Do not want an AI browser. I’m more likely to switch to a text-only CLI browser.
Orion is a fine choice for Mac or iPad. Basically Safari with Firefox/Chrome extension support, more customizability, and a few other niceties.
Edit: not open source, FYI.
My cynical ass is having trouble finding a the dark side of this.
The last time I did any html/css work was about 15 years ago. Now I’m curious what’s changed.
If Civilization II taught me one thing, it’s that ongoing payments are an absolute scam… Unless you’re planning to declare war anyway.
Yeah, I meant for AI stuff specifically. Their main products are…well I wouldn’t say “good” but they successfully choked out all competition in the 90s so…
Microsoft has nothing worth using. Microsoft hasn’t made anything that’s even worth talking about. Anyone with an OpenAI key and an afternoon to kill could make something every bit as good as what Microsoft has done. They put the absolute bare minimum of effort into everything they’ve done with AI.
The only advantage they have is customer lock-in. Historically, that’s usually enough for them. I hope it’s not this time.
Eventually Microsoft will probably buy a company with people who know what the fuck they’re doing. I think that’s their only way forward because it looks like the brain drain has finally caught up with them.
Binary Eye
It’s a QR/barcode/etc. reader. Very simple, and after trying like a dozen different QR readers I’ve found it to be the most reliable.
I know that a lot of brands’ built-in camera apps can read QR codes nowadays, but I find a dedicated app faster than the all-purpose camera apps I’ve used, and if you use open-source camera apps like AOSP’s or OpenCamera, then you won’t have that feature built in anyway.
There is certainly a very big amount of fuckery going on right now with nvidia drivers.
“Right now” meaning every year for the past decade or two.
It’s always something with Nvidia drivers. Performance+stability is more the exception than the rule.
That said, AMD drivers have a bad rep too. Personally I’ve had zero issues since I switched to AMD but experiences seen to vary a lot from what I’ve read.
Before that, I don’t think I ever got through a full year without at least one weekend lost to troubleshooting Nvidia bullshit. CUDA is a pain in the ass even on Windows.
Jesus Christ what a dumb take. But at least they didn’t say that millennials are killing the cell phone industry. I guess that doesn’t make for good clickbait anymore.
Reminds me if the parable of the broken window, in which French economist Frédéric Bastiat explains the painfully-obvious truth that breaking windows is generally a bad thing, even though it drums up business for the glass maker.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
The problem here is education.
And I’m not just talking about “average joes” who don’t know the first thing about statistics. It is mind-boggling how many people with advanced degrees do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and will argue until they’re blue in the face that it doesn’t affect results.
AI is not helping. Modern machine learning is basically a correlation engine with no concept of causation. The idea of using it to predict the future is dead on arrival. The idea of using it in any prescriptive role in social sciences is grotesque; it will never be more than a violation of human dignity.
Billions upon billions of dollars are being invested in putting lipstick on that pig. At this point it is more lipstick than pig.
Debian Stable staying true to form!
Thanks for the writeup. Good stuff.
I’m a software developer first and a gamer second. Being a “gaming” distro does not detract from anything else, really. It just means that getting proper GPU acceleration is easy, and you’re likely to want that for development too. That was actually why I chose Bazzite. I was tired of wrestling with CUDA and ROCm.
It’s not “gaming” vs “developing”. That’s a false dichotomy.
The real choice is immutable vs traditional. And I’ll admit, immutable distros have a big learning curve. But it forces you to learn techniques that will make your life easier no matter where you go. The time I spent wrestling with dependencies on Debian or Ubuntu or OpenSuse just because I didn’t know about Distrobox…
Unless your needs are very narrow and unchanging, you’re likely to run into something that’s a giant pain in the ass no matter which distro you choose. I used to use Ubuntu LTSR so I could install a few big things in easy mode, but it made everything else harder because it was so outdated. Switched to OpenSuse Tumbleweed and everything was modern but those few vendors don’t support it so I had to wrestle with dependencies.
The answer to this problem is Distrobox. It’s the answer on Ubuntu, it’s the answer on OpenSuse, and it’s the answer on Bazzite. I’m never going back to dependency hell because I can just run everything the environment it is specifically designed for.
If you’re wondering “should I use distro X, Y, or Z”, the answer is simply “yes”. :D
On bazzite, your search order for apps/packages should be something like:
ujust. This is more for general configs than specific apps, but take a look at what it offers.rpm-ostree is a last resort because it compromises the “atomic” principle of the system, but in a pinch it will give you access to anything you could get with dnf on a regular Fedora install.
