FreeTube + Customized MPV: Guide to a Temporary Solution
Introduction
So, FreeTube is broken and you want to watch YouTube on your desktop without using the YouTube site or embed. If you have mpv installed and want to use that, this guide is for you.
Note: This guide does NOT work with the Flatpak version of FreeTube!
Getting YT Links to open in MPV
First, we need to set MPV as a video player in FreeTube. Since FreeTube has support for external players, this is what we will use.
- Open Settings
- Under External Player, select mpv from the dropdown list.
Below the dropdown is Custom External Player Arguments. Here are the recommended ones I use:
- --fs: Automatically opens the video in fullscreen.
- --ytdl-raw-options=format="(bestvideo[height<=X]+bestaudio/best)": Gets the best audio and best video and combines them. Video resolution is no larger than X. Example resolutions include 720, 1080, 1440, 2160. I personally use 720, but you use whatever your bandwith allows.
Install Recommended MPV plugins
By itself, mpv is pretty barebones. It's missing a few features that FreeTube has, such as sponsorblock or media controls. Below are the following plugins that solve these issues. I won't include the install directions for these as these will differ for each distro, but the main installation point should be either ~/.config/mpv/scripts (Current User) or /usr/share/mpv/scripts (All Users).
mpv-sponsorblock: github.com/TheCactusVert/mpv-s…
This Rust implementation of sponsorblock works well with MPV. A few things to note:
1. Segments do not display on the timeline. However, automatic skipping does work.
2. To edit what type of segments are skipped, follow the Configuration section in the repo, and edit your sponsorblock.toml file in ~/.config/mpv.
Here is what I personally use:
# Categories: sponsor, selfpromo, interaction, poi_highlight, intro, outro, preview, music_offtopic, filler, exclusive_access
categories = ["sponsor", "interaction", "music_offtopic"]
# Action types: skip, mute, poi, full
action_types = ["skip", "skip", "skip"]mpv-mpris: github.com/hoyon/mpv-mpris
This plugin displays media controls for MPV on KDE Plasma and GNOME. By default, MPV lacks the MPRIS D-Bus interface used by programs such as playerctl to provide media controls and information.
- mpv-mpris has a package in the Arch repos (Extra). Note that this will install to /usr/share/mpv/scripts instead.
Setup Recommended Keyboard Shortcuts
MPV is looking pretty good now, however there are some small tweaks we can make to the default keyboard shortcuts. My main gripe with mpv is the UP/DOWN arrows are set to seek 1 minute and * and / (Numpad) control volume. Let's fix that.
- Copy the default
input.conffile for mpv to~/.config/mpv. This file should be located in/usr/share/doc/mpv, but depending on how you install mpv, this may differ.$ cp /usr/share/doc/mpv/input.conf ~/.config/mpv - Edit this file with your preferred text editor and add the following to the end:
UP add volume 2 # Increase volume by 2% DOWN add volume -2 # Decrease volume by 2%
This will rebind your UP/DOWN arrow keys to volume controls. Change the value to whatever your want. If you want to match FreeTube's volume controls, set the values to 5 and -5.
Some additional shortcuts to know about for MPV:
i: Show debug info (Similar to View Stats in YT)o: Show current video progressMenu: Show the menu key. Useful for accessing playlist menu.- Usually the Square with 3 horizontal lines in the middle.
- Some keyboards lack this button.
[: Decrease video speed by 10%- Use
Shiftto decrease by 50%
- Use
]: Increase video speed by 10%- Use
Shiftto increase by 50%
- Use
Backspace: Reset video speed to 100%m: Mute audioPage Up: Go to next chapterPage Down: Go to previous chapterq: Quit MPV>/Enter: Play next video in playlist<: Play previous video in playlist- For these two, you need to press and hold
Shiftwith them. The exception isEnter.
- For these two, you need to press and hold
Wrap-Up
And thats the setup. I hope you enjoy this temporary setup until FreeTube gets fixed. It takes some time to setup, but once it is, you can use it anywhere. You can even use it with just yt-dlp if you want.
This guide might work with Celluloid. I personally don't use it, but you can try if you want to.
If there are any issues with this guide, let me know!___
EDIT: Added Flatpak FreeTube warning
EDIT 2: Updated debug keybind. D was for interlace, not debug.
GitHub - TheCactusVert/mpv-sponsorblock: MPV plugin that allow you to skip sponsors while watching YouTube videos
MPV plugin that allow you to skip sponsors while watching YouTube videos - TheCactusVert/mpv-sponsorblockGitHub
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Norway braces for Trump’s reaction if he does not win Nobel peace prize
With hours to go until the announcement of this year’s Nobel peace prize, Norwegian politicians were steeling themselves for potential repercussions to US-Norway relations if it is not awarded to Donald Trump.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee pointedly said on Thursday that it had reached a decision about who will be named 2025 peace prize laureate on Monday, several days before Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire under the US president’s Gaza plan.
Taking into account the timeframe and the composition of the independent five-person committee, most Nobel experts and Norwegian observers believe it is highly unlikely that Trump will be awarded the prize, leading to fears in the country over how he will react to being overlooked so publicly.
Norway braces for Trump’s reaction if he does not win Nobel peace prize
US president may impose tariffs, demand higher Nato contributions or even declare Norway an enemy, analyst saysMiranda Bryant (The Guardian)
Looking for a new place...
I used to use gaytorrents. They have the content and forums and it’s a nice little community. However, it’s suspicious they aren’t trying to prepare for the censorship hitting all other adult sites. They flat out stated in the forums they will not adopt i2p or tor or any other darknet and will start using age verification/start banning IP ranges when requested. If we don’t like it, we are told to just use a VPN.
This is an incredibly dumb response.
So I need to plan my migration away while there is still enough open conversation to discover new places. My state already bans porn unless we hand over our IDs to be handled irresponsibly/given to identity thieves/added to a list of undesirable people they want to toss into a gas chamber.
Under this regime, I’m not giving that out. Fuck them.
So where can I go now?
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This doesn't answer your main question but I suspect their thinking is that VPN use is already very common in torrent communities. So common that it's not really a big deal for users to browse the site via VPN if necessary. It's not really that the staff there is going to do age verification, realistically if necessary they'd likely just block access from whatever states/jurisdictions are giving them issues with age verification.
That aside not too sure if what you're looking for currently exists. There are a few general torrent sites that also operate Tor / I2P domains, and also the general torrent indexer Postman exists on I2P. The amount of users in Tor / I2P networks is way lower vs the clearnet torrent sites so a hyper-focused torrent site in Tor / I2P doesn't seem viable but I could be wrong.
Linux Day 2025 - Verona
Linux Day 2025 - Verona
Unisciti a noi per il Linux Day 2025, l'evento annuale dedicato alla promozione di Linux e del software libero! Che tu sia un esperto, un appassionato o semplicemente curioso di scoprire di più sul mondo dell'open source, questo appuntamento è pensato per te!
Durante il pomeriggio, potrai partecipare a talk coinvolgenti e laboratori pratici, dove professionisti ed esperti del settore mostreranno come il software libero possa avere un impatto reale nella vita quotidiana e nel lavoro. Sarà un'opportunità unica per incontrare la comunità locale, condividere esperienze, porre domande, scambiare idee e conoscere o approfondire il mondo Linux e le sue applicazioni.
L'evento si terrà sabato 25 ottobre 2025 dalle 14:00 alle 18:00 presso il 37100Lab a Verona, e sarà seguito da un rinfresco.
Vieni a scoprire la potenza del software libero e contribuisci alla costruzione di un mondo più aperto e collaborativo!
Programma:
- Luanti: mondi liberi a cubetti
Introduzione e laboratorio pratico su Luanti, la piattaforma per creare videogiochi cubettosi - rigorosamente software libero(a cura di Marco Amato)
- Proxmox for Fun and Profit:
Se funziona al primo colpo, hai sbagliato qualcosa(a cura di Michele Bertoncello)
- OpenTofu + Proxmox: la ricetta open per il tuo datacenter
Un introduzione pratica nel mondo dell’Infrastructure as Code(a cura di Filippo Peretti)
- Open source e libertà: storie di successo nel mondo Linux
Non solo perché è gratis, ma soprattutto perché è libero!(a cura di Alessandro Marchioro)
Facilitatori: volontari ILS Verona
Al termine, goditi un ottimo rinfresco!
La partecipazione è gratuita. Prenota il tuo posto ora!
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Denmark's EU president cancels vote on Chat Control
Denmark's EU president cancels vote on Chat Control - Hostvix
The Danish EU presidency has withdrawn plans to bring a vote next week on its controversial “chat control”…Alex Ivanovs (Hostvix)
Countries canceling USD For China Currency Loans As U.S. Trade Crash To intensity In 2026
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Scientists Completed a Toxicity Report on This Forever Chemical. The EPA Hasn’t Released It.
This spring, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency completed a report on the toxicity of a “forever chemical” called PFNA, which is in the drinking water systems serving some 26 million people. The assessment found that PFNA interferes with human development by causing lower birth weights and, based on animal evidence, likely causes damage to the liver and to male reproductive systems, including reductions in testosterone levels, sperm production and the size of reproductive organs.
The report also calculated the amount of PFNA that people could be exposed to without being harmed — a critical measurement that can be used to set limits for cleaning up PFNA contamination in Superfund sites and for removing the chemical from drinking water.
For months, however, the report has sat in limbo, raising concerns among some scientists and environmentalists that the Trump administration might change it or not release it at all.
EPA Report on Dangers of PFNA, a Forever Chemical, Hangs In Limbo
The report was completed in mid-April, scientists familiar with the document told ProPublica, but the Trump administration has yet to release it.ProPublica
Federal court to weigh Trump's deployment of National Guard troops in Chicago area
President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Illinois faces legal scrutiny Thursday at a pivotal court hearing, a day after a small number of troops began protecting federal property in the Chicago area.
U.S. District Judge April Perry will hear arguments over a request to block the deployment of Illinois and Texas Guard members. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and local officials strongly oppose the use of the Guard.
Colombia's president says boat struck by US was carrying Colombians
Colombia's president says boat struck by US was carrying Colombians
The White House calls the allegation "baseless" as the US Senate rejected a measure to bar Trump from using force against the boats.Ione Wells (BBC News)
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They spoke Spanish.
::: spoiler in case of anger
/s
:::
as the US Senate rejected a measure to bar Trump from using force against the boats.
because killing innocents is the american way!
Russia Shoots Down Ukraine’s Flamingo Cruise Missile Flying at 600 km/h
Russia Shoots Down Ukraine’s Flamingo Cruise Missile Flying at 600 km/h
Russian forces reportedly shot down Ukraine’s newly unveiled Flamingo cruise missile, according to military sources on Telegram.Petr Ermilin (Pravda English)
Hopefully they can use it at the same time as cheaper missiles to force specific defenses.
There is a troika haunting lemmy, disregard anyone calling it a 'triad'
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Who?
They used to systematically repost everything posted to memes@lemmy.ml to .world due to their raging hatred of the tankie triad
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look if you can't give me proof of it, it can't be a nazi bar using dog whistles
what do you mean it reflects badly if I who loves being there can't see the dog whistles
There are so many times I wonder if it's just a goat alt or someone exactly like them
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Once more for the people in the back:
we all know libs will side with fascists over leftists every single time.
Hey commies, you claim to hate Trots but you love decentralized social networks. Curious.
Turning Point Neck Fountain
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Hey hey this is innacurate to link us to Stalin
we work for George Soros too
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For a while now there's been a group of NAFO-adjacent shit-stirrers obsessing over the malign influence of the so-called 'tankie triad' which is lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net. This style of posting has been dubbed 'feudposting', and I'm parodying it in the OP.
The joke I am making is that if you're going for ominous names the 'tankie troika' is way more menacing and russian. I made this meme taking that bit to its ridiculous conclusion.
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There's a lot to the troika, it's been associated with Russia for centuries. Literally means 'a group of three'.
The configuration of two horses galloping with one horse trotting in the middle allowed for high speeds across vast distances and is commonly referenced in russian literature, particularly authors like Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc.
It's also pretty associated with the trinity (troitsa). Triplicity is a major feature of Russian folklore and culture in general; the three brothers, the three trials, three roads, three kisses, etc.
For revolutionaries it was the smallest organizing unit for a number of reasons and was present in both early anarchist and bolshevik cells. Some advantages were that it was agile, hard to infiltrate, and doesn't need a leader, rather a shared direction. In many ways an anti-hierarchical organizing pattern.
In the Stalin era it got a bit more of a sinister connotation as a 'troika' would be the group of officials signing off on sentences.
You love to hear the story, again and again,
Of how it all got started way back when,
The monument is right in your face,
Sit and listen for a while to the name of the place,
The World,
Lemmyworld.
‘Total impunity’: Why FIFA won’t sanction Israel despite Gaza genocide
World Cup 2026 qualifiers: Why FIFA won’t ban Israel despite Gaza genocide
Protection of political, economic and commercial interests has led to FIFA’s ‘double standards’ in dealing with Israel.Hafsa Adil (Al Jazeera)
Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses
Eyes Up's purpose is to "preserve evidence until it can be used in court." But it has been swept up in Apple's attack on ICE-spotting apps.
Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses
Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.
“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”
💡
Do you work at Apple or Google and know anything else about these app removals? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.Mark said the app was removed on October 3. At the time of writing, the Apple App Store says “This app is currently not available in your country or region” when trying to download Eyes Up.
The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location.
“I personally look at each submission to ensure that it's relevant, accurately described to the best I can tell, and appropriate to post. I actually look at the user submitted location and usually cross-reference with [Google] Street View to verify. We have an entire private app just for moderation of the submissions,” Mark said.
Screenshots of Eyes Up.
The videos available on Eyes Up are essentially the same you might see when scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or X. They are a mix of professional media reports and user-generated clips of ICE arrests. Many of the videos are clearly just re-uploads of material taken from those social media apps, and still include TikTok or Instagram watermarks. Mark said the videos are also often taken from Reddit or the community- and crime-awareness app Citizen too.
