how to avoid LLM suctioning my data
I hate reddit because it sells my data to AI and they killed the apps and Steve is a pigboy:
reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/com…
But if I post on Lemmy - AI just suctions my data for free ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I hate that.
so how do we handle this?
I dont want to feed AI, what can I do?
Saturday, August 9, 2025
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Russia’s war against Ukraine
People gather at Independence Square in Kyiv to attend the funeral ceremony of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna on Aug. 08, 2025 who reported from occupied territories before her detention and death in Russian custody. (Andre Luis Alves/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Trump, Putin to meet in Alaska on Aug. 15 for peace talks. “The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that “further details will follow.”
Putin proposed halting war in exchange for Ukraine’s eastern regions in meeting with Witkoff, WSJ reports. Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced a sweeping proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine during a meeting with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, offering a halt in hostilities in exchange for Ukraine’s eastern regions, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Aug. 8, citing European and Ukrainian officials.
Peace talks will include ‘some swapping of territories,’ Trump says ahead of proposed meeting with Putin. U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Aug. 8 that a potential peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv would likely include “some swapping of territories,” as Trump prepares to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week.
US, Russia discuss deal to cement Moscow’s hold on occupied Ukrainian territories, Bloomberg reports. The proposed deal is aimed at freezing the conflict and laying the groundwork for a ceasefire and technical negotiations toward a final peace settlement, the news agency reported.
Poland’s Tusk says Russia-Ukraine war could be frozen ‘sooner rather than later.’ “There is hope for this. Today is the deadline for the ultimatum,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a news conference.
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Putin holds calls with key allies Xi, Lukashenko ahead of Trump summit. Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko are among Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest international allies.
Watchdog claims Russian troops enter Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, military says attack repelled. “They (Russian troops) are now regrouping for further attempts, but remain positioned in Donetsk Oblast,” said Victor Tregubov, spokesperson of the Dnipro group of forces.
Ukrainian drones strike 23,000 targets in July, kill 5,000 Russian troops, military chief says. Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said first-person-view (FPV) drones and night bombers were responsible for most of the hits.
Ukraine kills 12 soldiers in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai, intelligence source claims. According to the source, two explosions near the unit’s checkpoint killed at least 12 Russian soldiers and injured dozens more. Russian military equipment was also destroyed, they added.
Pentagon can divert some weapons meant for Ukraine to US stockpiles, CNN reports. According to the sources, the memorandum permits the Pentagon to reclaim weapons produced for Ukraine under the U.S. Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) and return them to U.S. stockpiles.
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Ukraine war latest: US, Russia discuss deal to cement Moscow’s hold on occupied Ukrainian territories, Bloomberg reports.
The U.S. and Russia are seeking to reach a deal to cement Moscow’s occupation of Ukrainian territories and end the war, Bloomberg reported on Aug. 8, citing undisclosed sources. The news come as U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are expected to meet as soon as next week.
Photo: Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images
We choose to stay in Ukraine — to bring the world the truth about Russia’s brutal war.
If you think the truth matters — here’s your chance to stand for it.
Human cost of Russia’s war
Kyiv holds farewell for journalist tortured, killed in Russian captivity. Journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna’s death has become a stark symbol of Russia’s systemic abuse of Ukrainian civilians and the brutal risks faced by journalists in occupied territories.
3 killed, 19 injured in Russian attacks on Ukraine over past day. According to Ukraine’s Air Force, Russian forces launched 104 Shahed-type attack drones, decoy drones, and eight rocket-powered kamikaze drones overnight.
General Staff: Russia has lost 1,061,350 troops in Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022. The number includes 1,040 casualties Russian forces suffered just over the past day.
Why Americans, Europeans choose to fight for Ukraine
International response
EU approves reduced $3.7 billion in Ukraine Facility aid amid reform delays. The EU Council approved a regular tranche payment of 3.2 billion euros ($3.7 billion) under the Ukraine Facility mechanism on Aug. 8, a smaller amount than initially planned due to Kyiv’s failure to complete key reforms.
China vows to continue buying Russian oil amid Trump’s tariff threats. “It is legitimate and lawful for China to conduct normal economic, trade and energy cooperation with all countries around the world, including Russia,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in response to question about Russian oil purchases posed by Bloomberg. “We will continue to adopt reasonable energy security measures in accordance with our national interests.”
In other news
Armenia, Azerbaijan sign peace deal at White House ceremony, plan to nominate Trump for Nobel Peace Prize. “For more than 35 years, Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought a bitter conflict that resulted in tremendous suffering for both nations… Many tried to find a resolution… and they were unsuccessful. With this accord, we’ve finally succeeded in making peace,” U.S. President Donald Trump said.
Russia’s budget deficit hits $61 billion, already surpassing annual target by 30%. The deficit jumped by 1.2 trillion rubles ($15 billion) last month alone, “mainly due to a decline in the average price of oil,” the Russian Finance Ministry said.
Putin presented award to Witkoff meant for CIA official whose son died fighting for Russia, CBS News reports. Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the Order of Lenin award to U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff to pass along to a senior CIA official whose son died fighting for Russia in Ukraine, CBS News reported on Aug. 8.
Russia reportedly pushes to replace PMC Wagner with state-run Africa Corps in CAR. Russia’s Defense Ministry reportedly demanded cash payments for security services, marking a sharp departure from previous arrangements under Wagner that involved compensation with natural resources.
UEFA pays $13 million in ‘solidarity’ money to Russian football clubs while Ukraine fails to receive funds, Guardian reports. At the same time, five Ukrainian clubs have not received similar payments due to restrictions by a Swiss bank, allegedly because they are located in a “zone of military operations,” the Guardian reported.
Romania reportedly suspects Russian sabotage behind Azeri crude oil contamination. The crude mixed with organic chloride, which was transported through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, could have seriously corroded infrastructure at OMV Petrom’s Petrobrazi refinery, potentially triggering a national fuel crisis, G4Media reported.
Russia reportedly shifts oil exports to China after Trump’s India tariffs. Barrels of Russia’s Urals oil are now being offered at a discount to both state-owned and private Chinese refineries, Bloomberg reported.
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Russia reportedly shifts oil exports to China after Trump's India tariffs
Barrels of Russia's Urals oil are now being offered at a discount to both state-owned and private Chinese refineries, Bloomberg reported.Tim Zadorozhnyy (The Kyiv Independent)
EU has CLOUD act analogue too
Hi everyone. Probably not everyone knows but EU has CLOUD Act analogue too - it has a name "e-evidence - cross border access". so this is a description of framework from the official site - "create a European Production Order: this will allow a judicial authority in one Member State to obtain electronic evidence (such as emails, text or messages in apps, as well as information to identify a perpetrator as a first step) directly from a service provider or its legal representative in another Member State, which will be obliged to respond within 10 days, and within 8 hours in cases of emergency (compared to up to 120 days for the existing European Investigation Order or an average of 10 months for a Mutual Legal Assistance procedure);"
basically it means that the national authorities of the country where companies are registered no longer has juducial control over law protection of their companies - so for example if extreme right government of Poland will be dissappointed with your post on Mastodon about Pegasus surveillance used by them against political journalists by new Framework they will issue juicial order to obtain your mastodon account details, ip, email etc and will electronically request your mastodon provider (which reside for example in Belgium) to give this data to them withis 8 hours or 10 days (without possibility to make appelation) basically overriding national courts of country of registration of the provider.
Do you believe that EU goverment respect right to privacy and national souvereginity as a fundamental right?
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There's been evidence in their github repo that they're using LLMs to code their tools now.
It's making me reconsider using them.
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LLM is avoided by many experienced developers and competent medium and small companies.
Tools like cursor are sometimes ok for small things like people learning, or to generate boilerplate.
But it is seen by some as a warning flag when it’s in source code for larger projects
This comment is meaningless.
What red flags? Why is it a red flag is an be experienced developer used cursor on a larger project? Put it into words.
When adding code this way, one needs to look it over and read to fix bugs or things that are not quite correct; stats show experienced developers often are faster not using this approach because debugging existing code takes longer than writing it fresh.
The speed is not the issue.
What matters is sometimes subtle bugs are introduced that require several people to catch. If at all. These issues might be unique to the Llm.
Having large sections of generated code offers the possibility of hard to find problems.
Some codes are more sensitive to such issues.
The details of how the code was added, and what it does, may render this issue harmless or very much a problem to be avoided.
This is why it’s a flag and not a condemnation
No wAy something popular and megacorp-embraced could be bad. Asbestos, lead pipes, 2-digit dates, NFTs, opiates, sub-prime lending, algorithmic content, pervasive surveillance, etc must have just been flukes.
All technology weilds a double edged sword.
Sure, but with all the mistakes I see LLMs making in places where professionals should be quality checking their work (lawyers, judges, internal company email summaries, etc) it gives me pause considering this is a privacy and security focused company.
It's one thing for AI to hallucinate cases, and another entirely to forget there's a difference between =
and ==
when the AI bulk generates code. One slip up and my security and privacy could be compromised.
You're welcome to buy in to the AI hype. I remember the dot com bubble.
You’re welcome to buy in to the AI hype.
We've been using 'AI' for quite some time now, well before the advent of AI Rice Cookers. It's really not that new.
I use AI when I master my audio tracks. I am clinically deaf and there are some frequency ranges that I can't hear well enough to master. So I lean heavily on AI. I use AI for explaining unfamiliar code to me. Now, I don't run and implement such code in a production environment. You have to do your due diligence. If you searched for the same info in a search engine, you still have to do your due diligence. Search engine results aren't always authoritative. It's just that Grok is much faster at searching and in fact, lists the sources it pulled the info from. Again, much faster than engaging a search engine and slogging through site after site.
If you want to trade accuracy for speed, that's your prerogative.
AI has its uses. Transcribing subtitles, searching images by description, things like that. But too many times, I've seen AI summaries that, if you read the article the AI cited, it can be flatly wrong on things.
What's the point of a summary that doesn't actually summarize the facts accurately?
You can't practically "trust but verify" with LLMs. I task an LLM to summarize an article. If I want to check its work, I have to go and read that whole article myself. The checking takes as much time as just writing the summary myself. And this is even worse with code, as you have to be able to deconstruct the AI's code and figure out its internal logic. And by the time you've done that, it's easier to just make the code yourself.
It's not that you can't verify the work of AI. It's that if you do, you might as well just create the thing yourself.
There it is. The bold-faced lie.
"I don't blindly trust AI, I just ask it to summarize something, read the output, then read the source article too. Just to be sure the AI summarized it properly."
Nobody is doing double the work. If you ask AI a question, it only gets a vibe check at best.
Nobody is doing double the work. If you ask AI a question, it only gets a vibe check at best.
Hey there BluescreenOfDeath, sup. Good to meet you. My name is 'Nobody'.
It's easy to post on a forum and say so.
Maybe you even are actually asking AI questions and researching whether or not it's accurate.
Perhaps you really are the world's most perfect person.
But even if that's true, which I very seriously doubt, then you're going to be the extreme minority. People will ask AI a question, and if they like the answers given, they'll look no further.
If they don't like the answers given, they'll ask the AI with different wording until they get the answer they want.
As the other guy said, double edged sword. Asbestos was fucking great, and is still used for certain things because it's great. The poor interaction with human biology was the other side of the sword.
An aside, I just pulled a fuck load of vinyl asbestos tile out of a house a year ago and while it wasn't actually all that dangerous because I took proper precautions it's sorta scary anyway cause of the poor interaction thing.
It's a single data data point, nothing more, nothing less. But that single data point is evidence of using LLMs in their code generation.
Time will tell if this is a molehill or a mountain. When it comes to data privacy, given that it just takes one mistake and my data can be compromised, I'm going to be picky about who I park my data with.
I'm not necessarily immediately looking to jump ship, but I consider it a red flag that they're using developer tools centered around using AI to generate code.
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Especially proton, their image of privacy does not reflect reality at all
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you still have to trust them that they don't save the plaintext email somewhere else before they run tbeir encryption.
and that's what I do. I trust that they are doing it. what better can I do? the other option is to use a provider that 100% is not doing that, which does not seem to be better. or hosting it for myself, which maybe a small minority of people are capable to do it
what purpose of the site if you cant use it for registration?
I'm saying the site not working is likely unintentional, and the result of some sort of technical error.
Have you actually asked proton support about this issue, if so what have they said?
It seems like you got frustrated and instead of trying to get help you decided to complain on lemmy.
The average response time is nowhere near a month.
It seems more and more this was a bad faith post. I'm not sure I believe you even use proton.
You say that and yet you feel the need to respond and down vote.
If you didn't care about what others thought you wouldn't have made the post.
Do not believe other, try by yourself.
You are blocked for lack of interest in conversation.
Email green, secure, simple and ad-free - posteo.de - Features
Posteo is an innovative email provider that is concerned with sustainability and privacy and is completely ad-free. Our email accounts, calendars and address books can be synchronised - we use comprehensive encryption.posteo.de
Seems a fair question to ask someone who makes a post to direct people away from a service under the presumption that they were trying to use it, only to find in the comments that they already use a different service that they not only enjoy, but are happy to freely advertise for.
Also, your justification for their lack of crypto payments is that they use a payment system they designed themselves, which I find funny since most of the complaints I see about Proton (granted, not yours) is the unverifiability of their operations, leaning on "Just trust me, bro." which is the same thing as this site's payment processing system. 🤭
- You don't know if I signed up for posteo after or before tryibg with proton.
