It’s a common problem with electromechanical switches. Especially if you have salty, sweaty hands.

The solution is to get a keyboard that uses contactless switches like hall effect, TMR, optical, etc.

I designed and built my own hall effect keyboard (and custom 3D printed Void Switches) from scratch because I was having to replace my keyboard once every 18 months or so because of the exact problem you describe 🤷

Vegan Linux users can compile their own protein from source.

Their purity level is so high that they can kill -9 anyone wearing a leather belt with just a glance.

It’s called dogfooding and it’s what you’re supposed to do to improve your product.

Total market share is irrelevant. What matters more is total users.

If you make a product and there’s a million people on a platform who could buy it, the costs to port that product (and support it) need to be low for it to be worthwhile.

If the total number of people on that platform increases to 10 million, now the cost to port/support becomes more like a minuscule expense rather than a difficult decision.

When you reach 100 million there’s no excuse. There’s a lot of money to be made!

For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.

It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but you get the general idea: There’s a threshold where any given software company (including games) is throwing money away by not supporting Linux.

Also keep in mind that even if Linux had 50% market share, globally, Tim Sweeney would still not allow Epic to support it. I bet he’d rather start selling their own consoles that run Windows instead!

One thing for certain, Microsoft will not stop using Copilot to develop their software in house.

You’re wrong, but I think you’ll be OK with that because the reality of the situation is actually hilarious:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/865689/microsoft-claude-code-anthropic-partnership-notepad

“Turns out Copilot sucks so let’s just use our competitor’s superior product but that’s no reason we can’t keep foisting the inferior garbage on the masses!”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of cool and useful stuff you can do with KDE Plasma (and Kwin).

Another tip: Did you know that KRunner (Alt-Space) can do unit conversions? Type Alt-Space and 10cm or something like that and it’ll give you that value in inches.

Another: You can bind shortcuts to mouse buttons like Ctrl-Alt-Right (click) And Ctrl-Alt-Left to say, switch desktops right/left.

You can type Ctrl-i in Dolphin to filter files. So if you’re looking at your enormous downloads directory and you want to see all the .png files you can type Ctrl-i, png and it’ll only show you files with png in their name.

KDE’s “get hot new stuff” framework works with Dolphin “actions” (context menu file handlers) so you can go into the settings—>Context Menu and click on “Download New Services” to browse tons of free scripts/tools that let you do things like file conversions, write disk images to USB drives, get checksums, etc.

I actually made a personal script that converts videos to looping .webp files (or just sets WebP files to loop forever). So I can right click on a .WebP, .webm, .mp4, etc and it’ll run ffmpeg on it in the background.

Every decade since 1999 (the year of the Linux desktop—for me) I spend a few weeks trying out all the hot new shit in terms of desktop environments. I’ll switch to Gnome for a few days, get disappointed at how much I miss from KDE, and then try one of the newer ones like Cosmic. Then I’ll play with the latest versions of the classics (xfce) and marvel that they still make you configure everything in a single file or they still lack basic shit that normal people want like a clipboard manager.

All the actually useful or just plain really, really nice/handy stuff is built into KDE Plasma. I’ve been using so many of those features for so long, I can’t fathom having to go back to a world without say, being able to navigate the filesystems on all my other PCs via ssh:// (and other KIO workers).

I remember when KDE 2.0 came out and it added support for kioslaves (now called KIO Workers) and it completely changed how I viewed desktops. That was in the year 2000. How is it that literally nothing else (not other FOSS desktops nor Windows or Macs) has implemented the same feature?

It’s not just the file manager, either. I can access ssh:// (or any other KIO worker) from any file dialog! The closest thing is shared drives in Windows but even that isn’t nearly as flexible or feature rich (or efficient, haha).

Then there’s the clipboard manager (klipper), Activities, and a control panel that lets you customize everything to extreme degrees. It even supports fractional scaling and has supported that since forever. I remember when they introduced that feature over a decade ago and it still blows my mind to this day just how forward thinking the devs were.

Monitors since forever have had a different X DPI than the Y DPI. Yet only the KDE devs bothered to both query the monitor’s DDC info to figure that out and set it correctly when the desktop starts.

There’s other features that drive me nuts when I don’t have them! For example, the ability to disable global shortcuts on specific windows. So if I’ve got a remote desktop open to my work I can send Super-. (Win-.) and that’ll open the Windows emoji picker in the remote desktop instead of the KDE one (locally). And it will remember this setting for that application!

I can make any window I want stay above others temporarily to take notes, enter values into the calculator, or just turn any window into something like a HUD (you can control any window’s transparency on the fly!).

It even supports window tiling! A feature most people aren’t aware of. Like, if you’re already running KDE, why bother with a tiling window manager? You’ve already got it (though the keyboard shortcuts to manage the tiling layout in real time are lacking).

TL;DR: KDE Plasma is the best desktop in existence across all platforms and this is easy to prove with empircal evidence.

Comcast—in the top ten of the shittiest companies of all time that no one wants to have to deal with—is surprised that their “new” deal of, “be slightly less villainous, and expect all our problems to go away” isn’t working.

