What drives me crazy about its programming responses is how awful the html it suggests is. Vast majority of its answers are inaccessible. If anything, a LLM should be able to process and reconcile the correct choices for semantic html better than a human… but it doesnt because its not trained on WIA-ARIA… its trained on random reddit and stack overflow results and packages those up in nice sounding words. And its not entirely that the training data wants to be inaccessible… a lot of it is just example code wothout any intent to be accessible anyway. Which is the problem. LLM’s dont know what the context is for something presented as a minimal example vs something presented as an ideal solution, at least, not without careful training. These generalized models dont spend a lot of time on the tuned training for a particular task because that would counteract the “generalized” capabilities.

Sure, its annoying if it doesnt give a fully formed solution of some python or js or whatever to perform a task. Sometimes it’ll go way overboard (it loves to tell you to extend js object methods with slight tweaks, rather than use built in methods, for instance, which is a really bad practice but will get the job done)

We already have a massive issue with inaccessible web sites and this tech is just pushing a bunch of people who may already be unaware of accessible html best practices to write even more inaccessible html, confidently.

But hey, thats what capitalism is good for right? Making money on half-baked promises and screwing over the disabled. they arent profitable, anyway.

I still use them since i got grandfathered into the pro plan (or whatever its called) without having to pay for a subscription. Not sure if i would pay for it now if i had to.

However, still a really good service for the cost to sync podcasts across lots of devices for anyone who listens to a lot.

Right, and then not watch YouTube or Netflix or anything on my… TV… Good plan!

Roku was such an easy recommendation for a long time… Non-complex UI, long support for updates, not owned by google or amazon… Far cheaper than LG and Samsung… (Not that Samsung’s UI is anywhere near as easy as roku)

But now I guess thats done. Unless an alternate firmware exists or this doesn’t hit older TVs I guess I’ll be looking for a new TV… Which is a shame because my current 4 year old roku TV is more than capable.

I picked up one of the ARZOPA ones and they are fine. Not the best looking, but good enough for a second monitor on the go. I used to take my ipad 9.7" with me places for this purpose and even though the image isnt as good, its way less effort to carry around.

I wouldnt use it as a single monitor regularly, nor for gaming.

I had to keep using the usb-c cable that came with it. Not sure if its a specific protocol that my thunderbolt 4 cables dont support or not. Minor inconvenience i havent looked into further.

Having as many followers as he does on the fediverse right now is difficult. There aren’t any tools or options to reduce the flood of notifications you get or do do any sort of sane filtering (especially on mastodon) so i totally understand why he often reacts the way he does. You cant feasibly block or de-federate when your reach is so large.

The political aspect is especially true. The FOSS confusion is often similar to the communism confusion, especially when it comes to small-scale things.

Take the concept of a neighborhood garden that no one is expected to pay money into, for instance. “Wait, so the people here who like gardening don’t expect me to pay or provide labor unless I’m able to? What do you mean i should take only according to my needs? What about Jimothy, he never helps but he takes way more than I do! What do you mean Jimothy contributes as he is able or in other ways? How can i trust everyone to be fair?”

Take the money for goods/services exchange out of the equation and it can really throw people off.

I find that most people are fairly understanding as long as it doesn’t effect them. Coworkers and friends tend to give the benefit of the doubt and are understanding. Sometimes you have to remind them, but usually that clears things up quickly. Sometimes, those of us with chronic migraine also develop some anxiety about missing things or letting people down, even if people are very understanding.

The gaslighting… most of the time it’s people who don’t know enough about migraine (or don’t care) and start to see patterns as laziness, avoidance, or similar. Miss a few wednesdays in a row? Guess what, your manager might think you’re avoiding that wednesday team meeting… Miss a few tests or a presentation in class? Well, clearly that’s because you weren’t ready and wanted to buy yourself more time… Sometimes they’ve bought into some misinformation that all you have to do is eat some magical salt every day and you’ll be cured. Or they disbelieve the existence of chronic conditions entirely. That’s where a manager will find a way to use some performance metric to get rid of you or a professor will treat you like a drain on their time.

All of this is in the context of the United States (I’m sure many other countries handle this a lot better, as usual). It’s really uncommon for migraine to be well-understood at work or school. Especially if you don’t have a current diagnosis, which is also common since doctors tends to brush it off or require some extreme logging to even consider, or insurance companies will refuse to pay for the testing and MRI scans usually required to have an official diagnosis and meet ADA requirements. Like any non-physical disability or illness, schools and employers tend to continually forget and fall way short of ADA recommendations. Especially with chronic conditions that may have phases of being worse or non-existent for months at a time. “Well, you didn’t have this problem last quarter, so what gives?”

Chronic migraine. People think its just a headache, but that’s really just the most obvious symptom and least complex symptom. Family practice/generalized doctors know too little about it to recognize it. Everyone around you thinks you’re just being dramatic. If they can push through a headache then why cant you push through a migraine?

Migraine is a cycle that lasts days. It has phases: prodrome, aura, acute, postdrome. The acute phase (the headache part) is just one phase. Sometimes the headache isn’t even that bad, or long. Sometimes it lasts multiple days. Its a neurological disorder and, in a lot of ways, basically is like your nervous system short circuiting for a few hours or days. Triggers have a lot to do with severity, but there is also a lot of bad info about triggers too. With chronic migraine, you could avoid all triggers and still have 1-2 migraine events a month, and those events dont care about your calendar.

Because information is so badly shared and everyone (mostly unintentionally) gaslights anyone with migraine into thinking they’re not suffering from a chronic condition, many of us go a long time before discovering useful information or getting diagnosed.

