nekusoul

nekusoul , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Wait, am I missing something here? Are there countries where you don't have all options on the ballot, or at least an empty space?

Edit: Saw your explanation in another comment. Wouldn't having to bring your own ballot also invalidate voting secrecy, since bringing your own indicates that you most likely intent to vote for an unlisted party (and, in reverse, anyone using the regular ballot voting for a party that's listed)?

nekusoul , 7 days ago

I think the examples given are just poorly chosen. When it comes to regular applications and DRM, then yes, that's ridiculous.

On the other hand, when it comes to gaming, then yes, give me all the raytracing and visible pores on NPCs. Most modern games also scale down well enough that it's not a problem to have those features.

nekusoul , 7 days ago

The topic is bloatware, not games.

The original post includes two gaming examples, so it's actually about both, which is a bit unfortunate, because as you've said, they're two very different things.

nekusoul , 21 days ago

Recall won't take snapshots of [...] DRM-protected content.

At least the movie industry will survive this unscathed. Thanks Microsoft. 👍

nekusoul , 21 days ago

The non-fun answer is that they're most likely just using the default screenshot mechanism, which already blocks that. Other programs like KeePassXC, which also hides itself from screenshots and recordings (unless allowed) will probably not be included either.

nekusoul , 22 days ago

Some of the other comments show that off pretty well. When people say they want a dumb phone they usually want a "dumb" phone that also has X, where X may be their favorite messaging app but it can also be anything else really, like a good camera or support for NFC payments.

nekusoul , 26 days ago

... which is also not open-source. But yeah, really good music player and organizer.

nekusoul , 28 days ago

Looking into the metadata of the included PDF version reveals that it's from 2004, so even a bit older than that.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

All they had to do was to allow me to move the taskbar to the side and I'm only partially joking.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Don't worry. There's still plenty of ESP32 waiting to be flashed with ESPHome and placed into their own little enclosure out there.

Source: Me, who's got a Bluetooth Proxy for my adjustable desk and some small LED strips running, with a soil moisture sensor planned as my next quick project.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

That whole industry can cease to exist from one day to the next and nothing of value would be lost - if anything value would be gained for the average person

That last point can't be stressed enough. The whole marketing sector is essentially a net negative to society because neither an actual product gets produced nor any useful service is offered.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

If you want to skip ahead, there are also a few ways to get Home Assistant running that don't need any level of Linux competency:

• They sell their own devices that are more or less plug & play.
• Installing Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi is just flashing the image onto an SD card.
• Installing Home Assistant OS onto a dedicated device involves shortly booting into Linux from USB to flash Home Assistant OS onto the internal disk.

If you don't want to run Home Assistant OS, and instead want to run Home Assistant as one of several applications running on a Server, that's when you need to start getting comfortable administrating a Linux server.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Only sort of related, but it's kind of insane how many different phones Samsung releases. Checking GSMArena, they've apparently released an average of two phones per month over the last year.

Seems a bit overkill to me.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Even the PC manufacturers selling "gaming" PCs using integrated graphics aren't usually this brazen about it.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

As long as that applies to all browsers equally. I don't know the current state of things but if I remember correctly, Firefox already circumvented the earlier default protection method, because Microsoft made it so that their own Edge browser didn't require those extra steps that were forced upon all other browsers.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Same. Not being able to move the taskbar, alongside all the other downgrades to it and the start menu is what got me to check out Linux as a desktop OS for real, and not just out of curiosity. So far, I don't see going back.

And I was even one of the few dozen people who loved Win8. At least there the points that got criticized were due to sweeping and bold changes. Win11 on the other hand feels like the same as 10 but with arbitrary features removed in the core part of the OS.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Not completely though. A while ago I've had a wave of these comments on a 3 year old post of mine. They got deleted after I've reported them at least, though I don't know if that action was done by a mod of the subreddit or site-wide admin.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Personally, these services are all a bit sketchy anyway. Mostly because they advertise themselves as the magic bullet to remove all your unwanted personal data from the internet, but ignores that this removal relies on the cooperation of the third parties in possession of your data. Most notably, this won't work if your data has been exposed in a data breach.

To me it very much feels like VPN ads. Technically a working product, but advertised in a very dishonest way.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

This particular issue was caused by a breaking change in Plasma 6 and bad handling in a specific global theme.

The general security concerns that were being brought to light however apply to all versions.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

Good idea. If we do this and also add some sort of positive label on devices that work locally and are interoperable it might start a positive feedback loop: More people become aware of the issue or simply want the device with the better label when choosing in a store, leading to more manufacturers producing more devices that aren't cloud-dependent.

