No problem. :)

Nah, FOSS stands for “free and open-source software”. There was a time before paid software was a thing, so the “free” there stands for freedom.

In a lot of ways, it means the same as open-source (access to source code and allowed to modify+redistribute it), but it’s more idealistic and political, looking to prevent software from restricting what users can do.

This is a bit of me-thing, but yeah, I’m annoyed that YouTube is the way it is. It’s non-trivial to embed videos from there without violating the GDPR, so embedded videos are basically not a thing these days on general-purpose social media.

And personally, I also want to avoid the tracking from clicking through to a YouTube video and Google encourages long-ass videos, so I always hesitate before clicking through. Also, people without ad blockers go through a completely different circle of hell before a video starts.

Basically, I miss the days when memes could just be short videos. Where everyone could see on the embed that, oh, it’s a 30 second video, I can watch that. And then they’d just click play, without leaving the page.

I do understand that likely no one would care to provide the bandwidth for dumb meme videos on PeerTube either. But yeah, I just dream of that being a thing.

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

It’s a thing here in Europe. I’m guessing, because our walls are generally concrete, we usually either throw on decorative plaster or a wallpaper, to make it feel a bit warmer and have a uniform surface which accepts paint more readily.

It’s even quite common that if you rent an appartment, that the walls have wallpaper on them, which is painted with a fresh coat of white paint every time someone moves out and the next folks move in.
And then some people, after they move in, will just paint (some of) the walls in a different color, if they feel like not living in pure white…

I enjoy this:

return a.or(b);

But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers…

Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.

Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.

So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.

Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.

But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.

I quite like the star-button on Mastodon for this. Just pings the comment author that you appreciated their comment. So, it’s not an indication to some algorithm that this comment is incredibly relevant for everyone, because well, some comments just aren’t.

I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised, if what you say is true. It is the typical PR playbook to calm down the shitstorm and then not bring it up, again.

But at the same, they’ve enjoyed a lot of industry goodwill in the past, because we recognized that they’re not IT professionals and were just doing their best. If they don’t do this investigation, that shows they’re not doing their best. And at least personally, I am more than ready to start tearing them a new one for their wild technological incompetence.

“Open-source” is not up for interpretation. The word was coined by this definition being made public: https://opensource.org/osd/

Mozilla will want to be API-compatible, but there’s nothing inherent to the API that requires the arbitrary content-blocking limitation that Google put in. So, Mozilla will be API-compatible without adopting this shitty limitation.

This person (unintentionally) tested it: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/375713

F-Droid has the most up-to-date versions (v0.3.16 and v1.4.5). Both of these just haven’t seen a release in a while, although the FlorisBoard developer seems to have recently returned.

Somewhat tangential, but USB-C docking stations, as useful as it is to have everything in one cable, it can also be annoying.

At the office, I often just want to charge my laptop with them, but they also give me a wired internet connection, which, thanks to corporate networking shitfuckery, doesn’t work. So, every time I plug in, I have to disable that wired connection.

Also, recently a colleague had problems getting her headset working when she was plugged into certain docks, ultimately due to a bug in the OS.
Like, alright, that should be fixed in the OS, but that USB-C dock doesn’t even have a speaker attached to it. It’s completely useless that it shows up as an audio device.
And even after we found a workaround to fix her headset, she will now have to switch over her audio device every time she plugs into a dock.

So, basically it’s now one step to plug in the cable, but potentially multiple steps to undo half of what you unwillingly plugged in…

It is completely 100% ridiculous to try to ‘diagnose’ you from this short of a description, but it could be that you’re autistic to some degree.

Us autistic folks like to take moral issues a lot more personal, like having to lie. We’re often at odds with societal standards. We may feel like we’re socially slow, even though in my experience, it’s usually just that we socialize differently. And we definitely overanalyze things.

Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:

I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.

Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.

Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.

All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.

Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.

Well, it’s a non-commercial project. There’s going to be issues in it that may seem smart to fix, for which there’s simply no volunteer. On the flipside, there’s other issues that won’t get prioritised in a commercial DAW, which are not a problem in LMMS.

As for Wayland support, LMMS works under XWayland and I don’t think that’s going away in the next decade. But LMMS is also built with Qt, so it’s likely not a big problem to get native Wayland support.

LMMS development is perfectly active. The master branch sees new commits every few days. They just haven’t had a release in a while, and well, apart from maybe this scaling issue, I think that’s quite fine.

Yeah, and at least those are their pets and they don’t, like, violently kidnap wild Pokémon to force those into fights.

Connect Four, I win!