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nickwitha_k

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I was explaining to my daughter about the differences between Gimp and Photoshop and saw that Adobe had a page that claimed to compare the two. It never compares the two. It barely mentions Gimp. (www.adobe.com)

I expected ridiculous propaganda from Adobe, but they give absolutely no reasons why Photoshop is better than Gimp and list a bunch of things that Gimp can do too....

nickwitha_k ,

So does Gimp…

nickwitha_k ,

One can reduce to two steps:

  1. Draw elipse selection
  2. Fill with paint bucket

I’ll not disagree that it is unintuitive, however. But, that was not the statement.

nickwitha_k , (edited )

Yeah. That’s different. The way that I’d do it, supposing it didn’t need to be perfect (I’d use a vector-based program like Inkscape for that), would be to create the selection, paint bucket, contact selection by desired number of pixels, clear. Not as good as converting to a path but more intuitive to me having learned PS circa early 2000s.

nickwitha_k ,

And if you have a 3D printer, you can make your own pieces and share them with others.

I really wish that an affordable desktop chip fab was a thing. Maybe with graphene semiconductors it could be feasible.

‘Will I ever retire?’: millennials wonder what’s on the other side of middle age (www.theguardian.com)

Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan....

nickwitha_k ,

One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don’t want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother’s corpse to get it.

Plus, modern MBAs see turnover as a good things because it makes the short-term investors happy.

nickwitha_k ,

This is an appropriate reaction, in my opinion. Modern economic philosophy is entirely myopic with no apparent perceived value in anything beyond the next quarter. From that perspective, if your employees have already created value and you’ve budgeted more than severance would cost (or think you can get away with constructive dismissal), then, for the quarter, getting rid of employees looks like a financial positive.

nickwitha_k ,

Nah. They’ll be happy that minorities are hurt too.

nickwitha_k ,

That’s what they were SO close to getting. Solutions like Xreal Air and Viture are just much more comfortable and less isolating.

nickwitha_k ,

Curious from your perspective what you’d like to see. From mine, Viture and Xreal are nearly perfect, with the exception of Xreal failing to be supportive of open APIs.

nickwitha_k ,

It’s a tag from a Beanie Baby.

nickwitha_k ,

The state of Michigan has no historical connection to the AR-15, to my knowledge. Why don’t they pick something that is actually native to Michigan like the Johnston Muzzleloader?

nickwitha_k ,

Indeed. I think that my questioning was more rhetorical but explicitly spelling it out can be helpful.

nickwitha_k , (edited )

Really?..

Just about every FOSS and Source-Available license that I’ve seen is perfectly valid. As a software developer, one has the option to choose how they wish to license their software. This can be based upon one’s personal philosophical view or what seems most appropriate for the piece of software.

Not everyone is motivated by profit. Most software that I develop personally is permissively licensed because IDGAF as long as I have enough to get by. If I write some code that makes someone else’s life better or easier, that’s more than enough for me.

Wait. What am I saying? This is the Internet and, according to the rules of corpo social media, we’re all supposed to be dicks to each other to further “engagement”. WHICH ONE OF YOU SAVAGES IS USING TAB INDENTATION INSTEAD OF BLOCKS IN YOUR LICENSE FILES?!?;!!!111one

nickwitha_k ,

what would you do if someone used it to hurt people instead? I’d personally feel like shit if my software were used for that, and as others said in this post, they’d prefer to have entities request an exemption rather than have their code used in ways they don’t approve of. So what say you?