Many of the videos from New York are footage of ICE officials aggressively detaining people inside the city’s courts, something ICE has been doing for months. Another is a video from the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), which represents more than 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups. Another is an Instagram video showing ICE taking “a mother as her child begs the officers not to take her,” according to a caption on the video. The map includes similar videos from San Diego, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, which are clearly taken from TikTok or media reports, including NBC News.
“Our goal is to preserve evidence until it can be used in court, and we believe the mapping function will make it easier for litigants to find bystander footage in the future,” Mark said.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told 404 Media “Like any other government agency, DHS is required to follow the law. The collection of video evidence is a powerful tool of oversight to ensure that the government respects the rights of citizens and immigrants alike. People have a right to film interactions with law enforcement in public spaces and to share those videos with others.”
“If DHS is concerned that the actions of their own officers might inflame public opinion against the agency, they should work to increase oversight and accountability at the agency — rather than seek to have the evidence banned,” he added.
Apple removed ICEBlock, another much more prominent app, on Thursday from its App Store. The move came after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials acting at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to Fox. A statement the Department of Justice provided to 404 Media said the agency reached out to Apple “demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.” Fox says authorities have claimed that Joshua Jahn, the suspected shooter of an ICE facility in September in which a detainee was killed, searched his phone for various tracking apps before attacking the facility.
Joshua Aaron, the developer of ICEBlock, told 404 Media “we are determined to fight this.”
ICEBlock allowed people to create an alert, based on their location, about ICE officials in their area. This then sent an alert to other users nearby.
Apple also removed another similar app called Red Dot, 404 Media reported. Google did the same thing, and described ICE officials as a vulnerable group. Apple also removed an app called DeICER.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Yet, Eyes Up differs from those apps in that it does not function as a real-time location reporting app.Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday about Eyes Up’s removal.
Mark provided 404 Media with screenshots of the emails he received from Apple. In the emails, Apple says Eyes Up violates the company’s guidelines around objectionable content. That can include “Defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Professional political satirists and humorists are generally exempt from this requirement.”
The emails also say that law enforcement have provided Apple with information that shows the purpose of the app is “to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
The emails are essentially identical to those sent to the developer of ICEBlock which 404 Media previously reported on.
In an appeal to the app removal, Mark told Apple “the posts on this app are significantly delayed and subject to manual review, meaning the officers will be long gone from the location by the time the content is posted to be viewed by the public. This would make it impossible for our app to be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
“The sole purpose of Eyes Up is to document and preserve evidence of abuses of power by law enforcement, which is an important function of a free society and constitutionally protected,” Mark’s response adds.
Apple then replied and said the ban remains in place, according to another email Mark shared.
The app is available on Google's Play Store.
Update: this piece has been updated to include comment from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class
Internal emails show tech giant used anti-hate-speech rules meant for minorities to block an app documenting immigration enforcement.Pablo Manríquez (Migrant Insider)
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Send Apple feedback. They need to hear how unpopular working with Trump will make them.
Product Feedback
We would love to hear your comments about any of our hardware and software products. Send us your thoughts.Apple
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Well, both, really.
Make sure they know you won’t be buying their process anymore because of these policies.
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If people actually do this, they would find out next quarter
But everyone loves talking big but keeps using these corpos products
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Oh that's fantastic.
Can you please tell me you're entirely ethical smartphone setup?
Obviously you won't have any Android in there, including Android ROMs which are based off of AOSP, as Google is just as, if not more, evil than Apple, and any project based off Google's OS is inherently unethical.
Are you're using a Fair Phone? If not, what ethical phone are you using?
And for your OS, is Sailfish or Ubuntu Touch?
Oh no, we can't have ethical smartphones so we are forced to fund the worst corporations that exist 😢
I guess I'll just go buy an overpriced piece of tech crap locked in a shitty proprietary environment that doesn't respect any of my rights...
Uh, that would have been a good argument back when flagship models didn’t cost more than the latest iPhones. Unless you’re buying something other than Samsung though, you’re paying more than $2k for something that soon won’t even be able to side-load apps.
The gap between Android and iOS is closing as fast as Google can build the wall around their garden.
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What makes you think I buy flagships?
Also who cares about their gap, Linux phones are the next stop now.
The person I was responding to was declaring that their choice to use an Android based phone makes them a more ethical consumer, and therefore a better person, then iPhone users.
That's an absurd position, which was what my comment was highlighting.
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No, the thing here is that whenever one calls out company X then its fanboys will be like "company Y is worse".
Which is absurd because X and Y don't care about any of you.
Cause using AOSP benefits Google's ability to limit their app restrictions.
Tell me you don't understand open source without telling me you don't understand it...
You give off some real "Well achkshuslly" enlightened centrist vibes here.
Using Google products is implicit support for Google.
Which, by the way, I understand, but if you actually read the comments from top to bottom, you would have grasped the context.
So tell me you didn't actually read the comment thread without telling me.
Can you please tell me you're entirely ethical smartphone setup?
A used Onpeplus 10 with Lineage on it
au contrair, that's still Android!! We got em! Ez, kek!
Yeah, and I didn't pay for it. I don't use Google services. You said ethics, right? I bought it used, Google doesn't profit and I don't use any of their services, so, they don't continue to.
Seems pretty sound to me. Lemme know if you need a recc for a TV or anything. I'm good with those too. I like helping normies connect with technology.
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Correct.
One guy standing tall is cute and all but that'd not how systematic change happens. Need like 10-15% of people to get in the fight to send a proper message
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I am already balls deep, chief.
Helping family and friends while shilling it online.
We got min 5 years best case scenario still
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What do you use?
I tried pine phone, but it wasn't usable as a daily driver.
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A random second hand smartphone, with a custom Android rom and no Google crap on it.
Also I'm constantly behind a VPN, just in case they can still get some useful data from me.
I consider that WAY better than buying a shitty iPhone
Which is why I stay away from Google's products too.
I guess can see how buying items second hand and flashing a ROM is not quite the same as buying a brand new phone running Android, but it seems unfair to then besmirch all iPhone users.
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Did I really say anything about iPhone users? I suggested to boycott Apple and I stated that I don't use their products.
Then someone accused me of being an hypocrite, out of literally nowhere.
That is what I use, but it still dependent upon Google, for both software and hardware.
While I look forward to Linux phones being usable, but I haven't had that experience yet.
Can you not have fun without big tech platforms? There is so much stuff out there to do. So many hobbies both digital and physical to entertain yourself with.
For tech things there is the open source nerds that continue to make it possible to remove the influence of our tech overlords from our lives while still making use of the hardware we already have.
For climate change there are local groups in many cities (at least in Germany) with the specific idea of creating future proof communities that will survive supply chain collapse for food, water, electricity, etc.
Yes, but also make it clear why you are leaving. And as dirty as it feels, don't tell them their actions are irredeemable and they've lost you for life.
If you tell them you'll never come back no matter what, then they no longer have to care about your opinion. You're essentially telling them that they should start catering more-heavily to the fascists now that the only potential customers don't mind them bending the knee.
How much "feedback" do you think it will take to make them contradict the vindictive sitting President? Apple doesn't care about what you think about this because it's not for you.
You know what you can do? Stop giving them money. Write them an email from your iCloud account, then delete said account. Cancel any subscriptions (this seemed to be effective against Disney).
The fed gov holds too much power. You have to show them that Americans, collectively, have more power to affect their bottom line than the Pres, and (most importantly) are willing to exercise it.
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The only people worse than Apple fans, are Apple haters.
Because I see a lot of vocal Apple haters on Lemmy, just shitting all over Apple users, but I rarely see Apple users here shitting on Android or anything else.
I use a iPhone, my mom and dad (may he rest in peace) were already using them and wanted to use the family features on them to keep my brother and me safe. I didn’t choose to be in the ecosystem, I was just placed in it.
I also just have no reason to talk shit on android users because I know many of them are like me. Just placed into the ecosystem by parents, since their parents used them. Also just who really gives that much of a fuck? It’s a phone, it’s a laptop or earbuds or whatever. Largely things that people just need in the modern world, and it’s easy to stick with what you know and what’s easy to use.
What argument...?
Out of nowhere, you just started talking shit about Apple users to make yourself feel superior about your individual consumer choices, really cool bro.
Also unclear who I was making fun of, unless you consider pointing out how absurd your Apple user hate is, to be making fun of you.
But that's not making fun of you, it's pointing out how pathetic your unprompted and vocal hatred for Apple users was.
Really proving how intelligent Apple fans are with that reading comprehension... The argument referenced there is obviously referencing the arguments you brought up elsewhere on the internet between Apple fans and other fans.
It's not out of nowhere. This is a topic about how people maybe should not give Apple money if they don't want to support a corporation that will bow to fascists.
How stupid and captured their dumbass fans are is DIRECTLY related to how easy it'd be to convince them to not keep throwing money at Apple.
The fact you cannot even follow a basic conversation is the only pathetic thing here.
It's not my reading comprehension that's to blame for your rancid hatred of Apple users and I'm confident that your behavior is repulsive to more people than just me.
The irony is that I use Linux for desktop and Graphene for mobile so my objections are not rooted in defending my own consumer choices, they're based entirely on your pathetic blind hatred of people who use Apple products.
lol so you defend that which you do not even use and that which you do not undertand? What a joke...
My hatred is anything but blind, and you calling it such is sealioning beyond belief. I love your hypocrisy... An Apple user without even using Apple products... Truly, your lot in life is more dreary than you could ever admit.
You're a sad little creature.
If I didn't hold you in such contempt, I would pity you.
And you either didn't read the entire thread, or you agree that OP is morally superior to anyone who uses Apple products, and that Apple users are people that should just be hated.
So which is it?
I read it all and you are acting like a certified jackass no doubt about it.
"The Defender of Apple" or whatever is in your fucked up head.
Please show me where I defended the Apple corporation.
Because me thinks you can't read good.
But don't worry, there's a school for that:
Man does your brain twist up in pretzels when you think like that?
Obviously you are not acting in good faith, but we knew that from the start.
You literally just said:
"The Defender of Apple" or whatever is in your fucked up head.
But when I ask you to provide a single example of my defending Apple, you respond with:
Man does your brain twist up in pretzels when you think like that?Obviously you are not acting in good faith, but we knew that from the start.
So are you just incapable of admitting you made a mistake?
I do appreciate the irony of you saying that my mind is twisted up like a pretzel, just beautiful 10/10.
Let me get this straight, you are here to correct everyone that Apple Haters are wrong?
No wait, it is there are too many Apple Haters on Lemmy?
No, I got it you don't have a fucking point because you are playing devil's advocate like a dumbass.
You make a bunch of bullshit statements about your opinions and then expect us to just believe you?
Please post proof that there are more Apple Haters than Android. Please post proof that your brain isn't a fucking pretzel you jackass. I want to see a picture of it!
I just accused you of being a devil's advocate. You did not deny it so it must be true.
You didn't provide evidence there are more Apple haters than Android haters. You also did not provide proof you brain isn't twisted into a pretzel.
Wow, that is the best you can do Quackers?
Not only are you not funny and a stupid Devil's Advocate, but you are also an insufferable idiot.
I may not be funny, but you're goddamn hilarious.
Not only do you clearly have no idea what playing devil's advocate means, conceptually, like at all, but you keep trying to pigeonhole it into your little argument and it has me crying bro, I'm dying laughing.
Quack quack quack its about to be a quack attack!
Don't have an aneurysm now my little tard baby.
I stand corrected.
Clearly I am the deficient party here.
Really nailed that aneurysm zinger, btw.
I don't disagree.
But my comment was a direct response to the user ranting about their superiority to, and hatred of, anyone who uses Apple products.
They kind of got that rep though for defending things people saw as anti consumer such as soldered ram, limited, storage, and blocking installation of non Apple apps. Always going Apple knows best and its for security.
Not exactly the group known for demanding more, but ones who are more complacent.
I'm an Apple owner too with MacMini and iPad so these criticisms of Apple users isn't coming from a non Apple product owning hater. I think average Apple fan in general really sucks for how they seem to kneel over to whatever Apple decides compared to other platform users who are much more critical and demanding of products.
Here come the devil's advocates, good lord that is something I don't miss from Reddit.
Wake up call! Apple doesn't need you defending it. It is okay to shit on them. This isn't about fairness so please take you tired schtick somewhere else.
They're based in the USA, they have to work with the government or they'll be targeted/taken over/shut down, surely?
They could try to escape the USA and move all their operations to Europe, but I think they're just going to stick where they are and do whatever the fascists want them to do. So long as they're getting paid why should they care?
They had no problem standing up to the FBI when they knew the Constitution still worked. It's not bravery when it doesn't cost you anything and there's nothing to be afraid of. But now things are different and regular every day people don't want to say it out. The implications make them uncomfortable.
Apple's market share outside of the US is pretty pitiful. Even with their piles of money, it would hurt.
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Thus solidifying my scorched earth policy with apple.
I don't want your naziPhone.
FYI, Google is also going after ICE-spotting apps.
And therefore, ill punish neither.
Can you add anything else to nullify action, and foster an attitude of placid obedience?
Please, share more ideas to help entrench the status quo.
Can you add anything else to nullify action
You're made of spare parts, aren't ya, bud? No, therefore you should punish both, and get a phone with GrapheneOS or Linux.
No, they're pointing out the chilling effect of shitting on the topic.
You're the kind of fuckwit that would say Chris Hansen does no good against predators because he's one guy doing a small set of stings... You're the kind of guy who'd shit on a compromise policy that's otherwise still a step in the right direction. You're the kind of guy to make good the enemy of great.
and you have the gall to use insults when YOU are the one committing the social faux pas...
