4oo4

Friendly reminder to don't just comment and complain to Google, contact your antitrust authority today:

US:

- https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation

- antitrust@ftc.gov

EU:

- https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en

- comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu

UK:

- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...

- general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk

India:

- https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/

- https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd

Canada:

- https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/frm-e...

Friendly reminder to don't just comment and complain, contact your antitrust authority today:

US:

- https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation

- antitrust@ftc.gov

EU:

- https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en

- comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu

UK:

- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...

- general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk

India:

- https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/

- https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd

Canada:

- https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/frm-e...

Don't just comment and complain, contact your antitrust authority today:

US:

- https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation

- antitrust@ftc.gov

EU:

- https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en

- comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu

UK:

- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...

- general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk

India:

- https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/

- https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd

My thoughts exactly. These GitHub protests, while emotionally satisfying, do not work. Google does not care and they are already drunk on monopolist power.

Contact info for antitrust authorities:

US:

- https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation

- antitrust@ftc.gov

EU:

- https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/contact_en

- comp-greffe-antitrust@ec.europa.eu

UK:

- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/tell-the-cma-about-a-competition...

- general.enquiries@cma.gov.uk

India:

- https://www.cci.gov.in/antitrust/

I could not find an easy contact method for filing a complaint for the CCI, but it looks like this is the process?

- https://www.cci.gov.in/filing/atd

Canada:

- https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/frm-e...

I'm happy to share what I've sent to the FTC if others want to use it as a template.

I tried out NixOS the other day using the stable ISO image in a VM. To try to get some familiarity I tried to install a really simple package (neofetch). After the VM was stuck at 100% CPU for about 10 minutes I gave up.

Not sure if it was a cold start issue for the package manager or a quirk of using the live ISO versus an actual install but I was too demotivated to keep learning.

Also check out: https://www.loldrivers.io/

Can I use Bing in ChatGPT to call ChatGPT in Bing?

I love just about everything about Tutanota except having to spell out my email address for administrative things IRL.

Glad that they are changing the name now and that they succeeded in spite of the name, that's long overdue. However I think it shouldn't be limited to just paying customers (which I am). Forcing free users into having an awkward domain name is bad for converting free users into paying ones since they'll be less likely to try it out.

They very well could do this for a company that requires really strict privacy and security, but unfortunately in its current state Firefox doesn't have nearly the corporate sysadmin-friendly tooling that Chrome and especially Edge do.

When I was tasked with implementing CIS browser hardening policies at a previous job a few years ago, this was just a matter of enabling some Group Policy template settings for Chrome and Edge, but for Firefox this involved distributing a prefs.js file to all the workstations. In any corporate environment it's very likely going to be point and click Windows admins that are implementing browser standards, who tend to be allergic to anything resembling code and are already used to using GPOs for just about everything.

Yes, Firefox does have GPO templates but it's not nearly as rich as Chrome and Edge. Edge has even more GPO templates than does Chrome iirc, Chrome already had a lot to begin with and then Microsoft added even more of their own on top of that.

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/v4.11/READM...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/configure-micro...

That alone already puts Firefox at a huge disadvantage for corporate deployment, the other thing that makes it even less attractive, even to companies where privacy/security is a huge requirement (like my previous job) is that Edge is already bundled with the OS, and is one less thing that needs to be manually patched. In high security corporate environments, just keeping things patched is always a huge task so it's very hard to convince someone that they need to put in more work to keep an extra piece of software patched (which is already very difficult considering how frequently browsers are updated). To make things even worse, just about all vendors will only support Chromium-based browsers for whatever SaaS they sell you, so Firefox is a nonstarter for getting support, even if it will work just fine 99.9% of the time.

For all these reasons, I lost the battle to keep Firefox around, which is a huge shame because of how much I love it and wanted to fight the Chromium monoculture. So I guess for a corporation to support Firefox despite how much more corporate-friendly the alternatives are, they'd have to reaaaally want to.