Zionism is the correct term. WTF else do you call it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

Zionism is the motivating factor in removing/killing Palestinians. Jews that believe in Zionism literally believe that the only way for Judaism to survive in the future is for Jews to have a majority ethnic presence in all of the places that they consider, “Israel” which is based on religious mythology and a tiny little hill (just 750M tall) called, “Mt Zion.”

It’s a religious belief and it’s the official policy of the government of Israel.

Bismuth oxyselenide? You mean it can cure both indigestion and get rid of dandruff‽

The Void already has claims to all of us. The Void actually enjoys and needs the screaming, so it’ll be patient and wait until your warranty runs out; when your particular version stops getting patches and reaches EOL.

When that happens, it’ll welcome you, and you’ll get sent to /dev/random instead of the recycle bin or the trash can.

Note: You’ll have to wait for enough entropy in order to get to your next destination. How long that takes depends on how many people are screaming into the void at that time 🤷

This is super interesting. I think academia is going to need to clearly divide “learning” into two categories:

• What you need to memorize.
• What you need to understand.

If you’re being tested on how well you memorized something, using AI to answer questions is cheating.

If you’re being tested on how well you understand something, using AI during an exam isn’t going to help you much unless it’s something that could be understood very quickly. In which case, why are you bothering to test for that knowledge?

If a student has an hour to answer ten questions about a complex topic, and they can somehow understand it well enough by asking AI about it, it either wasn’t worthy of teaching or that student is wasting their time in school; they clearly learn better on their own.

I used to live down the street from a great big data center. It wasn’t a big deal. It’s basically just a building full of servers with extra AC units.

Inside? Loud AF (think: Jet engine. Wear hearing protection).

Outside: The hum of lots of industrial air conditioning units. Only marginally louder than a big office building.

A data center this big is going to have a lot more AC units than normal but they’ll be spread all around the building. It’s not like living next to an airport or busy train tracks (that’s like 100x worse).

No, it could be true. AI—especially with .NET—tends to generate exceptionally verbose code. Especially if you use “AI best practices” such as telling the AI to ensure 100% code coverage. Then there’s the, “let’s not use any 3rd party libraries, because we are Microsoft” angle.

.NET is already one of the most absurdly verbose languages (only other widely-used language that’s worse is Java). Copilot could easily push it over the top 🤣

All it would take would be for Microsoft to have AI rewrite some of the core libraries.

Every modern monitor has some memory in it. They have timing controllers and image processing chips that need DRAM to function. Not much, but it is standard DDR3/DDR4 or LPDDR RAM.

No shit. There’s easier ways to open the fridge.

unless you consider every single piece of software or code ever to be just “a way of giving instructions to computers”

Yes. Yes I do. That’s exactly what code is: instructions. That’s literally how computers work. That’s what people like me (software developers) do when we write software: We’re writing down instructions.

When you click or move your mouse, you’re giving the computer instructions (well, the driver is). When you type a key, that’s resulting in an instruction being executed (dozens to thousands, actually).

When I click “submit” on this comment, I’m giving a whole bunch of computers some instructions.

Insert meme of, “you mean computers are just running instructions?” “Always have been.”

In Kadrey v. Meta (court case) a group of authors sued Meta/Anthropic for copyright infringement but the case was thrown out by the judge because they couldn’t actually produce any evidence of infringement beyond, “Look! This passage is similar.” They asked for more time so they could keep trying thousands (millions?) of different prompts until they finally got one that matched enough that they might have some real evidence.

In Getty Images v. Stability AI (UK), the court threw out the case for the same reason: It was determined that even though it was possible to generate an image similar to something owned by Getty, that didn’t meet the legal definition of infringement.

Basically, the courts ruled in both cases, “AI models are not just lossy/lousy compression.”

IMHO: What we really need a ruling on is, “who is responsible?” When an AI model does output something that violate someone’s copyright, is it the owner/creator of the model that’s at fault or the person that instructed it to do so? Even then, does generating something for an individual even count as “distribution” under the law? I mean, I don’t think it does because to me that’s just like using a copier to copy a book. Anyone can do that (legally) for any book they own, but if they start selling/distributing that copy, then they’re violating copyright.

Even then, there’s differences between distributing an AI model that people can use on their PCs (like Stable Diffusion) VS using an AI service to do the same thing. Just because the model can be used for infringement should be meaningless because anything (e.g. a computer, Photoshop, etc) can be used for infringement. The actual act of infringement needs to be something someone does by distributing the work.

You know what? Copyright law is way too fucking complicated, LOL!

Hmmm… That’s all an interesting argument but it has nothing to do with my comparison to YouTube/Netflix (or any other kind of video) streaming.

If we were to compare a heavy user of ChatGPT to a teenager that spends a lot of time streaming videos, the ChatGPT side of the equation wouldn’t even amount to 1% of the power/water used by streaming. In fact, if you add up all the usage of all the popular AI services power/water usage that still doesn’t add up to much compared to video streaming.

Sell? Only “big AI” is selling it. Generative AI has infinite uses beyond ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.

Most genrative AI research/improvement is academic in nature and it’s being developed by a bunch of poor college students trying to earn graduate degrees. The discoveries of those people are being used by big AI to improve their services.

You seem to be making some argument from the standpoint that “AI” == “big AI” but this is not the case. Research and improvements will continue regardless of whether or not ChatGPT, Claude, etc continue to exist. Especially image AI where free, open source models are superior to the commercial products.