Right now I often see the opposite happening: Manufacturers who don't even put on their packaging that their system is really just Zigbee under the hood for example.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

Or you might want to use G-Sync or other forms of VRR on a multimonitor setup, which you can't do under X11 and is broken on Wayland.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

I think the first one can be circumvented by just using a DP->HDMI adapter. But yeah, those other points are why I'm a bit hesitant about swapping to AMD myself.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

I wish that were the case. It's obviously not a thing at all in Gnome (yet), but from my experience and what others are reporting, VRR is also pretty broken on KDE Wayland. It works fine 90% of the time, but at certain loads it starts rendering frames out of order. As far as I can gather this won't change until there's proper esync support across the whole render chain for NVIDIA, starting with the drivers.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Huh, when I first checked out Hyprland under 535 drivers, it was barely working under Wayland, whereas Gnome and KDE worked at least decently well. Might have to check it out again now that some time has passed, although I still hope that the next beta driver will finally fix most things.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

It simplified cleaning a lot when all you have to clean is a single large pane of glass

Alternatively, a combined oven+stove unit where the knobs are on the front panel and can be pushed in when not in use. That way you have a single pane of glass and knobs that aren't an annoyance when cleaning.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

Someone already explained it, but here's a ranking of the different methods which are commonly used in terms of security, from bad to good:

• No 2FA
• SMS/Phone-based TOTP (TOTP = the normally 6 digit code)
• App-based TOTP
• Hardware-token-based TOTP
• Hardware-token (Fido2/WebAuthn/Passkeys)

nekusoul , 3 months ago

Yup. I obviously don't hate the people doing this, quite the opposite if anything, but it's so silly that it's a thing in the first place.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

Exactly. And just to be clear, because it's annoying me every time people gloss over this, it's not just some percentage points lost in the conversion of energy, it's actually ~75% of the energy that goes to waste, from energy production to the final motion of the wheels. EVs on the other hand only waste ~25% of energy. Even with the wishful thinking that the hydrogen can simply be created in times of energy overproduction, you can't beat a factor of 3.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

It's not free though. There's such a thing called 'opportunity costs': If I have the choice between a 'free candy machine' that spits out one candy every hour, and one that spits out three candies every hour, I know what I'll choose.

I also wasn't aware you ware talking about ICE powered hydrogen cars, where the efficiency is even more comically abysmal.

nekusoul , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It seems to me like you're comparing the costs for building one at the most out there location possible. Putting the questions aside if building anything in such locations would ever be profitable enough for something to be build, or if fast-charging is absolutely necessary: This absolutely isn't true for the majority/average location, where your solution is the one that prohibitively expensive, not to mention that a good chunk of people wouldn't even need a charging station at all when they can charge at home, maybe even using the solar panels already on their roof.

There may be some limited space for hydrogen ICE cars on the market, but it won't be the solution that'll see widespread adoption and support by car manufacturers as long as there's a much cheaper and comfortable solution for 99.9% of people on earth (number made up).

Though if anything, I predict that specialized EVs with swappable batteries (which already exist) that can then be charged slowly with solar will become viable as they're much cheaper and efficient in those areas.

nekusoul , 4 months ago

Not exactly the same thing, but the xone (XBox One controller driver for Linux) project disabled Issues on Github and uses a Discord server instead. Which is stupid as heck, because I'm not going to join a Discord server just to check if someone has already encountered the same issue as me.

nekusoul , 4 months ago

The naming of WSL sort of makes sense because it's actually build upon a kernel feature, which hass been mostly unused for more than a decade, called subsystems. There's the 'subsystem for Win32', which is the primary one that all Windows applications use, and then there were also the 'subsystem for POSIX' as well as the 'subsystem for 'OS/X'. WSL was simply a reboot of that technology.

The funny part is that this turned out to be to complex so WSL 2 ditched all that and simply uses a VM running the actual kernel in the background, so the name isn't even accurate anymore.

nekusoul , 4 months ago

As someone who has previously argued that user/kernel-level distinction is pretty pointless (along the lines of this XKCD), the multi-user aspect is something I haven't considered before and actually quite important.

nekusoul , 5 months ago

Not sure how standard this is, but on Pixel phones the default is no auto rotation, but when the phone detects rotation it will display a tiny rotate button in the corner of the screen for just a few seconds. Best of both worlds IMO.

nekusoul , 5 months ago

The way WSL1 worked is actually quite interesting: The NT kernel always had the capability to run multiple subsystems, with Win32 only being one of them and there were subsystems available for OS/2, POSIX and later UNIX. WSL1 was pretty much a revival of that feature. So WSL1 is indeed somewhat like Wine, but making heavy use of some features built into the kernel. So yeah, no real boot process happening.

(Also it's kinda stupid that the 'S' in WSL2 still stands for 'subsystem', despite not using that feature anymore.)

nekusoul OP , 5 months ago

A nice grid lined notebook and a mechanical pencil is still my favorite.

If only my default font wasn't so bad that it causes data loss.

nekusoul , 5 months ago

it is kinda wild that people abandon Windows 7 because of Steam

There's this certain subsection of Win7/8 diehards that absolutely confuse me. It's one thing to keep using them on old systems, but I've seen a few people posting about their brand-new PC, equipped with RTX 4090s and 13th gen I9 processors, who are adamant on running those outdated operating systems as their only OS. Such a waste of money.

nekusoul , 8 months ago

What kind of content are you guys getting from there?

For me it's probably best described as "background chatter", so mostly a bunch of different news sites that aren't important enough for me to go into my RSS feed, bots posting notifications, and random thoughts from bloggers.

Any stuff like that to help onboarding Mastodon?

There are those that help you to stay on your home instance as well, but the big one for me is StreetPass for Mastodon, which finds and collects Mastodon accounts as you browse the web. That way you can organically build your network without much effort. You'd be surprised how many accounts from news sites, open source projects and people with blogs you can find that way.