Not sure where you're looking but source code is here (not sure why they don't link to it?) and last update was about a year ago and there are recent commits.

https://github.com/alainm23/planner

I just discovered this and really like it, it's a huge improvement over GNOME Todo. My only complaint is that it seems to choke on a large number of (completed) tasks. Though that might be more of an issue with Nextcloud not clearing out completed tasks and a lot of caldav apps have this problem.

Do you have a source for that?

Also apt-file so you don't have to leave the terminal

This is extremely light on substance, many words to say very little.

It seems that the main thing that inspired this post was the author didn't like Darktable compared with Lightroom. Why exactly was it badly designed? Some examples by comparison, especially screenshots would have really helped illustrate the point.

And what exactly do they mean by badly designed? Doesn't look pretty enough for their standards as a professional designer, creates usability problems, or just doesn't satisfy the UI expectations one has from only using proprietary OSes/applications? Bad design is subjective, and there's no clarification on what this means beyond the author's personal opinion.

As someone that puts up with the many annoyances of GNOME, to use one example of questionable design (looks pretty and is oversimplified at the expense of usability and functionality) there is a lot of room for discussion to be had on this topic but this does nothing to add to the conversation. They had almost started an interesting discussion about projects aimed at technical and non-technical users, but again, no examples to illustrate the point and changes subjects before anything of substance is mentioned.

This also ignores how many people have gotten non-technical users, including grandmothers (!!) using Linux successfully using just the GUI, without them ever having to touch a commandline. That really speaks to how subjective design can be, and I think is a great counterexample to the point the author may have been trying to make. Personally I find many (but not all) community-driven FOSS apps well-designed, in that GUIs seem much easier to navigate since the design is much simpler and makes it much easier for me to make a mental map to navigate it quickly, and I'd suspect this simplicity is also what might make it appealing for non-technical people too. Though, obviously application design can vary quite a bit depending on the GUI framework used, but it also should be pointed out that Windows 11's design is probably even more fragmented and has at least 10 different UI design languages in different parts of just the OS.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...

The author also wastes a lot of words about making GitHub seem like this impenetrable fortress where the only way that one could have an impact on the design is by being skilled enough to make a pull request, but anyone can file an issue to ask a question or for an enhancement to improve the design of an application without knowing any code. Yes, some projects will be more receptive to this and noob-friendly than others, but people can still have an impact on software without coding skills if they're able to ask politely and show a use-case that's not being met or find a bug that someone might have overlooked. I get the impression that the author's probably not a developer themselves, and that's totally OK, but that's also another wasted opportunity of a fresh outsider perspective being able to highlight blind spots.

There is almost zero discussion here on actual UI/UX design, and rather a lot of bloviating about proprietary/free software history and economics in general without making a point.

I bought a Librem laptop and was trying to install Debian on it, only to find that there was a firmware bug that prevented me from using the installer. So instead, I read the Arch wiki and installed Debian Arch-style using the live ISO and debootstrap, and I've been installing Debian that way ever since. I've never used Arch because I like everything as boring as possible, but someday I might take the plunge. They're the first place I go for docs, regardless of what distro I'm using, except for maybe Alpine when I have to read docs on something strange like OpenRC, and have to go to Gentoo's wiki for that.

The thing that makes the Arch docs so great is that it covers edge cases and has lots of examples.

The API is nice as an end user and it's super easy to integrate it with lots of things, but working with it as a developer not so much. The latest version is pretty RESTful, but the previous API versions that lots of things still use (since it sounds like Last.fm will allow you to keep using it forever even though it's deprecated) are pretty painful.

However, one pain point with all versions of the API is lack of full HTTPS. I've always been really confused why I'd still see HTTP traffic to the Scrobbling API despite giving it an HTTPS scrobbling URL, and what I found is that you authenticate over HTTPS to get a token, but then the API returns a submission URL that's always plaintext HTTP.