Pathetic. If you're going to point out flaws, be constructive with it. Otherwise it is still on YOU if someone assumes negative intent from unconstructive criticism.
You're made of spare parts, aren't ya, bud? No, therefore you should punish both, and get a phone with GrapheneOS or Linux.
So why didn’t you just say something like Look into Graphene OS or Linux in the first place?
Why did you assume I was "nullifying action"?
Mostly your action nullifying attitude.
I shit on Tesla on a routine basis, and get zero pushback. No bitching about other vehicle producers who also are Trumpdy Dumptys..., zero.
I say don't buy naziPhones, and people come out of the woodwork with every conceivable devil's advocate angle, and basically maximize tangentiality.
Anything other than reinforcing the message of not buying apple:
Be mad at everyone, such that you apply pressure to no one.
You know, nullifying action.
OK, so you had an incorrect perception of a comment, but it's not your fault. No, surely it must be everyone else that's at fault for *checks notes* "nullifying action", whatever the fuck that made-up nonsense verbiage means. not only that, but then your pet attack dog comes along and somehow twists that into me defending pedophiles.
idk, maybe the problem here people is contorting themselves into human pretzels so they can leap to nonsensical conclusions.
not only that, but then your pet attack dog comes along and somehow twists that into me defending pedophiles
I should actually pop back in and look at the thread, instead of just replying to my inbox. I have a pet attack dog? That's kinda neat. I wasn't aware, but neat nonetheless.
My point stands: when called upon to boycott Tesla, no resistance. When called upon to boycott Apple, blow up the conversation into anything but generating momentum for an Apple boycott.
It really is that reductionistic.
No shit, Big Tech is going to kowtow to whoever is in charge.
Remove Apple's restrictions from the equation and just make it a PWA. This isn't the sort of app that needs to run natively on your device, anyway.
I was wondering about that with some of the recent removals as well: Why not just a PWA?
Something like Voyager or Phanpy runs excellent when installed as a PWA and especially with Phanpy I‘m not even missing a native app or „wrapper app“.
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Here's the app's page on Google Play.
Features:
• Anonymous Recording – No account, no personal details required.
• Secure Uploads – Encrypted transfer to privacy-focused storage.
• Map-Based Sharing – Videos appear where they happened, for public awareness.
• Offline Support – Record even without internet; upload when connected.
• Metadata Control – Strips identifying data before publishing.
Seems like more than just a website wrapper.
Surely all of those things can be done in a browser. You can grant location and camera permissions to a website easy enough. And encrypted transfer can be done any number of ways. Offline recording is possible with localstorage. All of this seems very achievable and effectively uncensorable by Apple.
The only thing it can’t get is App Store search rank.
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I guarantee you that all this can be done in Mobile Safari. I have done it before.
You have to go through the “Share > Add to Home Screen” workflow instead of having the site simply install it for you, so it’s a bit more effort (and confusion) on the user’s part.
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Because people are stupid. We had a new client whose employees were asking for an app to access their payroll. I told the manager we didn't have one but our website was optimized for mobile. Also told her I can show them how to put a shortcut on their home screen.
"They're just not going to be able to handle that. If they can't download from the app store they're helpless."
"But they'll have an icon to click, just like an app."
She just shook her head. I ended up wrapping the site in an app and putting it in the Play Store.
I’m growing very annoyed with Apple lately. Giving Trump a solid gold brick was bad enough. I knew it would get worse with all those Trump dinners Tim Cook has been attending.
Between Apple Google AWS and Microsoft the amount of control by US tech is terrifying.
This year I’ve started divesting but politically I think I need to accelerate.
I’ve been a user of the Mac for 20 years, this year I moved to a Linux desktop. Now I need to look into Linux phone and laptops soon.
Basically every company over a certain size. They all got that big by unfair conduct or outright abuse, because your market laws are way too lax and regulators look away.
You have created menaces that the rest of the world (and the environment) has to deal with.
CVS (working to compile a medical database on all USAmericans)
Can I have a source for that?
nbcnews.com/health/health-news…
Not sure if this proves anything, but it is probably the source of the comment.
Trump administration is launching a private health tracking system with Big Tech's help
The Trump administration is launching a new program that will allow Americans to share personal health data and medical records across health systems and apps run by private tech companies.The Associated Press (NBC News)
Absolutely. apnews.com/article/trump-ai-rf… (second paragraph)
More than 60 companies, including major tech companies like Google, Amazon and Apple as well as health care giants like UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, have agreed to share patient data in the system.
A lot of sites suck on mobile because the browser sucks, the app can't be bothered to make a mobile friendly version, or it's intentionally made awful to force you to use the app (assuming they don't literally just redirect you to the app store when you try to go to the website).
I'm actually surprised at how often a shitty looking website looks fine once I tell the stupid fucking built in kneecapped chrome browser to open in Firefox and it's fine.
Lol I tried using Baidu Maps too look up the neighborhood I used to live in mainland China, and jesus christ it automatically attempted to download the .apk EVERY TIME I tap something on the site. Wtf lol 🤣
Edit: typo
its just how things are in 2025 🤷 /s
I realize I'm not entirely free yet, but I sleep better ever since I changed to a non-Google Android ROM. Also because the path to proper mobile Linux feels shorter now.
Anyone still on Google Android: Look into making the change. It's worth it.
And if not, at least start getting your apps from F-droid whenever possible.
MicroG makes most things work, so it's not much compromise in my experience. 😀
I use /e/OS which has access to apps from the Play Store, so that I still have my banking apps and stuff. I think streaming apps should work just fine.
Me too, but the lords of Technofeudalism, backed by government, won't allow that forever. Maybe on PCs, but not phones. No "side loading" what they don't approve. Banks and co, only allowing their apps on approved OSs. No satnav traffic data unless you use an approved satnav, rendering them useless.
The problem isn't technological, it's political. We need decent government protecting citizens and enforcing competition laws. The problem is the population don't understand what is being done to them, so don't vote against it.
None of it is new. Liberty vs security, monopoly, etc, aren't new, but wrapping it in technology blinds most people to it.
Well you can build Linux from scratch if you want to create your own. And RISC hardware is opensource, and gaining adoption.
But at least with Fairphone they have built it so that you don't need google android or derivatives, you can install Ubuntu Touch OS.
With Ubuntu you have access to the worlds store of Linux apps, you don't have to rely on apple or Google restrictions
Well you can build Linux from scratch if you want to create your own.
Building a project is not creating your own.
And RISC hardware is opensource, and gaining adoption.
RISC-V, and what's gaining adoption is not what's opensource.
I don't think you are getting my point. When you depend on one humongous project, open or not, you depend on what those having influence in it decide.
That's why they make autonomies, checks and balances, minority quotas, proportional systems and so on in democracies. Because deciding everything through a simple majority vote with no limitations and nuance, with winner taking all, doesn't make things good.
In this case it's a weight of work vote, not majority vote, but the results are not too much different. Similar to how Bitcoin turned out.
So-o - in Linux most of work is now being done by a set of the same big corporations. It's not the magic freedom tool someone would want it to be, sorry.
You can totally build your own.
You don't have to rely on packages given.
Free and OpenCode
And there are so many Linuxes (some like Redhat that gets influence from Intel, and some like (insert name here) that are peoples own projects) that corporate control cannot dominate it all.
Like nixOS has controversy at the moment because a steering board member is linked to US military. He could compromise the project by steering it toward the fascist regimes agenda, so you load Gentoo or VOID.
Choices are freedom
The claim that most of the work is bring done by big corps , skips a step. Corps have money and dedicate people to add to projects to suit their own needs, their commits to kernel may be high, but its not neccessry for a running system...there is a world wide open source community building their own stuff out of passion alone.
Like Facebook contributed a lot to btrfs, if you feel that somehow has shady backend, just don't include it in your kernel modules.
Or if you are super paranoid run Haiku LOL
No, there's one Linux and its versions. And various ways you can use it, build it, package it.
What I meant is that the codebase is mostly one.
It's sort of like with Bible.
And there are so many Linuxes (some like Redhat that gets influence from Intel, and some like (insert name here) that are peoples own projects) that corporate control cannot dominate it all.
No, those people will still use code contributed by RedHat, and the OS whose development has been influenced by RedHat.
Like nixOS has controversy at the moment because a steering board member is linked to US military. He could compromise the project by steering it toward the fascist regimes agenda, so you load Gentoo or VOID.
NixOS is a distribution. Somehow in this quote you admit that said compromise can come in various ways, so controversy arises from that board member themselves just being there.
But with enormous companies making the actual software you ignore it.
Also replacing nixOS with Gentoo or Void is not quite equal. I've been trying to move to GuixSD from Void (because Nix gives me anxiety, Guile doesn't, and the whole GNU spirit is nice), but I'm always too lazy to wait for actual Guix installation to finish, so I interrupt it and forget it for a while.
The claim that most of the work is bring done by big corps , skips a step. Corps have money and dedicate people to add to projects to suit their own needs, their commits to kernel may be high, but its not neccessry for a running system…there is a world wide open source community building their own stuff out of passion alone.
Too complex. When you need a more vague explanation than the obvious, cynical, common sense one, it's likely wrong.
People building stuff out of passion alone do much more idea-centered and specific things. Which are much smaller. They don't make consumer operating systems or web browsers or office suites or device drivers.
You can probably attribute things like Emacs and, ahem, Guix and a few other GNU projects permanently in alpha, like GNUNet, to this. And plenty of interesting obscure stuff.
But not things that make money. In that domain everything is done to in order make money by people paid for their work and in the way that doesn't hurt moneymaking.
Like Facebook contributed a lot to btrfs, if you feel that somehow has shady backend, just don’t include it in your kernel modules.
No, that is probably fine, except btrfs still doesn't react well to power loss, probably cause Facebook and Oracle think more about servers with UPSes. And that's typical, other people make their own project goals, the results may work for you too, but you'd have something better if you paid for it directly.
Haiku is not about paranoia, but speaking about volunteers and passion - it's a system made that way.
If you want to get that deep into it even your tomato choices are controlled by a large company (hybrid seed, chemical starter, distribution, preestablished deals with vendors) but you can still grow your own.
Nothing stopping anyone from being the next Linus and deciding to start something new.
Nothing stopping anyone from forking an old kernel and doing something different with it and stripping out the big corp stuff you don't like.
Right.
Linus made a Unix clone. One can say, started with the wrong premise.
It's a lot of work. I honestly think what Emacs developers are doing - assume that the underlying OS won't ever be good enough, and just put all your ideology into particular environment you're making, - is the right approach. I'm not even sure if what I'd want to do requires anything but Emacs, I think I'll get busy with learning elisp.
Yeah, he created an OS from scratch to avoid corporate greed of what they charged for Unix.
It is a lot of work, and the TempleOS guy building his system is a huge accomplishment also...as quirky as it is.
I guess I don't see us being stuck with anything other than our own complacency.
To be honest nobody has given me a good view of what emacs actually does...so I'm all ears
Yeah, he created an OS from scratch to avoid corporate greed of what they charged for Unix.
Which was a Unix clone. Which was the subject of the famous Tannenbaum-Torvalds argument, and Tannenbaum's position in it is pretty much obvious.
To be honest nobody has given me a good view of what emacs actually does…so I’m all ears
It's a nice cozy lisp environment - almost an operating system - that runs on many popular OSes. First of all it's a powerful text editor, but can be used to chat, manage e-mail, read e-news, and so on.
Why are these apps being distributed on app stores
Why are these apps not PWAs with an app store deployment wrapper???
Every Lemming be like "what app do you use" meanwhile I'm like "...app? 👀"
-Sent via WebUI
(I don't keep stuff logged-in on my phone, incase a cop grabs it)
Why are these apps not PWAs with an app store deployment wrapper???
Web wrapped websites are not allowed on either app store btw.
Don't need any of that shit.
The thing is - the Internet itself is a fascist technology. Fascists, and especially German Nazis, used electric terms and analogies to refer to their politics. Mostly referring to unification of various parts into one network, except in their case the information medium really used was radio.
But the basic idea was that any kind of fascism thrives as means of mass politics. Anything unique, specific, individual is in conflict with that. But the Internet is the tool to slowly grind through that conflict, because it gradually reinforces one voice, one way and one meaning.
It's a very intelligent trap and one hard to believe in, but our world today is so much more fascist than even in dictatorships 30 years ago, that I think I'm right.
Also consider that the very shock of something so modern and new and comfortable being used as a channel of control is, too, what Nazis did.
And when you want to argue that in the Internet one can post their own opinions and create their own spaces and do their own things, think again. These abilities are inherent to reality as well. Make a thought experiment - could you whisper with your friends at a Nazi meeting in the back rows? Could you not even attend? Could you have private conversations on everything you'd want elsewhere? Yes, these all are true. But the only voices to be heard by everyone and reinforced by that system and order were those from the tribune, and millions of voices would answer them in one and the same way, and millions of hands would raise in salute.
And LLMs and such new tools are going to make this worse, because they are tools of situational speech accord with what you expect, leveled by the common average, just like fascism is an ideology of situational emotional accord with what you feel, leveled by the common average. Fascism is the extreme ideology rejecting logic and semantics, and the Internet on every level has been built to reject logic and semantics as a medium of communication of living people. And LLMs are an even more direct tool to do well only that, all the rest is attempts to sell it, but this is its main trait.
And let's recall again how that stopped - by spending all its resources and being defeated in a war.
A truly visionary and futuristic regime, honestly. It's funny how Nazis were so futuristic despite being blood and soil barbarians, and Stalin's regime was really reactionary despite dreaming of space travel, except Stalin's regime's official philosophy was dialectic materialism which is the only thing convenient to describe this contradiction.
Stalin’s regime was really reactionary
Even this is a charitable description. The best term for Stalin's regime is "despotism".
That and also anti-intellectualism with ability to physically destroy intellectuals. People like Lysenko and Lepeschinskaya and so on being able to do that to their opponents are, IMHO, the main difference between 20s USSR which was pretty believably in avantgarde and 60s USSR which in all parts of its society just wanted some silent life and no more greatness.
