Just a dorky trans woman on the internet.

My other presences on the fediverse:
@copygirl@fedi.anarchy.moe
@copygirl@vt.social

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  • 51 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Apologies, I don’t understand. Is any modern Linux distro lacking “general usability” or applications? Anyway, for Bazzite, there’s a bunch of ways to install software. (Though I haven’t used it myself.) I’m also not sure what you’re looking for when you’re saying “support”. Good documentation? A helpful community? Continued active development?

    Just because there’s a strong focus on gaming doesn’t mean the distro would suddenly do bad at everything else, especially… general home/office use. Linux is good with that across the board. I hope I didn’t misunderstand. Please explain.


  • When people complain about energy hungry AI, they’re not talking about AI being used for research purposes. They’re talking about generative models that create text and images that are being pushed onto people when nobody asked for them. Trained on stolen work. Possibly being queried a billion times a day. Enshittifying everything for profit.

    I don’t see many complain about specialized models being trained for specialized purposes. Noise cancellation. 3D pose estimation from a picture or video. Helping detect illnesses. Predicting dangerous weather. Folding proteins. There’s many great applications that I can’t think of on top of my head.

    Sure, we should use traditional algorithms (I hope I used the right term) where possible and important. They would be less computationally expensive to run and you can actually reason about the implementation, where AI is just a black box that we hope gives us the right answer. But in some cases, it’s not unreasonable.







  • Presumably this is because a block is different from the content being removed. It simply means the servers stop communicating with each other regarding new communities, posts and comments. This could allow the instance to be unblocked and the old content to continue existing – say for example when an instance has been acting badly, but it gets fixed some time later.

    Blocked instances should probably not show up in search, but if you have a direct link to an old post, perhaps this should still be available? Not being able to block a community when its instance is already blocked makes sense, and probably doesn’t matter if you mostly check for new content, but I can see it being a bother when its shows up in other situations. One could call this a bug, or an oversight, but I suppose it depends on what the intended result is.


  • Politicians decide things, but to actually make stuff happen, the government needs to collect taxes to pay for services that are then provided to the public. I think the idea here is to take out the middleman. You won’t solve the problem country wide, but you’ll help some people, and that’s still worth it. Work together without like-minded people locally, be an inspiration, and show that it works. I’ve only been very briefly part of an activist group (specialized in food saving), so probably best to look elsewhere for good advice on how to do this well.






  • Is providing a number of commands to use that require user input really that bad? When people start tinkering with the command line, first of all they shouldn’t trust just anything on the website blindly, which at the very least requires a basic understanding of how to enter commands, and respond to the terminal asking for input. The following “bad” example…

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install software-properties-common
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
    sudo apt install python3.9
    

    …is instead turned into this single command with even more confusing syntax for beginners:

    sudo apt update && \
      sudo apt install --yes software-properties-common && \
      sudo add-apt-repository --yes ppa:deadsnakes/ppa && \
      sudo apt install --yes python3.9
    

    Sure, it’s convenient, but if you just throw blocks of code at people to run, are they really learning anything?

    A better approach would be to have a quick tutorial on how to use the terminal and what the $ and # symbols mean (though they could be CSS decorators that can’t be copied), what sudo is and warning people about running untrusted commands on their system. Then you just link to that at the top saying something along the lines of “if you’re unfamiliar with running commands, and the following seems confusing, check this quick summary”, behind a question mark icon connected to each block of commands, or similar.



  • I don’t think I disagree with you, I just think Valve should be the last company that should be under fire for the 30% cut. As in, it should come after plenty of other companies, because they actually do offer many valuable services in return. I’m all for lowering the cut Valve takes, just make sure every other storefront that does objectively less is required to do the same.

    It also feels like complaining about the food from one store being expensive, while you get larger potion sizes than other places for the same price. Yes, food should be affordable. Shouldn’t the complaint be made towards the industry as a whole rather than the store that is (for now) objectively better than the alternatives?


  • It matters because they are not forced by law to maximize profit. They can and do make decisions that are good for the future health of the company, such as making sure developers and customers are happy, and unlike other companies they put that 30% cut toward at least some things.

    Regarding worker coöps, I wanted to respond to the other commenter and didn’t know how to phrase it. I’m currently leaning towards describing myself as an anarcho-communist, though I’m not well-read at all. However I question a coöp could grow to a size comparable to Valve. From some things I’ve read about the company, their internal structure might not even be THAT far off from that, allowing employees to choose what to work on and such, even if it’s far from ideal.

    Finally, Valve has done much more than any other company considering they push gaming on Linux. Also their handheld is dope.