- You are blocked now for offrnsive behaviour and insinuations about me.
Have a good day bro, LOL
- Of course not, because you refuse to answer a simple question.
- Just because you were offended doesn't mean I was being offensive. Learn the difference, kid.
They had a warrant.
It's okay to have privacy concerns regarding that, but don't make shit up to make it sound worse than it was.
There is a relatively small number of shared Tor exit node IP addresses.
So it’s more likely using Tor will trigger “too many attempts for IP” throttling for any service with bot protection.
It’s nothing against Tor, but is an expected side-affect of attempting to be anonymous by sharing the same IP address with many people.
Just tested it, same here. Clearnet works but tor not. I will contact support since part of the reason I like to pay for unlimited is to subsidize free, anonymous accounts.
Edit: here is my other comment:
I previously commented I would write the support, now I actually read the docs first and found out why:
If you want to create an account over tor you can, just not via the clearnet URL, probably due to rate limiting by IP adress. However if you use their Onion Link as specified in this article by their support (proton.me/support/tor-setup) it works just fine (as far as I just tested). So great! Because using .onion services is far more secure than accessing clearnet over Tor anyway.
Here the url, verify it with the link in the support article tho: protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleeg…
that sucks, this means no more hiding metadata. However, they aren't ditching switzerland (yet) - this only happens if the government applies the new surveillance rules which is not set in stone yet.
I use pgp and host mail myself. It's not as hard, and it's by far less problematic than a lot of people make it out to be. Don't trust hosters.
that sucks, this means no more hiding metadata. However, they aren’t ditching switzerland (yet) - this only happens if the government applies the new surveillance rules which is not set in stone yet.
I could agree with you but my threat model currently allows me to use third party providers
I previously commented I would write the support, now I actually read the docs first and found out why:
If you want to create an account over tor you can, just not via the clearnet URL, probably due to rate limiting by IP adress. However if you use their Onion Link as specified in this article by their support (proton.me/support/tor-setup) it works just fine (as far as I just tested). So great! Because using .onion services is far more secure than accessing clearnet over Tor anyway.
Here the url, verify it with the link in the support article tho: protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleeg…
While on dread recently I stumbled across this old post regarding issues with their onion adresses encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-fact…
When a user makes a new account with Protonmail on TOR they are re-directed from Protonmail’s “.onion” to “.com” address. This breaks your secure encrypted connection to their onion address, enabling your identification. There are absolutely no technical reasons for this feature. In fact, the only other websites that operate like this are suspected NSA/CIA Honeypots.
Disturbing facts about ProtonMail
Some disturbing facts and my personal experience with Proton AGencryp.ch
Ah so your last hundred job applications went nowhere? Here, have this short time gig
Your last million tinder swipes got you nothing? Here, have this guy for the summer
ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine
ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine
CEO Sam Altman says it's like having a superpower, but GPT-5 struggles with basic questions.Matt Novak (Gizmodo)
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Go ahead and use the tool that works for you. But don’t forget to test your tools on things you know every once in a while.
Ok boomer.
An LLM cannot be anything other than a bullshit machine. It just guesses at what the next word would likely be. And because it's trained on source data that contains truths as well as non truths, by chance sometimes what comes out is true. But it doesn't "know" what is true and what isn't.
No matter what they try to do, this won't change. And is one of the main reasons the LLM path will never lead to AGI, although parts of what makes up an LLM could possibly be used inside something that gets to the AGI level.
Did we ask god 1.0 the meaning of life and expect the answers to be more accurate than '42?'
Gizmodo is doing something important here. Everyone is in dismay over how powerful AI is. But it's largely just a bullshit machine.
The Israeli remote machine gun assassination trick isn't being pulled off without lots and lots of humans working behind the scenes. Our focus should be on leveraging AI to resist the fascist machine wherever it is rising, which is everywhere. The environment is gonna have to wait^goddamnit^
How many U.S. states include the letter “R” in their name? You may not know the answer off the top of your head, but any literate adult could figure it out with a list of the states and minimal effort. Unfortunately, OpenAI’s ChatGPT doesn’t know the answer, even its new GPT-5 model.
Duh, and/or hello. They can't think or compute. They just look for the statistically correct answer from an n-dimensional matrix of data. They can't even "compute" 2+2 even thought they are running on an actual computer.
Great reference manuals when trained well, that's it for LLMs.
wtf, I checked out the claim about states with R in their name and it was pretty ridiculous how badly it answered it. It answers like someone running through their thoughts in front of you.
====================================================
list all of the US states with R in their name
ChatGPT said:
Here’s the full list of U.S. states that have the letter R in their name:
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Illinois
Maryland
Massachusetts
Missouri
Nebraska
North Carolina
North Dakota
Oregon
South Carolina
Texas – (wait… nope, no R here! ❌)
Vermont
Virginia
Washington – (nope, no R either ❌)
West Virginia
Wisconsin – (no R ❌)
Wyoming – (no R ❌)
Let me clean that up so only correct ones remain:
Final Correct List (22 states):
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Maryland
Missouri
Nebraska
North Carolina
North Dakota
Oregon
Vermont
Virginia
West Virginia
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
Massachusetts
Connecticut – (wait, no R ❌)
Minnesota – (no R ❌)
Hold on — I think we should actually verify methodically, because it's easy to miss one or double-count.
Do you want me to go alphabetically through all 50 states and pick only the ones with "R" so we’re 100% sure? That way we won’t miss any.
I tried this with MS Copilot and got this:
===========================================
list all of the US states with R in their name
Sure! Here's a list of all U.S. states that contain the letter "R" in their name:
🗺️ U.S. States with "R" in the Name
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Delaware
- Florida
- Georgia
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Minnesota
- Missouri
- Nebraska
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Oregon
- South Carolina
- Texas
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
Let me know if you want this grouped by region or visualized in a map!
Seems like loss of context. By the end it's seeing a list of US states, alphabetically, and it'd usually be weird to skip one.
The question is not kept at the forefront for each state named.
LLMs fundamentally can't answer this kind of question, so it's an unfair test. They don't see letters, they just see tokens.
It's a bit like asking a random person on the street the square root of 75. Most will just guess on the spot.
Most will just guess on the spot.
Well no, most would say "I don't know". Which an LLM is unlikely to do unless the training material shows that a consistent answer is "I don't know". It will give a fact shaped answer that may fail, but it's at least 'shaped' right.
Again, the big problem is not that LLMs are just useless because they can't do these little specific tricks, it's that it is important to continue calibrating expectations, particularly as, at this point, people have bet trillions on these things and that's a lot of money to have people lie and cheat their way to make everyone overestimate them. Without counter perspective, I think 90% of my coworkers would have been laid off already as the executives just soak in unchallenged marketing bullshit from the big players.
GPT-5 without "thinking" mode got the answer wrong.
GPT-5 with thinking answered:
Here are the 21 US states with the letter “R” in their name:
Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia.
It wrote a script that verified it while doing the "thinking" (feeding the hallusinations back to the LLM)
Well, not quite, because they don't have criteria for 'right'.
They do basically say 'generate 10x more content than usual, then dispose of 90% of it', and that surprisingly seems to largely improve results, but at no point is it 'grading' the result.
Some people have bothered to provide 'chain of thought' examples and even when it's largely 'correct', you may see a middle step be utterly flubbed in a way that should have fouled the whole thing, but the error is oddly isolated and doesn't carry forward into the subsequent content, as would be the case in actual 'reasoning'.
I encounter an attitude with a lot of people who really hate it where they act like it's the Antichrist but the problem is really people. Unfortunately you can't uninvent a technology and make it go away forever.
There are some tasks that it's useful for but I treat it like a really stupid guy who is occasionally fun to talk to. Anything involving important information will be researched properly. The idea of using it to write anything is insane to me, in order for it to be half decent you'd have to tear out large sections and rewrite them yourself. At which point why would you just write the thing.
There is one feature that GPT has that I don't know how to get on a locally hosted instance, i'd like to host my own but I'm too inept. Being able to upload files for it to "look" at is novel. Also having it not be censored would be good. As well as having it entirely contained within my computer.
How Digital Press Releases Are Changing Brand Visibility in 2025
In today’s fast-moving online world, traditional media coverage is no longer enough to get your brand noticed. Digital press releases have evolved into powerful tools for building brand authority, improving SEO, and driving targeted traffic.
I recently came across Smart Press Hub, which offers streamlined press release writing and distribution services designed for modern businesses. What caught my attention is how they focus on blending traditional PR strategies with online marketing tactics to maximize exposure.
How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content
How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content
Wikipedia editors are struggling with an influx of non-reviewed AI-generated content, but a new speedy deletion policy could help them wade through the muck.Emma Roth (The Verge)
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Anyone know how to actually get adobe lightroom for free on mac?😭🙏.
I want to start by listing adobe alternatives:
If they don't satisfy your use case here is what FreeMediaHeckYeah(FMHY) has about this:
- Mac section - Adobe
GitHub - KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives: A list of alternatives for Adobe software
A list of alternatives for Adobe software. Contribute to KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Publishing Giants Escalate War on 'Shadow Libraries' With Broad Cloudflare Subpoena
Major academic publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, are trying to unmask the operators of several shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library and Libgen. They're also targeting SLUM, a third-party uptime monitor for these unofficial libraries. A DMCA subpoena, issued by a D.C. federal court, requires Cloudflare to hand over identifying user data for possible legal action.
Publishing Giants Escalate War on 'Shadow Libraries' With Broad Cloudflare Subpoena * TorrentFreak
Major academic publishers are trying to unmask the operators of several “shadow library” and piracy domains.Ernesto Van der Sar (TF Publishing)
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)
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Microsoft investigates Israeli military’s use of Azure cloud storage
Microsoft investigates Israeli military’s use of Azure cloud storage
Concerns that tech company’s Israel-based staff may have concealed key details of work follow Guardian investigationHarry Davies (The Guardian)
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La pupilla di Van Gogh
Mary Rood “la pupilla di Van Gogh”
La pupilla di Van Gogh è un romance dallo sfondo storico e romanzato che immerge il lettore nel passato e nell’amore.
La protagonista di questo libro si fingerà un uomo per poter raggiungere i suoi sogni: diventare una pittrice.
La vita per le donne dell’Ottocento non era semplice, siamo nella metà del secolo e iniziano le prime silenziose rivendicazioni femminili che dovranno come sappiamo bene attendere un altro secolo perché prendano fuoco e si accendano in tutta Europa e America.
Eppure, Marie la nostra piccola ma sagace e forte protagonista lotta contro il destino dell’essere donna! Sotta una fascia strettissima nasconde il suo seno, mette calzoni, maglietta da uomo e un cappello sotto cui nasconde i suoi splendidi capelli.
Un affascinante storia alla scoperta di un mondo fatto di sogni e colori perché Marie riuscirà ad entrare nella cerchia di pittori vicino a Vincent Van Gogh e, quando lui scoprirà chi è, ne rimarrà soddisfatto e affascinato.
Sarà l’amore a completare la vita di Marie un amore mai preso in considerazione.
La meraviglia
Marie cresciuta senza padre perché morto, aveva imparato a fare i conti senza la sua presenza, ma uno strano incontro e una rivelazione inseguito la porteranno a dubitare sulla vera morte del padre. Forse egli è ancora vivo?
Un romance che non parla solo d’amore ma anche al cuore del lettore una scrittura piacevole, pulita e ben definita quella di Mary Rood che conquista tutti coloro che la leggono.
Una storia che sa far piangere ed emozionare.
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A "political blackmail" – the EU Parliament is pressing for new mandatory scanning of your private chats
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/45880359
- The EU Parliament is pushing for an agreement on the child sexual abuse (CSAM) scanning bill, according to a leaked memo
- According to the Council Legal Service, the proposal still violates fundamental human rights in its current form
- The Danish version of the so-called Chat Control could be adopted as early as October 14, 2025
The nations welcoming and supporting the Danish proposal include Italy, Spain, and Hungary. France also said that "it could essentially support the proposal."Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Slovenia, Luxembourg, and Romania currently remain undecided or in need of a review with their local parliament.
A "political blackmail" – the EU Parliament is pressing for new mandatory scanning of your private chats
According to the Council Legal Service, the Danish Chat Control proposal still violates human rightsChiara Castro (TechRadar)
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So... there's been a lot of Europeans looking at America and laughing at the stuff we're going through, smug that the US is getting this.
I'm not going to say as someone from the US we don't deserve the kicking, as a country the attitude of the US has had a bad problem of exceptionalism
But this right here should be the warning to Europe not to fall into the exceptionalism trap... your oligarchs are waiting to take everything over as well. And before I get called overreacting and unconnected, this is smelling quite of the "Patriot Act" we got.
Their "oligarchs". LOL.
That's a different part of the world, it's not "oligarchs", it's just the government and politicians and a significant part of society in every European country. Eastern Europe might even be a bit better in this regard than Western, because of relatively recent historical memory.
You have to deserve "oligarchs" first. They didn't. You ask some granny in any European country, that granny will likely be in favor of full-on totalitarianism because they are a law-abiding society and there should be order, and people thinking they have natural rights are extremists.
