nekusoul

nekusoul , 10 days ago

It sounds vague and will either end up being a very powerful tool or almost useless. If it’s the former, it would be gigantic win indeed.

nekusoul , 10 days ago

At the very least it’s seems heavily inspired by the Digital Markets Act, which is why I’d hope that their wording will be specific enough to close those “loopholes” Apple is currently attempting in the EU.

nekusoul , 10 days ago

It might take a lot more effort, but I don’t think this will be the end. Google is required by law to label ads as such, giving these tools an opportunity to detect and skip them.

nekusoul , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

That would mean running an unmarked ad for five seconds, which would create an interesting legal question. But YouTube also buffers a good chunk of upcoming content, so there’s enough upcoming video material to check.

nekusoul , 10 days ago

At the very least I’d say that UK/Germany would be a good bet. Though the idea of just plastering the note over the whole video might do the trick, considering that’s what some German channels already do if they are sponsored to stay on the safe side.

nekusoul , 10 days ago

Germany has the “Medienstaatsvertrag” §8.3, which requires advertisements to be easily recognizable as such and also adequately separated through audio or visual cues.

nekusoul , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

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

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

nekusoul , 19 days ago

Personally it’s the part where it requires an app and a subscription with no option to just insert a damn coin. Apart from being needlessly complex it also shuts out people who don’t have a smartphone or don’t want to install random crap.

nekusoul , 19 days ago

Yup, it’s the lack of options that’s bothering me. It’s either tap water or a full blown app+subscription, nothing inbetween.

The reason I mentioned coins is because I think that cash should always remain an option even though I’m personally almost always using digital payments as well.

nekusoul , 20 days ago

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

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

nekusoul , 20 days ago

The topic is bloatware, not games.

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

nekusoul , 20 days ago

I hate how oddly specific “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo people” is, mostly because that’s exactly what I did as well. I don’t use it to write any blog posts though. It’s more a “Here’s a list of things I’ve created”-generator.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

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

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

nekusoul , 1 month ago

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

nekusoul , 1 month ago

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

nekusoul , 1 month ago

… which is also not open-source. But yeah, it’s areally good music player and organizer.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

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

nekusoul , 1 month ago

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

nekusoul , 1 month ago

I’d have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.

Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you’d be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn’t caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch “real” cheaters.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Yup. At the very least, they shouldn’t have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that’d be more of a game design problem anyway.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

That’s true. Personally though, it not being optional for any amount of time just shows that there’s no good argument to have it be mandatory in the first place.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

[…] I didn’t bother to activate 2fa on my github account. I ended up writing a simple fetch for fun, …

I’m not judging, but reading those two lines back to back is pretty funny.

Also good to know what causes those seams. I’ve noticed it in some consoles, but never bothered to check why exactly that is.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Yup. I’ve always loved having a handheld device as a companion to my PC. The first few months with the Switch were great, but as time went on I just wanted a better designed Switch that’s also just a PC, particularly after getting hardware-banned for trying to fix some of the issues myself with homebrew apps.

I never would’ve thought that we’d actually get to see a device that’s real so quickly (anyone remember the Smach Z?), is actually pretty good and how quickly it’s now becoming its own market segment.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

We also shouldn’t just focus on generation, but also on consumption. If we had a smarter grid that could shift demand to fit the dynamic power generation of renewables better, that should reduce the required capacity for backup power generation quite a bit.

nekusoul , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

The entire point of the nuclear is so that it can take the base load

The idea to cover baseload demand with its own baseload power generation is an outdated concept though from a time when demand was inflexible and generation could be controlled to fit. Now that generation is dynamic, having baseload power generation is the opposite of what’s needed. We need flexible backup generation and more flexible demand to bring down baseload demand.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Oh yeah, I kind of skipped over that, but I actually meant that more flexible consumption helps bring down baseload demand, and in turn the need for backup generation as well once we reach that point where that matters.

Really good explanation of the issue though. Personally, I’m a bit more optimistic about being able to be more flexible demand. Particularly EVs and heat pumps are two areas where a smart grid can help shape demand without even being noticed by the people (apart from cheaper tariffs) as long as the car is fully charged in the morning and the room temperature is maintained.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

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

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

nekusoul , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

These days, knowing some people, I’m already grateful if a person is just using the default notification sound. Two highlights:

1. Camera flash light.alongside the notification, so you get a free flashbang whenever you’re sitting across from that person. I’ve yet to figure out how that mode is even helpful in any way and not just an annoyance for other people.
2. Long music clips not as a ringtone, but as a notification on full blast. Essentially, that person has trained themself to drop everything when a notification comes in in order to shut down the music. I’m not an expert, but that feels like the opposite of healthy phone usage.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Unlike the article suggests, I really hope that the option “only vibrate when unlocked” means that it doesn’t play a notification sound when the phone is unlocked. Also that it’ll be enabled by default.