Even when that anti-scientific crap and repressions stopped, Soviet science fiction and Soviet state ideology and Soviet system couldn't be believed any more. They've lost basis in reality.
20s' USSR had just restored its economy to 1914 levels and above in a few years after WWI, the revolution and the civil war, made a new republic, and seemed a successful resolution of Russia's early XX century dead end.
60s' USSR failed agriculture, controlling some of the most agriculturally productive areas on the planet.
$fascist bool yet.
I'm glad the google play store never censors apps, oh wait. It's almost as if big corporations and now governments have no citizens best interests in mind, mind blowing.
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” - Benito Mussolini
Very light on the details here. How did the app do this? What was the functionality of the actual app? From looking at the play store it seems to be basically a LE tracker as well, no matter how much they want to say it isn't. Getting cute and saying "no my app where you can tag where ICE agents are and upload photos of the ice agents isn't actually to track ICE agents, it's just a photo sharing app" doesn't actually work, no matter how much people on sites like this think it does.
Also lol at this:
Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation.
He released an app on the apple store, they know who he is.
Yes you can lol. Citizenship records exist. Visa records exist.
Can you determine if someone has a drivers license without a trial?
They wouldn’t punish me in the first place because they’d have checked their records and seen that I am a citizen. No one is just being rounded up on an allegation and deported. No citizens have been deported.
You’re saying that they don’t follow procedures, and your solution is……procedures?
American citizen detained under ICE hold in Florida
A US-born man is in custody on a 48-hour U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold at the Leon County Jail in Tallahassee, Florida, after he was charged as an “unauthorized alien” who entered Florida without being inspected by immigration officer…Carma Hassan (CNN)
You know that police can check citizenship on these things called computers, right? When the police ask if you have a drivers license, they already know if you have one or not, and even if it’s expired.
You don’t need a trial to prove you’re a citizen - you just need to actually be a citizen. Do you think people go to trial to prove that they have a drivers license? Lol
Yes they do lol. They give you a ticket on the spot. If you don’t have a license, which they can tell simply by looking up your details, you are guilty. It’s the same with citizenship/immigration status - it’s not a subjective thing, or something that can be argued in court.
You don’t go to trial for being caught driving without a license lol
Better though than Framework who donate to bad open source developers. Hail big corporate! /s
(This isn't directed at you, I'm more frustrated by the people in the Framework controvery threads who somehow thing buying Apple or Dell is a more ethical choice).
"Which side did you choose when authoritarianism came to your doorstep?"
Looks like Tim Apple has chosen.
Unfortunately, the data shows violent uprisings almost always fail.
We need nonviolent action.
Notice I didnt say peaceful.
Future of democracy in the US relies on the people being vaguely intelligent as a group. Right now tens of millions of people there are straight-up worshipping an obvious fascist as god-king and a sizeable portion of the other chunk is still desperately clinging to the idea of being “moderate”.
A linux phone would be nice but it’s not going to save the world if the people are still dumb and cowardly.
Future of democracy in the US relies on the people being vaguely intelligent as a group.
Yeah, it's fucked.
this is why we need to install apps without their approval or verification.
security my ass, they want to stop us from controlling our computers.
Why can’t this be a web app that uses web notifications? Why does it even need to be an on-device app? That’s building in a vulnerability that doesn’t need to be there.
Make it a site.
Go to the site.
Pin the site.
Allow notifications from site.
Done.
Yes, Apple and Google are in the wrong, but why are we relying on them for this at all? Not everything needs to be a fucking app.
This isn’t a tech illiteracy issue. Sure you CAN take a video, and upload it to archive.org from your phone.
Try doing that while actively being abused by ICE.
It’s about making the process as foolproof as possible, because seconds matter here, and making sure that footage is backed up as quickly as possible is paramount.
Even if an app like this isn't distributed through Google Play, they could disable the developer's account for any vague "abuse" reason.
N. Korean Military Aid to Russia to Be Part of States' History of Friendship - Medvedev
N. Korean Military Aid to Russia to Be Part of States' History of Friendship - Medvedev
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - North Korean military aid to Russia will forever remain in the history of the two countries' friendship, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday.Sputnik International
The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe
The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe
The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.Denis Stetskov (From the Trenches)
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Planned Obsolescence .... designing things for a short lifespan so that things always break and people are always forced to buy the next thing.
It all originated with light bulbs 100 years ago ... inventors did design incandescent light bulbs that could last for years but then the company owners realized it wasn't economically feasible to produce a light bulb that could last ten years because too few people would buy light bulbs. So they conspired to engineer a light bulb with a limited life that would last long enough to please people but short enough to keep them buying light bulbs often enough.
Not the light bulbs. They improved light quality and reduced energy consumption per unit of light by increasing filament temperature, which reduced bulb life. Net win for the consumer.
You can still make an incandescent bulb last long by undervolting it orange, but it'll be bad at illuminating, and it'll consume almost as much electricity as when glowing yellowish white (standard).
Yes, if you factor in the source of disposable culture: capitalism.
"Move fast and break things" is the software equivalent of focusing solely on quarterly profits.
I think a substantial part of the problem is the employee turnover rates in the industry. It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises). This leads to a situation where, consciously or subconsciously, noone really gives a shit about the product. Everyone does their job (and only their job, not a hint of anything extra), but they're not going to take on major long term projects, because they're already one foot out the door, looking for the next job. Shitty middle management of course drastically exacerbates the issue.
I think that's why there's a lot of open source software that's better than the corporate stuff. Half the time it's just one person working on it, but they actually give a shit.
Definitely part of it. The other part is soooo many companies hire shit idiots out of college. Sure, they have a degree, but they've barely understood the concept of deep logic for four years in many cases, and virtually zero experience with ANY major framework or library.
Then, dumb management puts them on tasks they're not qualified for, add on that Agile development means "don't solve any problem you don't have to" for some fools, and... the result is the entire industry becomes full of functionally idiots.
It's the same problem with late-stage capitalism... Executives focus on money over longevity and the economy becomes way more tumultuous. The industry focuses way too hard on "move fast and break things" than making quality, and ... here we are, discussing how the industry has become shit.
Probably because all the dummies are finally realizing it's a fucking stupid slogan that's constantly being misinterpreted from what it's supposed to mean. lol (as if the dummies even realize it has a more logical interpretation...)
Now if only they would complete the maturation process and realize all of the tech bro bullshit runs counter to good engineering or business...
Shit idiots with enthusiasm could be trained, mentored, molded into assets for the company, by the company.
Ala an apprenticeship structure or something similar, like how you need X years before you're a journeyman at many hands on trades.
But uh, nope, C suite could order something like that be implemented at any time.
They don't though.
Because that would make next quarter projections not look as good.
And because that would require actual leadership.
This used to be how things largely worked in the software industry.
But, as with many other industries, now finance runs everything, and they're trapped in a system of their own making... but its not really trapped, because... they'll still get a golden parachute no matter what happens, everyone else suffers, so that's fine.
Exactly. I don't know why I'm being downvoted for describing the thing we all agree happens...
I don't blame the students for not being seasoned professionals. I clearly blame the executives that constantly replace seasoned engineers with fresh hires they don't have to pay as much.
Then everyone surprise pikachu faces when crap is the result... Functionally idiots is absolutely correct for the reality we're all staring at. I am directly part of this industry, so this is more meant as honest retrospective than baseless namecalling. What happens these days is idiotry.
Yep, literal, functional idiots, as in, they keep doing easily provably as stupid things, mainly because they are too stubborn to admit they could be wrong about anything.
I used to be part of this industry, and I bailed, because the ratio of higher ups that I encountered anywhere, who were competent at their jobs vs arrogant lying assholes was about 1:9.
Corpo tech culture is fucked.
Makes me wanna chip in a little with a Johnny Silverhand solo.
Fuck man, why don't more ethical-ish devs join to make stuff? What's the missing link on top of easy sharing like FOSS kinda' already has?
Obviously programming is a bit niche, but fuck... how can ethical programmers come together to survive under capitalism? Sure, profit sharing and coops aren't bad, but something of a cultural nexus is missing in this space it feels...
Well, I'm not quite sure how to ... intentionally create a cultural nexus ... but I would say that having something like lemmy, piefed, the fediverse, is at least a good start.
Socializing, discussion, via a non corpo platform.
Beyond that, uh, maybe something more lile an actual syndicalist collective, or at least a union?
Yeah, a union would be great, although I feel like that would be something that would have to come quite a ways down the road of ethical devs coming together. After all, not even the FOSS community agrees on what is ethical to give away and to whom.
Maybe a union is still the right term for the abstract 'coming together' I'm thinking of, since it's hard to imagine how they could go from a generic collective to a body that could actually make effective demands, but perhaps it's roughly the same process as getting a job-wide union off the ground.
Agile SHOULD have a lot of the things 'traditional' management looks for! Though so many, including many college teachers I've heard, think of it way too strictly.
It's just the time scale shrinks as necessary for specific deliverable goals instead of the whole product... instead of having a design for the whole thing from top to bottom, you start with a good overview and implement general arch to service what load you'll need. Then you break down the tasks, and solve the problems more and more and yadda yadda...
IMO, the people that think Agile Development means only implement the bare minimum ... are part of the complete fucking idiot portion of the industry.
Agile was the cool new thing years back and has been abused and misused and now, pretty much every dev company force it on their team but do whatever the fuck they want.
Agile should have a lot of traditional project management but doesn't because it became the MBA wet dream of metrics. And when metrics become the target, people will do whatever they need to do to meet the metrics instead of actually progressing the project.
It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises).
Well. I did the last jump because the quality was so bad.
True, but this is a reaction to companies discarding their employees at the drop of a hat, and only for "increasing YoY profit".
It is a defense mechanism that has now become cultural in a huge amount of countries.
I'm glad that they added CloudStrike into that article, because it adds a whole extra level of incompetency in the software field. CS as a whole should have never happens in the first place if Microsoft properly enforced their stance they claim they had regarding driver security and the kernel.
The entire reason CS was able to create that systematic failure was because they were(still are?) abusing the system MS has in place to be able to sign kernel level drivers. The process dodges MS review for the driver by using a standalone driver that then live patches instead of requiring every update to be reviewed and certified. This type of system allowed for a live update that directly modified the kernel via the already certified driver. Remote injection of un-certified code should never have been allowed to be injected into a secure location in the first place. It was a failure on every level for both MS and CS.
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I don't trust some of the numbers in this article.
Microsoft Teams: 100% CPU usage on 32GB machines
I'm literally sitting here right now on a Teams call (I've already contributed what I needed to), looking at my CPU usage, which is staying in the 4.6% to 7.3% CPU range.
Is that still too high? Probably. Have I seen it hit 100% CPU usage? Yes, rarely (but that's usually a sign of a deeper issue).
Maybe the author is going with worst case scenario. But in that case he should probably qualify the examples more.
Well, it's also stupid to use RAM size as an indicator of a machines CPU load capability...
Definitely sending off some tech illiterate vibes.
Most software shouldn't saturate either RAM or CPU on a modern computer.
Yes, Photoshop, compiling large codevases, and video encoding and things like that should make just of an the performance available.
But an app like Teams or Discord should not be hitting limits basically ever (I'll excuse running a 4k stream, but most screen sharing is actually 720p)
You're right, they shouldn't be stressing either resource. Though my point was that referencing how much RAM is in the system is a bit silly when referring to a CPU being pinned at 100%. There is a HUGE swathe of CPUs with an even bigger range of performance that are all sold in 32GB systems.
I'm positive the low end of that scale could be rightfully pinned at 100% for certain common tasks.
I haven't really checked but CPU usage on Teams while just being a member on a call is low, but using the camera with filters clearly uses more. Just checking CPU temps gives you more or less how much CPU is used by a program. So clearly it is just worst case scenario: using camera with filters on top.
My issue with Teams is that it uses a whole GB of ram on my machine with it just existing. It's like it loads the entire .NET runtime on the browser or something. IDK if it uses C# on the frontend.
IDK if it uses C# on the frontend.
Pretty sure it's a webview app, so probably all javascript.
Running out of ram isn’t a problem in itself. You want your ram to be in use as much as possible ideally, otherwise why do you have it?
By running out I mean you’re getting issues caused by something needing ram and it not being able to get any, not simply all your ram being in use.
Fabricated 4,000 fake user profiles to cover up the deletion
This has got to be a reinforcement learning issue, I had this happen the other day.
I asked Claude to fix some tests, so it fixed the tests by commenting out the failures. I guess that’s a way of fixing them that nobody would ever ask for.
Absolutely moronic. These tools do this regularly. It’s how they pass benchmarks.
Also you can’t ask them why they did something, they have no capacity of introspection, they can’t read their input tokens, they just make up something that sounds plausible for “what were you thinking”.
Also you can’t ask them why they did something, they have no capacity of introspection, (...) they just make up something that sounds plausible for “what were you thinking”.
It's uncanny how it keeps becoming more human-like.
The model we have at work tries to work around this by including some checks. I assume they get farmed out to specialised models and receive the output of the first stage as input.
Maybe it catches some stuff? It's better than pretend reasoning but it's very verbose so the stuff that I've experimented with - which should be simple and quick - ends up being more time consuming than it should be.
I've been thinking of having a small model like a long context qwen 4b run and do quick code review to check for these issues, then just correct the main model.
It feels like a secondary model that only exists to validate that a task was actually completed could work.
I’ve been working at a small company where I own a lot of the code base.
I got my boss to accept slower initial work that was more systemically designed, and now I can complete projects that would have taken weeks in a few days.
The level of consistency and quality you get by building a proper foundation and doing things right has an insane payoff. And users notice too when they’re using products that work consistently and with low resources.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about my current boss. He keeps talking about some future project that uses a new codebase we're currently writing, at which point we'll "clean it up and see what works and what doesn't." Meanwhile, he complains about my code and how it's "too Pythonic," what with my docstrings, functions for code reuse, and type hints.