I believe you can still send it over HTTPS by rewriting the URL, and I know that this API was designed before the ubiquity of HTTPS, but it's absurd to keep doing this HTTPS --> HTTP redirect in 2022. Even 3rd party scrobbling services like libre.fm copy this behavior. When API docs give you a primary endpoint of a plantext HTTP URL, that's a huge red flag.

https://www.last.fm/api/intro

However, I do still love last.fm and still try to obsessively scrobble everything I'm listening to since I've discovered a lot of my favorite bands that way, and it's a great way to get recommendations of live music if you're ever traveling somewhere. I think the paywall has been there for a while, but I'm definitely guilty of not supporting it enough despite how much value I've gotten from it over the years.

Will this cover his own hateful and negative tweets as well? And what are the new policies for what constitutes hateful/negative?

So people dying avoidable deaths because of insulin prices is less important than brand reputation? Deaths should be a much stronger signal than a day of bad stock prices.

He deserves credit for potentially taking action now but also blame for the deaths caused by the status quo.

As much as the verified chaos shouldn't have happened, whoever sent that tweet is a hero.

Speaking as someone that prefers weird and experimental music but also has some theory training, IMO, most key changes, especially a big one at the end of a pop song are overrated and don't add much.

Also, if this is only looking at popular music as defined by the Billboard charts, that's more likely caused by the homogenization of music production and a very small group of producers that are responsible for the majority of hit songs. This is a much better analysis:

https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/

I really don't like the assumption behind these types of articles that increased complexity of music theory-wise automatically means better music. Just like adding unnecessary complexity when writing code is always better.

Both complex and simply structured music both have merit, and I'd argue that more simple music is harder to do well beacuse you need a really strong central idea/concept to make it work.

For example, musically Perfume Genius is extremely simple, but it's still some of the best songwriting I've ever heard. It works so well because of the simpliclity makes the subjects he's singing about even more stark and makes it feel more vulnerable. If complexity were all it took to write good music, then everyone would be listening to things like Ornette Coleman (who is great at doing the exact opposite).

You can still be an excellent musician without knowing a lot of theory, and it also should be pointed out that our system of music theory is based around classical composers who made up the rules as they went. All you really need is muscle memory and recognizing harmony and dissonance.

As much as I respect people like Rick Beato that are into this old school view of music needing to be heavily backed by theory and saying "they don't write songs like they used to", I think it's very elitist and extremely artistically myopic to claim authority on something that's completely subjective.

Yes it can help to know theory depending on what type of music you want to make, but you might also make even better music not having that sense of what's correct or not. This is the approach that Giorgio Moroder took and he's one of the most successful and inventive producers of all time.

And just remember that pop music is a market demographic and a product more than it is a distinct genre/style, and that we should all be free to listen to whatever music we want, however correct or wrong someone else tells you it is.

I initially had this same concern too about migrating from Ubuntu as well, but for any Debian based distro those same commands are going to be almost exactly the same, and really the main differences are what comes default and package versions.

How Debian feeds into downstream distros is something that Linux novices might not know, but I think that the differences aren't as intimidating as they might seem.

It's called The Universal OS for a reason, and I think if people give themselves enough credit for using Linux in the first place they would be surprised at how capable in using other distros and they can be and how much the skills transfer over.

I think part of that is because if you're used to using Windows you get a sense of learned helplessness because you're taught you're not worthy of learning how the OS works, so if the first distro people use is Ubuntu that same feeling will carry over, and you tell yourself "this is the only Linux I'm capable of using". Also when you've only ever used one distro having dozens of different options makes it seem like every one is radically different, despite having similar conventions and using the same code within distro families.

So never be afraid to "fuck around and find out" and see what else is out there, if you can use Ubuntu you're capable of using many other distros. Ubuntu is geared for enterprise deployments and cloud VMs nowadays, instead of regular people just dipping their toes into Linux like it used to be. So its status as the default user friendliest distro isn't valid anymore.

