ddtaylor

One more reason to use Linux packages and tools in the repository.

As a KDE developer I can say that there are times that we have done things differently or taken the long road because we wanted to support Plasma Mobile.

It would have just been better to continue doing the desktop specific things and let the Plasma Mobile enthusiasts make those changes.

I still maintain some Launchpad packages and recipes. It's an insanely archaic system and borderline non-functional. I wouldn't wish it upon most.

That is half the problem. They often introduce neat ideas, but then fail or refuse to integrate them with he rest of the FOSS ecosystem. Then anyone who subscribes to their experiment is left cleaning up the mess and trying to migrate the features or ideas they like to the remaining projects that should have been extended in the first place.

I'm fine with a company getting things wrong from time to time. What I don't like is the attitude where they walk into the room and start moving the furniture around while smugly dismissing or ignoring talented and established people. Then after a bit of milling around they just give up and leave the room and everyone has to clean up the mess.

Things improved a lot with Gnome over the years, but as a fellow Gnome 2 user the initial release of 3 and the following years were a real kick in the teeth.

Things have improved, but the overall Gnome Foundation attitude hasn't improved. They are still very stubborn and remove basic features. This seemed to start when they did their infamous "focus groups" where they claim users can't understand basic things.

I get the desire to provide a cohesive experience, but I think you can do that while also giving people control.

KDE is shaping up to be much better and it's likely because Valve is providing commercial support and exposing it to a larger audience.

Cosmic is the new kid backed by system76 and its pretty nice too and may rescue Gnome in some ways in due time.

Snap is a terrible. It's the reason why I stopped using Debian based distros after decades for desktop usage.

Lying to users and turning apt install commands into shims for a barely functional replacement was disrespectful. Flatpak was and still is better, but even then if I say I want a system package you give me a system package. If you have infrastructural reasons why you cannot continue to provide that package then remove it, Debian based systems have many ways to provide such things.

Canonical did it because they wanted to boost Snap usage and if failed while sending a clear message they don't respect their user base.

Correct, and I used bzr quite a bit during that time. It was interesting in some ways, but Canonical pushed it for many years after git was obviously the better choice.

Even to this day there is a complex and archaic process of using Launchpad where git is tacked on because they stuck with Bazaar for so long.

Sadly, KDE and Gnome each spent a lot of time on the same things. Plasma Mobile has ate more time that could have went into making Plasma a better desktop.

Wayland was created in 2008. Mir was created in 2013.

Bazaar and Git were created around the exact same time.

Unity was abandoned after a failed attempt to circumvent Gnome 3. I was actually involved with the development of Compiz and they hired Sam to work on Unity, as he was one of the masterminds behind Compiz, but again they just didn't have the vision or execution to make it work.

I stopped listening to what Canonical says. They often get involved in things and disturb the ecosystem then abandon stuff or dig a "not invented here" hole.

Unity, Bazaar, Mir, Upstart, Snap, etc.

All of them had existing well established projects they attempted to uproot for no purpose other than Canonical wanted more control but they can't actually operate or maintain that control.

I don't think they are interested in those nuances. I think they just want to get free PR for a widget they are making.

Source available, meaning we just want to use open source as a marketing gimmick and don't do anything too interesting with it that could affect our bottom line.

These projects get shared on HN sometimes and it doesn't fit with the hacker ethos overall. Everyone wants to yell the cool part aloud, but mutter the asterisks and license language that takes power away from a would be tinkerer underneath their breath.

It could actually be marketed in a decent way, like saying if our company ever goes under you'll have these designs and the license to do anything you want with them. Even a conditional license like that would have more value.

As it stands this is a neat thing that some people can use and disregard the license that wants to hamstring you into doing free research and development for a company that produces a product that they tell you not to make.

Can an NDA be used as justification for a DMCA? Has it happened before?

HN just being curmudgeonly. Nothing you can do about it except disengage with the site. All social media is bound to have the same results.

When you are logged in to the Google Play Developer console there is an area to do the verification and once you get to a stage that breaks down (as explained) it just has a support form, which then happens via email.

Pay me and I'll post the email thread with verified headers. My contact info is in my profile.

Otherwise consider that you're fucking wrong and have little understanding of how communication with Google works?

Also go through my history and find the other times I have sharesd this same story. Do I get paid for each time?

I had a strange and similar interaction with Google recently. I was asked to do the Android developer verification, but then I missed a deadline at some point. Support said that I would need to create a new Google account for all of this. I said this was unacceptable as this was a Google account I had for nearly 25 years and I didn't want to create another. They said tough luck, go make the new account. Luckily, I had recently married and was making a new account for the name change. I tried to use that account, but it wanted a different phone number to use for verification, but I only have one number and you can't use Google voice numbers. I went back and told Google I cannot use the same phone number to verify and I'm not buying a burner phone to do this with. Then they just said "Ah, ok, we'll fix your original account then" and fixed the original account. This was literally a week of back and forth. Pointless waste of time.

I think a lot of people are really interested in what an LLM or something that can pass the Turing test "thinks" or generates as output.

Obviously it's for entertainment, but there are many channels where content creators post questions that have asked LLMs [1]

I also think many people are prompting image generators to see what they produce. I can remember a time when many images that involved asking ChatGPT to make someone aggressive would make the people in the image black, whereas using neutral terms would have them generate as white.

I also remember asking early GPT 4 LLMs to explain something to me like a 5 year old from X location and basically seeing the network produce varied responses as it was clear it had an idea of some 5 year olds from one city being inherently smarter than others. Then you can change it to say a 5 year old girl or a 5 year old boy and it would dumb things down a lot more for the boy.

[1]: https://youtube.com/@fatherphi

I think utility is a big component of that. I think there's a reason we're discussing these types of things instead of just cat pictures and memes.

Desktop Linux has been a little bit of a fragmented landscape over time, but I think that what keeps most organizations using Microsoft is that they have someone on staff dedicated to resolving all of these problems for all their users. Most organizations don't ask their regular employees to do things related to setting up software, making sure that they have access to network shares, etc, that's done by a dedicated IT staff that just happens to only be Windows right now for some reason.

Over time the web browser is becoming the only real software that is needed and that has simplified things.

Gaming has helped improve the Desktop Linux space, and Valve is a great force for change there. KDE has decent funding and adoption now.

Microsoft has been disrespecting their user base for a very long time now. This is not news. Stop giving them your money.

Raising a bunch of money to recreate the wheel.

A dog writing sounds like an interesting story.

Because an attacker will do that the same thing and without sharing that knowledge good actors are in the dark. It's the same reason we share known security problems, since there will be bad actors that discover the same bugs and use them for much worse.

Those are good arguments to be made regardless of who wrote them. I'm all for actual arguments against the work instead of hand waving it away as AI and being too lazy to say what is wrong with the work.

Can the same argument be made about a writer that is blind? If a blind person submitted work about fonts would we be equally as dismissive?

If a truly amazing thing was released tomorrow that had massive utility you wouldn't care how long it took to create and would just use it.

I get the attention economy is messed up right now, but using it as a justification for being curmudgeonly or abandoning principles is lame.

Often the commentor wants to take a shortcut and just say it's AI written and hand wave it away.

A comment should argue the merit of the work not attack the source or medium.

I read a lot of comments on HN that say something is not hard, yet don't provide a POC of their own or link to research they have knowledge of.

I also read a lot of comments on HN that start by attacking the source of the information, such as saying it was AI assisted, instead of the actual merits of the work.

The HN community is becoming curmudgeonly and using AI tooling as the justification.

I have a 4TB hard drive that contains thousands of movies and tens of thousands of TV episodes. It feeds into a Jellyfin server.