So I secretly maintain a second codebase with better documentation and optimization.
How can your code be too pythonic?
Also type hints are the shit. Nothing better than hitting shift tab and getting completions and documentation.
Even if you’re planning to migrate to a hypothetical new code base, getting a bunch of documented modules for free is a huge time saver.
Also migrations fucking suck, you’re an idiot if you think that will solve your problems.
(I write only internal tools and I'm a team of one. We have a whole department of people working on public and customer focused stuff.)
My boss let me spend three months with absolutely no changes to functionality or UI, just to build a better, more configurable back end with a brand new config UI, partly due to necessity (a server constraint changed), otherwise I don't think it would have ever got off the ground as a project. No changes to master for three months, which was absolutely unheard of.
At times it was a bit demoralising to do so much work for so long with nothing to show for it, but I knew the new back end would bring useful extras and faster, robust changes.
The backend config ui is still in its infancy, but my boss is sooo pleased with its effect. He is used to a turnaround for simple changes of between 1 and 10 days for the last few years (the lifetime of the project), but now he's getting used to a reply saying I've pushed to live between 1 and 10 minutes.
Brand new features still take time, but now that we really understand what it needs to do after the first few years, it was enormously helpful to structure the whole thing to be much more organised around real world demands and make it considerably more automatic.
Feels food. Feels really good.
He's a great boss. He really is.
I had goodwill stored up because like me, he uses the tool to several times a day, he really likes it because it makes some tasks far easier (v0.1) and I added loads of extras over the years, and it was me that dreamed it up in the first place.
The new server constraint affected me on the daily but wasn't going to affect him at all for most of those three months, and even then, not often and there was a workaround for his usage, but he trusted me and he wants my end to be as convenient as his is (very fair minded guy indeed).
I would go a long long way for him. I went to his wedding in 2023 and we sometimes have drinks after work. He knows how it is, has been there, done that and got the T shirt and isn't afraid to tell truth to power:
You know you like to have X? We're gonna need Y...
Remember the prioritisation of Y you were going to do?...
Yeah, so no, sorry, we don't quite have X, partly because of this and that mistake we made, but also we weren't able to get very close to X because we never got Y.
Genuinely, cue recommitment of senior management to Y in the next quarter! It might not happen, but no shouting, no blaming, and rationality all round.
I don't think they like it at all when he says stuff like that, but they love that the crises pretty much dwindled out when they put him in charge and as he gradually recruited more people who put more effort into making things better than shouting and blaming, and as the shouters and blamers left to find employment elsewhere where shouting and blaming was effective. It simply does not work on my boss even a little bit, and he simply never does it. Customers now praise his department instead of complain about it, so he gets a lot of leeway from management to do things his way.
Brilliant. It's so valuable to have a manager that actually treats you like a professional in these situations. Sounds like a diamond in the rough alright.
Some agency when working goes a long way to fostering a really good working relationship. I'm still a lot earlier in my career, so generally in my first non-internship role I was expecting to be given little bits of work like change this button, widen this form, that kind of stuff.
Turns out I'd joined one of those "sink or swim" smaller companies where you have to wear a lot of hats. Initially I thought quite negatively about it but once I started to gain some confidence I realised he was giving me the time and space to properly learn stuff and develop it until it was "good". He, thankfully, still shoots down my sillier ideas but if I have a good one he throws his full support behind me.
Currently he was like, I need you to investigate how to set up automated fraud prevention checks and flag, let's say things, for clients to investigate further, and he sent me off for a week to analyse the problem, speak to everyone involved and gather a list of data points and how to calculate them. Then he gave me the time to design the system, including the mental room to develop our first shared lib after .net framework.
Really I'm rambling a bit, but my point is, you can get a lot of good work out of people if you invest in them and allow them some agency. Maybe some can't work well without constant pressure, but I think a lot of people thrive when supported and enabled correctly by management.
Another big problem not mentioned in the article is companies refusing to hire QA engineers to do actual testing before releasing.
The last two American companies I worked for had fired all the QA engineers or refused to hire any. Engineers were supposed to “own” their features and test them themselves before release. It’s obvious that this can’t provide the same level of testing and the software gets released full of bugs and only the happy path works.
Software has a serious "one more lane will fix traffic" problem.
Don't give programmers better hardware or else they will write worse software. End of.
You never worked on old code. It's never that simple in practice when you have to make changes to existing code without breaking or rewriting everything.
Sometimes the client wants a new feature that cannot easily implement and has to do a lot of different DB lookups that you can not do in a single query. Sometimes your controller loops over 10000 DB records, and you call a function 3 levels down that suddenly must spawn a new DB query each time it's called, but you cannot change the parent DB query.
but you cannot change the parent DB query.
Why not?
This sounds like the "don't touch working code" nonsense I hear from junior devs and contracted teams. They're so worried about creating bugs that they don't fix larger issues and more and more code gets enshrined as "untouchable." IMO, the older and less understood logic is, the more it needs to be touched so we can expose the bugs.
Here's what should happen, depending on when you find it:
- grooming/research phase - increase estimates enough to fix it
- development phase - ask senior dev for priority; most likely, you work around for now, but schedule a fix once feature compete; if it's significant enough, timelines may be adjusted
- testing phase/hotfix - same as dev, but much more likely to put it off
Teams should have a budget for tech debt, and seniors can adjust what tech debt they pick.
In general though, if you're afraid to touch something, you should touch it, but only if you budget time for it.
"Don't touch working code" stems from "last person who touched it, owns it" and there's some shit that it's just not worth your pay grade to own.
Particularly if you're a contractor employed to work on something specific
I get that for contractors, get in and get out is the best strategy.
If you're salary, you own it regardless, so you might as well know what it does.
Where is this even coming from? The guy above me is saying not to give devs better hardware and to teach them to code better.
I followed up with an example of how using indices in a database to boost the performance helped more than throwing more hardware at it.
This has nothing to do with having worked on old code. Stop trying to pull my comment out of context.
But yes you're right. Adding indexes to a database does nothing to solve adding a new feature in the scenario you described. I also never claimed it did.
I've not read the article, but if you actually look at old code, it's pretty awful too. I've found bugs in the Bash codebase that are much older than me. If you try using Windows 95 or something, you will cry and weep. Linux used to be so much more painful 20 years ago too; anyone remember "plasma doesn't crash" proto-memes? So, "BEFORE QUALITY" thing is absolute bullshit.
What is happening today is that more and more people can do stuff with computers, so naturally you get "chaos", as in a lot of software that does things, perhaps not in the best way possible, but does them nonetheless. You will still have more professional developers doing their things and building great, high-quality software, faster and better than ever before because of all the new tooling and optimizations.
Yes, the average or median quality is perhaps going down, but this is a bit like complaining about the invention of printing press and how people are now printing out low quality barely edited books for cheap. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of that, but it produces a lot of awesome stuff too!
Accept that quality matters more than velocity. Ship slower, ship working. The cost of fixing production disasters dwarfs the cost of proper development.
This has been a struggle my entire career. Sometimes, the company listens. Sometimes they don't. It's a worthwhile fight but it is a systemic problem caused by management and short-term profit-seeking over healthy business growth
"Apparently there's never the money to do it right, but somehow there's always the money to do it twice."
Management never likes to have this brought to their attention, especially in a Told You So tone of voice. One thinks if this bothered pointy-haired types so much, maybe they could learn from their mistakes once in a while.
We'll just set up another retrospective meeting and have a lessons learned.
Then we won't change anything based off the findings of the retro and lessons learned.
That applies in so many industries 😅 like you want it done right... Or do you want it done now? Now will cost you 10x long term though...
Welp now it is I guess.
I don't make games, but fine. Baldurs Gate 3 (PS5 co-op) and Skyrim (Xbox 360) had more crashes than any games I've ever played.
Did that stop either of them being highly rated top selling games? No. Did it stop me enjoying them? No.
Quality feels important, but past a certain point, it really isn't. Luck, knowing the market, maneuverability. This will get you most of the way there. Look at Fortnite. It was a wonky building game they quickly cobbled into a PUBG clone.
I love crappy slapped together indi games. Headliners and Peak come to mind. Both have tons of bugs but the quality is there where it matters. Peak has a very unique health bar system I love, and Headliners is constantly working on the balance and fun, not on the graphics or collision bugs. Both of those groups had very limited resources and they spent them where they matter, in high quality mechanics that are fun to play.
Skyrim is old enough to drive a car now, but back then it's main mechanic was the open world hugeness. They made damn sure to cram that world full of tons of stuff to do, and so for the most part people forgave bugs that didn't detract from that core experience.
BG3 was basically perfect. I remember some bugs early on but that's a very high quality game. If you're expecting every game you play to live up to that bar, you're going to be very disappointed.
Quality does matter, but it only matters when it's core to the experience. No one is going to care if your first-person-shooter with tons of lag and shitty controls has an amazing interactive menu and beautiful animations.
It's not the amount of quality, it's where you apply it.
(I've had that robot game that came with th ps5 crash on me, but folding@home on the ps2 never did, imagine that)
"AI just weaponized existing incompetence."
Daamn. Harsh but hard to argue with.
Anyone else remember a few years ago when companies got rid of all their QA people because something something functional testing? Yeah.
The uncontrolled growth in abstractions is also very real and very damaging, and now that companies are addicted to the pace of feature delivery this whole slipshod situation has made normal they can’t give it up.
How Microsoft went from Test to No Test to Test again
I was lucky enough (or “lucky” depending on who you ask) to be working at Microsoft at the time when something they called “combined engineering” happened around 2014/2015.Quality Weekly (Software Quality Newsletter)
Being obtuse for a moment, let me just say: build it right!
That means minimalism! No architecture astronauts! No unnecessary abstraction! No premature optimisation!
Lean on opinionated frameworks so as to focus on coding the business rules!
And for the love of all that is holy, have your developers sit next to the people that will be using the software!
All of this will inherently reduce runaway algorithmic complexity, prevent the sort of artisanal work that causes leakiness, and speed up your code.
Not x. Not y. Z.
It wasn't that --em dash--it's this.
It loves grouping of 3s
Those are just the ones I noticed immediately again when skimming it, there was a lot more I noticed when I originally read it. I read it aloud to my wife while cooking the first time and we were both laughing about how obviously chatjipity it was lol.
Software quality collapse
That started happening years ago.
The developers of .net should be put on trial for crimes against humanity.
You mean .NET
.net is the name of a fairly high quality web developer industry magazine from the early 2010s now sadly out of print.
The article is very much off point.
- Software quality wasn't great in 2018 and then suddenly declined. Software quality has been as shit as legally possible since the dawn of (programming) time.
- The software crisis has never ended. It has only been increasing in severity.
- Ever since we have been trying to squeeze more programming performance out of software developers at the cost of performance.
The main issue is the software crisis: Hardware performance follows moore's law, developer performance is mostly constant.
If the memory of your computer is counted in bytes without a SI-prefix and your CPU has maybe a dozen or two instructions, then it's possible for a single human being to comprehend everything the computer is doing and to program it very close to optimally.
The same is not possible if your computer has subsystems upon subsystems and even the keyboard controller has more power and complexity than the whole apollo programs combined.
So to program exponentially more complex systems we would need exponentially more software developer budget. But since it's really hard to scale software developers exponentially, we've been trying to use abstraction layers to hide complexity, to share and re-use work (no need for everyone to re-invent the templating engine) and to have clear boundries that allow for better cooperation.
That was the case way before electron already. Compiled languages started the trend, languages like Java or C# deepened it, and using modern middleware and frameworks just increased it.
OOP complains about the chain "React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways". But he doesn't even consider that even if you run "straight on bare metal" there's a whole stack of abstractions in between your code and the execution. Every major component inside a PC nowadays runs its own separate dedicated OS that neither the end user nor the developer of ordinary software ever sees.
But the main issue always reverts back to the software crisis. If we had infinite developer resources we could write optimal software. But we don't so we can't and thus we put in abstraction layers to improve ease of use for the developers, because otherwise we would never ship anything.
If you want to complain, complain to the mangers who don't allocate enough resources and to the investors who don't want to dump millions into the development of simple programs. And to the customers who aren't ok with simple things but who want modern cutting edge everything in their programs.
In the end it's sadly really the case: Memory and performance gets cheaper in an exponential fashion, while developers are still mere humans and their performance stays largely constant.
So which of these two values SHOULD we optimize for?
The real problem in regards to software quality is not abstraction layers but "business agile" (as in "business doesn't need to make any long term plans but can cancel or change anything at any time") and lack of QA budget.
This. Prototypes should never be taken as the basis of a product, that's why you make them. To make mistakes in a cheap, discardible format, so that you don't make these mistake when making the actual product. I can't remember a single time though that this was what actually happened.
They just label the prototype an MVP and suddenly it's the basis of a new 20 year run time project.
In my current job, they keep switching around everything all the time. Got a new product, super urgent, super high-profile, highest priority, crunch time to get it out in time, and two weeks before launch it gets cancelled without further information. Because we are agile.
we would need exponentially more software developer budget.
Are you crazy? Profit goes to shareholders, not to invest in the project. Get real.
I agree with the general idea of the article, but there are a few wild takes that kind of discredit it, in my opinion.
"Imagine the calculator app leaking 32GB of RAM, more than older computers had in total" - well yes, the memory leak went on to waste 100% of the machine's RAM. You can't leak 32GB of RAM on a 512MB machine. Correct, but hardly mind-bending.
"But VSCodium is even worse, leaking 96GB of RAM" - again, 100% of available RAM. This starts to look like a bad faith effort to throw big numbers around.
