Right, okay, I definitely haven't bought a new computer in the past 5 years. I wonder if anyone has "how old is the average computer" percentiles, because I have a feeling most people haven't bought a new computer in the past 5 years, so it seems surprising to supercede a codec after so few years, but maybe I'm the weird one?
- Posts
- 1
- Comments
- 202
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
- Posts
- 1
- Comments
- 202
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
Yeah, I think it's just the way the blog post was written. When I was reading it I saw the first few paragraphs was basically "here's how to do Cron with it", and then everything after that was "here's a bunch of other features it has that cron doesn't and how to use those"
I don't think that's the wrong way to write this kind of article, but I could see it feeling overwhelming on a skim, because it may feel like you need to read the whole thing in order to get anything working. But actually only the start was necessary, and the rest was tasty feature pitch.
I think I'm just getting old, but I thought AV1 was still new too. Do I even own any devices that can decode it? I'm not sure I've even got h265...
To anyone reading this that's red-green colourblind, the joke is that the word "Red" is green coloured, and "Green" is red coloured.
Right, but here's the trick: I can't do the same thing twice. So if I write it ugly the first time, that's the best that's ever going to be. What a waste of its potential! 😅
I don't think it's the tickling thing. It's a fair hypothesis, but it doesn't feel right to me. To me I think it's the emotional connection of doing something with another person, and the physical connection of two (or more) people working together. Like, I'd say that throwing a ball up into the air and catching it again just isn't as fun as throwing a ball back and forth between people is, and there's no biological imperative there. There isn't a lust for tossing the ball with the boys. But it's a group activity, and group activities fill a different need than solo activities, which is a different biological imperative.
So I think joinking it fulfills only part of the craving, but leaves other parts unfulfilled, which is why as soon as that part recovers the body is like "okay, let's try again"
A classic I needed to send to a friend:
For an honest answer, from an Open Source perspective, it's mostly auth, profiles, and discoverability.
Presuming I have a GitHub account, when I encounter a library or tool or something that's hosted on GitHub that means I can fork it, make issues, comment on issues, make pull requests from my fork to upstream tied to issues, and generally have seamless interaction with any and all software on GitHub.
Or, if I have my account added to a project, then I can also merge PRs and push to master and be a maintainer of that software without any friction.
When I see that software is hosted on KDE's thing it's like "Ugh". I have to login to that, and create a profile for that, and then figure out how tickets work there, and how do I contribute to that. It's enough to just not, most of the time. And maybe I do that for kdenlive. Then I have a bug for Gimp. Okay, what the heck do they use? Is that another login? How do I contribute over there? Is registration even open? Okay guix, oh boy a mailing list. Do I want to subscribe to a dev mailing list just to submit a 2 line patch? I think I'll just not... I'm sure someone else will fix it eventually......
So besides all that, some people like their GitHub profile, and like that people can see all the things they've contributed to from one spot. That's why it's often linked on resumes, but beyond that there's also a kind of cultural cachet to having a diverse and positive profile, should someone look. If someone is a maintainer of a repo with a lot of stars, that might tell you they're "important" even if you don't know why. Because maybe you're a JS programmer, but this person seems to be big in the Java community, because they seem to maintain a few high profile java libraries.
And then lastly, it's sometimes useful as a shortcut in searching. "Source code" is kind of a useless term for searching, so if I search "ruby Ledger file library" I'm more likely to get some docs or a rubygems page, but if I search "ruby Ledger file GitHub" I'm probably going to get what I actually want, which is a readme and a git uri I can clone and play around with. Or a web view of the source I can search through to debug something without cloning. At least assuming that is what I want, it depends on what my goals are, but it's useful often enough that I do it sometimes as a way of jumping to the source part.
I'm typically anti-centralization, and anti-microsoft, and if we all move away from GitHub I'm sure I'll live, but this is why I like it despite its problems. And sometimes I want a webview of file contents, with search, without cloning, so sue me 😛
I don't know the original author's opinions on AI, but I think it's still fair to say that it was clearly Copilot's goal to steal all the code and be good, and they had all the code, and so ethics aside one would expect them to have succeeded with flying colour at whatever their goals were, even if those were bad goals.
But they failed instead, which is impressive.
I know it's kinda off topic, but what I find even weirder are bands that are "one hit wonders" in one country, but have like 10 hits and a long career in another country.
They'll have a whole wikipedia article of awards they've won you've never heard of, and tours they went on, and you're like "they wrote more than one song!?"
Maybe we're LONG LOST TWINS!!! 🙀
My understanding, though it could be mistaken because I am not a scholar, is that the Germanic peoples were going through and replacing the Roman gods with Norse equivalents. But then they got to Saturn and were like "Hmm, there's not really a good 1-to-1 match here, so I guess he stays"
That might be fully untrue though. 😅
I've just invented it from no sources, but I've taken it to mean "intending to inform and correct a future misunderstanding, without correcting the present statement"
I don't have my IPA memorized, but in my accent I propose "high-annu-boyn-ism", in case anyone wanted to use it out loud.
Fair, but I think in the context of an etymology thread it's fair to say a word that came from nowhere, that someone thought they were inventing anew, is "less real" than all the origins at work here. But I appreciate the relativism, descriptivism, and hyanuboinism.
- JumpDeleted
Permanently Deleted
I think it's instead useful to notice how weird it is that we have Open Source desktops and laptops at all.
