Wow. Installing it now. I need this.

I see YT videos mostly in three languages (IT, PT, EN), and you have no idea how much I bloody fucking hate that autodubbing crap - no matter how I configure YT, Google, and my browser, that steaming pile of shit automatically turns on for at least two of the languages.

And frankly, I don’t want it even for other languages. For me it’s subtitles all the way. Let me see the korokke recipe with the original audio, who cares if I don’t speak Japanese?

It is not even good dammit. Not even for people who want/need it. It sounds robotic and expressionless, the voices being chosen don’t match the people being shown, the lip movement is desynchronised to the point of uncanny valley, the translation is filthy garbage.

I wish I could outright ditch YouTube, but PeerTube tends to be unstable and true alternatives (i.e. not relying on anything Google) have network effect against them.

[rant]

Might as well rant about the rest of the botnet aka Google aka Alphabet:

Even when taking privacy concerns out of the equation, I can’t help but stay clear of most things Google. Mostly because of anti-features like the above.

Search? I’m using DuckDuckGo nowadays, except for reverse image search. It has the decency to ask me if I want an AI overview, and if I say “never” it respects my choice; I don’t need an assumption algorithm telling me to put glue on my pizze. I also abhor results being “tailored” (= bubbled) based on location, and goddammit respect the language options I’ve set up in my browser!

GMail? I never used it for my primary e-mail, only for potentially junk subscriptions. Nowadays it isn’t even worth that, so I’m using a Proton account for the same purpose. And if some service assumes you use GMail, guess what - I’m not using it.

Android? Yeah, I still need to use it because of my bank app, but goddammit every fucking update I need to deactivate yet another dumb feature. Plus I barely use the phone. Also, stop trying to convince me to enable PlayProtect, this wall is not to stop invaders going in - it’s against users going out, and using non-Google repositories.

Maps? I want a map; nothing more, nothing less. Organic Maps fits the bill.

And in every single Google product, there’s always that belittling tone. Never to be spoken in loud voice, always implied. Something like this:

• “Since you’re a user, we assume you to be stupid/filthy/dumb trash unable to think by itself. Something like you would cause itself harm if allowed to decide what it should do, so we’re telling you what you should do.”
• “You want to say «no»? Ah, so you’re too stupid to understand simple concepts, like obedience… right. Here’s a «maybe later»; we’re going to smear the same pop-up on your snout all the time, until you say «yes». You’re a user, not a human being, so consent doesn’t apply to something like you.”
• “Oh, the user is still able to jump the wall and run away from the walled garden! Quick, raise the walls. Users are things to be herded in factory farms, not free range, you know?”

[/rant]

For my take on those news, check here. Including context. Here I’ll solely talk about the comments in that cesspool of idiocy.

[1]All this does if make things worse. [2] Things like banning the sale of personal information would be a step in the right direction.

1: It’s too early to know what’ll happen. It might make things better, worse, or the same.

2: I agree that the sale of personal info should be outright banned; one’s control over their own data should be seen as an inalienable right.

Note currently there’s an ongoing law project seeking to assign property rights to individuals over their personal data. IMO a side-step - on one hand it means you’d have an easier time suing megacorpos for stealing your data, on another it means they can still press you to share it.

A big issue here would be defining social media. // Are forums social media? What about reddit? What about YouTube? // I think what we really need is a ban on algorithmic recommendations that seek to encourage engagement or total time spent on the app.

The article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet - that the STF is getting rid of - does not talk about “social media”, but rather “provedor de aplicações de internet” (lit. internet application provider). It’s basically anyone providing internet services to a third party.

As such, “ackshyually wut teh definishun of sacial meria” is not a relevant concern.

US Social Media should just cancel service to that territory.

I kind of low-key wish that that happened, those megacorpos are cancer. But it won’t - no megacorpos would unnecessarily restrict its own market.

But let’s roll with that. The impact of that would be hilariously small: a single month of disruption, then business as usual. For reference check what happened when the dickhead Alexandre de Moraes banned Twitter, almost everybody and their caramel-coloured dog migrated to Bluesky. Once a platform is gone so is the network effect associated with it.

Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not “encourage or measure ‘sludge,’” and that “there was zero intent to add ‘sludge’” to my interactions with Ford.

Here’s the catch: odds are that what Levine is saying is technically correct - truthful, but misleading.