"Also this AI 'panicked', 'lied' and later 'admitted it had a catastrophic failure'" - no it fucking didn't, it's a text prediction model, it cannot panic, lie or admit something, it just tells you what you statistically most want to hear. It's not like the language model, if left alone, would have sent an email a week later to say it was really sorry for this mistake it made and felt like it had to own it.
Yeah, that's quite on point. Memory leaks until something throws an out of memory error and crashes.
What makes this really seam like a bad faith argument instead of a simple misunderstanding is this line:
Not used. Not allocated. Leaked.
OOP seems to understand (or at least claims to understand) the difference between allocating (and wasting) memory on purpose and a leak that just fills up all available memory.
So what does he want to say?
You can’t leak 32GB of RAM on a 512MB machine.
32gb swap file or crash. Fair enough point that you want to restart computer anyway even if you have 128gb+ ram. But calculator taking 2 years off of your SSD's life is not the best.
It's a bug and of course it needs to be fixed. But the point was that a memory leak leaks memory until it's out of memory or the process is killed. So saying "It leaked 32GB of memory" is pointless.
It's like claiming that a puncture on a road bike is especially bad because it leaks 8 bar of pressure instead of the 3 bar of pressure a leak on a mountain bike might leak, when in fact both punctures just leak all the pressure in the tire and in the end you have a bike you can't use until you fixed the puncture.
THANK YOU.
I migrated services from LXC to kubernetes. One of these services has been exhibiting concerning memory footprint issues. Everyone immediately went "REEEEEEEE KUBERNETES BAD EVERYTHING WAS FINE BEFORE WHAT IS ALL THIS ABSTRACTION >🙁((((".
I just spent three months doing optimization work. For memory/resource leaks in that old C codebase. Kubernetes didn't have fuck-all to do with any of those (which is obvious to literally anyone who has any clue how containerization works under the hood). The codebase just had very old-fashioned manual memory management leaks as well as a weird interaction between jemalloc and RHEL's default kernel settings.
The only reason I spent all that time optimizing and we aren't just throwing more RAM at the problem? Due to incredible levels of incompetence business-side I'll spare you the details of, our 30 day growth predictions have error bars so many orders of magnitude wide that we are stuck in a stupid loop of "won't order hardware we probably won't need but if we do get a best-case user influx the lead time on new hardware is too long to get you the RAM we need". Basically the virtual price of RAM is super high because the suits keep pinky-promising that we'll get a bunch of users soon but are also constantly wrong about that.
Noticing absurd RSS usage with opt.retain=true on Linux 64-bit
Hi, We have a use-case for jemalloc to use on Asterisk which does tens of thousands of very small memory allocations (~900 bytes on average). Using default settings on Linux RHEL 5.14.0-427.50.1.el...azertyfun (GitHub)
These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix.
Yet all those examples have been fixed 🤣. Most of them are from 3-5 years ago and were fixed not long after being reported.
Software development is hard - that’s why not everyone can do it. You can do everything perfectly in your development, testing, and deployment, and there will still be tonnes of people that get issues if enough people use your program because not everyone’s machines are the same, not everyone’s OS is the same, etc. If you’ve ever run one of those “debloat windows” type programs, for example, your OS is probably fucked beyond belief and any problem you encounter will be due to that.
Big programs are updated almost constantly - some daily even! As development gets more and more advanced with more and more features and more and more platforms, it doesn’t get easier. What matters is if the problems get fixed, and these days you basically wait 24 hours max for a fix.
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You can do everything perfectly in your development, testing, and deployment, and there will still be tonnes of people that get issues if enough people use your program because not everyone’s machines are the same, not everyone’s OS is the same, etc.
Then you didn't do it perfectly did you?
Works on my machine is no excuse.
"Perfectly" is a strong word, so I wouldn't subscribe to this.
But it's impossible to test software on all setups without installing it to them. There's endless variation, so all you can do is to test on a good portion of setups and then you have to release and some setups will still have problems.
The only way to guarantee that it works on every customer's device is by declaring every customer's device as a beta test environment, and people don't seem to like that either.
All of the examples are commercial products. The author doesn't know or doesn't realize that this is a capitalist problem. Of course, there is bloat in some open source projects. But nothing like what is described in those examples.
And I don't think you can avoid that if you're a capitalist. You make money by adding features that maybe nobody wants. And you need to keep doing something new. Maintenance doesn't make you any money.
So this looks like AI plus capitalism.
Stockholders
Stockholders want the products they own stock in to have AI features so they won't be 'left behind'
nonsense, software has always been crap, we just have more resources
the only significant progress will be made with rust and further formal enhancements
32gb+ memory leaks require reboot on any machine, and need higher level than critical.
The AI later admitted: "This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a code freeze." Source: The Register
When I started using LLM's, and would yell at its stupidity and how to fix it, most models (Open AI excepted) were good enough to accept their stupidity. Deleting production databases certainly feels better with AI's woopsie. But being good at apologizing is not best employee desired skill.
Collapse (Coming soon) Physical constraints don't care about venture capital
This is naive, though the collapse part is worse. Venture capital doesn't care about physical constraints. Ridiculously expensive uneconomic SMRs will save us in 10 (ok 15) years. Kill solar now to permit it. But, scarcity is awesome for venture capital. Just buy the utilities, and get a board seat, get cheap, current price lock in, power for datacenters, and raise prices on consumers and non-WH-gifting-guest businesses by 100% to 200%. Physical constraints means scarcity means profits. Surely the only political solution is to genocide the mexican muslim rapists.
64k Scene | Gallery
A curated selection of 64k intros: realtime computer animations in less than 64kB64k Scene
They mainly show what's possible if you
- don't have a deadline
- don't have business constantly pivoting what the project should be like, often last minute
- don't have to pass security testing
- don't have customers who constantly demand something else
- don't have constantly shifting priorities
- don't have tight budget restrictions where you have to be accountable to business for every single hour of work
- don't have to maintain the project for 15-20 years
- don't have a large project scope at all
- don't have a few dozen people working on it, spread over multiple teams or even multiple clusters
- don't have non-technical staff dictating technical implementations
- don't have to chase the buzzword of the day (e.g. Blockchain or AI)
- don't have to work on some useless project that mostly exists for political reasons
- can work on the product as long as you want, when you want and do whatever you want while working at it
Comparing hobby work that people do for fun with professional software and pinning the whole difference on skill is missing the point.
The same developer might produce an amazing 64k demo in their spare time while building mass-produced garbage-level software at work. Because at work you aren't doing what you want (or even what you can) but what you are ordered to.
In most setups, if you deliver something that wasn't asked for (even if it might be better) will land you in trouble if you do it repeatedly.
In my spare time I made the Fairberry smartphone keyboard attachment and now I am working on the PEPit physiotherapy game console, so that chronically ill kids can have fun while doing their mindnumbingly monotonous daily physiotherapy routine.
These are projects that dozens of people are using in their daily life.
In my day job I am a glorified code monkey keeping the backend service for some customer loyalty app running. Hardly impressive.
If an app is buggy, it's almost always bad management decisions, not low developer skill.
GitHub - Dakkaron/Fairberry
Contribute to Dakkaron/Fairberry development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
It's really an issue with companies, not software.
If you use corporate crap, that's on you.
Yeah, my favorite is when they figure out what features people are willing to pay for and then paywal everything that makes an app useful.
And after they monetize that fully and realize that the money is not endless, they switch to a subscription model. So that they can have you pay for your depreciating crappy software forever.
But at least you know it kind of works while you’re paying for it. It takes way too much effort to find some other unknown piece of software for the same function, and it is usually performs worse than what you had until the developers figure out how to make the features work again before putting it behind a paywall and subscription model again again.
But along the way, everyone gets to be miserable from the users to the developers and the project managers. Everyone except of course, the shareholders Because they get to make money, no matter how crappy their product, which they don’t use anyway, becomes.
A great recent example of this is Plex. It used to be open source and free, then it got more popular and started developing other features, and I asked people to pay reasonable amount for them.
After it got more popular and easy to use and set up, they started jacking up the prices, removing features and forcing people to buy subscriptions.
Your alternative now is to go back to a less fully featured more difficult to set up but open source alternative and something like Jellyfin. Except that most people won’t know how to set it up, there are way less devices and TVs will support their software, and you can’t get it to work easily for your technologically illiterate family and or friends.
So again, Your choices are stay with a crappy commercialized money-grubbing subscription based product that at least works and is fully featured for now until they decide to stop. Or, get a new, less developed, more difficult to set up, highly technical, and less supported product that’s open source and hope that it doesn’t fall into the same pitfalls as its user base and popularity grows.
Attenti al Libro: su Rai 3 una serata evento con Francesca Fialdini e un parterre d’eccezione
Attenti al Libro è la nuova serata one-shot di Rai 3 firmata Rai Cultura e condotta da Francesca Fialdini, in onda questa sera, giovedì 9 ottobre, in prime time. Un viaggio giocoso e appassionato nel mondo della lettura che riunisce artisti, scrittori, attori e musicisti per raccontare, a modo loro, il rapporto con i libri.
TUTTI I DETTAGLI: Attenti al Libro: su Rai 3 una serata evento con Francesca Fialdini e un parterre d’eccezione
Attenti al Libro su Rai 3: Francesca Fialdini e il cast stellare
Attenti al Libro, serata one-shot su Rai 3 con Francesca Fialdini: omaggi a Benni, Camilleri, Simenon, Murgia e un cast ricchissimo di ospiti.Redazione (Atom Heart Magazine)
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Gaza ceasefire inches closer; Senate fails to stop Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/37301612
Israel kills 11 Palestinians over the past 24 hours in Gaza. President Donald Trump announces a ceasefire agreement has been reached between Hamas and Israel, while Israeli military continues sporadic attacks in Gaza. The Israeli cabinet will convene today to discuss the deal. A UN study finds 54,600 children under 5 in Gaza may be acutely malnourished. Trump says Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker “should be in jail” for allegedly failing to protect ICE agents. Russia warns that the United States supplying Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles would be a “qualitatively new” escalation that could draw them into direct confrontation. The Senate fails to pass a resolution aimed at stopping Trump’s extrajudicial U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats. Colombian President Gustavo Petro says that a vessel bombed this week by the United States was Colombian and carried Colombian citizens. Eleven Pakistani soldiers killed in a clash near the Afghan border.
Gaza ceasefire inches closer; Senate fails to stop Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats
Israel kills 11 Palestinians over the past 24 hours in Gaza. President Donald Trump announces a ceasefire agreement has been reached between Hamas and Israel, while Israeli military continues sporadic attacks in Gaza. The Israeli cabinet will convene today to discuss the deal. A UN study finds 54,600 children under 5 in Gaza may be acutely malnourished. Trump says Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker “should be in jail” for allegedly failing to protect ICE agents. Russia warns that the United States supplying Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles would be a “qualitatively new” escalation that could draw them into direct confrontation. The Senate fails to pass a resolution aimed at stopping Trump’s extrajudicial U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats. Colombian President Gustavo Petro says that a vessel bombed this week by the United States was Colombian and carried Colombian citizens. Eleven Pakistani soldiers killed in a clash near the Afghan border.Gaza ceasefire inches closer; Senate fails to stop Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats
Drop Site Daily: October 9, 2025Drop Site News
Gaza ceasefire inches closer; Senate fails to stop Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats
Gaza ceasefire inches closer; Senate fails to stop Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats
Drop Site Daily: October 9, 2025Drop Site News
Kiev loses 1,450 troops along engagement line in past day — Russia’s top brass
Kiev loses 1,450 troops along engagement line in past day — Russia’s top brass
Russia’s Battlegroup West inflicted roughly 230 casualties on Ukrainian troops and destroyed six enemy armored combat vehicles in its area of responsibility over the past day, the Defense Ministry reportedTASS
NATO eyeing ‘forceful’ response to Russia
NATO eyeing ‘forceful’ response to Russia – FT
NATO states are considering easing the air engagement rules and deploying drones on Russia’s borders, FT sources claimRT
Marwan Barghouti secretly removed from prisoner list by Israel, source says
The Israeli prime minister's office unilaterally removed Marwan Barghouti's name from the prisoner exchange list at the last minute, endangering the Gaza ceasefire deal's implementation, a source close to the prominent Palestinian prisoner told Middle East Eye.
Barghouti, who is the most popular Palestinian political figure according to polls, was one of the most valuable names to potentially be traded for the 48 Israeli captives in Gaza.
A source close to Barghouti and his family told MEE that last night mediators including US envoy Steve Witkoff signed off on a prisoner list that included Barghouti.
Marwan Barghouti secretly removed from prisoner list by Israel, source says
The Israeli prime minister's office unilaterally removed Marwan Barghouti's name from the prisoner exchange list at the last minute, endangering the Gaza ceasefire deal's implementation, a source close to the prominent Palestinian prisoner told Middl…Lubna Masarwa (Middle East Eye)
Even Canada Sells Record $57.1B In U.S. Debt As Global Financial Reset Begins
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Trump’s ‘Antifa roundtable’ was so much worse than you’re imagining
Trump just hosted an ‘Antifa roundtable’ at the White House ... it was so much worse than you’re imagining
Holly Baxter reports on a meeting which, at one point, appeared to position people protesting against Nazis in the Weimar Republic as the bad guys, and at another saw the president declare, ‘We got rid of freedom of speech’Holly Baxter (The Independent)
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Poll: Katie Porter leads California governor’s race, boosted by former Kamala Harris supporters
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/21/katie-porter-california-governor-race-poll-00517347
More than 97% of organizations find it tough to demonstrate the business value of gen AI, according to a survey of 600 data leaders by Wakefield Research
Global Data Leaders Seek to Harness the Power of GenAI for AI-Driven Success
Informatica’s CDO Insights 2025 survey reveals that organizations plan to ramp up AI Investments, despite near-term headwinds on AI readiness.Informatica
Router uses
Macroscopic quantum tunneling wins 2025's Nobel Prize in physics
Macroscopic quantum tunneling wins 2025’s Nobel Prize in physics
Quantum mechanics was first discovered on small, microscopic scales. 2025's Nobel Prize brings the quantum and large-scale worlds together.Ethan Siegel (Big Think)
China tightens export rules for crucial rare earths
China tightens export rules for crucial rare earths
The announcement comes ahead of a meeting between China's President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump later this month.Peter Hoskins (BBC News)
Let's talk about the economic situation in Canada
let's break down what capital flight, people leaving, government debt, and the gold bonanza mean. The libs are scratching their heads, but from a Marxist perspective, it isn't a mystery. It's just late-stage capitalism playing its greatest hits.
