Does it use safe development practices though? Or is mainstream Rust development npm leftpad all over again with developers dumpster diving for dependencies to make their lives easier and more productive.

    There is potentially a price to pay for colour ansi graphics and emoji and it comes in the form of a large tree of often trivial third party crates of unknown quality which could potentially contain harmful code. Is it all audited? Do I want it on a company server with customer data or even on a desktop with my own data?

    The various gnu and bsd core utils are maintained by their projects and are self contained without external dependencies and have history. There are projects rewriting unix core utils in Rust (uutils) that seem to be less frivolous which are more to my taste. Most traditional unix utils have very limited functionality and have been extensively analyzed over many years by both people and tools which offsets a lot of the deficiencies of the implementation language.


  • Disney announced the end of physical media in Australia and New Zealand. Blackmarkets arise naturally when supply does not meet demand. It is preferable, morally and for society if people share media for free rather than fund organised crime as happens with most other black markets. I try and support creative industries where I can but piracy is the lesser evil in some cases.


  • Most of us do live in bubbles (not exclusive to lemmy or tech nerds). I first picked up Ubuntu in 2004. It was a massive leap forward at the time as Gnome was moving a lot faster than Debian stable and I was running Sid to keep up. I am genuinely surprised everytime I learn Ubuntu is still “popular” as they have made so many NIH misteps over the years (mir,upstart,unity,snap) and frustrated their users. I moved back to Debian years ago for server/dev as Ubuntu re-packaging wasn’t adding any value and once I was on another distro for desktop I lost all interest.

    Ubuntu started off with some amazing community building. It felt more like a peoples distro than Canonicals for a time. I felt more invested in it in those days so I can relate to Ubuntu users but I also understand some of the criticism aimed at Canonical and their choices.


  • Anti-viruses are a scam and always have been. They aren’t much more than security theater and box ticking. Don’t get into the mindset that you can outsourse security to a single product. Security is something that happens in depth. The more intrusive av software can itself become an attack vector as it often runs with lots of privileges.

    Distros operate with webs of trust and cryptographically signed packages. Your distro installer verifies the integrity of the package. There is no need to check a third party signature database. It adds no value. Even well audited software could contain hidden vulnerabilities so increasingly we are running software with less capabilities via systemd, flatpak/brwrap or in containers. The environment is very different to the origins of av software on Window 9x where people would download random unsigned executables to a system with no privilege restrictions.

    There are lots of challenge for the FOSS community. We love features and freedoms and those features and freedoms sometimes make security more complicated. We need to show more restraint packaging software like ssh and not add so many patches and additional dependencies. We also need to show more restraint in the typical rust, go or javascript project where adding dependencies is so easy we end up sometimes including hundreds of them for stupid crap like coloured messages or being able to handle a dozen config file formats. I don’t care about your garbage collection or advanced compile time checks, if you include hundreds of crates from other developers you are no better than npm and I would put more faith in a 20 year old c library.


  • Most of these platforms make no money but have taken huge amounts of VC funding which they have burned through. For the VCs to unload it and cash out they need to show the product can be monetised and them try and shift it before the users leave the platform. Idiot users want all the features of a product developed by lots of talented full time paid staff but don’t want to pay for it themselves so they leap from startup to startup then complain when the inevitable happens while dismissing open source alternatives as inadequate for their needs. Why should we care? I don’t.


  • I was setting up a modded minecraft launcher for the family to use and and I have trust issues with the modding ecosystem and kids installing random jar files. I used bwrap and it works really well. The launcher uses wayland, minecraft typically X, needs dri access for opengl, pipewire, input devices, networking and dns resolve to connect to servers etc. Doesn’t need filesystem access to much other than some shared libs (ro) and a directory in .config. There is a bit of trial and error involved and making the bwrap robust to differences between desktops (different sockets for dns or mdns resolvers) and makes me appreciate apps packaged as flatpak as this level of sandboxing should be standardised for all distributed apps. Half the stuff in AUR should be bwrapped IMO.


  • shirro@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlWhich terminal emulator do you use?
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    6 months ago

    There are a small number of terminal emulators I would be happy to use as daily drivers and most of them have been named here but my default is kitty. It supports everything I need and a lot I don’t and doesn’t have any showstoppers. All the modern terminal implementations are performant enough. I used real terminals like vt-100s and vt-220s. Everything we have today is awesome by comparison. We fetishize performance and features too much. Once you have something that works there isn’t much reason to change IMO.


  • I made an effort to only use Firefox because browser diversity is important for the web. It can be rough sometimes when things like.chromecast only work.via unstable extensions but I persist even on mobile.

    I suspect the Mozilla corporate structure and leadership needs to be reviewed. They don’t seem to know where they are going and get sidetracked.

    Things like lack of good cross platform support for passkeys (fido2/ctap stuff) is going to hurt them even more as people won’t be able to use Firefox to login to many sites on Linux where there is currently no blessed platform libraries for this. Unfortunately stuff like that is going to drag me back to Chrome for some stuff which handles this fine on Linux.


  • Platforms that offer greater freedom also tend to host visibly more extreme content. My guess is the slightly more advertiser friendly extremism pushed by algorithms on mainstream platforms is far more impactful on society.

    Outside of the relatively small number of people engaged with issues like software freedom, privacy, right to repair there is no reason to choose a platform with less views unless your content is banned from the alternatives.

    I expect Rossmann’s politics are shaped by his experiences as a small business owner. Many such people desire greater economic and individual freedom and are likely economic liberals but that doesn’t necessarily influence their views on other matters. He is an outspoken advocate for consumer freedoms including right to repair which I respect. I don’t know the guy personally but I would be surprised and disappointed if he endorses far right crazy shit. I am using Lemmy and respect the people who wrote the software but nothing about my politics should be inferred from theirs.


  • shirro@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlI had a journey
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    9 months ago

    I don’t really see the link to communism though I can see the parallels to social democracy.

    Private ownership of computer code should lead us to a hellscape where all code is owned by a handful of huge companies and wealthy elites. But instead of doing away with private ownership and making all code public domain we added regulation in the form of free and open source licensing that democratized private ownership and made it serve our community. Perhaps that is the real lesson, not communism.


  • It was decades ago but Burger King was a bit of a staple for me for a few years when I lived close to a franchise operator that was consistent. It has been awhile and I knew things had gone downhill and some of the franchise operators are very shitty but I was shocked last time we went. The restaurant was filthy and the tables and floors were covered in food. The burgers looked to be thrown together out of bin leftovers. Can’t say I blame staff for the lack of enthusiasm given their employer has a known history of wage theft. We couldn’t tell the differences between the more expensive special and regular whopper so took the mess to the counter to ask what the fuck we were given and why it looked nothing like the photo. The whole family swore off them for life. Never going back.