So annoying to hear tons of notification sound from a person who’s actively chatting, holding the phone in their hands, making the sound completely pointless.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

Even as a heavy user of CLIs, claiming that their text-only nature somehow makes them more uniform, feels a bit overly reductive to me:

To start with, there’s simple fire-and-return commands, interactive commands, full-blown TUIs and so on. Then there’s the parameters, which aren’t really consistent either across applications either. Neither in the naming of arguments, nor their grammar. The representation of the output is also all over the place.

With all those things, it’s really not so dissimilar from the different layouts of GUIs. Not to mention that there’s also lots of CLI tools that do the same thing but have a different interface, so yeah.

nekusoul , 1 month ago

I use the CLI because it’s keyboard-focused (though I use lots of mouse-enabled TUIs) and because it’s programmable.

Generally though, I kind of get what you’re trying to say, but ‘uniformity’ feels like an unfortunate choice in the context of your question, as the meaning can be very arbitrarily defined, hence the confusion. I could, for example, claim that GUIs are more uniform because all chat apps, browsers etc… are so similar to each other that once I’ve learned one I can use all.

Which is why It’d probably be better if you tried to reword your initial question avoiding that term, focussing more on describing the desired benefits of your definition of uniformity.

Otherwise I’d point towards voice recognition, as that’s very similar to a CLI, but probably not what you had in mind, I’m guessing?

nekusoul , 1 month ago

It’s one of the very few things Microsoft actually gets right on their websites. You select to log in with a passkey, authenticate, optionally select which account you want to use, and you’re signed in. Not a single username or password entered into the website.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

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

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

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Different person, but I started using vertical tabs a few weeks ago and gave both extensions a try for a few days.

I’m using Sideberry now. It seems more polished to me with lots more features. I particularly like how well it integrates with Firefox containers and that you can create tab groups, which are essentially tabs for tabs.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

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

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

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

nekusoul , 2 months ago

They’ve basically perfected keeping the community mostly happy by toeing the line between putting out solid base games and putting out greedy DLC.

What we’re now seeing is what happens when you don’t immediately change course after you skimp on making a good base game.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

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

Seems a bit overkill to me.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Even the PC manufacturers selling “gaming” PCs using integrated graphics aren’t usually this brazen about it.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Yup, at the very minimum let me continue to play TFT. You can’t really cheat there, and if you could, that’s more likely due to an underlying gamplay/UX problem.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

I have a Onyx Boox Nova C that has pretty much the same technology (Kaleido Plus) and would say that the color display is mostly just a neat gimmick that comes with some tradeoffs. Compared to a pure monochrome E-Ink display the contrast is much worse and colors don’t really pop either. You basically always need at least a bit off background lighting to be able to read.

I’d recommend these types of display only if being able to read without background lighting isn’t a must and even then only for stuff that’s better with color, like notes, technical books or the occasional colored page in a book/manga. If you want to read something reliant on stunning colorful artwork like graphic novels I’d stay away.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

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

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

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Imagine a “Choose your Browser”-style pop-up, but for your OS on first boot. I’d really love to see it, partially mostly for the amount of pure chaos it would cause.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

AFAIK MusicBee isn’t open source, just Freeware. Which is fair enough if the dev doesn’t want to, but also a bit frustrating personally, as people could’ve improved Linux support considerably if it was.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

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

nekusoul , 2 months ago

I was guessing that this was going to be the next big Square Enix release after FF7 Rebirth and FFXIV Dawntrail with a release some time in the latter half of the year, but it looks like the project is more troubled than I assumed.

nekusoul , 2 months ago

Not to mention that most sites will put their main content into a container with a limited width anyway, since overly long lines are awful to read. So unless you’re using the browser side-by-side with other content on a low-res monitor it’s a net benefit. And even if it’s not I usually find the extra vertical space to be worth more, as you said.

nekusoul , 3 months ago

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

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

nekusoul , 3 months ago

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

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