Don’t sleep on Distrobox. I have a Debian box so I can run Signal from its official repo and install Geany with both GUI and CLI support. Once you export applications from distrobox they behave like first-class citizens within your desktop.
I strongly recommend trying Distrobox. If you instead hop distros, you’re going to find yourself in a similar situation eventually, where something is unreasonably difficult. That’s why Distrobox exists; so you can get the best of all worlds.
The actual paper presents the findings differently. To quote:
Our results clearly indicate that the resolution limit of the eye is higher than broadly assumed in the industry
They go on to use the iPhone 15 (461ppi) as an example, saying that at 35cm (1.15 feet) it has an effective “pixels per degree” of 65, compared to “individual values as high as 120 ppd” in their human perception measurements. You’d need the equivalent of an iPhone 15 at 850ppi to hit that, which would be a tiny bit over 2160p/UHD.
Honestly, that seems reasonable to me. It matches my intuition and experience that for smartphones, 8K would be overkill, and 4K is a marginal but noticeable upgrade from 1440p.
If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish
Three paragraphs in and they’ve moved the goalposts from HD (1080p) to 1440p. :/ Anyway, I agree that 2.5 meters is generally too far from a 44" 4K TV. At that distance you should think about stepping up a size or two. Especially if you’re a gamer. You don’t want to deal with tiny UI text.
It’s also worth noting that for film, contrast is typically not that high, so the difference between resolutions will be less noticeable — if you are comparing videos with similar bitrates. If we’re talking about Netflix or YouTube or whatever, they compress the hell out of their streams, so you will definitely notice the difference if only by virtue of the different bitrates. You’d be much harder-pressed to spot the difference between a 1080p Bluray and a 4K Bluray, because 1080p Blurays already use a sufficiently high bitrate.
Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?
The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.
Alien meaning “external”.
Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.
Thanks for posting the solution!
If you happen to be using a BTRFS or XFS file system, you might want to try duperemove. It will help you reclaim usable disk space without deleting any files, by using those filesystems’ built-in support for data deduplication and copy-on-write. In other words, it will make duplicate files point to the same data on disk, but still work as individual files. Files will appear and function exactly the same, and editing one copy will not change another (unlike with hard links, for example). That way it won’t interfere with cases like Flatpak or Python virtual environments where you really need multiple copies of the same files.
I have a bookmarklet to enable text selection on any web page that tries to block it that way.
Here it is for your convenience. Bookmark it and give a try on the linked blog post:
javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("* { user-select:text !important }", 1);
Can’t remember where I swiped that from. Probably some ancient StackOverflow thread.
Generally speaking, xz provides higher compression.
None of these are well optimized for images. Depending on your image format, you might be better off leaving those files alone or converting them to a more modern format like JPEG-XL. Supposedly JPEG-XL can further compress JPEG files with no additional loss of quality, and it also has an efficient lossless mode.
Do any of them have the ability to recover from a bit flip or at the very least detect with certainty whether the data is corrupted or not when extracting?
As far as I know, no common compression algorithms feature built-in error correction, nor does tar. This is something you can do with external tools, instead.
For validation, you can save a hash of the compressed output. md5 is a bad hashing algorithm but it’s still generally fine (and widely used) for this purpose. SHA256 is much more robust if you are worried about dedicated malicious forgery, and not just random corruption.
Usually, you’d just put hash files alongside your archive files with appropriate names, so you can manually check them later. Note that this will not provide you with information about which parts of the archive are corrupt, only that it is corrupt.
For error correction, consider par2. Same idea: you give it a file, and it creates a secondary file that can be used alongside the original for error correction later.
I also want the files to be extractable with just the Linux/Unix standard binutils
That is a key advantage of this method. Adding a hash file or par file does not change the basic archive, so you don’t need any special tools to work with it.
You should also consider your file system and media. Some file systems offer built-in error correction. And some media types are less susceptible to corruption than others, either due to physical durability or to baked-in error correction.
Hard to say what the used market is like, but the cheapest cards that would be broadly similar in performance would probably be the Arc A580, RX 5700 or RX 6600. This page has some rankings that are reasonable for comparison: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388-2.html
But…surely there’s a way to just stick with the latest supported driver, right? Or is Arch truly an “upgrade or die” distro?