I’d be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they’re bundling it with YouTube Music and I’m not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.

They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn’t actually access.

Also I don’t want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It’s pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!

It’s a “beginner-friendly” distro so people might subconsciously think you should “graduate” to use something “better”.

Which is ridiculous, of course. No reason to switch if it works for you!

If the speedrun strategy is “introduce a stupid law, wait for everyone to go ‘holy shit none of this can be realistically implemented in this timeframe’, wait for OS vendors to just ban the use of the OSes in the country, watch the local industry as a whole to rally and petition the government to stop the madness before there’s a new dark age, repeal the clearly stupid law”, all before the California law comes to effect - I’ve got to say it’s a bold strategy and we’ll see how it plays out.

Edit: Also, not going to upvote a Lunduke video - I’m glad he crams every bit of substantial information in the thumbnails so I can just not listen to him at all

Don’t worry, this is very old news.

OpenOffice.org was basically stuck in a bureaucratic hell of their own and couldn’t really do major decisions without the leaders’ approval. I think Sun Microsystems/Oracle was involved.

Some high up developers got basically kicked out by the governing folk, so they decided to start the Document Foundation to make LibreOffice, and vast majority of the developers followed. They were just happy to be actually able to do something.

OpenOffice got donated to Apache Project and there’s been very minimal maintenance on it ever since.

Firefox. I’m not happy with how Mozilla Corp is operating, but I’m not switching to a Firefox fork unless there’s actual developer exodus (akin to what happened to OpenOffice/LibreOffice). Ultimately, at this stage, those forks depend on upstream Firefox developers for 99% of the work.

My Xbox gamertag/Steam id is “Rose in Shadows” and also using “Rosa Umbrarum” and variations.

The inspiration came from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The last line of the novel is “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus” (“The rose of the past endures only in name; we hold the bare names”) Which is why I usually put “Yesterday’s Rose” in the name fields.

I don’t know much of Latin at all. Also, the z in the username was for edginess, to make it a Notorious Hacker Alias or someshit.

That’s a bit weird. They didn’t get this worked up about being called “Micro$oft” or something. This is probably hitting the nerve in a completely different way!

Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.

Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to “why isn’t the sound working?” was usually “you tried to use anything but direct ALSA”.

I was about to ask “I’m mildly concerned, are American Evangelicals okay?” but then I remembered there has never been a time when they have been okay, so I don’t know why am I even asking.

Oh good, the Bitcoin argument.

“Sure, Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy, but you know what else wastes energy? The Visa payment network.”

Yeah, but Visa handles six quadrispillion transactions per megawatthour, Bitcoin handles two drug purchases. Not the same results, is it?

So yeah, training humans takes a lot of energy. But in the end, you get a coherent, capable and well functioning individual. Spend the same energy on training LLMs and you get a system that’ll happily tell you to glue the cheese on pizza or something.

A significant chunk of American pop culture of the past decades is based on the premise that The Government is Hiding Something.

Trump’s going to throw a big wrench in that by releasing fucking everything. Except a few things. A few great secrets.

I swear American pop culture in the coming century or so is just going to be The Government is Hiding The Epstein Files, over and over and over.

I just went grocery shopping and oh wow looks like onions are nice and cheap and domestic.

Early this week I was cutting onions (figuratively), I feel better now that I’m cutting onions (literally). Made some tacos. Things are good.

I was so happy that I could successfully cancel Crunchyroll a few years ago when I was cutting down on pointless subscriptions.

They’re the only service I’ve subscribed to that had frequent payment shenanigans going on. Most of the service works fine, but if you look at the payment side - why, look at the time already, it’s jank o’clock. Payments sure went through as far as PayPal and my bank were concerned, but stuff on Crunchyroll’s end was often just “pending”. Wouldn’t let you unsubscribe while there were outstanding issues, of course!

So if Crunchyroll had promotions that never went through, I would just say, well, that sure sounds like Crunchyroll all right.

Streaming service: “You’re lucky, this show is available on this service this week! Who knows which service will have it next week. It’s up to the bosses, sorry.”

Me with my ADHD brain: (Ready the sloop, check the rigging) “Aye, I know where it’ll be, right tharrr on me USB stick”

JK Rowling has an extremely murky supply chain. By choice.

A good example I heard a while back: Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh was one of the worst industrial accidents ever. Death toll in the thousands. One of the companies involved was Primark, which makes the official Harry Potter apparel. Was HP apparel actually made in this particular death trap? We don’t know. JK won’t discuss it. But you know what she says, she just takes one look at her bank statement and all of the worries go away. We know that much.

Epstein invitation thing was just more of the same. Was JK personally involved? We don’t know. Did JK care? Evidently not.

Back when the original Tux drawing was made, we didn’t have boot partitions. In LILO days, the bootloader barely fit in the MBR and the kernel was located and loaded with sheer magic incomprehensible to most mortals. So that’s why Tux has no shoes.

(Someone on the interweb:) “Hey, you should try KDE Connect”

(Me:) Uh, I don’t use Linux on my laptop and that’s the computer that I use the most

(S:) “Well it also runs on Windows.”

(Me:) Really?.. Holy sh- HOLY SHIT, this is so much better than every shitty cloud sync package, and that Google app they keep renaming every time I look at it so I can’t remember what it’s called this week