You can also get the "just works" experience from other distros, and in fact maybe more so because of all the issues with snap based applications that Canonical forces on you that add complexity, makes troubleshooting more difficult and creates a much worse overall user experience.

All of that history is relevant, and contrary to your assumptions about my political beliefs I don't disagree with any of that. In fact I'd say it goes back further than that. Perhaps even to WWI when actual leftist movements in the US (actual socialism, not the center-right but socially liberal thing that we consider "leftist" today).

https://truthout.org/articles/absence-of-universal-health-ca...

Or if you want to take it even further back than that, one could even argue that the American version of Christianity that got entangled in capitalism was also responsible:

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism

It's actually not a specific narrative or the only cause of blame, it's actually just one facet of the larger narrative you're describing. In the recent history of the entrentched political power and wealth hoarding of Silicon Valley, the last decade is very relevant to our current situation. The Obama administration let many mergers and acqusitions happen that we today recognize were monopolistic and anticompetitive. They were mainly allowed to take place because of the deregulation and forces of inequality you mention, but also because of the corrupt relationships that the Obama administration had with many key SV people, especially Google. The main thing that changed is that the concept of "Big Tech" became politically unpopular because we're now paying the price for those regulatory failures.

It's the same forces at work that allowed SBF's crypto scamming to fester because of their coziness with the crypto industry while they chased fundraising dollars.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/crypto-industry-exe...

It goes without saying that the Republicans are even more guilty of this type of corruption, just with different people writing the checks. I'll admit that I feel more compelled to call out the democrats for this type of behavior, not only because it's such a letdown for me personally but also because if we expect that democrats are suddenly going to do an about-face on regulatory policy from just one administration ago, with many of the same players involved now as then, accountability is necessary.

It sounds like we actually agree on a lot more than you might assume, but just like you're pointing out with there being a larger narrative, this is a systemic issue that transcends partisanship.

Yes, I can personally attest to this. I was guilty of having to maintain one such spreadsheet that was an absolute abomination to both programming as well as business processes.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33317169

Just a reminder, they have been blowing it for more than a decade because of the Obama administration's coziness to SV.

Had they taken a more balanced approach with mergers and acquisitions and providing basic checks on their corporate power rather than letting them do whatever they wanted, we likely wouldn't be in the situation we're in currently. Now we have to play catch up in enforcing laws against antitrust and anticompetitive and their entrenched power makes it much messier and it's also become entangled with the government also trying to apply pressure on social media companies fighting what it considers "misinformation".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-obama-nea...

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

Despite Biden's supposed enthusiasm about reigning in Big Tech, he was also a party to letting them accumulate the power they have now, though Lina Khan's appointment was a positive step.

Is systemd having an OOM killer really needed given that the kernel already does this? And if you have systemd doing OOM killing, would that also be competing with the kernel doing the same thing?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/understand...

The kernel's OOM killer can be annoying and complicated sometimes, but I do like it since I can easily change /proc/${PID}/oom_score_adj to prevent it from killing something important.

EDIT: Per the docs:

    systemd-oomd is a system service that uses cgroups-v2 and pressure stall information (PSI) to monitor and take corrective action before an OOM occurs in the kernel space.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-oom...

I'd be really interested in a more thorough explanation about the justification for it. This makes it seem like a bad thing that this is happening in the kernel, but memory management is the kernel's job and there would be less overhead than in userspace. Personally I think OOMScoreAdjust that systemd I think has provided a long time is the best approach for this, since it's not duplicating functionality and gives you a more user-friendly way to maintain the oom score without messing around with /proc.

Another fun fact, it also seems to kill based on what it determines to be excessive swap usage.

https://askubuntu.com/a/1423840

Facebook also wrote its own oom daemon, that systemd's was forked from:

https://github.com/facebookincubator/oomd

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-22.04-Systemd-OOMD

Providing evidence in the form of emails from her public records request for said coverup is new. This is the beginning of direct documentary evidence of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, with law enforcement collusion, that's definitely noteworthy. Not proof on its own but definitely creates leads for further investigation.