Sure, they (people in those big businesses) might not be active and directly adding sludge. They might not be encouraging it. Or measuring it. But it’s there. Because they created the perfect conditions for it to thrive, as the author shows.

And, sure, odds are they are not targetting the author; that sludge is for every single body in a similar situation.

Why this matters: because any potential law punishing sludge should disregard esoteric concepts like “intention”, and focus solely on what the customer gets. If the customer is getting sludged, it doesn’t matter if the business says “trust us ( = be gullible filth), we don’t have the intention!” - the business should get the short end of the legal stick.

Agreed. It’s the best of both worlds: retro-inspired games can pick what the retro games did right, and still add modern improvements.

Yup, it is a refutation. But people seem to be eager to ignore reality, to keep things consistent with the bullshit they believe (in this case, the Copenhagen interpretation):

• what Schrödinger wanted to show - if the cat can’t be dead and alive at the same time, then superimposition is bullshit
• what people did with the thought experiment - if superimposition is true, the cat is dead and alive at the same time

It’s refreshing for me, to see someone respected within the academic community, calling superimposition bullshit.

I always saw the idea that particles were in multiple places at the same time with suspicion; for me it was always more like “you don’t know where the particle is, if you try to measure it you’ll fuck its location up, so you pretend it’s in multiple locations”. It’s useful because, statistically speaking, you won’t notice the difference.

Applying this to Erwin’s kitty: it’s like you have a bunch of cats. Each is trapped in a separated device, that releases poison depending on the decay of some radioactive atom. You have no clue if any individual cat is alive or dead, but when dealing with all of them, you can say “x% are alive, (100-x)% are dead”. And you apply those proportions to an individual cat, just to make your maths easier: “this cat is x% alive, (100-x)% dead”.

So it’s an abstraction; and sure, we need abstractions, but we should not confuse them with what is being abstracted.

I’ll go further. I feel like someone will eventually find a theory that describes accurately small and big, massive and light, fast and slow objects. The so-called theory of unification. Perhaps it might resemble the theory of general relativity from a distance, but it’ll look nothing like QM.

We have to try to phrase things more precisely to keep public misunderstandings from wreaking havoc on science.

That’s a losing battle. Assumers gonna assume.

I hope so, too. Their current situation isn’t currently the best (a lot of them went away in the late 10s, simply because people were using them less); I’m kind of hoping to see a revival, but that’s at the mercy of the STF, so I can’t completely rule out that the situation will evolve exactly like in the UK. It’s “let’s wait and see”, you know?

I’m also wondering the impact of that on chatrooms, that used to be extremely popular here.

When something similar happened in the UK, it was pretty much exclusively smaller/niche forums, run by volunteers and donations, that went offline.

[Warning, IANAL] I am really not sure if the experience is transposable for two reasons:

1. UK follows Saxon tribal law, while Brazil follows Roman civil law. I am not sure but I believe the former requires both sides to dig up precedents, and that puts a heavier burden on the smaller side of a legal litigation. While in the later, if you show “ackshyually in that older case the defendant was deemed guilty”, all the judge will say is “so? What is written is what matters; if the defendant violated the law or not.”.
2. The Americas in general are notorious for sloppy law enforcement. Specially Brazil. Doubly so when both parties are random nobodies.

So there’s still a huge room for smaller forums to survive, or even thrive. It all depends on how the STF enforces it. For example it might take into account that a team of volunteers has less liability because their ability to remove random junk from the internet is lower than some megacorpo from the middle of nowhere.

Additionally, it might be possible the legislative screeches at the judiciary, and releases some additional law that does practically the same as that article 19, except it doesn’t leave room for the judiciary to claim it’s unconstitutional. Because, like, as I said the judiciary is a bit too powerful, but the other powers still can fight back, specially the legislative.

For context:

There’s an older law called Marco Civil da Internet (roughly “internet civil framework”), from 2014. The Article 19 of that law boils down to “if a third party posts content that violates the law in an internet service, the service provider isn’t legally responsible, unless there’s a specific judicial order telling it to remove it.”

So. The new law gets rid of that article, claiming it’s unconstitutional. In effect, this means service providers (mostly social media) need to proactively remove illegal content, even without judicial order.