You in your land of the weird joke about "freedumb" and "mass shooter rights" and "free hate speech", not understanding that the reason Europeans too joke about those is not them seeing your problems as they are, but because they (except for France and maybe some Scandinavian ones, and, eh, maybe Switzerland) unironically have problems with the ideas of freedom, equality, limits of mandate, right to rebellion and free speech. Half the European nations are monarchies or recent monarchies or recent fascist nations or ex-Commie nations.
You there joke about these treating it as a given that you have those rights, just some jerks abuse them, while Europeans joke because they don't have those rights and don't treat them as certain. There's nothing in UK's or even Germany's constitutional laws that admits that their citizens are free people with right to rebellion and to freedom of expression and association, even if someone in some other law writes that they are not.
Mhm. Show me where in the US constitution it says that people have a right to rebellion.
And then please show me how this right to rebellion was applied when an actual rebellion occured.
And please also take into consideration any laws regarding treason or domestic terrorism.
I said constitutional law, not the US constitution alone. Including declaration of independence and the surrounding history of discussion and all. Also not "says that people have", but recognizes it as an inherent right. Naturally if such a right exists, either no law can retract it or it would be meaningless.
And then please show me how this right to rebellion was applied when an actual rebellion occured.
I don't see how this is relevant. If you think it is, please explain how, explicitly and not implicitly.
(Also one would guess that slaveholders' right to rebellion is in significant doubt.)
And please also take into consideration any laws regarding treason or domestic terrorism.
Can't override constitutional and inherent rights. Also if you don't recognize the latter, it's too bad but your country's founding documents do as a basis. Basically the US constitution is toilet paper compared to unstated but mentioned in d.o.i. inherent rights, and any normal law is toilet paper compared to the US constitution.
And people who made that system were very well educated, also very practical, and explained very thoroughly why should any system of formal rules be possible to discard by force and why inherent rights not prone to degeneracy of any formal system driven by power should exist in philosophy. They were not XX and XXI centuries' idealists with overvalued ideas, or idiots dreaming of totalitarianism with those like them on top.
A law that doesn't apply is worthless.
Thinking that this somehow makes you or your anachronistic shithole of a country somewhat better is just plain delusional.
First, my anachronistic shithole of a country would be Russia.
Second, I said right, not law. Rights are more transcendent.
Rights don't exist. They are social conventions based in law. If you don't have a law or the law isn't enforced then you don't have a right.
Contrary to the name, there are no basic, inalienable human rights.
If your right is not supported by law, it does not exist.
Rights don’t exist. They are social conventions based in law. If you don’t have a law or the law isn’t enforced then you don’t have a right.
That's your opinion which was a minority one in most of the world for most of history. Including such counterintuitive parts of it as China.
Contrary to the name, there are no basic, inalienable human rights.
Says who and based on what?
If your right is not supported by law, it does not exist.
And from which hairy arse would a law gain justification to determine someone's rights?
You are likely from one of the countries with English-derived legal system, where the precedent mechanism literally means that there are non-codified rights outside of the law, which the interpretation of the law has to approximate.
Ok, lets put it in a way you might understand.
Let's say there's a basic human right to life, liberty and security (Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). That's quite basic.
You say you live in Russia. What good does that right do if your holy leader decides that he doesn't like what you posted online and sends you to the front in Ukraine or into a Gulag? Are you going to tell the military police that they can't touch you because you got rights?
Or lets make it more extreme: Say you live in Gaza. Are you going to tell the IDF that you got rights and thus their bombs and starvation just won't touch you?
You are likely from one of the countries with English-derived legal system, where the precedent mechanism literally means that there are non-codified rights outside of the law, which the interpretation of the law has to approximate.
Nope, I don't live in a country with English-derived legal system. A law is a law and judges interpret laws and not judges.
But even in a precedent-based system: Precedent means jack squat if the country's leadership doesn't care, as seen by the US.
I say it once again: Rights, laws, constitutions, all that are fine and dandy, and they are somewhat useful as long as the rule of law is mostly upheld. But:
- If the leadership doesn't care about any of that, none of it matters.
- If laws stop being enforced, they stop mattering. A law that isn't enforced is a suggestion, nothing more.
- The same goes for constitutions and constitution-adjacent rules.
- Rights are never anything more than suggestions. If they are supposed to have any meaning at all, they need to be codified into law.
Look up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All 193 member countries of the UN ratified these. And yet there are articles in there that every single of these member countries violate. And having these "rights" means absolutely nothing in real-life terms if there's no mechanism to enforce them or get any benefit from it.
As a russian, how much do you e.g. enjoy the "right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association" (Article 20.1) and the "right to freedom of opinion and expression" (Article 19)? How much does "having these rights" help you if you go on the street and protest the war?
You say you live in Russia. What good does that right do if your holy leader decides that he doesn’t like what you posted online and sends you to the front in Ukraine or into a Gulag? Are you going to tell the military police that they can’t touch you because you got rights?
It'll just be a violated right. As that's treated always.
And you don't seem to understand that when "right" is treated as a thing separate from "law", arguments functional against "law" are not arguments functional against "right".
But even in a precedent-based system: Precedent means jack squat if the country’s leadership doesn’t care, as seen by the US.
Which doesn't change if it's a right or not. It's in the word. You are either in the right or in the wrong. If you're in the right, that doesn't guarantee you anything in the physical world. That's the point of such an entity.
And having these “rights” means absolutely nothing in real-life terms if there’s no mechanism to enforce them or get any benefit from it.
Wrong. Having a common frame of reference means a lot as a precondition for other things.
Say, having a program supporting some Kademlia-based protocol doesn't guarantee you to find other nodes supporting it, or to find a file or other resource you look for on them, or that someone won't block it. But it's better than if people can't agree on any protocol, but, suppose, MS and Apple can.
I think you shouldn't treat things you don't understand so arrogantly.
Are you seriously applying your half-knowledge about programming to legal and philosophy?
You are so lost that you don't even know which topic we are talking about and still think that your arrogance has any basis in reality?
This is pidgeon chess, and you are a delusional pidgeon.
You may think whatever you want, you don't even need to have negative feelings about it.
But you've got no clue at all.
Yeah, and not with the guy who after saying something outta their ass went straight to insults.
Also why do you care? If you don't, why did you write this?
Also Dunning-Krueger is strong with everyone, that's what follows from that study.
If you mean that you have achieved something in some specific thing IRL and think I have no similar achievement, then (suppose you're right, most likely true) your achievement is in that specific thing only, and doesn't make you one bit more qualified to talk about anything else.
I made an AI clone of my dead son - and let a journalist interview him
I made an AI clone of my dead son - and let a journalist interview him
An interview between a US journalist and an AI clone of a teenager who was killed during shooting at his school has prompted criticism online.BBC News
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Justice Department Reaches Proposed Settlement with Greystar(Largest U.S. Landlord) to End Its Participation in Algorithmic Pricing Scheme
Justice Department Reaches Proposed Settlement with Greystar, the Largest U.S. Landlord, to End Its Participation in Algorithmic Pricing Scheme
The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division filed a proposed settlement today to resolve the United States’ claims against Greystar Management Services LLC as part of its ongoing enforcement against algorithmic coordination and other anticompetitive …www.justice.gov
Net neutrality advocates won’t appeal loss, say they don’t trust Supreme Court
Public-Interest Groups Decline to Seek Supreme Court Review of FCC Open Internet Rules
Free Press and allies that intervened in the legal case will pursue other federal and state solutions rather than relief from the Roberts Court.Free Press Action Fund
This Week in Plasma: quick toggles in System Settings
This Week in Plasma: quick toggles in System Settings
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.This Week in Plasma: quick toggles in System Settings
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Are there open hardware wrist watches around?
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there are different approaches to this, but some of these links should help:
Hardware:
OS: asteroidos.org/
Gadgetbridge:
I personally use a garmin, which is paired to gadgetbridge
+1 for the BangleJS. So open hardware, you can buy it as a kit you assemble yourself. Or, prebuilt.
I have every model of þe Pebble, including þe absolutely horrible Round. BangleJS is better þan Pebble was, and completely privacy friendly.
This is where I'd start
are there any decent wrist watches that respect your privacy and don't send all the dam data home?
I've heard Garmin is decent, and Pebble is coming back
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Garmin sends all your health data to the cloud and the app won't work without an Internet connection.
On the plus side, they're not part of the Google/Apple/Samsung data ecosystems, and I don't think actually they do anything with the data, beyond computing statistics for you.
Depends how much you're prepared to trust them I guess.
Garmin sends all your health data to the cloud and the app won't work without an Internet connection.
However, unless something has changed with newer models, you do not need to use the application or connect to Garmin's servers to use the watch.
Mine does (a fenix 7). I think any model that has a heart rate sensor would probably work based on the wiki page. There are certain models that offload sleep tracking to the official app, and I don't think those support sleep tracking in gadgetbridge yet (last I checked this was the case), but the ones that handle it on the watch like mine fully support that too (and you can view stats and a graph in gadgetbridge).
Speaking of the wiki page: gadgetbridge.org/basics/topics… - there's a lot to parse since so many models apply, but my fenix 7 has had full support aside from live cloud maps in the weather app, and I've been issue-free since last October aside from a couple things they quickly fixed for me after I opened them.
There are 2 main gotchyas:
- despite the weather sync not requiring the official app (gadgetbridge can sync with breezy weather), the watch stops trying to refresh it if it's been ~3 months since rotating the api key. In the advanced settings you can have gadgetbridge create a new api key for you, but that may break the ability to use the official app (I don't so I went with that).
- gadgetbridge can't update the firmware or maps, however you can update directly on the watch via wifi, or you can use the PC app (which works great in a libvirt windows vm).
Garmin devices - Gadgetbridge
A free and open source Android application for bluetooth devices.gadgetbridge.org
That is cool so data from the watch is retrieved and seen through gadget bridge if I'm getting it right for the features it is able to access?
I've never had a smart watch, but I guess with the way it would work with gadget bridge for supported watches is that you can keep it not connected to the wifi and just rely solely on Bluetooth to communicate with gadget bridge?
Exactly. Gadgetbridge reverse engineered the protocol so it can configure all the same settings the Garmin app can, notifications get forwarded to the watch, the watch sends its sensor data, gps tracks, etc and Gadgetbridge knows what to do with the data so it's displayed in graphs and lists, etc.
And yeah, if you get a watch without wifi or don't connect one with it to a network, then all data i/o is going to be exclusively bluetooth with Gadgetbridge, which specifically avoids the network permission (so there's zero chance of anything leaking to a server somewhere.) That's why it communicates with a weather app fur that data instead if pulling it in itself.
It also works with more than just smart watches; like I can use it to configure the buttons, noise cancelling state, etc on my bluetooth headphones.
It's definitely not perfect, like I can grab a nap and not have it notice sometimes so I assume there are a bunch of heuristics at play that create a "best guess".
That said, how rested I feel does typically line up with the number of hours it shows (regardless of how long I've actually spent in bed), and it has a short description about the quality of sleep like "restorative" or "not enough rem" that further lines up with how I feel.
AsteroidOS is a linux based replacement for wearOS (android for watches) which is FOSS and removes all the google privacy issues.
Free your wrist - AsteroidOS
AsteroidOS is an open-source operating system for smartwatches.asteroidos.org
It can integrate in gadget bridge too
GitHub - sharandac/My-TTGO-Watch: A GUI named hedge for smartwatch like devices based on ESP32. Currently support for T-Watch2020 (V1,V2,V3), T-Watch2021, M5Paper, M5Core2 and native Linux support for testing.
A GUI named hedge for smartwatch like devices based on ESP32. Currently support for T-Watch2020 (V1,V2,V3), T-Watch2021, M5Paper, M5Core2 and native Linux support for testing. - sharandac/My-TTGO-W...GitHub
Not to sound stupid, but it really depends on how smart you want the watch to be. From connectionless firmware device to fully-featured Android.
+1 for gadget bridge either way.
I have a Fossil Hybrid, that combines physical hands with a 2-color e-ink display. It can't do apps, but it has standalone timers, notifications, media control, pulse/oxygen and step counter.
I personally don't need more. It's cloudless and lasts a week.
If you need full Android/WearOS check AsteroidOS and specific ROMs. Hardware tends to be on the older side here.
The only thing that's hard to do is sleep tracking. That tends to rely on proprietary algorithms and cloud compute a lot.
I kind of want to buy the new one, but with them being based in the US I'm a bit scared of getting a nasty surprise due to import taxes...
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lilygo.cc/products/t-watch-ult…
There's also a Plus version.
Also: open-smartwatch.github.io/
If you search for "ESP32 open source watch" there are quite a few out there.
T-Watch Ultra
Specifications MCU ESP32-S3 FLASH 16MB PS RAM 8MB Platform Arduino-IDE, ESP-IDF, VS Code, Micropython Wireless Wi-Fi: 802.11 b/g/n; BLE V5.LILYGO®
Overall the bangle seems better built.
I have a Watchy, I didn't have any problems yet, it's fairly open and a lot of fun to play around with.
They also have an aluminum watch case I ordered together with mine
Real estate agents say new seller disclosure laws are 'bottlenecking' Queensland's property market
In short:Real estate agents say new seller disclosure laws are "bottlenecking" property sales due to lengthy turnaround times on required documentation.
The laws allow buyers to get their entire deposit back, and even claim compensation, if the vendor fails to offer up vital information.
Antonia Mercorella from the Real Estate Institute of Queensland says the laws have created "nervousness" about last-second contract cancellations.