The billionaire class and their lackeys can read the balance sheet of their own system. They see that the profits have been squeezed out of us, the working class is tapped out, and the whole house of cards is wobbling. Hence why we're seeing capital flight. They're pulling their money out because the mobile nature of capital means they can park it in safer markets.
And the gold rush is just the bourgeoisie quietly admitting their entire financial system is built on hot air. They're ditching liquidity for a physical asset that will hold value when the inevitable crash comes. It's a massive vote of no confidence in the very system they built. We're seeing a classic sign of over-accumulation with nowhere profitable left to invest.
Now, about the whole people fleeing abroad thing. The people who are leaving are those with the means to do so, namely, the workers who are still relatively well off. When even the so-called professional-managerial class, such as engineers and other tech workers, are getting priced out of a future and leaving, you know the system is failing. It's obviously problematic since it's a loss of talent, but at a deeper level, it's a crisis of social reproduction for the most privileged group of workers. If the labour aristocracy can't make it, what does that say about the rest of us in the proletariat? The canary in the coal mine has just packed its bags and fled the country.
And then we have the government's role in all this. Our state is the management committee for the bourgeoisie, and it's doing its job perfectly. All that government borrowing and quantitative easing was just socializing the losses of the capitalists during the pandemic, creating a massive bailout for them. Now comes the bill, and they're handing it to us in the form of austerity. Here's what PSAC says about Carney's announcement of sweeping public service cuts.
They're cutting public services to shred the social wage and force us deeper into reliance on the capitalist market, while funneling money into the military. The military needs to be kept happy in case of any social unrest that their austerity will cause, and to tie Canada tighter to US imperialism as the domestic economy rots. The money is going to cops, jets, and bombs instead of our healthcare or education.
We're most likely headed for another 2008 style crash, and these crashes are themselves a feature of the system. They're how capitalism resets itself by devaluing our labour, destroying excess capacity, and letting the big capitalists gobble up everything for pennies on the dollar. It's the centralization of capital in its most brutal form.
And in the political vacuum that we have here, without a strong, organized socialist left to offer a real alternative, people get funnelled into the waiting arms of right-wing populism. They'll blame immigrants, wokeism, or whatever scapegoat the ruling class offers to direct our anger away from them. We're seeing it all over Europe, and it's coming here hard.
The future for Canada is grim with the class war that's heating up like never before. The capitalists are preparing for it with their gold, their capital flight, and their militarized state. The question is, are we? We need to build our own power, our own organizations, and our own vision for a world beyond this parasitic system.
More Canadians are fleeing the country than ever and one province just broke a record
Canadians are leaving the country in record numbers — and the departures just keep climbing. Emigration from Canada hit an all-time high in 2024, but according to the latest figures from Statistics Canada, 2025 is already on track to break that recor…Narcity Staff (Narcity)
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ doesn't like this.
It's true the gold price increase is pretty striking, although it's not the first time since Marx gold has been king (actually didn't he write that fiat currency was impossible?). The rest, I'm pretty sure, are records the same way the stock market sets records all the damn time.
All relate to the fact the US is doing things.
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ doesn't like this.
Why not just admit that you've never actually read Marx?
Meanwhile, similar records have indeed been hit before, and that's precisely how those of us who pay attention to history know that the crash is coming.
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Excellent. You'll get banned slightly later by your not-toxic comrades.
I mean, we did get in a bit of engaging before the inevitable implode-and-insult thing I was waiting for. As I remember it, "as you can see, gold will inevitably always be the only form of money" was a major part of one of those exact chapters you mentioned, although obviously written in a more obtuse Das Kapital-ish way.
He was a smart man, but he did die before germ theory really took off. And goddamn, he didn't need to torture sentences like that to prove it.
I've seen chatbots string together more coherent arguments than this. You've gracefully sidestepped every point of substance only to start deflecting, which is quite a performance. Your trolling is so transparent you're not fooling anybody.
And the fabricated Marx quotes? It's a bold and frankly pathetic strategy to just invent passages from a book you're pretending to have read. You're essentially just admitting you lack the intellectual horsepower to actually engage with what he wrote.
It is absolutely hilarious watching you cosplay as someone who has a clue about the subject you're attempting to debate. So, for anyone still following this thread, let's deal with this drivel directly and expose this fraud.
You're original claim was, and I quote: "Marx gold has been king (actually didn’t he write that fiat currency was impossible?)."
This is false. Not only did Marx not think fiat currency was impossible, he actually dedicated a significant part of Chapter 3 of the first volume of Das Kapital, to explaining exactly how it works. What you claim is a common misreading of what Marx wrote about money. It's ok though, this is dense stuff, so it's easy to get the wrong impression if you have poor reading comprehension
The actual argument rather than the one you made up is way more interesting though. The key thing to get is his distinction between money as a measure of value and money as a medium of circulation. For money to be a universal yardstick to measure the value of everything else like chairs or coats, he argued it had to have its own value, which is why a commodity like gold historically took on this role. That's the part you appear to be fixating on. However, when money is just being used to circulate goods where you sell a coat for money, then use the money to buy bread, the actual gold coin doesn't need to be there. It's just a placeholder, a symbol representing that value.
Since it's just a symbol in that moment, it can be replaced by something with no intrinsic value, like a piece of paper. He then proceeded to describe the state stepping in and issuing worthless tokens to circulate in place of gold. Here’s a direct quote from the book you claim to have read:
Hence the state can designate any token – for example, a piece of paper appropriately labelled– as a representative of money, a money token.
That's basically the original definition of fiat currency. He literally explained how it was as a logical development where the symbol of value gets detached from the valuable thing itself. He never argued that gold was money because of some magical property. What he showed was that it became money because it had the right physical characteristics for the job. Once again, if you bothered reading the book you'd see the following line that clears it up:
although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver
In other words, the need for money arose from the economic system, and gold just happened to be the best material to fill that role at the time. It’s a functional argument, not a dogmatic one.
My advice is just delete your account and go back to reddit where trolls like you belong. You'll be much happier there interracting with people on your own intellectual level.
Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Two
Capital Vol. I : Chapter Two (Exchange)www.marxists.org
What you claim is a common misreading of what Marx wrote about money.
Sooo it's not just me, lots of other people read it this way too.
In other words, the need for money arose from the economic system, and gold just happened to be the best material to fill that role at the time. It’s a functional argument, not a dogmatic one.
Sure, which is entirely reasonable if you're writing in the Victorian era, and no other kind of money has existed to your knowledge (Europeans didn't pay much mind to what the deal was with cowrie shells). As was the thing about the spread of railways leading immediately to global communism - it was a huge, unprecedented shift at the time. Scholarship advances, though.
I'll just skip the return poo-flinging, since you're right, we might be alone. If you mistake that for weakness that's your problem.
Yes, you're in no way unique in having poor reading comprehension.
Sure, which is entirely reasonable if you’re writing in the Victorian era, and no other kind of money has existed to your knowledge (Europeans didn’t pay much mind to what the deal was with cowrie shells). As was the thing about the spread of railways leading immediately to global communism - it was a huge, unprecedented shift at the time. Scholarship advances, though.
Ooor everyone else is right and you're a zealot reading what you want into a holy book.
his union is helped on by the
improved means of communication that are created by modern industry,
and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one
another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the
numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national
struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle.
And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with
their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian,
thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
It's been more than a few years, and I'm not sure Marx's imminent revolution is any more imminent.
I mean I literally provided you with the quotes from the book showing that what you said was wrong. Instead of taking the L, you decided to double down using the ad populum fallacy. Absolutely incredible stuff. We have a true reddit moment here.
It’s been more than a few years, and I’m not sure Marx’s imminent revolution is any more imminent.
Hilarious of you to say this when the entire western world is imploding on itself. I guess makes sense that you'd be living in your own fantasy world given that you have reading comprehension of a squirrel on meth.
An honest interlocutor would consider the possibility that either could be the alternate reality.
Hilarious of you to say this when the entire western world is imploding on itself.
Which time? A lot of stuff has happened; WWII is still closer to present than to Das Kapital.
I love how you got caught lying, but just keep on digging. Meanwhile, it's adorable how you think the age of Das Kapital has anything to do with the analysis there. Again, maybe if you spent the time to actually read it instead of making clown of yourself in public, then you'd see why it's an important theoretical work on the mechanics of capitalism.
Anyways, I'm going to stop here. You can have the last word which you so desperately need.
Let's talk about the economic situation in Canada
let's break down what capital flight, people leaving, government debt, and the gold bonanza mean. The libs are scratching their heads, but from a Marxist perspective, it isn't a mystery. It's just late-stage capitalism playing its greatest hits.
The billionaire class and their lackeys can read the balance sheet of their own system. They see that the profits have been squeezed out of us, the working class is tapped out, and the whole house of cards is wobbling. Hence why we're seeing capital flight. They're pulling their money out because the mobile nature of capital means they can park it in safer markets.
And the gold rush is just the bourgeoisie quietly admitting their entire financial system is built on hot air. They're ditching liquidity for a physical asset that will hold value when the inevitable crash comes. It's a massive vote of no confidence in the very system they built. We're seeing a classic sign of over-accumulation with nowhere profitable left to invest.
Now, about the whole people fleeing abroad thing. The people who are leaving are those with the means to do so, namely, the workers who are still relatively well off. When even the so-called professional-managerial class, such as engineers and other tech workers, are getting priced out of a future and leaving, you know the system is failing. It's obviously problematic since it's a loss of talent, but at a deeper level, it's a crisis of social reproduction for the most privileged group of workers. If the labour aristocracy can't make it, what does that say about the rest of us in the proletariat? The canary in the coal mine has just packed its bags and fled the country.
And then we have the government's role in all this. Our state is the management committee for the bourgeoisie, and it's doing its job perfectly. All that government borrowing and quantitative easing was just socializing the losses of the capitalists during the pandemic, creating a massive bailout for them. Now comes the bill, and they're handing it to us in the form of austerity. Here's what PSAC says about Carney's announcement of sweeping public service cuts.
They're cutting public services to shred the social wage and force us deeper into reliance on the capitalist market, while funneling money into the military. The military needs to be kept happy in case of any social unrest that their austerity will cause, and to tie Canada tighter to US imperialism as the domestic economy rots. The money is going to cops, jets, and bombs instead of our healthcare or education.
We're most likely headed for another 2008 style crash, and these crashes are themselves a feature of the system. They're how capitalism resets itself by devaluing our labour, destroying excess capacity, and letting the big capitalists gobble up everything for pennies on the dollar. It's the centralization of capital in its most brutal form.
And in the political vacuum that we have here, without a strong, organized socialist left to offer a real alternative, people get funnelled into the waiting arms of right-wing populism. They'll blame immigrants, wokeism, or whatever scapegoat the ruling class offers to direct our anger away from them. We're seeing it all over Europe, and it's coming here hard.
The future for Canada is grim with the class war that's heating up like never before. The capitalists are preparing for it with their gold, their capital flight, and their militarized state. The question is, are we? We need to build our own power, our own organizations, and our own vision for a world beyond this parasitic system.
More Canadians are fleeing the country than ever and one province just broke a record
Canadians are leaving the country in record numbers — and the departures just keep climbing. Emigration from Canada hit an all-time high in 2024, but according to the latest figures from Statistics Canada, 2025 is already on track to break that recor…Narcity Staff (Narcity)
The question is, are we?
unequivocally no.
it's pretty clear that the culture wars; media propaganda; and political capture are doing an excellent job at ensuring that people in canada; along w the rest of the western world; will not push for an alternative in sufficient numbers until our material situations become bad enough and the racism, homophobia & xenophobia contained in the main stream media guarantees that the "undesirable" classes of people will endure the brunt of the worsening conditions to maximize the misery for as long as humanly possible.
The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles
The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles
How a home computer, the Commodore 64, became one of the best-selling gaming machines of all time.slicker.me
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I wonder if history will repeat with PCs, and especially handheld PCs, a market which the Steam Deck effectively sparked into life, while Nintendo, PS, and Xbox crash and burn should there be a second Video Game Crash any time soon.
Because all three of the current console vendors aren't doing great at all, in fact Xbox is basically already dead and even the Switch 2 seems DOA as far as exclusives go and it's very much maligned by the press atm, while PC seems to be doing fine comparatively especially considering the success of the Steam Deck and the other PC handhelds which followed it.
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Nintendo will not change, maybe they will get out of the US.
Sony may sack their console departments and stick to everything else.
Microsoft is already getting over with Xbox.
Steam Deck and clones will become the new handhelds, along with (possibly) Android gaming phones with controllers.
PC architectures will displace console ones.
Oh my beloved C64! I made my first "real" games with it, my buddies were artistic and made the music, sprites, animations, etc. I programmed the tools to make them!
The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone. As an early teen, I had the C64 programmer's reference manual checked out of our library for 2 years!!! Doing any kind of advanced graphics meat PEEKing and POKEing random addresses and registers and interrupts to see what would happen. A nightmare! My hat's off to all the demo scene folks that did ludicrous stuff
edit: My first released game was "Studmaster" replete with every horrible thing your mind is currently imaging lmao. I'm not proud of this now but it was pretty wild for two 14 year old kids in the 80's to make a small-scale text/graphic adventure game and publish it
The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone.