I’ve a few thoughts on this:

  • Anyone who wants to use anything that I release for harm, will probably do so regardless of license. Bad actors are going to act badly. Plus, chances are that they’d see no legal repercussions as underdogs winning in court is the exception, not the rule. The legal system is heavily stacked against the little guy.
  • I tend to specifically avoid working on things that are weaponizable to reduce the chance of ethical conflict.
  • The projects that I’ve released or plan to release tend to be pretty esoteric. The one that saw the most interest was years ago and it was an adapter between abandoned gallery plugin and an abandoned social media CMS thing. It would take some great creativity to hurt people with that, other than making them read my horrible code from that era. My current projects are more about FPGA and mixed reality stuff.
  • Once I’ve created something and shared it freely, it is no longer wholely mine. I cannot dictate how one uses it, anymore than a musician can dictate how someone listens to the radio. As long as one abstains from creating tools intended to harm (or that can be predictably turned to harm), I don’t see legitimate ethical culpability. We only have control over ourselves.
nickwitha_k ,

Exactly. Bad actors are going to act badly. Unfortunately, something that we have to accept as reality (and something that some political philosophies fail to plan for). Bad actors will break the rules and, if they are wealthy, they will more often than not get away with it in the current state of affairs.

However, I would say that you bring an interesting point. It would be worthwhile, philosophically to have a “Pacifist MIT” license, being permissive but explicitly denying legal use to MIC.

nickwitha_k ,

They are absolutely eating the real costs in order to gain market share. I suspect that there’s going to be a mad dash to rehire humans when the bill comes due and the VCs want profits.

nickwitha_k ,

That’s their prerogative. FLOSS is a communal effort of equals. Users are not customers; not entitled to anything as it’s donated freely. If you want to be bannied and not contribute, there’s proprietary software out there but they’ll exact a price (currently more than just financial).

nickwitha_k ,

To clarify why you’re getting downvoted:

ADHD is among the most studied of psychological disorders. It is caused by physiological differences in the prefrontal cortex. You come across as ableist, dismissing this very real and frequently debilitating psychological disorder that people are born with. Like telling someone with recurrent major depressive disorder to “just cheer up” or someone with a compound fracture to “walk it off”.

Would you tell someone with a black mamba bite that was begging for antivenin that they sounded like an addict due to their desire for medicine to treat their medical condition?

nickwitha_k ,

Don’t forget Yitzhak Rabin. He worked towards peace while prime minister. Which is why Netanyahu and Likud marched calling for his death, almost certainly inspiring or at least encouraging Rabin’s assassination.

nickwitha_k ,

That’s not to say bikes don’t have any safety at all… there is R&D that goes into making them safe in a collision… as safe as they can be.

Yup. I survived a high-side collision after being sideswiped by an SUV. Thanks to modern safety gear, I only had minor injuries with little long-term beyond an ankle to lets me sense slight changes in atmospheric pressure.

nickwitha_k ,

Don’t know that they’ll all be ported to PC but the Supermassive standalones (Until Dawn, The Quarry) and Dark Pictures Anthology are great, if you like horror movies. I prefer to watch my wife play them. They’re literally like interactive/choose your own adventure films.

nickwitha_k ,

Extra bonus: Odyssey was supposed to feature a female lead, rather than the choice, but a misogynistic Ubisoft exec vetoed it, which I can only assume was reason for the absolutely garbage dialog.

nickwitha_k ,

Probably this and a synthetic emulsifier/surfactant or the like.

nickwitha_k ,

And beeswax is an animal product.

HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware (www.tomshardware.com)

On May 26, a user on HP’s support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue....

nickwitha_k ,

Here’s some extra fun: there’s a decent chance that you only need a cable with JST or DuPont connectors. I’ve seen a fair number of laptop motherboards with unused SPI headers/connectors just hanging out. My understanding being that they’re for possible accessories or, literally for flashing/debugging the bios.

nickwitha_k ,

Yeah… Having ads in an app for FOSS software automatically makes it shit-tier for me. Even if they are blocked. I just really hate ads though.

nickwitha_k ,

“Papers, please.”

nickwitha_k ,

Far Right is now the first party in France and nobody has a clue on how to get them down bar them completely failing at ruling.