ABC News
ABC News provides the latest news and headlines in Australia and around the world.Ciara Jones (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
How do you get lightroom for free on Mac?
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Did you tree photopea? photopea.com/
Photopea | Online Photo Editor
Photopea Online Photo Editor lets you edit photos, apply effects, filters, add text, crop or resize pictures. Do Online Photo Editing in your browser for free!www.photopea.com
Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs
Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs
There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel..www.phoronix.com
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phoronix.com/news/Intel-More-O…
Additional Intel Linux Drivers Left Orphaned & Maintainers Let Go
Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuringwww.phoronix.com
I am sure they are not doing layoff on Israel the genocide state needs these jobs more!
US taxpayer is a useful idiot who funds their share buy backs 🤡
I chuckled about this like the sicko that I am, then remembered my server is an old Intel... Fuk
Come to think of it, isn't Intel CPUs running some kind of Linux like... The backbone of the entire Internet?
Big Updates Are Coming to Loops
There's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline for the open source federated alternative to Tiktok and Vine, including a Web UI and a boatload of new features. Let's dive in, and see what's coming in the next release.
Big Updates Are Coming to Loops
Loops, the open source Tiktok alternative for the Fediverse, is continuing to grow and evolve. Although the platform launched with a fairly limited featureset, development has ramped up to pull in some ambitious new features. Daniel Supernault has this to say:With Loops, we saw an opportunity to bring short video to the fediverse in a way that feels familiar, fun, and safe — while building something new beyond Pixelfed: a community-first platform of its own.Daniel Supernault, Pixelfed Development lead
There’s a lot of new features coming in to the video-sharing platform. Let’s break down some of the most significant ones:Loops Comes to the Web
One of the most important updates of this development cycle concerns a new Web interface for the Loops platform. Soon, users will no longer be constrained to Android or iOS clients to make use of Loops and its social features.
Demo courtesy of Daniel Supernault
The new UI looks incredibly slick, and feels like an evolution of Pixelfed’s own design language. Bringing a Web interface to Loops feels like a smart idea, as it opens up the possibility for more people to use it.
The new Web UI also ships with a Dark Mode, for those of you hoping to shield your eyes from a bright browser page. It’s clean, and really makes the video content pop.
Better User Controls
A big design focus for Loops (and presumably, Pixelfed) centers around giving users greater control over their online experience. This includes what they see on the timeline, who can interact with them, and whether posts can be interacted with in the first place. Taking further lessons from Pixelfed, Loops also brings in comprehensive tools for blocking bad actors, and keeping your timeline civil.
A new user-wellness feature here is called Screen Time, which helps keep track of how often a person is logged into Loops and watching videos. While it’s something of a niche feature, it’s nice to know that there are ways to set daily time limits.Self-Hosting
The backend code for Loops has been open to the wider community for a while, but the prospect of including a Web-facing interface solidifies the possibility that Loops will soon formally allow admins to host their own Loops instances. This boils down to a few critically important features for the network: admin controls, customization, and federation support.mastodon.social/@dansup/114757…
Admin Controls and Customization
A big focus of Loops development has involved encouraging admins to set up their own community instances. Loops takes a lot of the lessons learned from Pixelfed, and incorporates a lot of flexibility for admins to make their instances stand out, while providing necessary tools to keep communities safe.Custom Links and Pages in Loops
Admins will be happy to see the addition of custom pages and navigation for instances. With the upcoming release, it will be even easier for admins to put need-to-know instance info front and center to their community. This could include sharing community messaging channels, donation links, methods for getting updates from the admin, or details pertaining to server status.Federation Support
It might not seem obvious, but Loops technically already supports ActivityPub federation. It’s just that the flagship instance at loops.video only has the feature enabled for select accounts, for testing purposes. Nevertheless, federated following and interactions are possible, and seem to work.Dan’s account on Loops.Video does in fact federate. Here it is, as seen from Mastodon.
The significance of Loops turning on federation capabilities cannot be understated. Short-form video is an extremely popular medium, and bringing it in to the Fediverse gives people a new way to talk to one another, and might just be the incentive needed to get more video creators on the network.Loops Studio
One of the more exciting features coming in an update is Loops Studio, a creator’s dashboard designed for uploading and managing videos, viewing interactions, and keeping track of analytics and engagement. This could provide a solid incentive for content creators to commit to using Loops full-time, and allow them to better engage with their friends and followers across the network.
Interestingly, the new composer for creating loops includes some unique capabilities that seem to be directly inspired from Tiktok: there are options to allow other users to stitch your video into theirs, allow users to perform a duet with you, and also disclose Not Safe for Work content. There’s even a way to tag whether something was created using generative AI.Loops Sound Library
Details on this feature are scarce, but this NLNet-funded project is designed to allow Loops videos to incorporate music from Fediverse musicians that allow for remixing and resharing. The feature reportedly will allow users to select tracks from Funkwhale and possibly other federated music platforms for background music in their videos, while preserving attribution.The idea of integrating with Funkwhale and other federated music servers is older than it sounds. Over the years, Dansup has experimented with various mockups and ideas on how to incorporate music capabilities into Pixelfed. It seems like some of that work may have eventually influenced this feature.
Comprehensive Data Export
Being an open and federated platform, Loops is aiming to include an export data for all of your videos, posts, and social connections. The goal here is to give users the ability to migrate to other Loops servers and retain their follower graph, much in the same way that Mastodon does. Hopefully, in the future, this might also give users the ability to pull in videos and activities from their old instances when moving.
In Conclusion
Loops is a massive, ambitious undertaking, and it’s exciting to see so much development effort finally bear fruit. While we still have to wait a little while longer for a release to ship and for the flagship instance to get updated, I’m extremely hopeful about the prospects of having a free and open Tiktok / Vine alternative for the Fediverse.Audio Support (via FunkWhale)
I spoke with the developer of Funkwhale to support audio from Funkwhale and other AP services. He still needs to do some work on his side before I can implement it, so I will be following this: htt...dansup (GitHub)
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Twelve-day war: Impact of Iran’s strikes censored by Israel
Twelve-day war: Impact of Iran’s strikes censored by Israel
A month after the end of the conflict between Iran and Israel, the damage caused by the Islamic republic remains unclear largely because of Israeli censorship.Derek THOMSON (FRANCE 24)
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Additional Intel Linux Drivers Left Orphaned & Maintainers Let Go
Additional Intel Linux Drivers Left Orphaned & Maintainers Let Go
Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuringwww.phoronix.com
Basically yeah. It’s a bit more complicated because of touch sensitivity, but I think I’ll need to learn driver programming soon, because I can’t afford a new model (e: and there’s nothing wrong with this one). Then I’ll be able to say for sure.
e: Intuos 4. And to be fair, it would have died under windows like 10 years ago, apparently.
Connect my tablet
Connect my tablet is doing exactly that: It connects your Wacom (TM) tablet to your Mac and restores at least its critical functionality to be creative with Photoshop (TM) and other programmes in Sequoia, Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur, Catalina…App Store
Ooh thanks!
e: have you updated past Ventura? I haven’t yet because I keep seeing posts where this tablet breaks at Ventura and later. If your 3 works in a more recent OSX, I’ll be able to breathe again, since my subscription services (Adobe, Sibelius) are complaining that I haven’t upgraded.
Meanwhile else gets to talk about how great the new unreadable ui is. That skeleton at the bottom of the swimming pool meme could work here.
I don’t think that was a thing when I bought my Wacom, and this 12x8 tablet was the best you could get at the time for drawing and working with the Adobe suite in OSX, which was why I needed it.
I wish I could go back in time to when I could afford such things, but now I have to work with what I have. It’s still a very good tablet, it’s just getting outmoded for no good reason.
e: and I don’t mean something like an iPad, I mean a drawing tablet. This:
(Sorry for the horrible bloom)
Google is testing an AI-powered Google Finance website in the US, letting users ask questions, access advanced charting tools, view a live news feed, and more
We’re testing a new, AI-powered Google Finance.
Beginning this week, you'll see us testing a new Google Finance, reimagined with AI at its core. Here’s what to expect:Research your finance questions with AI: Now, you can ask detailed questions about the financial world and get a comprehensive…Barine Tee (Google)
Microsoft will phase out its Lens scanner app, launched in 2014 as Office Lens, starting in September; users can create new scans in the app only until December
Retirement of Microsoft Lens - Microsoft Support
Learn about the retirement of Microsoft Lens and how to use Microsoft 365 Copilot as an alternative.support.microsoft.com
Humans make better content cops than AI, but cost 40x more
Humans make better content cops than AI, but cost 40x more
: To keep toxic content from damaging brands, both people and machines have a placeThomas Claburn (The Register)
What problems does Linux have to overcome to get more users
Is the the work place Pc's market improving.
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There needs to a single “App Store” where regular people can find free and paid apps that will work on all distros.
Basically, we need Steam for non-gamers.
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There are already computers that come with Linux right out of the box. It’s needs more than that.
You need to be able to walk into a big box store, get a Linux computer right off the shelf, and take it home. That’s what’s needed here.
Once you get people to userstabdnits a different kind of computer they would take to it fine. iPad and chromebooks sell just fine and they don’t run windows or macOS. I refuse to believe Microsoft and Apple are the only ones who can sell a computer.
Being able to do everything a "normie" would do without the need to use a terminal.
And a way for companies to get flatpak as an alternative, i remember a friend of mine who tried to use 'buntu budgie for a while and he needed a software for cartographic stuff.
We got lucky the company of said software (and yes, it needed to be THAT specific software to avoid compat' issues, so no free alternatives were viable even if they were available) used to provide a .deb package, we got forced to change a lot of sys native binaries to make it work and ended up just breaking a lot of other stuff to do so. Flatpaks (fuck snaps) need to be the default option to be available across systems without caring about distros, so anyone can run it on "mandragora linux" if they want to
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I'd agree with the: come preinstalled. Most people buy a device and never change the operating system. So it needs to be the preinstalled operating system on the average computer or laptop, wherever people buy those.
(And mind that Linux completely dominates the market on servers. So technically, a lot of people use Linux in a way... Just not on desktop computers.)
1. Obviously it needs to come pre-installed. This is a really tough hurdle to overcome and I'm not sure how it can be.
2. Security needs a lot of work if Linux is going to lose the small-target advantage.
Oh, heavens, I can only imagine what crapware OEMs would cook up with full access to the OS…
How would you like 11 gigabytes of junkware in your kernel? That only works on that version? Oh, and your computer won’t work without it.
- Needs to come pre-installed on computers.
- Pre-installed distro needs to support one-click installation (like .app or .exe).
- Pre-installed distro needs to have be easily searchable (for problems, and e.g. searching "chrome DISTRO_NAME" needs to pop up with a link to the one-click installer).
- Pre-installed distro needs to run perfectly out-of-the-box, no fiddling with drivers, no needing to issue a random shell command for some random issue.
- UI needs to be intuitive. Probably something like KDE. Could maybe do Elementary or GNOME with dash-to-dock or something.
- Updates should be easy. Ideally apps can self-update or the apps will indicate if they need an update and have a button opening up an updater that can update all your apps/the OS.
- Updates for minor programs need to be hidden/rolled into OS updates. Most people aren't gonna want to see that glibc updated.
- Better management of stuff like VPNs (probably not important for the average user, but e.g. NetworkManager's GUI support is kinda shit).
- If using GNOME, need to have app indicator stuff pre-installed (if I'm being honest, the fact it's not built-in is absurd).
- Needs to come with good basic apps. Some of the default apps included with DEs are kinda shit. There is still no truly good mail client IMO (at least that doesn't look dated AF).
Probably more.
EDIT: Something like Lutris should probably be integrated into the OS. Installing non-Steam games is a minor hassle at the moment IMO.
Pre-installed distro needs to support one-click installation (like .app or .exe).
This defeats a lot of what makes Linux secure. The main reason you don't get malware is because you never run untrusted binaries from the internet and you install everything from trusted sources like your package manager. A non tech savvy person doing this will inevitably hit one of the super rare Linux malware in the wild. Clueless person downloads the wrong installer is the model malware entry case. I also don't see a benefit of just having an app store, you can even show proprietary software by default as long as they can be turned off (I suspect the main reason for one click installation is for downloading proprietary software).
Personally, basically no one I know uses the app stores on windows or macos much. These app stores are actually functional in that they have proprietary apps and allow purchases. There is basically 0 chance Linux will become popular if you can only install things through an app store (especially those that make it hard/impossible to buy proprietary apps). Additionally, desktop Linux is not particularly secure anyway. Flatpaks are helpful here, but most require manual tuning of their sandbox to actually be secure, which the average user is 100% not gonna do. On top of this, what do you do when an app is not available in your curated app store? Do you download it directly online? Do you trust some random repository you find online that can be filled with who knows what at a later point? Or do you just say "oh well sucks to be you I guess?" If you download it directly online, then it may not even have dependency information. If it doesn't embed dependency information, then it's basically useless to your average person. It also has the problem you mentioned of someone downloading the wrong executable. Likewise, the other two options are IMO just not viable.
IMO, the only way for a package manager/app store solution to work is:
1. The platform is built around it from day 1
2. The platform has a large number of developers submitting their packages to it (as opposed to the distro maintainers having to track down changes themselves)
3. The app store has payment methods
4. The app store has proprietary apps
5. The app store has a large number of reviewers that can check the apps submitted in a timely manner
6. Probably bundling dependencies with the apps.
7. The app store has a functional review system with users actually leaving reviews.
8. Going along with the reviews, going through the app store (as opposed to using the package manager directly) may need to be a requirement to encourage reviews, at least at first.