I really hope Leah can get answers and that Shelly didn't get treated like Lisa McPherson did.

This 100%.

It's a trap to follow the advice of investment savvy people that recommend higher risk options without taking into consideration the energy it takes to properly manage risky investments if someone isn't doing it for you. They falsely assume that what works for them (higher risk/return investments and closely following the markets for signals) is what also works for normal people that don't follow markets and financial news very much at all. They mean well and are genuinely trying to help people make the most money possible, but it's a huge blind spot that the time/energy/attention costs of investing aren't also taken into consideration.

It's the same reason I wouldn't recommend Linux to someone that isn't motivated enough to learn how to use it. It definitely can maximize what you get from your computer, but only at the expense of requiring more responsibility and time to learn how it works. Though, it's far easier to get solid Linux advice than solid investment advice and a bad financial decision is way harder to recover from than a bad technology choice.

> Sure and yet they have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Are you referring to Mastodon developers or server owners? For someone that has actually used Mastodon you still seem to be confusing where responsibility lies. And again, you can maintain your own cookie jar if you choose to by running your own server as you see fit.

> In fact I was an early adopter who has a coveted handle. I did the same with the various other social media.

Great, you must feel very special.

> I saw it for myself before she was banned. Kathy Griffin NEVER labelled herself as parody and was pushing 'vote for the democrats' under elon's name. Not only is this an actual crime, it was never allowed on twitter.

I wasn't referring to her, there were others, specifically @h3h3productions:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k8mya/twitter-bans-users-wi...

Actual crimes? What law specifically are you referring to? You do know parody is also considered a protected class of free speech? Do you really not see the irony here?

> My pihole blocks porn. I did not particularly go seeking this out on mastodon. I don't follow how you went from 'they allow porn, so no censorship' when there's a years long history of them censoring.

My point is that what constitutes "censorship" is relative. Twitter might be guilty of "censorship" by disallowing porn, just as any Mastodon instance might be guilty of "censorship" by banning someone for violating the community standards that a particular instance owner and/or community decides. By running a Pi-Hole that blocks porn, you are also choosing to participate in censorship.

The point being, that if you feel like you are being unfairly "censored" and not allowed to post what you want, then you can run your own Mastodon server. You are not being "censored" by the entirety of Mastodon, but rather a particular community. If that's the case you can run your own Mastodon server to decide how much you want to "censor", if anything at all. I'm also someone that sees social media cancel culture as problematic and believe that people should still have the freedom to saw terrible things that are not lawbreaking. However that is very different from freedom of venue for said speech, and again, Mastodon gives you the freedom to create your own venue for whatever speech you want to tolerate. There is no singular "them", you are not being oppressed but rather are being too lazy to run your own Mastodon server and community.

> No. This is why Elon needed to buy it and fire all the political activists. It may be a bastion of free speech in a few months.

I'm not going to argue that social media moderation in general is problematic, but "political activists" is really just a distraction from its owner's terrible decisionmaking and narcissism. I don't think you're following the situation closely enough and are blinded by worship. He fired a majority of Twitter's SRE's that keep the site up and running just from a technical standpoint for being too stupid and impatient to come up with a cogent plan to restructure the company (even Steve Jobs took a month to plan out layoffs when he returned to Apple). He did such a bad job with choosing who to lay off that just days later they have to start hiring people back. He chose to make the remaining employees work themselves to burnout for his artificially short deadlines to pay the price for his bad decisions. He scared off advertisers with his chaos in buying the company and just being a dick that no one wants to associate with.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-asks-some-laid-of...

These are all terrible ways to run a business and if you think that moderation can magically improve when there's not enough engineers to keep the site running and revenue streams are dying off, have fun with that fantasy.