Is this another case of doing like the neoliberals do over in the States, trying everything but measures that would actually help the populace instead of funneling their money into wealthy people’s pockets?

nickwitha_k ,

Amateurs. I beat mine 14 weeks per day.

nickwitha_k ,

I’m still getting things set for Silverblue to be my baremetal hypervisor distro on my laptop. And by that, I mean giving up on Incus, setting up libvirt, and… everything is working like it should. I wasn’t expecting that. Now, I’ve got to find something else to do with my time.

nickwitha_k ,

For me, I think it’s just not ready for non-Debian distros yet. The docs and packages just aren’t up to parity. I like a lot about Incus and its general direction but libvirt and virt-manager are fully functional at the moment. Passing through devices with virt-manager is dead easy.

Spacetop AR laptop / glasses (www.sightful.com)

Wired AR glasses / laptop geared for work. Seems like a cheaper, lighter alternative to apple’s Vision Pro. Looked it up after seeing a cybersecurity guy use it in that crazy documentary on the Ashley Madison hack and a few people post about it on LinkedIn...

nickwitha_k ,

Apparently, Viture has been much more FOSS friendly. Xreal really wants people in their ecosystem and have as of yet refused to provide documentation or open API, though there’s been a good deal of success with reverse engineering.

nickwitha_k ,

I have a first gen pair of Airs that I absolutely love, except for the lack of open-ness. I think that I’ll have to try dumping the firmware and writing my own at some point - likely when I have to replace the frames (have had to CA glue and tape the right arm three times now; I’m rough on my electronics). The teardowns that I’ve seen show that they contain almost entirely common off-the-shelf components (MCU, IMU, I/O expander, etc), so, shouldn’t be too bad to implement via Arduino or Rust.

The thing that drives me most crazy though is the lack of forethought on the Beam. It does it’s job great but they didn’t bother to have a dedicated power-in or support high enough wattage to run it off of external power. It’s absolutely maddening to have to recharge it 3/4 of the way through work. Think I’ll be modifying it to add a USB-PD input for power.

nickwitha_k ,

It was a Mars lander.

nickwitha_k ,

Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.

I’ll add that they’re also generally quite pleasant when I see them on Lemmy. And I haven’t seen either of them involved in being ban-happy. Some will argue otherwise based upon misconstruing the relationship between FLOSS devs and FLOSS consumers as a business/customer relationship (expecting customer service and product manager input on software that’s donated free of charge). But, I think that those folks are just not yet familiar with how FLOSS development works.

nickwitha_k ,

(you can prob keep the same username if you want too).

Unless it is already taken on the new instance, you absolutely can. Usernames are namespaced similar to email addresses. So, [email protected] and [email protected] are considered two different users. This means that there is no technical reason preventing it.

nickwitha_k ,

Not defending his behavior but I would note that he has been actively seeking to remedy his cunty-ness after becoming aware of how problematic it was and the problematic people that it attracted.

nickwitha_k ,

No. The shit that you took is more meaningful than fake Internet points.

nickwitha_k ,

In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I’m ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.

nickwitha_k ,

I’d certainly say so. I’ve yet to see him even coming off as dismissive without trying to clarify why in a polite manner.

nickwitha_k ,

Just explained this to my Irish wife. To “run a train on someone” in American slang would mean having group sex with that person, potentially consecutively.

nickwitha_k ,

Came here for beans, not a comedic has-been that’s flailing about, trying to be edgy and failing to remain relevant in a changing world. Meme rating: 5/7

/uj Really though, I hope Gervais either gets his shit together or retires - many of his past works still hold up.

nickwitha_k ,

Almost definitely.

nickwitha_k ,

To add to this Ardour may be worth a look for DAW. I haven’t touched it in a while but recall it being rather nice.