Basically, it needs to be an iOS/Android situation, with a similarly large company backing it. I should also note that it's possible to install malware on iOS/Android, just harder, and the scope is usually less severe because of sandboxing.
EDIT: Also, it's entirely possible to do one-click installs in a "safe" way, by requiring that developers get their apps signed by whoever makes the distro (like macos gatekeeper or whatever it's called).
EDIT 2: I should also note that just being "different" is enough for people not to use something. If something basic, like the way to install apps, is different enough, people may just decide they don't like it. My relatives would likely do this, for instance.
For non-enterprise users only two things:
- Zero reasonably priced options for support when things go wrong.
- Breaking changes caused by updates that make that support necessary.
If my neighbor's Windows or Apple machine breaks they can call Microsoft or Apple, the PC manufacturer or a bunch of different support providers. Microsoft provides free support if one of their updates causes problems.
I can't find any Linux support aimed at home users, only very expensive enterprise support options.
It's amazing how much damage those scammers cause.
Last year I ran into a retired neighbor at Staples buying a new laptop because her existing machine had been hacked. She came back after leaving it running to find someone was logged in remotely. They drained $8k from her retirement account. Turned out 6 months earlier she got a call from "Microsoft" asking to connect to her machine because they "noticed it had a problem."
Most of the people I know are computer illiterate. They know nothing about PC's and don't care to learn because they think of PCs as appliances. They want word processing, email, photos, and web, and don't give a damn what's going on under the hood. Microsoft support is generally pretty bad, but it's far better than none at all.
That lack of any support (except me) is the only reason I haven't moved friends and family to Linux.
Most of the comments here seem to be from the consumer perspective, but if you want broader adoption, you need to consider the corporate market too. Most corporate software these days is web-based, so the problem is less with the software and more with the people responsible for it.
The biggest hurdle is friction with the internal IT team. They like Windows because that's all they ever learnt and they're not interested in maintaining a diverse set of company laptops. They won't entertain Linux in a corporate environment unless it's mandated by management, and even if the bosses approve it, IT will want a way to lock you out of your laptop, force updates, do a remote wipe, etc.
There are (proprietary) tools to do some of this, but they generally suck and often clash with your package manager. Microsoft is just way ahead of Linux in the "bloatware that tours your hands" department.
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This is it. Exactly it. Internal IT management wants a good, centrally managed system to lock down and control corporate devices. Heck, corporations often even contract this task (and help desk) to management companies.
Let's assume the tools and the experts are there to perform these remote management shenanigans, after this it only comes to "money talks". Don't have to replace a 2-4yo laptop with a new one if the old one still performs fine for another 2-4 years. So then you have to weigh the cost of expertise against slower amortization.
My company disabled VPN access for anything but macOS and Win11. Because even though the VPN we use is mandated to be used with a closed source app, and the app has a Linux version, the IT dudes couldn't exit vim when asked to manually edit /etc/environment
the IT dudes couldn't exit vim when asked to manually edit /etc/environment
Lol, my brother/sister in christ what kind of IT are they hiring these days? i cant, i just cant
The vast majority of business apps and network admin apps are written for windows so you either can't run them on unix or they would require an additional layer of complexity that can't be justified "just to be on unix".
For dev and IT work I use a mix of windows and RHEL. Business apps in windows and terminal sessions on our linux servers. My db work is almost 100% linux.
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Everything mainstream is a black box corporate ecosystem these days. Kids learn how to use specific programs and mobile apps, but don't learn anything about the OS or machine itself because everything is isolated and "just works".
It's a really weird spot to be in. We're used to the older generations being bad with tech, but now it's also the younger ones too.
Part of the problem there is that we don’t teach people how to actually use computers, we teach how to use specific programs instead usually.
A few months back I saw a post somewhere about how “kids these days don’t know how to read an analog clock”. And it’s the exact same thing, you have to teach people how to use them. You don’t just innately know how to use these things we created.
I grew up in the 2000s and got taught how to read an analog clock in like the first year of school.
I remember me teacher made a clock face on paper with the two arms pinned on. I brought up my parents had a clock with 'lines instead of numbers' and she taught everyone roman numerals on the spot.
What are teachers doing nowadays?
A lot of teachers are really underpaid and have a lot of students to worry about. And that’s on top of parents wanting to meddle in their kids education and schools trying to cram more into the same amount of time. So it’s not always possible for teachers to be able to teach everything they need to, let alone other useful things to know.
And well what I said in my original comment about people just expecting others to know things without bothering to teach them. Years ago I was expected to know how to sign my name in cursive when the school district that I was in cut cursive when I was in kindergarten. Thankfully I had a teacher who actually taught me how to later on but otherwise I wouldn’t have known.
Take photos, for example. If I'm looking for pictures of my dog, I don't want to go into the 2022 folder, then the August folder, then look through all those files, back out into 2022 then go into the September folder, etc. I just want to type 'dog'. Or pick from a dropdown list of common tags, or anything other than digging through files and folders.
Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.
But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It's not taught at school. It's not relevant to anything they do.
It used to make me so frustrated (it's a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it's not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators).
It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.
Precisely- it's a concept that is ingrained in people to the point where anyone who doesn't understand it is viewed as lacking. However, it's needless.
I don't need to understand IP addressing subnet routing to go to a website. Why should I need to understand a file and folder structure to find an old tax document?
my point is thatfor us techie users (i use arch btw) having choice is good. But for the average user it's a big negative actually.
The linux ecosystem needs to standardize on more things to also allow linux development to be worthwile for devs.
Choosing one distro is not enough, when it can decide to rip out and replace half of its subsystems at will. The most stable api on linux for games is win32 ffs! I have linux native builds of games that simply don't run on linux anymore.
But for the average user it's a big negative actually.
With gamers generally being steered towards Bazzite right now, it's already addressed in part. For everyone else, Linux Mint gets recommended a lot.
Having 2-3 starting choices based on use case is a manageable number for anyone.
What? It already doesn't have most of the gamers.
Normies can use it easier than gamers. Linux on the right hardware is stable as fuck and Linux has always been good at running a web browser, which is like 99% of what normies do on computers these days.
CAD software.
FreecCAD just released it's first full version and it's a pain to use. Back in 2018 somebody said FOSS CAD software was at least ten years behind the big windows commercial software. I think now it's about fifteen behind.
Even if for a moment we assume u r right, what about electricians? cnc ? 3D printing? etc.
Not a problem for u doesnt mean it isnt for someone else, and we aint even talkin about compatibility issues between cad software.
Majority of average office workers do not use CAD software.
That really depends on the office, doesn’t it? Project Managers, Detailers and Engineers should be familiar with CAD software.
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1. A smarter and wiser population able to discern and care enough that they're being cucked by Microsoft, overcoming the inertia to install Linux.
2. Linux invents a game/feature that is so goddamn appealing that everyone wants in on the action.
2. Preinstallation.
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I've been dragging my feet on making the switch. Some of it is i just doing feel like doing another OS install and desktop setup. Some of it is distro paralysis. There's a lot and I dont really know what to choose.
I downloaded Mint Cinnamon a while back and was too lazy to install it. Is this still a good choice for gaming and school work? I already use libreoffice.
I'm comfortable enough with configuring and settings, but by no means a superuser.
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Multiple screens can be really finicky if they have different resolutions and refresh rates.
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For the vast majority of users Linux is just a worse deal. Only thing that really comes to mind that Linux does that users care about is that it will support that hardware that Windows 11 will leave behind, and even those users will happily just run Windows 10 without updates and if that bites them in the ass then maybe they’ll upgrade or just ask their IT friend to use a bypass to make Windows 11 at least work on their old hardware.
Otherwise, of the things users actually care about, Linux has worse app support to the point that even pro-Linux users would rather dual-boot that lose access to their games and worse hardware support. Linux also has a problem of not being well understood by a lot of tech folk so if you bring somebody onboard you better be ready to be their only point of support.
ChromeOS is probably the best example against this since it is basically just a browser, the laptops it sells on are substantially better value than their budget counterparts and realistically a lot of the people buying them are parents for their kids so the user’s preference is substantially pushed aside in favour of cost. The SteamDeck is another good counter-example since it essentially refuses to compete with the PC gaming market by calling itself a handheld.
Linux is stuck in the crappy position of needing more users to get more software and hardware support but users need better software and hardware support for Linux to make sense compared to Windows. It’s getting better and Valve’s efforts have steadily brought the Linux gaming percentage up but it’s still the enthusiast OS.
By all means encourage it’s usage though. Linux is a far more open and privacy-respecting option and the more tech folk and basic-usage users that adopt it the better!
For the vast majority of users Linux is just a worse deal.
The vast majority of users only need an office suite, an internet browser, and maybe the ability to play games. Linux does these just fine, with less bullshit than Windows to boot.
The real problem is inertia. People tend to go with what they're familiar with, and most of them are familiar with Windows. And those that might be willing to try a new OS get turned away from Linux due to outdated stigmas about it being harder to use than Windows. While that stigma may still be true for enthusiast distros like Arch, new users are generally steered away from them
I think the big thing that everyone is missing here is that schools and workplaces need to push it into people's lives. For that to happen Linux (or at least one of its distros backed by a hardware distributor) needs to develop killer features for those markets and successfully sell to them in large enough numbers that the average computer user - who does not care what their OS is because they only use it for email and work - will make sure that their at-home setup is compatible with their work machine.
That moment is when market forces will take over and drive real growth in desktop Linux, rather than the tiny little bumps we've seen the past few years thanks to the Steam Deck coming out and MS pissing its users off.
This is how Apple built its marketshare against the Microsoft domination of the 90s. For a long time it was the go-to "school computer", and then those kids grew up and now a huge piece of the tech industry and culture is more or less Apple only. It's unclear if this process can be repeated, since Apple's marketshare was carved out during a time of massive growth in the industry that is unlikely to repeat, but I wouldn't say it's impossible if the right conditions reveal themselves.
I will say that it is highly unlikely that the people here would like the change if it happens - imagine Google slinging fully locked down "linux" machines en masse and everybody else needing to download their kernel fork that's loaded with spyware ("for security reasons") in order to connect to Google Teams for work. Maybe I'm being pessimistic but I just don't see mass adoption of a new OS happening without some kind of fuckery like this that renders the version of Linux that gets mass adopted unrecognizable from the version we're all using now.
The other option is state intervention, as with NeoKylin in China, although the Chinese government seems to be limiting themselves to just government computers with that distro.
Yeah I was thinking about that, which is why I pointed out that Apple's plan only worked because of the massive growth in personal computing. Google was able to create marketshare for Android during the massive growth in smartphones, but those conditions haven't existed for anyone for a while.
Generally how these things go is that after the growth phase comes consolidation and monopoly - we're far more likely to see Apple and MS merge into one corporation than we are to see a third option emerge as a serious competitor.
This question comes up every other week. I reject the premise that "more users" is a commonly held objective.
For most linux / OSS projects the objective is to be the best the project can be. Having an active community is usually part of that but "more users" is a low priority.
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Stigma.
A very large number of people believe Linux is difficult to get into. There are a number of publisher that somehow think Linux users are all hackers that will cheat in their online games. There are a not-so-insignificant number of Linux users who like Linux to remain niche, and small, and exclusive, and difficult to get into, and scoff at the idea of a "general user".
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This most difficult one is probably the fact that 99% of people do not install their operating system.
The device they purchase needs to have a clean and elegant out of box experience like the Mac. Regular folk who are willing to stray from windows don't consider any computer that doesn't come off the shelf with sane defaults. Everything else is arcane to them.
We are not those people. I have to remind myself that not everyone likes to build their own systems.
I do have a friend who wants to buy a framework laptop with Fedora on it because that's what they use in the Laboratory he works in but he doesn't want to assemble it himself he just wants it to come like that.
I think we're getting there finally.
I think the gap between what the average Linux user thinks is ease of use and what the average non Linux user thinks is ease of use is probably much larger and many devs seem to understand.
I think it would be beneficial to have a completely idiot proof installer that doesn't ask you about partitions or formatting or basically anything just point it towards a drive and it will set up a default installation.
More GUI based means of doing basic stuff. A casual who wants to access some photos from his laptop does not want to figure out how to manually configure samba shares by editing config files in their terminal based text editor.
I think codecs are a much bigger pain in the ass than is ideal. As I understand that there are legal reasons for this but the first time some casual goes to play a video and gets an error message their first thought may not be "let me search Google and figure out what this error message means" their first thought maybe "Linux sucks and can't play videos".
The permission structure that makes Linux so secure makes it a little annoying for casuals. For example, you actively and intentionally go to the default software store, navigate to the updates tab, update a package you've already installed and clearly want, and do so from the official OS repository... This requires that you enter your password to protect you from what exactly? It's not a big deal it takes one second to type my password, but how would you explain this to a casual in a way that makes sense? Your OS is protecting you from potentially rogue acts of official patches to your default text editor.
I think the folder structures are pretty big challenge for converts. On Windows you can find most of the files associated with any given program in your program files folder. On Mac there's an applications folder. On Linux... it's somewhere, don't worry about it. That's not really a fixable one it just is what it is.