Basically nothing else in our society works this way. Basically nothing has changeable firmware. It's practically a quirk of history that x86 was cloned and reverse-engineered and had a bunch of competitors spring up making compatible but swappable hardware that was all interoperable. It became an ecosystem, basically because of corporate piracy, rather than anything else. My hardware needed to work like the others or I wasn't in the club, and my next generation hardware needed to be backwards compatible with the club or I was out of the club. And laptops were just desktop parts made smaller, so they ran whatever the club ran.
It's practically a quirk of history that early computers didn't have enough ROM to do anything useful, and so they needed to be coded from scratch every time you booted them. And when we got tired of doing that, we attached external storage like punch cards and tapes and hard drives and floppy disks that we controlled from outside the computer and essentially just programmed the computer for us because the ROM needed input and it was a lot to type. And because we could control it from outside, we could put different disks in on different days and it would do different stuff.
My microwave didn't work that way. My VCR didn't work that way. My digital camera didn't work that way.
So the way phones work is a regression to the mean. The reason open source on phones sucks is because the hardware is specific to my model and manufacturer, but because the components aren't removable or swappable there's no ecosystem. I can't take parts from a Motorola phone and use them in a Samsung phone, so there's no standard. As long as Motorola ships a device that works with its hardware, it doesn't matter that it won't work on LG hardware. And vice-versa. And so long as Motorola's next phone ships with firmware that suits that hardware, it doesn't matter that it's totally different incompatible hardware with last year's model.
So every single phone that comes out has some hardware no one's figured out yet, but it may be unique to that one year and manufacturer and model, and so until it gets reverse engineered your phone just won't work. And then the next year a completely different device gets released, so there's no momentum to keep investigating the old hardware because no new person will ever have it again. It's not a good way to foster a community, with a shifting landscape of small minorities, brought together only by which device they happen to use, and breaking apart every time someone upgrades to a new device.
So long story short, if we want the situation to improve, we need to produce laws that require things to be an ecosystem. We need to force compatibility where it doesn't make financial sense, we need to force things to be swappable, we need to force things to be flashable, we need to force things to be removable, replaceable, and repairable. We can't hope it just happens again like it did for desktops, we need to make sure it does.
Ontario, Canada:
My wife had bad abdominal pains in the evening. She's had period cramps before, and it wasn't this. She's even had ovarian cysts go, which were terrible, but weren't this. So we went to the hospital. We sat in chairs for probably 5 hours, then got a physical exam by a doctor. They sent us for an ultrasound within the hospital to see if it was an ovarian cyst, but nothing showed on that. That took a few hours. Then we went for a CAT I think it was, also within the hospital, and that showed that it was a swollen appendix. Sat in chairs upstairs, not the entryway, for another hour or so, until the doctor came by and told us that she should probably have that out, but that it wasn't an imminent emergency and so they'll keep her overnight in case something happens, give some pain meds, and then have surgery the next morning when the OR opens again proper, because by now it was probably 2am.
So she got a bed upatairs, I went home and slept at home, then met her the next morning back in her room. She did have a roommate in her room, and that roomie sucked, so that's unfortunate. Then she went for surgery while I watched TV in the waiting room, then she was rolled out and stayed in a recovery room for a few hours while the anaesthesia wore off. The nurse came by and gave us medication to take, along with a prescription for some other meds, and some instructions, and we went on our way. The surgery was laparoscopic, so it only took a week or so to heal, and she was up and shuffling by the end of that first day.
All told, it was probably about 18 hours beginning to end, but that included some sleep in the middle. And, importantly, she didn't die at any point in that process.
At no point in this process did my money leave my pocket. Money was simply not discussed. When weighing the options of going to the hospital versus staying home, or staying in the hospital overnight versus going home, or having the surgery versus not, or having a laparoscopic surgery versus not, money was never a factor. At all times our collective concern was on the health of my wife.
Her surprise appendicitis didn't impact our life in any way, besides the one day we spent hanging out at the hospital.
There are two ways to get a doctor faster.
The first is to increase the supply of doctors: more doctors, more nurses, more beds in hospitals, more clinics, more MRI machines. Any government with a public healthcare system can do this at any time by allocating more funds to the public healthcare system, either increasing the taxes people pay, or diverting tax money from something else. If a country isn't bankrupt and isn't doing this, it's a choice.
The second way is to have private clinics that use money as a way to skip triage. To allow wealthy people to pay their way ahead of poor people to the same small supply of doctors. This is the way most people who rail against public healthcare see the solution going, but the part they don't say out loud is "I want poor people to suffer more so I can suffer less". Because that's what that solution is, it's what it boils down to, but for some reason saying "I want to sell my suffering to the desperate" makes it feel less fun.
Right, but what I'm saying is that git doesn't store authorship information or line-by-line history, no matter how it's done. Figuring out which line came from where is an algorithm the git blame command does every time you request it, and that algorithm can give different results depending on which options you give the blame command. And so what you've found here is a collection of commits that produces a situation the default blame algorithm can follow, without any optional flags, which is neat! Maybe not great for git history, but neat!
Yeah, like other people covered, it's unfortunate but also very important. It's easy to tie "visible wifi networks" to "surprisingly precise location on globe" in many places, so the permission is named for the worst case scenario. Yes, the app might just be looking for a wifi, but it also could use that same information to locate you, so it's the location permission. Sensible.
If they wanted to support just this one feature without requiring a location permission, they could maybe have an API that is "are you currently connected to this opaque token" API where the app can ask "am I connected" and is just told "yes" or "no". That's probably safe enough. And then I could register the app with my wifi without the app even knowing what my Wifi is, it just gets a unique but random string.
The same is true of bluetooth. If I can list nearby bluetooth, I can see that speaker and this TV and guess location. But there could be an API that hides that, there just isn't currently