This is simply false. The C64 was a completely open platform, everything was open, including how you programmed the special hardware directly. Even the included documentation was pretty good to get started, and included examples on how to program audio, graphics and sprites directly to the hardware.
For more advanced programming (assembly) you obviously needed to purchase the tools and documentation. The included book was only meant to get you started with the included BASIC. But the tools were cheap and documentation were extremely cheap compared to other computers, because it was a completely open platform.
The ability to have an assembler on a capsule in shadow ROM was extremely powerful.
The philosophy of Jack Tramiel was to put the hardware in the hands of users, and let them do whatever they wished without limitations. No closed garden at all.
Exactly because of that Jack Tramiel was a fucking hero IMO. And no other computer had more hacks and programming examples available at the time. And I bet it was a huge reason for why C64 was by far the best selling home computer for years.
Atari and Texas Instruments however at the time were closed, and therefore IMO useless.
Included book for C64:
commodore.ca/commodore-manuals…
Commodore 64 Users Guide - Commodore Computers: C64 VIC20 PET C128 Plus4 - 8 Bit PC's
Scanned by Rich Tener. Optimized and posted by Commodore.ca December 2007 Note that many of these PDFs are large files, so you may want to right click on the link and select SAVE TARGET AS rather than trying to access them directly through your brow…Commodore
You are talking a lot of philosophical stuff, but the reality was when you wanted to get the low level hardware, there was very little documentation. Even banks of the technical documents had giant blanks saying these are a bunch of video registers and interrupts, basically good luck lol
I don't sense that you have any actual experience programming on that platform, because if you did you'd know what I'm saying
but the reality was when you wanted to get the low level hardware, there was very little documentation.
The low level of what? Graphics sprites sound and IO were ALL documented!
Maybe horizontal and vertical smooth scrolling wasn't in the included book, which is essentially just an introduction for beginners, but such things were absolutely released info by Commodore, and it was dead easy to do for that reason, such info was everywhere!
I don’t sense that you have any actual experience programming on that platform,
I absolutely did, and I programmed sprites in assembly, and made a program we called sprite design, where you could design and animate sprites, which we never released, because we were under the false assumption that you didn't release software until it was perfect.
Later when i didn't use the C64 anymore, a friend of mine borrowed all my software, and came back absolutely ecstatic about how professional Sprite Design was, and was very puzzled he had never heard about it.
We made a build in help function using our own 90% efficient compression, we used self modifying code, and utilized the 6510 ability to switch off the ROM to have access to the RAM at that address space, and swapped where the character set was located and used our own 6 pixel wide character set, with an interrupt to give a tiny beep sound with key presses. The main structure was made with the Petspeed compiler, but everything surrounding the sprite animations was assembly. ( fuck 8 bit programming 😜 ) I made pretty sophisticated algorithms to make the weird 8x8 or 4x8 graphics format in color easier and faster to work with.
The C64 was amazing for its time for its speed and hardware capabilities. Despite being a machine that ran slightly below 1 MHz it was quite fast for its time.
You just probably isn't aware that all that was openly available on the C64 wasn't on most other computers of the time.
A collection on C64 books:
archive.org/details/commodore_…
An example of a book describing assembly and hardware registers:
archive.org/details/Assembly_L…
But also there was a ton of info released in magazines like RUN etc.
I'm not sure what info exactly you think was lacking? Except of course there were a few things that were possible that even the creators of the chips were unaware of, But was figured out by hackers. Such things can obviously not be part of the official documentation.
Commodore C64 Book: Assembly Language Programming With the Commodore 64 (1984)(Brady Communications Company) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Commodore C64 Book: Assembly Language Programming With the Commodore 64 (1984)(Brady Communications Company)Internet Archive
No computer I know of ever came with an actual hardware reference.
However the concept is shown for instance on page 60, that shows peek and poke address for border and background color.
The C64 had a lot to get you started, way more than most, but it is still just to get you started.
If you want to get serious on a C64 you don't peek and poke much, but program in assembly.
I do think software piracy also was a large success factor. When I was 13 there was one major spot in my city where consoles and computers were sold (within a department store!), and people where "swapping" games even before they bought the hardware. I remember at least one of the store clerks having a small side business providing access to disks and tapes you could copy - right on the machines that were shown in store.
And I learned how to copy the C64's basic rom to ram and mod small things even before I had the machine myself.
All the kids were gathering round the computers, the consoles were less attractive.
When I got my own C64 in 1983, my first game was Fort Apocalypse. It was not an original. You needed a boom box with dual tape decks to copy these.
78th hostage to die in israeli jails
Palestinian held without charge dies in Israeli custody
A Palestinian detainee has died in Israeli custody after being held without charge or trial for five months.Mera Aladam (Middle East Eye)
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‘The stakes are quite large’: US supreme court case could gut Voting Rights Act
‘The stakes are quite large’: US supreme court case could gut Voting Rights Act
Court’s decision in Louisiana v Callais could limit voters from challenging racial discriminatory districtsSam Levine (The Guardian)
ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked, Discord says
ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked, Discord says
The platform says hackers targeted a firm that helped to verify the ages of its users.Osmond Chia (BBC News)
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External trackpad for Linux?
**edit: I said wireless when I was actually just thinking external my b
I use Gnome as my main DE and I really like the touch gestures for my workflow, having a wireless trackpad would be really nice.
I've done some research before and seen that most wireless trackpads seem to work just fine with Linux, like the apple magic trackpad and an older out of production one from Logitech. But it doesn't seem that wireless trackpads are super common so I wanted to ask if there were any others anyone could suggest?
I also had the thought that maybe I could make my own by buying a spare trackpad module from Framework but I don't know how feasible that would actually be. I've never done anything like that but it seems like it could hypothetically be possible.
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I don’t know anything about wireless trackpads, but I love my workflow with Gnome and I know it wouldn’t be doable if I wasn’t working on a laptop.
Using the keyboard just wouldn’t be the same.
I used an Apple wireless trackpad with Ubuntu many years ago, maybe 10? I had to do some work to get it to recognize gestures but I don't remember what was involved. It worked great once everything was configured.
It's possible that support has improved over the years and it might work out of the box though I haven't tried recently.
Not sure how helpful this info is.
I read about this a while ago. Don’t know how good it is but it was something I’ve been wanting to look into.
GitHub - ploopyco/trackpad: A high-performance, open-source trackpad, powered by QMK.
A high-performance, open-source trackpad, powered by QMK. - GitHub - ploopyco/trackpad: A high-performance, open-source trackpad, powered by QMK.GitHub
Ah yes, the - rubbing off microplastics with my own fingers directly into my room - device.
And thats ignoring the haptics and the hygene. Think of all your skin gunk that you're never getting out of those micro filament line rifts MMMMH tasty!
I'd never recommend buying a trackpad without a glass top.
I have a Ploopy trackpad, and I absolutely love it. That said, it's not wireless, so OP might not be into it.
It's about the same size as the Apple trackpad. A big surface is a must for me, so this is great. I think the "active" surface is a bit smaller, but I don't notice it.
The responsiveness is glorious. I have LMDE on a Surface Book 2, and the built-in trackpad is shameful in comparison.
There's no physical click. You get tap-to-click only. The texture is noticeable, but for me, not in a bad way. Perfectly smooth trackpads can get a bit sticky over time or if you have sweaty hands. I suspect the fine texture on the Ploopy won't let that happen the same way.
libinput.
if you're into hacky workarounds like i am; you can use an android as a trackpad.
my home server was also multimedia center as well as one point running kodi & plex and i setup x11vnc on it and an old android phone to act as trackpad so that i can channel surf with the phone that was already in my hand.
Canonical releases Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka | Canonical
The latest interim release of Ubuntu comes with compatibility enhancements at the silicon level, accessibility upgrades and a robust security posture that sets the stage for the next LTS. October 9, 2025 Today Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 25.
The latest interim release of Ubuntu comes with compatibility enhancements at the silicon level, accessibility upgrades and a robust security posture that sets the stage for the next LTS.Canonical (Ubuntu)
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To quote a quote in the article - ”Ubuntu 25.10 is a statement of intent for the next Ubuntu LTS in 2026.”
If it doesn’t work out at all, they will likely pull the change for 26.04. The LTS has after all a need to be stable as a lot of companies rely on it.
What did they revert? I had not heard that.
UUtils is just the “core” utils for now but that was always the plan. What got reverted?
I thought all the reported bugs were fixed (mostly before the articles were even written).
None of this means there are not more bugs or feature gaps of course. I am sure there are. This is the first test of UUtils at scale.
As it stands today, sudo-rs is the default sudo implementation on Ubuntu 25.10, and uutils’ coreutils has mostly replaced the GNU implementation, with a few exceptions, many of which will be resolved by releases in the coming weeks. These diversions back to the existing implementations demonstrate that stability and resilience are more important than “hype” in our approach: I expect us to have completed the migration during the next cycle, but not before the tools are ready.
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-…
Ubuntu 25.10: A Retrospective
In February this year, I published Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years, which was something of a manifesto I pledged to enact in the design, build and release of Ubuntu. This week, we released Ubuntu 25.Ubuntu Community Hub
Thanks! I had to stare at your link for a bit to spot the exceptions. There are not many exceptions but they are important ones.
Good to see Ubuntu being pragmatic about it. I imagine they hope to ship the remaining Uutils versions before 26.04.
UUtils has, until now, been a niche project with few users. Putting it in the most popular desktop distro is going to expose it to many new users and use cases. Some of those are bound to find differences in behaviour between UUtils and GNU which should be considered bugs. No doubt.
But this “not-very-well tested” mantra is just silly. UUtils itself uses the exact same test suite as GNU does. They have been testing against this suite for years:
github.com/uutils/coreutils-tr…
While not all tests pass yet, the subset of functionality that people are likely to actually use is very well tested.
And the reason some bugs were found recently is precisely because UUtils were put through the normal test cycle for Ubuntu. A small number of bugs were caught which is the goal of that process. These are things that were previously not in the test suite. I see there are some new tests. UUtils may have contributed to that as new use cases were encountered that showed differences in behaviour between GNU and UUtils. The issues discovered were quickly fixed.
Think of what is involved in creating a distribution like Ubuntu and building the tens of thousands of packages that they ship in their repos—all with build scripts written for GNU Coreutils. This is all working with UUtils unmodified.
With the distro live now, the number of users will have already exploded. Where are the bug reports and articles about all the problems encountered? Crickets.
That does not mean there will not be any such cases. That is not my point at all. My point is that “not very well tested” does not jive with how well things are going considering what a massive change this is.
UUtils is much better tested than much of the software I use.
coreutils-tracking/gnu-results.svg at main · uutils/coreutils-tracking
Contribute to uutils/coreutils-tracking development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Thanks for the context. I did read the articles on this, but you've summed up the positives well.
Unfortunately, these articles also point out that putting uutils into the wild of 25.10 will doubtless reveal some hitherto unknown breakages and rough patches.
Which I agree with. No one is forcing anyone to use 25.10, but there is no better way to smoke test sw than pushing it to prod.
I'm a Debian user, so I have the luxury of waiting to see the outcome of these efforts for now.
We Are Elated by the Gaza Ceasefire News. Now, the World Must Hold Israel to Account for 2 Years of Genocide
We Are Elated by the Gaza Ceasefire News. Now, the World Must Hold Israel to Account for 2 Years of Genocide
In an emotional essay, former Palestinian negotiator Diana Buttu reacts to the ceasefire announcement, what it means for Palestinians, and what still worries her.Diana Buttu (Zeteo)
A Pause in Killing Is Not an End to Genocide | THE HIND RAJAB FOUNDATION
A Pause in Killing Is Not an End to Genocide | THE HIND RAJAB FOUNDATION
The HRF warns that Gaza’s genocide continues under blockade and destruction, urging global mobilization and accountability for all perpetrators.THE HIND RAJAB FOUNDATION
Kami
in reply to AstroLightz • • •RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️
in reply to AstroLightz • • •It comes as no surprise that the flatpak version of freetube doesn't like using an external player. I tried giving access to /usr/bin via flatseal, but alas.
Installing the real version it works though, but seemingly Fedora's current version of yt-dlp doesn't seem to cut it anymore. There is a newer version on yt-dlp's github though, so getting that and overwriting the installed version in
/usr/bin(don't forget to make a backup, otherwise there'ssudo dnf reinstall yt-dlp) that does the trick.The sponsorblock plugin is an excellent shout though, I hadn't heard of that for MPV, then again, it's rare for me to stream directly from youtube.
But wait, doesn't yt-dlp already have sponsorblock support? I guess it's better to get the whole stream and then do player based sponsorblock stuff.
Releases · yt-dlp/yt-dlp
GitHubAstroLightz
in reply to RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️ • • •I didnt know that. Apparently there are formating options for SponsorBlock in yt-dllp directly. I don't know how you would set that up with FreeTube though.
I'm sticking with the plugin since it's as simple as building it and copying it to the scripts directory, and it comes with a simple config.
Domi
in reply to RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️ • • •It does work via Flatpak, you have to give Freetube the "D-Bus session bus" permission and then put the following in your external player settings (this launches the flatpak mpv):
External player
Custom External Player Executable:
Custom External Player Arguments:
RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️
in reply to Domi • • •WeebLife
in reply to AstroLightz • • •nkk
in reply to WeebLife • • •Grayjay App - Follow Creators Not Platforms
grayjay.appglitching
in reply to AstroLightz • • •another option that works for me is macast. that's a DLNA sink that you can send youtube (and other) videos to and it plays it via mpv, in full screen if you so desire. it also accepts jellyfin, you can control it remotely (via AllCast).
so I'm browsing videos in newtube on my phone, send them to allcast, and that one sends them to macast. sounds convoluted but its like three taps and an alternative to chromecast.
lemmyknow
in reply to AstroLightz • • •anytimesoon
in reply to AstroLightz • • •MoonMelon
in reply to anytimesoon • • •AstroLightz
in reply to MoonMelon • • •