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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.

    How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don’t want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.

    Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there’s nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google’s interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.

    It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.



  • Private property isn’t a sacrifice. I don’t own any.

    There’s a difference between personal property and private property. Private property is a mall, is a factory, is machinery at your workplace. Personal property is your toothbrush, your Playstation, your Television, your blender, your set of German knives, your computer, your books, etc.

    Freedom of speech has never existed. The illusion of it has been allowed to be stronger or weaker in various places at various times, if your speech is no threat it’s often allowed, it’s when it’s a threat that suddenly the freedom vanishes and hides behind excuses like national security or illegal ideologies, etc.

    I question how you would get rid of freedom of thought without some sort of hellish brain implants being made mandatory so it’s an odd thing to mention.

    I’d be willing to sacrifice an awful lot of fascists, reactionaries, and an awful lot of enabling liberals. I’d be willing to sacrifice bourgeoisie. The expropriation of their private property is not a sacrifice but a necessity for things being held in common trust for the people.


  • Yes, absolutely. And they can drag Canonical into it as well if they wish though it’s harder. Being UK based doesn’t protect them from the long arm of US law including arresting any US personnel, freezing and seizing their funds, putting out arrest warrants for and harassing those in the UK with the fear of arrest and rendition to the US if they go to a third country (for a conference, vacation, etc, most would buckle rather than live under that). Additionally the US could sanction them for non-cooperation by making it illegal for US companies to sell them products and services, for US citizens to work for or aid them, etc.

    They can go after community led projects too, just send the feds over to the houses of some senior US developers and threaten and intimidate them, intimate their imminent arrest and prison sentence unless they stop contact and work with parties from whatever countries the US wishes to choose to name. Raid their houses, seize their electronics, detain them for hours in poor conditions. Lots of ways to apply pressure that doesn’t even have to stand up to extensive legal scrutiny (they can keep devices and things and the people would have to sue to get them back).

    The code itself is likely to exist in multiple places so if someone wanted to fork from say next week’s builds for an EU build they could and there would be little the US could do to stop that but they could stop cooperation and force these developers to apply technical measures to attempt to prevent downloads from IP addresses known to belong to sanctioned countries of their choosing.

    It’s not like the US can slam the door and take its Linux home and China and the EU and Russia are left with nothing, they’d still have old builds and code and could develop off of those though with broken international cooperation it would be a fragmented process prone to various teething issues.




  • Sure you can probably get a good value on a bluray player because people are getting rid of them still to go all streaming. But can you get a good price on a used working order 4K TV? Probably not. The prices of even used 2 generation old goods are going to be as high as they were when new before tariffs hit.

    Used is not going to be cheaper in a week or a month or 3 months of tariffs, it’s going to be the same amount as new right now or possibly more.

    These days there are sooo many resellers, flippers, scalpers. People who think it’s a side hustle to go around buying up cheap used stuff and selling it for just below the price of new stuff and pocketing the difference. It’s become so hard. Late capitalism ruins even good deeds.





  • Marx of course understood the dictatorship of capital and the nature of revolution as a violent affair. That Mao quote is abused as a thought-terminating cliche to be honest. He is referring to the fact that if you want to change a system systemically you need tools like guns, if you’re going to be a revolutionary, if you’re going to fight imperialists, you need guns. If you’re going to retain your independence against encroachment and attempts at overthrow by capitalist forces, you need guns. But those are largely affairs of the revolution and external defense. Internally Mao absolutely agreed with Marx on political authority and legitimacy of the party through its connection to the workers, which Mao phrased as the Mass Line. So in this way there would be agreement in a sense with Rousseau’s line (and Marx’s) here though there was a lot more to it from Rousseau obviously and I’m not trying to say Mao or Marx’s thought derives from Rousseau at all.

    This cartoon is kind of all over the place. For the first 4 panels it features thinkers, philosophers stating how things -should- be run in their thinking to create a society, not necessarily how things were run in their time but how they should be. Then suddenly in the last two panels it goes from proposals for how to structure society to analysis of how society exists or is seen to exist at a given point in time and how its authority is derived.


  • Yeah GIMP is more than a decade behind Photoshop and a lot of other software in many respects.