For example, you actively and intentionally go to the default software store, navigate to the updates tab, update a package you've already installed and clearly want, and do so from the official OS repository... This requires that you enter your password to protect you from what exactly?
I have never had this happen before across 3 distros, and I really doubt any casual user will have this experience either
I have a brother who is not into computers. But he has a shitty laptop (with only 3gb of ram) so windows stopped working on it (because Windows update). So I installed a Linux on it, and he is very happy with it.
He even managed to change the desktop by himself. Installing some stuff was not obvious (like making a scanner work), but I did it guiding him by phone and text.
Command line is in fact much easier in this case than any gui. In a gui, you must know it by heart to correctly guide the person. A command line you can fine tune it on your side, send it on discord, and he only has to copy/paste. That is much more powerful.
And the security is not less than downloading an executable on a dubious website.
It is true that specialist tend to overestimate the skill of unknowing people. But when it come to computer, people also forget that normal people always went for the help of specialist for their technical needs. Nothing changed.
There are a lot of things an average consumer don't wa't to deal with, but that's true for windows as much as Linux. The question is not what they want to do, but what they need to do and if it seems difficult.
A command line can also be distributed as a bash script btw. The difference with an obscure executable that will edit the registry on windows it that the bash file can be checked much more easily.
I guess it would be reducing the need of terminal usage as much as possible. That's still the only thing a common user struggles with, in my opinion. The rest is just difference or has nothing to do with Linux.
With Linux gaming is rising currently, most common problem is kernel anti-cheat games and it's not Linux problem, for example. What are devs supposed to do? To develop literal Windows kernel compatibility layer or something? But Linux may do stuff on their end to make cheating difficult to keep game studio's happy but that would also mean to stray away from its philosophy. As a general platform, it would be hard to do this anyway. This would be possible per distro basis. Maybe Linux dev circles are already discussing this, maybe not, I don't know honestly.
I mean to be fair most modern distros have a gooey for everything from updating to obtaining new packages to installing and managing software settings everything
If you want to use a terminal, it is completely optional in most distros now.
Hell I installed God damn endeavor OS for my brother. He is not once needed to use a terminal in 2 and 1/2 years. He uses nothing but a GUI manager for packages gaming everything.
He's the kind of guy who doesn't understand the difference between his desktop and a web browser. Took him about 3 weeks to get used to KDE and other than being inundated with a bunch of questions at the start of just what the name of different applications were to be able to find settings. He seriously couldn't find the settings app called settings.
He hasn't had any issues that he wouldn't also have had on Windows. At this point everything is just game related and unique to the game he happens to be playing.
I could end of the day. Terminal usage is entirely not required. It's just easier to use the terminal for so much that a lot of people go straight to it or default back to it instead of fighting through the GUI. That's the real issue. It's not that the terminal is mandatory. It's that the GUI while they exist and are competent in, complete enough to actually cover all your use cases finally.
Still need a lot of work to get to the point where they are. So user-friendly that even my idiot brother can use them without help at the start of his learning experience.
To be fair 7 or 8 years ago GUI were not complete enough to cover all use cases in terminals were still very much required for some niche things. We've come a long way, especially in the last three or 4 years on that front.
Also, as someone who has helped probably 60ish people over the last 4 years convert to Linux. The thing I have learned the most stop recommending gnome. Like gnome is the least user friendly desktop experience to learn on for new users. It is far too restrictive and descriptive too new users.
It results in new users. Getting frustrated because things that they expect to be there or to be adjustable or to work like Windows or Mac just don't. You need too many extensions, tools, tweaks and things to get it to the point that new users can bring existing knowledge from other systems over and hit the ground running.
Gnome is gnome's way no one else is in that fundamentally is a bad new user experience in a very poor learning platform.
If we weren't in a world where windows and Mac were so widespread it would be fine. But because users already have a host, a lifetime of knowledge based on other systems, you have to be able to convert that knowledge to the new system for new users. Asking them to do something a specific and new way or to move outside of the officially supported methods immediately to be able to use that knowledge. Is bad.
I've put new users on mate Cinnamon budgie kde gnome and xfce.
My experience the ones that do the best for new users coming from Windows or Mac. Has been xfce for users who have been using computers since Windows 95-XP. Cinnamon and mate tend to do amazingly well for users that grew up on Windows 7.
While KDE has far and away with kde6 been the most reliable for Windows 10 and 11 converts especially kids between the ages of like 12 to 16.
I've put people on endeavor popos mint and even open suse that have all done very well.
Weirdly enough. Every time someone tries Ubuntu it breaks on them not immediately. Usually usually within about 3 months. It just always breaks and some stupid way. I have just started telling people to avoid Ubuntu.
People who convince themselves they "just aren't good with computers."
In the early 2000s, it was widely thought that everyone who grew up with them would be reasonably competent with them. We now have 20-30 year olds who are still stumped with basic computing concepts like how to reset a forgotten password. I literally ran into this a couple of months ago: Really? You haven't had to do this a dozen times in your life by now? How did you finish college (this person was highly educated)?
I had a similar problem with a couple of friends a few weeks back. They're a couple with a lot of debt, so they usually do everything they can to save money. Then the main water line started leaking.
I asked a few questions, and it turned out they could solder the pipes themselves and save hundreds on hiring a plumber. But the wife kept insisting that they were both too dumb to figure it out and by me saying it's easy to learn she just took it as me calling them stupid (which was a weird bit of gaslighting).
They didn't even look up a video on how to do it. I looked some up as a sanity check, and yeah it's fairly straightforward. .
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just took it as me calling them stupid (which was a weird bit of gaslighting).
Glad I'm not the only one who notices this. It's not everyone I meet, but I know quite a few people who double down on their inability to do simple tasks or learn a basic skill... I mostly wonder where it started for these people.
Similar situation, had a buddy recently throw out a pair of $300 headphones because the cable broke.
Your response is short and quippy in a way that might be read as un-serious or dismissive, but its absolutely correct.
The users come first. The software is a tool and has no inherent "needs".
Your average user likely agrees with the statement " my device sending my data to big tech, and being cluttered with ads isn't nice", but they lack the time, knowledge, and interest to fix it.
Once installed, Linux (on supported hardware) is (to my best understanding and experience) no harder or easier than windows or Mac for most things.
I understand my tech expertise might give be blinders on the accuracy of that statement, but I have witnessed enough similar sentiment to begin believing it.
The challenge is getting over the installation hurdle, and putting users in the same mindset Mac users already instinctively have: "the instructions you find online might not apply to you because you are not in the majority".
Preinstalled by OEM is it. The final and ultimate hurdle to gain a loooot of traction.
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But here's the thing, the Linux we'd need to build to get mass OEM adoption probably wouldn't be the Linux that provides those benefits anymore.
Be preinstalled on laptops/desktops.
everything else is ready unless you use niche software. Most people just use a browser and word or a pdf editor.
note the distro MUST be an immutable up to date kde flatpak using one for normal people, however
Yeah a lot of people will complain about their OS but never try installing another one.
ChromeOS is best example. It doesn't have half the functionality linux or windows has but nobody is installing another OS on their chromebook.
Well, it may be actually due to the fact that schools often lock down the Chromebooks so you simply cannot install another operating system on them, and if you do manage to it will be quite a headache and may even include fines (at least for my former high school). I couldn't even install real apps on my Chromebook (all I had was webapps and extensions), even though the feature was already technically out there (it was just locked down my school).
Also yes, as a Linux user, I really hated my Chromebook.
Once again im gonna have to disagree. You are right only if someone is used to windows. But many people ONLY use a phone or tablet these days. Gnome is much more familiar when coming from Android or iOS on a mobile platform. Since its more gesture based just like those are.
Especially among younger people i think the main OS will not be windows but Android. Just look at how Samsung is testing out Samsung Dex on their devices and how Chrome OS is moving to android. Windows is more of the productivity, and desktop OS now imo. For daily use like web browsing, media consumption, etc, Android will be more and more common.
If trends continue as they are i expect Linux to be dominant in the server space still, and to gain ground in the gaming space. Mainly as Valve comes out with more plug and play Linux based consoles, and other companies copy them.
Windows will likely remain dominant in the professional and productivity space. Since they cater to companies and allow lots of remote control options, and the ability to monitor employees.
Android will probably be dominant in the casual media consumption, and web browsing space.
Apple kind of does their own thing and so i dont consider them for this. They are in a bit of everything, but mainly focused in the US specifically. Other regions have a lot more Android presence. But just assume Apple has a piece of each pie too.
Personally i do not think Linux can or should compete with Windows in the corporate space. What companies want is control. That control comes at the cost of features, privacy, and autonomy for users. Microsoft is happy to give those up to make more money. The Linux community isnt, and thats a good thing.
So the areas we can probably peel away some market share are in KDE powered gaming desktops, gaming consoles on something like Steam OS or Bazzite, and in touch friendly portable media machines. 2-in-1 Gnome powered laptops. Thats the way i see it anyway.
Flatpak is great for two groups of users: the ones who only use default settings in standalone apps and the privacy-oriented experts who know how to tweak things to their liking.
In the middle is a large group of users who don't know or care how things work, but they want that one feature an app is supposed to do but mysteriously doesn't work with flatpak.
This password manager is supposed to work with my browser but it says it's not running.App X says it needs app Y for feature Z, but I see both app icons installed on my desktop.
I found a guide online to enable feature D, but when I paste these arcane commands into the text box thingy, it just says ".config/AppQ no such file"
Even one of these occurrences is enough to make most users give up on that app or the OS entirely. I like the idea of sandboxing apps, and I use flatpak daily, but we have to acknowledge and hopefully improve some of its limitations or many users (yourself included, it seems) will consider it unusable.
It does not reduces maintenance. And it costs hard drive, and with heavy use, probably ram too
Redundancy of dependencies in different versions, might also be loaded in ram in different version, which can add its own kind of problems in some circumstances.
Maintenance is only reduced on the surface level. The complexity you don't see as a problem is the actual maintenance problem. It's not a problem only if you're not the one dealing with integration, maintenance or security.
It does not reduces maintenance.
It absolutely does, package maintainers just have to maintain ONE package for all distros.
And it costs hard drive, and with heavy use, probably ram too
This isn't performance really, it's storage, and I don't think it actually impacts ram.
Maintenance is only reduced on the surface level. The complexity you don’t see as a problem is the actual maintenance problem. It’s not a problem only if you’re not the one dealing with integration, maintenance or security.
This is a case you're going to have to try a lot harder to make, I don't see what you're saying at all.
A multi-billion dollars marketing budget, anti-competitive practices and confidential agreements, blacklisting hardware vendors if they dare proposing an alternative, and of course a legal department the size of a small city to sue all competition out of existence.
Oh wait that's Microsoft/Google/Apple/Meta/Amazon.
Came here to say this. My workplace used to offer a Linux workstation option (which I opted in for 9 years), but they had to remove that option to fulfill new security and management, compliance standards. They need to be able to manage exactly which applications are installed on a system, which binaries are allowed to run and when, the exact settings for every application, the exact version of the OS and the specific updates, and precisely when updates are installed.
All of this needs to be applied based on the user, their organisational division, their security groups, clearance level, specific model of device, etc.
I know that using a combination of Selinux, Kerberos, and something like Puppet can get you close in the Linux world, but Microsoft group policy has been around for 30 years and is well understood and just works.
I think it's more users need to realize that an OS that is easier to use in every way is not a more difficult OS to use.
But also, I'm okay gatekeeping Linux, as bringing the masses over just means enshitification and turning it into Windows again. Fuck that.
can you explain the reasoning in your second paragraph?
Also I'm not sure that your definition of Enshittification is correct.
You need to dumb shit down for the majoirty. Jist look at the downward spiral of popular software, and how little the masses really care about ownership or ability to tinker and control what they use.
If you want the masses to use Linux, then you'll need a distro that is as useless as Windows. No technical errors, no forward-facing power user features.
Plus, you'll bring the big corps into Linux with a their shit ideas like rootkits, SaaS, etc. Because if the masses are in Linux, they'll be following the money.
I think with any alternative to big tech the problem is most people are really unwilling to change their habits and make short term compromises.
A lot of people know on a surface level that big tech is stealing their data etc.
But actually changing their habits goes to far.
Another issue is that its more or less a systemic issue.
To many people aren't even awear of what FOSS even is.
The state of Foss and is a bit complicated where you do have organizations and activists advocating for it but also gigantic corporations that use Foss technology and exploit the free labor that goes into it.
There definitely needs to be more activism for FOSS technology and alternatives to big tech.
And those alternatives should be open to everyone like Linux is.
Of course there are always multiple reasons why something isn't used but I do think it is important to look at a bigger perspective than individual consumer/ in this case users
Adding my voice to the hardware compatibility issue. While most hardware just works, Linux usually lacks the ability to configure the device. Audio interfaces are a good example of this. They work but you can't set the sample rate or enable any custom features on ANY of them.
I believe government regulators should step in and require hardware manufacturers to provide Linux support equal to Windows or Mac. This could be relaxed for low volume or highly specialised devices, but mainstream consumer stuff should be more universal.
They work but you can't set the sample rate or enable any custom features on ANY of them.
Not in my experience. I have a RME card that can be configured via alsamixer (which should work for most cards) and a Focusrite Saphire USB interface that someone wrote a little UI for in which you can even freely route audio to/from different channels and mix busses.