I kind of like the direction this is going, but it raises three concerns:

1. False positives becoming more common.
2. The burden will be considerably bigger for smaller platforms than bigger ones.
3. It gives the STF yet another tool for vendetta. The judiciary is already a bit too strong in comparison with the other two powers, and this decision only feeds the beast further.

On a lighter side, regardless of #2, I predict a lower impact in the Fediverse than in centralised social media.

The difference between both links is huge - one shows 7%, another 73%. Since I have no idea which is more reliable, nor I think this difference is due to time (the FF link is from 2022), let’s go with your link instead.

73% Wayland means 27% X11. It’s still a lot; not a big problem in KDE’s case, since its developers are rather emphatic on still maintaining the X11 session. Can’t say the same about GNOME.

And the guy in question is, simply put, a nutjob.

I don’t even disagree with the idea of ditching X11. My criticism is timing; statistics like this show 90% X usage, either instead or alongside Wayland; it’s clear most users still use X11, in one form or another. It’s like making a street cars only when most people still use horse chariots.

For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it…

I ditched GNOME in 3.0 times. And I still gave it a second try, a third, even a fourth. And my system has GNOME (and KDE, and Xfce…) applications, so certain patterns are visible even in everyday usage. And I fuck around with virtual machines to find out about random stuff, including DEs that I ditched (like GNOME and KDE) or I never used directly in my machine (like Elementary).

So don’t assume “ditched it = ignorant about it”.

X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it.

O rly. And the point still stands: GNOME has a tendency to drop support to older software before the newer one is ready.

Unless you want to claim Wayland reached parity with X11, and there’s totally no reason people might want to stick with X11 instead.

And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years.

This does not address what I said.

Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.

That is not what I said.

*Yawn* Given that

1. I have little to no patience towards people who distort what others say and vomit assumptions; and
2. Others might come up with something actually meaningful to contradict what I said,

It’s safe to disregard you as meaningless noise, so I ain’t wasting my time further with you.

[inb4 people discussing the semantics of “ditch”]

Odds are they’re doing the same thing only in theory. In practice, the picture changes - typically the KDE devs are far more willing to maintain old and marginal features and/or support benefiting only a small chunk of the userbase. While the GNOME devs are way more likely to ditch it, babble something about their design vision, then try to convince the user “ackshyually you don’t need it”.

(A major exception is perhaps accessibility, mentioned in the text. It isn’t just the Wayland devs worried about it, but also the KDE and GNOME devs. In this regard props to all three.)

As typical, GNOME has a tendency to drop support to older software before the newer one is ready. I’m glad that I dumped it in 3.0 times.

Reminder HR is not your friend. It’ll ask you to do things that won’t necessarily benefit you.

Specially sensible excerpt of the text:

If you have suggestions on how things should work differently at the company, the time to tell your boss is while you work there. If they can’t bring themselves to act on it during your tenure, telling them at the exit interview isn’t going to do any good.

I don’t use KDE but thumbs up to them. Wayland did not reach feature parity with X11 yet; and while it’s good to encourage migration, users should be allowed to use the old tool when it makes sense for them.

I am fully expecting them to continue actively breaking windows 10 to push people who haven’t upgraded to get windows 11 (Derogatory)

I first read “push” as “punish”. It still makes sense.

The stick in question is off-site; it sees the PC once per month, then it gets back to the drawer in another room. And regardless of its fate, if I had a flood or fire affecting my PC, in the second store of a brick house, odds are that I’d have far more pressing matters than the data.

It’s mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.

That’s one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn’t address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you’re talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)

I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it’s just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:

• HDDs tend to be a bit less reliable than flash memory. Specially given the stick and SSD are relatively new, but the HDD is a bit older
• since the stick is powered ~once a month (as I check if the backup needs to be updated), and I do a diff of the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issue
• those sticks tend to fail more from usage than from old age.
• Any failure affecting my computer as a while would affect both the HDD and the SSD, so the odds of dependent failure are not negligible.
• I tend to accumulate a lot of junk in my HDD (like 490GiB of anime and shit like this), since I use it for my home LAN

That makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.

*I don’t recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros… meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.

No, it’s really not.

It is enough for my use case, considering the likelihood of my SSD and the USB stick going kaboom in the span of a single month is next to zero; if only one of them does it, I can use the other to recover the data to a third medium.