But yep, it's definitely the fault of those pesky "political activists" and not the person in control that actually made the decisions and has a track record of being totally incapable of running a business and taking responsibility for his own actions. If and when things go south, there's no one to blame besides himself.

> I created my account on twitter only days ago. I must say, really loving the changes so far.

You proved my point precisely.

Mastodon isn't monolithic, and only exists because of server admins and people that work hard to build communities.

You sound like you've never actually used Mastodon or even understand how it works. Even as someone that's only used it a handful of times I noticed right away how much different it was from Twitter, in terms of what it allowed. I can't speak for all Mastodon instances but the one I used actually let people post NSFW content and porn so what you're saying about Mastodon not respecting free speech is unfounded. Are you considering Twitter a bastion of free speech where you aren't even able to mock its owner despite following the rules and labelling yourself as parody?

Mastodon isn't threatened by ideas and conversations, it's a culture shock between capitalist social media and homegrown self-hosted communities. The whole point is that the community decides for itself what it wants to look like, and if you don't like it then you run your own instance where you can do whatever you want. So having the freedom to run your own server and decide what content and community you want doesn't constitute respecting free speech? That is a freedom you will never get from Twitter.

The Twitter "refugees" joining it don't understand that self hosting an instance is a largely thankless job that requires lots of time and money just to keep the lights on, and don't understand decentralization and federation. They just want the same narcissistic and centralized self-promoting rewards structure as Twitter, while Mastodon was designed against that and that's why people originally chose it over Twitter. Instead it's supposed to be a chill place where people can be weird.

If really you want to host a gigantic, centralized Mastodon instance for that sort of Twitter experience that's also friendly to edgelords, no one is stopping you.

This looks great but wish it had an audio out so you can pipe it into effects and other things instead of just the speaker, though it wouldn't be too difficult to add them. It's also the perfect size to fit on a guitar pedalboard.

Use a linter, personally pylint has helped me learn to write more "Pythonic" code. If you're using vscode, you can easily integrate it or any other python linter.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/python/lintin...

If you also want a linter for bash, check out shellcheck: https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck

This 100%. My hell for a couple years was being an Excel forms "developer" as part of my job duties, and maintaining an extremely complex Excel spreadsheet (that should have been a web application) that I inherited from my predecessor. I wish I had taken screenshots but I think some of the most complex formulas in it had about a dozen levels of branching in them, and to make it worse it was used for a business critical process related to documentation requirements for consumer mortgage loans. The formula shown in the screenshot is representative, though to make it more manageable you can hide and label intermediate calculations in hidden columns and sheets. It looks like they may have done some of that based on the cell references, but they could still offload a lot more of that to different places.

There were days I spent several hours clicking "Evaluate Formula" button close to 100 times in a row to debug things like this. The syntax colorization definitely helps, but I would have killed for just the ability to pretty print a formula or set a breakpoint. I'm always shocked it doesn't have features like this that programmers depend on, but I wonder if part of that is because the people that would write something this complex in Excel have never experienced all the tools you get with "real" programming languages.

At home I was getting deeper into Linux and bash/python, and that made me resent Excel even more. I finally moved into the IT department and got really into PowerShell and training myself as a sysadmin, but I would still get requests about that damn spreadsheet for at least a year or two until they finally stopped asking. I used to enjoy problem solving challenges with Excel for a while, but in the end it became a parasitic relationship because of the time needed to fix issues and the complete lack of ownership and knowledge within the department that supposedly owned the form and process.

Critical decisions are made based on Excel formulas like these, (people getting fired, financial decisions, etc.), maintained by people that barely understand programming. Yes, it's nice that it's helped democratize automation and coding for non-technical people, but Excel just wasn't designed for things this complex. When your Excel formulas and macros start to look like this, you need better tools to manage the complexity and trust the maintenance to tech people instead of business people that don't fully grasp the monsters they're creating when they just keep using the only tool they know.