Are either of those accessible from the GUI in a fresh default install? I know exactly where in Windows to find that control panel (granted they make it more convoluted to get to in every successive version), but I don't know how I would do it with just what the OS provides in either Mint or Kubuntu (the two distros I have the most familiarity with).
I have only been rocking Linux as a daily driver for a year or two now though, so it could just be a gap in my knowledge.
Are you able to enable the Air function or doing any routing on your focusrite? I've found a way to handle sample rates on Topping Pro 2x2, and on my old focusrite 2i2. But input delays through the audio layers in linux are slower than windows and mac.
I should clarify my original comment. I'm looking for full feature parity out of the box and not having to devise some sort of work around or relay on a 3rd party and hope they don't stop maintaining it.
It is a real frustration, I use my linux install as must as I can but somethings are limited by the lack of 1st party support.
The problem with audio interfaces is that they function very different internally and have different kind of settings. Alsamixer does usually a decent job of listing all parameters but it is an old TUI tool and not nicely embedded into the desktop so I guess people just don't find it. Stuff like latencies just have to do with buffer sizes that are configured in your machines audio system, usually pipewire, pulseaudio or jack, which all work on top of alsa (which is where the drivers run). You can reduce the buffers there (in config files) to get lower latencies. This however means that your system needs to have a very tight scheduling for your audio processes, because if it fails to fill the buffer in time there will be glitches. Professional low latency audio does definetly not work out of the box on linux. It got a little better with pipewire, but I don't think it works well without a little bit of tinkering. If you decide to tinker I recommend you read this:
wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profe…
I don't remember which tool I use for my Scarlett (I'm travelling). But I googled a bit and this looks good:
blog.rtrace.io/posts/fedora-su…
This all would be better if manufacturers would provide Linux config tools like they do on windows or at least information of their protocols. Until they do we have to be greatful for people reverse engineering that stuff (e.g. by analysing USB traffic on windows) and then writing uis for it.
Edit: this site seems to make more sense as the arch wiki page (it is linked there):
this.ven.uber.space/docs/compu…
Support for Focusrite Scarlett audio interfaces on Linux
If you’re into music creation, chances are you’ve heard of Focusrite Scarletts—they’re practically a staple in the industry. But here’s the kicker: while they’re adored by many, official support from Focusrite is limited to Windows and Mac users.Raffael Rehberger (🤬 blog.rtrace.io)
It CAN be configured, but you have to go hunting for the tools to do so.
I've got an old 5.1 surround sound speaker setup attached to my main rig, and in both Cinnamon and KDE (the only two I've tried), you can't use the normal DE's audio control panel to put the thing in 5.1 mode without first installing an old, probably unmaintained tool called ALSAJackRetask. Once you've retasked the jacks, several options for surround appear in the DE's audio control panel. It knows but it can't do.
I'm reminded of a video I saw of a woman talking about her dating prospects using M&Ms. She poured a bunch on the table as a metaphor for her dating pool, and slid away M&Ms as she ruled the people they represent out. "8 million people in the city. But half are women slides half of the M&Ms away of the remaining 4 million men, 20% are under 25, slides more M&Ms away" until she got to a point where she had one candy left, and then she shattered it with a meat tenderizer and continued sliding pieces of it away.
You can do that for potential adoptees of Linux, because there are a bunch of filters in series you have to pass through before successfully adopting Linux.
8 billion people on the planet.
Subtract the Sentinelese and Amish and North Koreans and everyone else who just outright doesn't have access to computers. Nothing we can really do about them and in some cases it would be unethical to try.
Now subtract out the people who only use a mobile device like a cell phone or tablet, which are locked to their OSes. Android or iOS is as much a part of the hardware as a microwave oven's firmware is to them. Linux on mobile devices (excluding Android) is in a severely rough state, there's basically no hardware and software combo that is ready for daily driving.
Now subtract out the people who do use a PC or other device, that won't ever install an operating system on a computer themselves. You'll get some of these folks by selling computers with Linux installed in stores and such, though I think you'll have to address a few other points later. I think SteamOS is demonstrating this.
Now subtract the people who might install Linux themselves, say PC builders who would have to install an OS anyway, but bounce off the process of choosing a distro and then installing. The big distributors like Canonical and Fedora tend toward marketing wankshit instead of human language. You can't tell their goddamn websites "I just want the normal end-user desktop version with KDE please." Does "Core" mean our main, central product, or the IoT embedded system version? You kind of have to know Fedora calls their Gnome edition "Workstation" and if you want "normal Fedora but with KDE" that's a "Spin." Then you get the Trendy Fork Of The Month, things like Bazzite and Nobara that pretty much are Fedora or Ubuntu with a theme applied, maybe some actual features in the OS, but often just a redone onboarding process, like I think it's Bazzite that offers a configurator on their website that lets you pick your desktop and such. Defuckulating the onboarding process of major distros might allow us to do away with the Trendy Fork Of The Month.
Now subtract the folks who get a Linux machine up and running and then bounce off of the unfamiliar UI. I'm pretty sure this is Gnome's fault more often than not, Gnome is deliberately hostile to both distro maintainers and end users to the point there are now four DEs that are "We can't do this anymore" forks of Gnome: MATE, Cinnamon, Unity and Cosmic. You'd probably see more people stick with Linux if it was less easy to stumble dick first into Gnome.
Now subtract the people who got this far and then said "My CAD/art/music/office/finance/whatever software doesn't run on this." and had to switch back. In a lot of cases, software like that exists in the FOSS ecosystem but it's significantly inferior, like FreeCAD or GIMP. These are often kept in a deliberately shitty state because some opinionated programmer likes how the code they wrote in 2004 looks in their IDE, so open software continues to be unadoptable and people continue to pay subscriptions to the Captain Planet villains in charge of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Adobe.
North Koreans
north korea literally uses linux on their computers
kept in a deliberately shitty state
now thats just ignorance.
now thats just ignorance.
Explain the permanent state of GIMP's UI without deliberate sabotage.
lack of resources.
despite that, gimp's ui has been slowly but steadily improving for years. the latest iteration is not ideal but its a big qualitative jump and the best it has even been.
SEC ends lawsuit against Ripple, company to pay $125 million fine
NEW YORK, Aug 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it ended its case accusing Ripple Labs of selling unregistered securities, leaving a $125 million fine intact and ending one of the cryptocurrency industry's highest-profile lawsuits.
Ripple and the SEC agreed on Thursday to dismiss their appeals of the fine imposed by U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan and her injunction against the sale of Ripple's XRP token to institutional investors.
XRP is the third-largest cryptocurrency by market value, trailing bitcoin and Ethereum, according to the market service CoinMarketCap.
The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, near the end of U.S. President Donald Trump's first White House term, accusing it of selling XRP tokens without registering them as securities.
In a mixed ruling in July 2023, Torres said XRP was covered by securities laws when sold to institutional investors, while XRP that Ripple sold on public exchanges was not. She imposed the fine in August 2024.
https://www.profitableratecpm.com/ytkdfp10?key=1002ebe4a4b83b8d95555c11ca18ff7b
Americans, Be Warned: Lessons From Reddit’s Chaotic UK Age Verification Rollout
Americans, Be Warned: Lessons From Reddit’s Chaotic UK Age Verification Rollout
Age verification has officially arrived in the UK thanks to the Online Safety Act (OSA), a UK law requiring online platforms to check that all UK-based users are at least eighteen years old before allowing them to access broad categories of “harmful”…Electronic Frontier Foundation
Comrades, how many libs do I need to get me to call me a tankie before I get my standard issue tank?
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Directly from Wikipedia:
The term "tankie" was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.[6][7] The term has extended to describe people who endorse, defend, or deny the actions of communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. In recent times, the term has been used across the political spectrum and in a geopolitical context to describe those who have a bias in favour of anti-Western states, authoritarian states, or states with a socialist legacy, such as Belarus, Cuba, China,[8][9] Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.
So OP is basically saying they love it when governments crack the will of their people by force as long as its their team doing it.
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So OP is basically saying they love it when governments crack the will of their people by force as long as its their team doing it.
Amazing how this doesn't' even match up with the definition you just posted yourself.
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Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring
huh?
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Idk about that. Seems there were conflicting opinions about whether this was good or bad. And while yeah it makes sense the CIA would back this. I dont see Amy fascist shit here.
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, military forces from several Warsaw Pact member states (Albania, Romania and East Germany did not participate[58]) invaded Czechoslovakia. Soviet media cited a call for help from unnamed representatives as the cause of the "fraternal intervention", publishing an unidentified appeal as proof on 22 August 1968; However, as it became clear from the first day that virtually the entire responsible leadership of the Czechoslovak government and communist parties, including Dubček, were being blamed as causes of the invasion, and even the Soviet-supported leadership fell into accusations against each other, most allied communist parties around the world rejected the Soviet pretext as a thin disguise for gross violation of national party autonomy.[59] Even President Ludvík Svoboda had publicly issued a statement calling on occupying forces to withdraw and for reforms to continue, while Czechoslovakia's UN representatives were calling for international support against the invasion.
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This is a decent overview of the background that led up to the events of 1956, and this is a decent overview of the darker side, where the lynchings happened. Content Warning: lynched corpses. Here is a source on MI6 training and arming the counterrevolutionaries. Those 3 articles give only the briefest overview of the events, but don't do the real buildup to them, their complexities, what the people actually supported, or the real character in any depth. If you want to actually take a deep dive, these are additional sources:
The History of the Working Class Movement in Hungary
1956 Counter-Revolution in Hungary
Others can offer more sources.
Overall, when it comes to geopolitical enemies of the United States in particular, it would not be a bad idea to treat your current understanding with extreme skepticism until you've investigated counter-sources as well. That doesn't mean the US always lies, in fact it frequently tells mostly the truth, but will distory either the quality or quantity of an event.
The 1956 counter-revolution in Hungary and the present-day anti-Communist Propaganda
A blog with a marxist-leninist perspective, against capitalism and imperialism, for workers' revolution and a socialist-communist future.www.idcommunism.com
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I think everyone has their own definition, though it’s definitely a crude slur.
I dunno a more respectful term, and my political leanings have changed over time, including recently…
Like I will nod my head as whatever capitalism or NATO or whatever has done. 'Yep, probably right, beyond awful'… But whatever the word/slur is, I draw the threshold at sheer inability to see self criticism, to an extreme. That’s a “tankie” to me.
I think would call extreme hyper capitalist apologists the same thing, where every awful thing capitalism and associated isms have done is just communist propaganda or whatever. That’s just too much for me.
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sshPilot 2.0 released with tunelling support and more
sshPilot is a desktop application for managing SSH connections. It loads/saves standard .ssh/config entries and make it easy to manage multiple servers.
It fully supports dynamic, remote and local port forwarding, key-pair generation, file transfer to remote machines and more.
Features:
- Load/save standard .ssh/config entries (it loads you current configuration)
- Full support for Local, Remote and Dynamic port forwarding
- Intuitive, minimal UI with keyboard navigation and shortcuts
-- Press ctrl+L to quickly switch between hosts), close tabs with ctrl+w and move between tabs with alt+right/left arrow
- SCP support for quicly uploading a file to remote server
- Generate keypairs and add them to remote servers
- Toggle to show/hide ip addresses/hostnames in main UI
- Light/Dark themes
- Customizable terminal font and color schemes
- Free software (GPL v3 license)
The app is currently distributed as a debian package and can be installed on recent versions of Debian (testing/unstable) and ubuntu. Debian bookworm is not supported due to older libadwaita version.
Latest release can be downloaded from here: github.com/mfat/sshpilot/relea…
You can also run the app from source. Install the modules listed in requirements.txt and a fairly recent version of GNOME and it should run.
A Flatpak and an RPM version are also planned for future.
I'm also looking for a volunteer to design a good icon for the app.
I'd highly appreciate your thoughts/feedback on this.--
GitHub - mfat/sshpilot: Simple, user-friendly SSH connection manager
Simple, user-friendly SSH connection manager. Contribute to mfat/sshpilot development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
I could try to design an app for the app, I'm no professional, but I also don't charge.
What would you want?
Trending Apps | Flathub
Find and install hundreds of apps and games for Linux. Enjoy Firefox, Telegram, RetroArch, GIMP and many more!Flathub
Ah, theyre both gnome style, that's perfect, it's what I'm working on right now.
Would you want to chat on discord or matrix or what have you, so I can show you some wips and you can lead me in the right direction.
edit: going to bed, I'll not be able to reply for a while
Looks like exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for - a clean and easy to use SSH manager!
One question: how are SSH credentials stored? Is there any option for password protection?
And one feature request: as a long time MobaXterm user on Windows, one feature I've yet to see in a Linux SSH utility is the "multi-execution" mode which let's you send commands to multiple terminals at once.
And yes, sending initial commands in a planned feature.
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Lebanese protesters reject Hezbollah disarmament, defend ‘right to defense against foreign invasion’
Lebanese people have taken to the streets in the capital Beirut, voicing support for the country’s resistance movement Hezbollah and protesting mounting US- and Israeli-led pressure towards the group’s disarmament.
The rallies took place in the city’s Dhahiyeh neighborhood on Monday night, with participants shouting slogans in favor of “the right to defense in the face of foreign invasion.”
The attendants, who included droves of bike-riding supporters, waved Hezbollah’s flags, hailing the movement as a “major” contributor to the country’s defense.
