Rose

Yup, I was supposed to say KeepassXC. (…I mean I probably considered using KeepassX at some point, it’s XC’s predecessor after all. But as I recall Keepass 2 worked well enough on Mono, so I didn’t need to switch.)

Also, whoopsies on XC’s AI use. At least they don’t seem to embrace it as much as Bitwarden, but still makes me go hmm.

When Bitwarden got a meh “refresh” of the user interface and started vibe coding stuff (I’m not some super hard-line anti-AI person, but dammit, you absolutely should not vibe code security-critical apps), I switched to KeePassX. It was like coming back home! I used to use KeePass and KeePass 2, switched to Bitwarden for a long while, and while it was neat, KeePassX is just neater. (Doesn’t have cloud sync, but syncing the vault files with LocalSend is easy enough.)

Well, that particular federation can’t be mad at yt-dlp right now, because PornHub support is broken right now. It appears. I’ve been told.

“Come, Muse, let us sing of rats!”
—James Grainger (1721-1766)

(Except in modern day, it’s the Muse who is the rat, obviously. This timeline is stupid)

Will be reborn? If they had actually released Winamp under a real open source licence, it would have been reborn years ago! A bit late for it now!

The problem is that the services are asking for age verification, but to do that, you need to supply them personal information, and the way the information is handled is opaque. You’re handing highly sensitive information to a private company that, more often than not, cannot be trusted to handle that information responsibly for the singular purpose they’re tasked with.

One solution would be an official government service which supplies this information and nothing else. We have “strong identification service” in Finland, they supply your identifying information to government services and businesses that need to have the actual information on record, while you see which information gets shared. There’s no technical reason this service couldn’t just supply “Is this person 18+? Yes/No” and absolutely nothing else, even anything tying this person to any identifier.

Actually, if age verification would become a legal requirement, I’d expect the technical side to be exactly that. I frankly can’t believe the UK half-assed this stuff and went “whatever, let private providers use whatever voodoo they can come up with to make age verification happen”.

Yeah, for most things, GIMP user interface is absolutely fine.

Most of my mild grumbles about GIMP are not really usability problems, rather just features that would be nice to have. (We got better layer groups now, yesss. Non-destructive plugins are finally within the viewing distance. Yay.) There is stuff that GIMP doesn’t do but competing open source apps do, and while there’s interoperability, it could always be better. (I hear GIMP is finally going to come up with a replacement for xcf files, hope they cooperate with Krita devs and blow the dust off the OpenRaster project.)

The only really aggravating GIMP usability thing is that exporting is very janky (would rather have one single unified export dialog with all the settings), but I assume that’s just a thing because of the way GIMP file plugins have worked in the past.

Somebody needs to finally compose a Linux install music that’s even more memorable and awesome than the Windows XP install music

I’m fed up with the streaming services, so I’m getting back to my big pile of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.

I was randomly reminded of the “BD-Live” thing that I tried long ago. One of the most janky joyless things I had ever seen. Some marketing person had decided to do a marketing thing for movie promos and trailers and had forgotten that the thing was to be visited by actual people.

This sounds like it was cooked up by the same people. Looks like marketing people building a Thing.

Like I said, the AI companies are not on the same side. The AI companies in the fight for their own selfish reasons. They’re eventually just going to make the copyright situation even more byzantine. They also make the copyright reform/abolition people look bad.

It’s like if I say I’m an Anarchist and then I have to constantly say “well actually I don’t advocate for looting and vandalism nonsense, those dipshits don’t know shit about Anarchism”. Do you know how hard it is to advocate for more reasonable copyright policy reflecting modern times, when the current big crisis in the mind of artists and creators are the dipshit companies blatantly violating the law?

I used to use Reddit, and I remember when collectible avatars were introduced.

The experience paraphrased:

“Hey, click here to claim a free collectible avatar!” *open in new tab* “Here it is! However, you first need to set up crypto wallet—” *close tab*

AI companies are not on the side of copyright reform or abolition. They just want an exception for themselves. They very much believe in trade secrets. They probably want copyright to eventually cover the current grey areas so that they can stop pretending they give a damn about open models.

It’s not unreasonable to demand AI companies to play by the same rules as everyone else.

Lemmy (and Piefed) have avatars and bio, and Piefed also has the custom fields thing that Mastodon has, but not all clients show this stuff. Voyager is probably the best Lemmy/Piefed client that basically has no support for profile details.

One of the things that bug me about Fediverse is that the amount of profile features varies so much between the services and it’s kinda inconsistent too.

Oh good, the current profile management is a little bit clunky. Having the option to launch random profiles wherever and whenever would be nice.

Astrum makes space stuff videos? I dunno, been a while.

Fireship makes videos about programming. Has series about “(Programming language/Framework) explained in 100 seconds”, for example. I think people are complaining that the channel is slipping into AI dudebroery.

Hoog is a history/explainer type channel, I think.

Oh yes. The Great pathlib. The Blessed pathlib. Hallowed be it and all it does.

I’m a Ruby girl. A couple of years ago I was super worried about my decision to finally start learning Python seriously. But once I ran into pathlib, I knew for sure that everything will be fine. Take an everyday headache problem. Solve it forever. Boom. This is how standard libraries should be designed.

In the 1980s, home computers were sold like this:

“Look at these awesome games, kids! And as for your parents, uh… well, you could use the computers to… uh… I dunno… keep track of the contents of the fridge? Yeah, let’s go with that.”

Nobody ever did that. Not then, not now.

Don’t buy a smart fridge, it’s a scam

Limiting the power mod reach is a good thing, but still, this will break Reddit. Ordinary users will not be lining up to step in as small time moderators. Especially if Reddit Inc is going to remove them if they do anything they don’t like.

Reddit Inc will just go “what the hell, we’ll throw more AI shit in the Automoderator. It’s not like it’ll do worse than the current arbitrary quagmire of moderation rules - or maybe it will be, who can tell the difference anyway”.

A lot of people are filming in 6K or 8K, but only because it gives them more editing leeway when the final video is delivered in 4K.

Being a “thinker” isn’t exactly a high bar. A fish can do it (depending on the definition). I mean I suppose I can think, but I wouldn’t brag about it.