    It’s frustrating. Basic things like content-aware fill for small spaces, not even AI generating huge things for large missing pieces but removing some text over a person’s cheek or plaid shirt, something in total 100x100 pixels big or so. Just doesn’t exist. You can clone stuff but it’s not aware of things like the gradient of a shadow that it should match or a highlight or other basic things so you’re left doing extensive work using layers and then cleaning it up to be visually acceptable using multiple tools over 10 minutes of time whereas Photoshop does it with one tool in an instant.


  • Incredible. This is one of those hard to believe moments.

    It’s been 21 years since the release of GIMP 2.0.

    It’s been more than 10 years since work on a majorly overhauled GIMP 3.0 was announced and initiated.

    And it’s been 7 years since the last major release (2.10).

    I can’t wait for the non-destructive text effects. After all these years of dealing with the fact applying drop shadows meant the text couldn’t be edited, at last it’s no longer an issue.


  • Whisper is open source and free AI model for transcription. If you’re not comfortable setting it up Audacity has a whisper plugin you can easily add and use.

    As to how good it is, it really varies a lot but it is free. You need another plugin to export to a subtitle file.

    Edit: Actually the program Subtitleedit (https://www.nikse.dk/) has the ability to run whisper models and you can download them from within the app, also no need for another plug to export so that’s probably the easiest. Once it’s as text you can use the translate menu within SE to translate. You need an API key (paid) for most of the truly good services but you can use basic google translate for free and it should give you the gist of things.




  • Look less suspicious. Be fingerprintable easily. Look unique but in a normal way. Be logged in. Look like a “normal” web user not using a hardened browser. That’s what tends to trigger them and what tends to escalate them to demanding more work to get past them.

    There’s no turn-key solution that fakes all of this flawlessly I’m afraid.


  • This is most likely cached images. For example emojis from your instance or other instances you’ve viewed as well as maybe other images but definitely emojis. Possibly other things like the images in post thumbnails which helps reduce costs by ensuring your instance doesn’t have to re-send you the same images over and over again each time you close the browser.

    Lemmy doesn’t generate enough content yet daily that most people who check in twice a day and scroll a bit through pages won’t almost certainly encounter several posts with images they’ve already seen before. I’ve had many cases where just a bit of scrolling brings up 3-4 day old posts I’ve seen before so caching associated images could save in cases like those at least 3-4 transfers of those images per user which adds up for a non-profit no ads service like lemmy.



  • It just does more and more easily. It styles things better, makes them more professional looking with a click. It can do certain things like nested tables in Word that Writer cannot do. Excel is much more powerful than calc, it has more functions, more refined functions, it’s easier to work with, has more and prettier chart options. And oh you can create tables in Excel that are sortable. There are many other cases.

    Now for the last two the die-hards will whine and whinge about how you should just use a software for creating charts and a database but sometimes you just want to make something quick, sometimes that’s overkill for what you need. Grandpa doesn’t need to learn how to deal with databases just to make a sortable list of books he’s read, he can just use excel and the Libreoffice people telling him to pound sand because they won’t add that feature to calc because it doesn’t belong there means he and many other people don’t use calc, they use MS office. Likewise the Libreoffice defense force saying of making graphs and charts to just use dedicated software, well many corporate types, business people, white collar workers don’t understand those things and may not be able to get them installed, what they understand, what they already have is MS office and it works and has lots of pretty, professional, very slick options which don’t make them look poorly in office meeting presentations.

    Just on the sortable tables front, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into hobby stuff that’s based on an excel file with tables that rely on being sortable. From stat sheet creators to mini-databases (<2000 rows) on some game created by fans.

    It’s useful for those who need the very bare basics of being able to open and read basic MS word documents, csv files, excel files, and to write an occasional letter. But the moment you need to start doing beyond basic formatting or dealing with files that have that, you run into issues.

    You have this gulf of usability, it’s useful for people at the very bottom of the basic needs pole, barely computer literate types who think facebook is the internet and it’s useful for highly technically competent people who can and do use other dedicated software, often without GUIs to solve problems, it’s a frustration for the middle 60% of the population who are more than basically computer literate but not scientifically trained, not CS or IT.