• 7 Posts
  • 165 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • The whole notion of CSDs is a blueprint example of what happens when UI designers try to think things through too hard. They come up with grand solutions to trivial problems that are so poorly thought through that they create even bigger problems.

    Realistically, nobody is going rewrite their entire application just because of what a tiny cabal of Gnome developers think. Just read this post that was linked elsewhere in this thread. At the end, Tobias is basically arguing that people should go out there and harass the developers of all Linux desktop applications (including the entire KDE project!) to follow through on this ridiculous idea:

    Thus, our goal is for as many apps as possible to have the following properites [sic]

    • No title bar
    • Native-looking close/maximize/minimize icons
    • Respects the setting for showing/hiding minimize and maximize
    • Respects the setting for buttons to be on the left/right side of the window

    Which apps are affected? Basically, all applications not using GTK3 (and a few that do use GTK3). That includes GTK2, Qt, and Electron apps.

    If that alone doesn’t alert people of how out-of-touch the Gnome developers are, then I don’t know what would.









  • It’s called tivoization and started with a device called “Tivo” which was the first of its kind to attempt this procedure.

    There are probably lots of hardware devices in your house that use GPL software but prevent you from actually modifying it because the hardware will refuse to run modified copies. If a piece of software is licensed GPLv3, it would violate the license terms to do something like this.




  • The number-one frustration, cited by 45% of respondents, is dealing with “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite,” which often makes debugging more time-consuming. In fact, 66% of developers say they are spending more time fixing “almost-right” AI-generated code.

    Not surprising at all. When you write code, you’re actually thinking about it. And that’s valuable context when you’re debugging. When you just blindly follow snippets you got from some random other place, you’re not thinking about it and you don’t have that context.

    So it’s easy to see how this could lead to a net productivity loss. Spend more time writing it yourself and less time debugging, or let something else write it for you quickly, but spend a lot of time debugging. And on top of it all, no consideration of edge cases and valuable design requirement context can also get lost too.



  • Cupertino has complied anyway, and said it introduced “Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and requirements that help protect children from inappropriate content and scams.”

    Notarization requirements mean that they still maintain total control over the operating system and what software it can run. These kinds of onerous requirements keep the bar artificially high for competitors and are only possible because they are still enforcing their monopolistic control over the platform.

    So no, they’re not complying at all actually. They’re just doing the same thing in a different way.


  • The last Windows OS I used was XP, around 2004-ish. Even back then, it was obvious to me that, because it was closed source, that they could one day start acting against my interests, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw open source as an insurance policy - it prevents vendors from acting maliciously against their users. In that very quaint, old time, nobody believed that MS would ever do something like that, but it didn’t matter - the fact was that they could, so inevitably, they would.

    I’m quite proud of how prescient I was when I look at what they’re doing today. No evil is too great to stop a greedy businessman.

    Anyway, I decided to just be brave and create a partition on my main drive and install Ubuntu on it. All I needed to get my work done was OpenOffice, LaTeX, a browser, a compiler, Python… Everything worked better in Linux than Windows so even though I was dual-booting, I practically never used Windows again after a couple weeks. Later on, I switched to Debian, and the next laptop that I bought, I just wiped the hard disk and used Linux for the whole thing. I kept the recovery partition because I was paranoid but obviously never needed it.

    Today, there’s no doubt in my mind that Linux is the best OS. Sure, Macs have better batteries, but if I’m doing productive work, then I don’t really need more than an hour away from my charger. I could maybe agree that the BSDs are better, but I’ve never tried them.



  • I was having issues with Librewolf on a work computer a few weeks ago, so I decided to try Firefox to see if it was LW’s security settings.

    Holy shit, what a fucking trainwreck Firefox has become! It’s so bad that I can’t honestly recommend anyone use it anymore. The first time I started it, I saw all kinds of ads and trashy “news” articles that had no relevance to me whatsoever. Plus I had to reinstall all my extensions because they weren’t signed and there’s no way to disable that requirement. I was so horrified and offended, I just dumped it immediately and tried Chrome instead. What difference is there at this point?

    It’s just insulting at this point. I understand that they trying to find new revenue sources, and things are still better today than they were with Mitchell Baker as CEO, but it’s still horrific how poorly Mozilla is being run. I’m so grateful we still have usable forks from the amazing people running projects like Librewolf. Without them, the web would just be flat out unusable.