Hezbollah was formed in 1982 with a mandate to defend the country in the face of Tel Aviv, which has been occupying the country’s Shebaa Farms on the common border with Syria since 1967, as well as the regime’s increasing regional expansionism drive.
Ever since, both the regime and the United States, its biggest supporter, have been mounting pressure on the country to have the movement disarmed.
The pressure has grown since 2023 after Hezbollah began staging solidarity operations in support of the Gaza Strip that had come under a genocidal Israeli war.
It soon evolved into heavily Washington-backed escalated Israeli aggression against the country that went on to claim the lives of more than 4,000 people.
Participants in the Monday rally also held up pictures of the movement’s current officials as well as those who have been martyred, including the leading figures assassinated throughout the escalation.
Hezbollah itself has vowed to continue defending the nation, as it successfully has throughout both the escalation and two full-scale Israeli wars in the 2000s. It has warned the Lebanese against succumbing to the pressure tactics that are aimed at serving the regime’s expansionist ambitions.
Lebanese protesters reject Hezbollah disarmament, defend ‘right to defense against foreign invasion’
Lebanese people rally in the capital Beirut, voicing support for Hezbollah and protesting mounting pressure towards its disarmament.PressTV
iii
in reply to cookie019 • • •I think the incumbents in EU commission are very scared as politicians from outside the traditional political families are getting popular votes. And instead of looking into to mirror as to why that is happening, they blame "the internet" and go authoritarian.
Thus creating the machinery for mass surveillance and supression.
cookie019
in reply to iii • • •JumpyWombat
in reply to cookie019 • • •National sovereignty is in contrast with the concept of an EU Union. The EU had been constantly eliminating barriers and differences for the past few decades, so it's not surprising that also law enforcement will follow the same evolution.
Many far right ultra nationalists don't like that transfer of powers, but they are the same people who swing from pro-Putin to pro-Trump and appreciate Hitler and Mussolini.
iii
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •It was supposed to be a trade union. But like any group in power, they want more and more?
It's weird that things related to trade, like unifying the train network, isn't happening. But they do spend a lot of time and effort meddling with people's private life.
JumpyWombat
in reply to iii • • •It was supposed to be an alliance to prevent further wars in Europe and it's becoming a political union. What's wrong with that?
You missed something. Check this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Eu… or this transport.ec.europa.eu/transpo…
Historically cross-border investigations have been difficult making it easier to get away with several crimes, especially fiscal and financial frauds. Improving the exchange of information is trying to solve that.
Is it possible that the Polish government investigates your anti-government post on a Belgian server? Maybe... although you are probably overestimating how much a government cares about criticism on Internet. Consider though that EU rules also aim to guarantee civil liberties against authoritarian governments. Things are not perfect (see Hungarian crackdown on lgbt), but we are getting there (see Italy under investigation for spying on journalists).
Rail
Mobility and Transportiii
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •That's weird, as the precursors "European coal and steel community", "european economic community" are clearly economic alliances.
So did you (1)
The answer should not be to bypass judicial prudence. Yet that's what they've chosen.
And that's but one example. The insistence of the unelected EU commission to again and again put chatcontrol for a vote, despite it being unpopular, is another example.
The CRA act is another: basically killing independen softwarw development.
I think you probably grew up in western EU? Those of us that did live under a autoritarian regime, in my case DDR, know the lenghts they will go to to supress people who's thoughts they deem bad.
One of the things that's most difficult to communicate is this: all the freedom surpressing tools that are being build today, which you believe will be used solely against "the bad people", will be used against you. For your own good.
What the EU needs is more direct democracy, not the charade that is parliament/commission, but sadly it's going in the opposite direction.
Track gauge by country in Europe
jakubmarian.comJumpyWombat
in reply to iii • • •en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuman_…
The EU Commission is the executive branch and it's approved by the parliament. You should check the basics.
You basically say that we should stop producing knives because someone could use them against people.
In this specific case, I don't see why in a union the location of a person or a company should have any influence on how the law operates. By the way, these laws also work the other way around in favor of the weaks. Imagine if you wanted to sue a guy protected by his government that made it difficult to collect proofs.
It's a nice idea on paper, but I doubt that it would work. The truth is that the vast majority of people fail to understand the basic functioning of the institutions, not to mention how they easily fall for misinformation and conspirationism due to a lack of critical sense and knowledge. It's a different discussion though.
speech by Robert Shuman on 9 May 1950 announcing plan to pool markets for German and French coal and steel
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)iii
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •People who dislike democracy tend to like the EU indeed. I don't think it's a different discussion. I think it's the philosophical core of this issue.
I feel like you and I are in completely different camps in that regard, as you feel the basis of society should be hierarchical and control. This explains why some appreciate less judiciary oversight on government, less freedom for individuals.
Others think the basis of society should be cooperation, appreciation of individuals, freedom both for and from others.
For the people who prefer domination and control I can only advise empathy. It won't be you who controls others. So try to feel what it's like to not be regarded as a person that deserves freedom and agency. People are more than an entry in a database.
Exactly, it should be the executive branch! It makes no sense that the executive branch proposes laws! And it makes no sense that a law-making part of government is not up for election. This is one of the least democratic institutes that dares to call itself a democracy.
Where the analogy doesn't work is that knives already exist. A better analogy would be: don't build novel weapons of mass destruction that are pointed at your own populace.
Brings us back to our core philosophical difference: cooperation vs subjugation. A union, to me, is cooperative with everyone's boundaries respected. A union to you is top down dictating who does what.
procedures for the adoption of legislation in the European Union
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)JumpyWombat
in reply to iii • • •That's your opinion and it's not based on facts.
No I don't.
I'm afraid that you don't understand how the executive power works.
You also do not understand the difference between a parliament and a government.
You shouldn't assume what I think, especially when you are wrong.
What you propose is an alliance where countries maintain their differences, essentially the dissolution of the EU and the return to the Europe of the early 1900. Interestingly that's the same thing that Putin and Trump hope for. You are free to think it's better, but I'm not sure you fully understand what that really means.
iii
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •If it walk like a duck, and quacks like a duck. Perhaps you should engage in some soul seeking 🙁
Again, there's more ways to interact with others than (a) everyone is dictated top down vs (b) dog eat dog.
What I propose is voluntary democratic cooperation. An improvement upon the current structure with more respect for everyone.
"In Russia they're doing it too" is to me insufficient motivation to lessen our democratic basis and individual freedoms.
How it should work is a legislative branch to propose laws, a parliament to vote on it, an executive to implement it. The bastardization of the process by the EU is that the executive initiates legislation, and isn't directly elected.
That's why they can repeatedly propose the same unpopular law, without any fear of losing power.
JumpyWombat
in reply to iii • • •I propose you to read less anti-EU propaganda. All the initiatives in the EU are made in agreement with the elected EU parliament and are supported by the member states. You should also check how the right of veto works, all the problems for the lack of authority of the EU (contrary to what you say), and what's the legislative procedure, because you don't seem to be fully aware of it.
ReversalHatchery
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •to the 1900? what? do you think that currently the EU is one big country with no major differences?
the EU consists of several different communities, with different cultures and different thinking. I think each country should be able to keep its healthy dose of sovereignty. I'm not saying what we have today is ideal, but turning everything to be more authoritarian is not going to make anything better.
JumpyWombat
in reply to ReversalHatchery • • •Where does this come from? An ultra conservative tabloid?
Although there is still a strong push towards national interests due to some countries' myopia, the EU members are largely aligned with common rules on every aspect of the social life, the EU laws comes before members' laws like in a federation, and there are common investments including the cohesion funds (did you ever hear of those?).
Basically what the ECR and the Patriots say, which is amusing because they are the authoritarian ones, including some big fan of Putin, MAGA, and Hitler. When you think about it, it's not surprising that an "healthy dose of sovereignty" goes side by side with far-right ideas.
You may be right if you talk about initiatives to contrast cryptography (which failed multiple times), but in general the EU has always had a centrist politics thanks to the fact that groups like ECR and Patriots never managed to get the power. In the latest years, the far right is gaining traction with victories in some countries and I dare to say that it's a mix of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda aiming to push precisely those ideas of an "healthy dose of sovereignty" to weaken what is becoming a political block that could eventually compete with the USA, China, and that could stop the imperialism of Russia. Having some of those far right parties strongly connected to MAGA and Putin, is an interesting "coincidence".
Check your sources because you have misunderstood lots of things. Unless, of course, you actually want the Europe of 1900.
far-right political group of the European Parliament
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)ReversalHatchery
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •umm, no, I haven't read it anywhere. It's just how it is. why do you think this is not the case?
are you immediately imagining me as a russian tankie?
well their dose is not healthy
as I see this would either need voluntary high cooperation of most countries, which would be a good thing (but not in the sense of imposing my country's laws on your country because your country hosts servers of interest), but something very hard to achieve because that would need to be maintained for multiple political parties when they are elected.
or a united states of europe that would basically replace each country's political system with a top-down system as the other user said, where there are no local elections for the ruling party anymore, or much less meaningful, but only an EU-wide election. which I'm not sure if it's bad, it's certainly a lot different. but it's not something I like that after that, moving to another EU country is not an option if what you want is to leave a bad legal regime.
you know, maybe I have these main problems with the eu cloud act:
- 10 days is way too little time for appeal, especially when there's a high volume of requests (a single country could overload their capacity)
- you won't get to know if a country has held the gun to your email or other provider to hand over your data. yes this is the case already, but this change makes it even worse.
- if a country bans encryption, does that mean my online service providers have to ban me from the encrypted functions?
far-right political group of the European Parliament
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)JumpyWombat
in reply to ReversalHatchery • • •So you are saying that you have first hand information to state that "the EU consists of several different communities, with different cultures and different thinking". Who are you? A sociologist who studied the EU for the past two decades?
I'm asking because it's completely in contrast with my first hand experience. I lived and worked in a few countries besides my original one and I found that the actual differences are more limited to what people eat for breakfast, what stereotypes they have for other countries, and the quality of the services one gets.
So where do you stand? With Farage cherry picking what you like of the Union?
The cornerstone of the EU is the free market that means having a company from Spain able to do business in Germany. To achieve that, it is essential to have common rules and common standards just like it's essential to eliminate barriers. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The UK tried, and now they are out.
Maybe you didn't notice, but the European elections are already much more important than the local elections since the internal political economy is largely controlled by the EU. Your government can (for now) play around civil rights, manage pocket money, but cannot go out of the European boundaries that are becoming tighter and tighter every year.
You are attacking a law that removes national barriers because your slightly-fascist country may abuse of that. Fix the fascism instead.
It won't happen, but even if it does, you run your own.
cookie019
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •for that purpose the NATO was created, not EU - it was trade union as the previous commentator said.
JumpyWombat
in reply to cookie019 • • •Nope. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European…
international organisation serving to unify European countries peacefully after World War II
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)cookie019
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •About if it is possible that goverment is interested - I don't know if you're Polish or familiar with the situation in Poland, but currently, a trial is underway in Poland, initiated by the pseudo-liberal opposition, regarding the illegal surveillance of journalists and independent political candidates in the 2019 elections using Pegasus. This surveillance was approved by national Polish courts. If a framework had existed at that time, they might have been able to gather much more compromising evidence on political opponents much faster.
Regarding your opinion that the government doesn't crack down on criticism on the internet, it's worth noting that the Polish Minister of Justice still insists on the maximum criminal punishment for two women who showed a depiction of the Virgin Mary in rainbow colors, as he claims it's an insult to religion. Since the ruling ultra-right party in Poland is a clearly clerical party with strong ties to Catholicism and has repeatedly used Catholic themes in their speeches, for them, it's evidently a priority to eradicate dissent in the country. The Minister of Justice's actions clearly confirm this.
I also use the term 'government' in relation to judicial investigations deliberately, as Poland has been subject to EU sanctions due to the government's force on the judicial system
JumpyWombat
in reply to cookie019 • • •I've read about what's happening in Poland and similar issues exist also in Hungary and Italy where (what a coincidence) far right governments are in charge with their ultra conservative and authoritarian agenda.
However, I don't see why the EU should not go ahead with the program.
If the Poles (or the Hungarians, the Italians,...) elect a fascist government to rule on them, the problem is with the people, not the EU. I completely understand that you may be against that government, but most of the people around you chose it. They may be fools or fascist. Either way you may be in the wrong place. EU comes with the freedom of movement: use it.
cookie019
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •people around you choose them
The ancient Romans did not like Christians and therefore one of their favorite entertainments was to gather in amphitheaters and watch as defenseless Christians were thrown into a cage with tigers and torn apart. People received positive emotions, it united the spirit of the nation, and children also had fun. Another example is that after a shipwreck, people on a boat wandered in the ocean for several days and were starving, having no food, they decided that it was better to die alone than to die together and ate a young boy. Then they were rescued. These are real examples of how your utilitarian philosophy is disadvantaged and its shortcomings.
JumpyWombat
in reply to cookie019 • • •It's 2025. Not only we are no more butchering minorities for fun, but any European is literally one ticket away to move to another country and start a new life. It's your choice to stay.
MonkderVierte
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •JumpyWombat
in reply to MonkderVierte • • •traceur201
in reply to JumpyWombat • • •JumpyWombat
in reply to traceur201 • • •Narri N. (they/them)
in reply to cookie019 • • •Matt
in reply to Narri N. (they/them) • • •