This stuff about the price reductions after 4 years of blatant gouging is really freaking me out

I mean, that’s 4 years of our lives taken! 4 years of opportunities that were more challenging because they wanted a number on a computer to go up! 4 years of feeling worse than necessary about my finances and management of them and general personhood because i felt like i couldn’t afford anything because everything was...

nickwitha_k ,

I think that you may be mixing up two things here: political systems and economic systems. Capitalism, socialism, and communism are economic systems. Political systems are things like monarchy, republic, and oligarchy.

I will also highly recommend Wage Labor and Capital. I had to study it in university and find that it is a good high-level analysis of the systemic issues in the capitalism. For a deeper analysis from Marx, while he is most known for communism, his magnum opus was really Das Kapital, which is not about communism.

nickwitha_k , (edited )

It definitely was due to ignorance, it was not intentional.

That means you learned something new today! :D (I don’t mean this in a condescending manner at all - I just love learning and even when it’s vicariously through other people).

That being said, the economic system in place is always at the mercy of those in political power, is it not?

Yes and no. There is a really complex interplay between political and economic systems. Despite this, differentiating between the two types of systems is an important tool for better understand how they work and influence eachother and society.

I’m not being facetious, it just seems to me that no matter the conomic system in place, human nature seems to be to find a way to exploit it. I just can’t think of a scenario where that can be protected against.

That’s a fun thing and you’ve unknowingly underscored a massive flaw in a lot of political and economic theory (especially the later). Humans must be understood through multiple lenses:

  • We are animals; biological entities with material needs to sustain life and drives to reproduce (some exceptions, like ace folks, though arguably, there are more forms of reproduction than biological). Nearly all biological entities pursue some form of reproductive competition/selection. Even the baboons who selected for less aggressive/more cooperative males select against these traits, competing with groups that are not selecting for cooperation. (Further note: I do not say this to mean that I believe that competition “human nature” - there are too many counter-examples but, from a high-level perspective, all organisms are effectively competing, even if, paradoxically against competition.
  • We are not rational actors; humans do incredibly illogical and irrational things all of the time. Many of the popular models championed by supporters of neoliberal capitalism completely fail to account for this, instead, assuming rational self-interest.
  • And many others.

ETA: From my perspective, as one who is cooperatively-minded, the best political and economic systems are the ones that can be currently conceived that result in the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people while providing protection to vulnerable populations and individual agency. I also think that this is a process rather than an endpoint - technology and organisms evolve over time, our social constructs have to do so as well in order to be useful.

nickwitha_k ,

Does it require you to climb through heaps of trash documentation? Absolutely.

That’s why I think the previous commenter’s statement rings true. I’ve been using Linux exclusively for over a decade across multiple distros. NixOS is not intuitive for new or seasoned users, making good documentation vital.

An example: I spent a good weekend day or so poking at NixOS. Live boot worked as expected. When I finished, I had a bootable system but no network stack, despite following the docs. This means that my only route forward would be going back to the live boot since there was no way to pull packages in that state.

I decided to go with Fedora Silverblue as my next test. After dding the image to my USB, it took about 10 mins to get up and running. I was able to setup libvirt and other similar software quick and easy. And once I’m happy, I can write my config to a repo and have my base system wherever, whenever.

nickwitha_k ,

I just wanted to offer some nuance to the table. After everything has been learned, enabling some (otherwise complex and obscure) features can be accomplished by a single line in your NixOS config. Like, this efficiency can not and should not be ignored.

I really appreciate it. I really WANT to like NixOS. The level of efficiency and portability (ex. Nix as package manager) is incredible and, I think, well worth learning about both for users and distros - I hope we see the ideas propagate further. It’s just not in a place that I can be happy using it. But, it is going to tickle some people the right way and that is something that makes me happy.

Fedora Atomic does deliver on those without requiring you to go into the deep and learn an entire new language that’s only used for managing your distro 😅.

This right here is why I’m liking it so far. I’m like Alton Brown is to cooking gadgets when it comes to languages in computing, I really don’t like unitaskers. I get unreasonably resentful of software that forces me to use a DSL (this is a “me” problem).

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