There are a ton of signs during the prodrome phase which, once you know what to look for, can help you avoid (sometimes) the acute phase by taking meds soon enough and focusing on avoiding known triggers. Even standard over-the-counter stuff can short circuit a lot of migraines before the most painful part. But also, some of the prodrome stuff alone can make working or completing tasks difficult. I often start having trouble speaking, get very tired, have difficulty focusing vision. General brain fog. This can be hours or days before an attack.

After the headache phase, the postdrome is often more brain fog, speaking issues, low energy, but also sometimes a euphoric state which can make getting back into your normal schedule really difficult.

I miss family events. I miss friend events. I have to cancel stuff all the time. I worry about scheduling things for fear of being in a headache phase. I’ve been lucky with employers being understanding, esp with the work from home setup and mostly DIY hours, but i absolutely couldn’t work a job with shifts.

The main reason people are distributing podcasts via youtube or spotify and not via RSS is because podcast RSS (podcasting 1.0) gives limited visibility into audience or whether anyone even cares.

Podcasting 2.0 is trying to build a standard that still uses RSS but provides the info podcast creators need to understand their audience. Basically, what can we do to keep people from relying on closed-source solutions and go back to RSS as the main driver of distribution. Its not intended to be used for targeting and mostly just provides download counts and such (which rss doesnt)

I haven’t tried v1 yet, but i am really looking forward to their v2 release. Really glad to see they are swapping from ubuntu-based to debian-based. Tons of really neat features in their roadmap too.

I’ve been on an arch kick recently, but i like the idea of immutable for my laptop which i don’t use as often as my desktop, but when i do use it i need it to just work and not have to be as proactive about the rolling release schedule. Honestly it becomes a good secondary device OS since it’ll likely support whatever package manager you use on your main to make installing all the same things the same way easy.

I also have that UPS rack mounted, just the cage nut bolts. It doesn’t concern me at all. I have it towards the bottom of the rack since its heavy(ish) but its also not too deep so there isn’t a lot of flex on it.

I spent a weekend configuring a gpu passthrough setup to run windows on my arch machine. I haven’t needed it yet.

Generally any popular distro should be fine. SteamOS is arch (btw) but that doesn’t mean its necessary.

That said, i don’t play a ton of FPS, and when I do I have 0 interest in being competitive. Right now i don’t really play any games with anti-cheat for online play. When i do play shooters i tend to play on xbox anyway, so if you also have a console you should be covered for any edge cases, esp when cross-play is available.

Once you pick the right proton version for a particular game things tend to just work. Protondb usually has enough info for solving any annoyances. ProtonTricks is helpful for annoyances.

For anything non-steam, Bottles is excellent. Bottles can also run games with Proton, but also supports wine (which as an upstream to proton gets many of the features of proton anyway). Bottles is also great for running windows programs.

Without those things open source would slowly die. All of those are about getting more users for products, getting funding to make them happen, but more importantly, inspiring the next group of contributors.

Open source doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It costs money and time. People need to care about it.

Without users, a project is just a hobby and unlikely to persist long term. Without funding, contributors are forced to abandon for jobs to out food on the table. Without the next group of contributors to pass the torch onto, projects die.

So you want software developers to spend less time building the software so they can run a nonprofit too? Do you think all the conferences, sites, fundraising, marketing, extensive help docs, bug processing, and community engagement is all something that can just be done on the side?

Just ask any software dev working st any of these foundations. They don’t want to do any of the business-side work. Or, if they do, they certainly don’t want to do it alone. If they were alone in it, they wouldn’t have time to write code.

Thundercast is a great listen! Its not all about mozilla stuff either. Mostly a group of thunderbird team members hanging out with a few discussion topics.

Sounds like it will probably be behind a subscription like Firefox Relay and Mozilla VPN, and probably very affordable like those. Server costs and all.

Definitely looking forward to more info about this. I really enjoyed the original send, and solving large files in email without needing to wire up a webDAV drive or go to another service to upload would be awesome. Presumably it’ll be thunderbird focused, but hopefully it can be used from a browser extension or web app to use on the go or with webmail clients too.

If there are extensions you use that aren’t available on firefox, just contact the developers. Its a bit more complicated if they are still using the mv2 API as that was far more fragmented. with the implementation of mv3, which is required for all new chrome extensions as of january 2023 and will eventually be a mandatory upgrade for older extensions, most extensions going forward will be 90-95% compatible with firefox and safari. Really there are just a few areas the dev would need to do some specific checking/handling for, and then of course getting the builds to the mozilla addons store or safari app store.

A lot of chrome extension devs simply don’t realize its much simpler now to support other browsers since that was definitely not the case up until the last year or two. All the browser teams are working with the w3c to have a unified API for extensions and its been a wildly successful effort over the last 5 years.

I build a chrome extension for my job. The only reason we don’t have a firefox or safari build yet is purely because none of our customers have asked (its only useful if you pay for our b2b product) but once someone does or we have time to make it happen proactively, its not going to be a big deal.

I have not explored Trillium enough, but from what I know, it seems to be an excellent choice and worthy of mention and advocacy. I did not say that Trillium was bad.

Unless obsidian goes fully foss, and gets way way more stable, i’ll be using the genuinely better choice, thanks though.

I’m glad it’s a better choice for you! Replying to you doesn’t mean I was saying your choice was incorrect for you or others, merely that I wanted to discuss in context of your comment. Apologies if you read that from my response. I do not think I can declare a genuinely better choice. In my opinion, the most important thing with note-taking is whether you keep returning to do it and can easily find past notes.

You’re doing that thing where someone starts going to bat and listing off this that or this other thing to rationalize their own choice or rationalize the choice for others.

Ok? I don’t recall saying Obsidian was THE choice, nor that your reasons were incorrect, so I don’t know why you’re casting me in that role. Generally I lean towards self-hosting and foss options for the reasons you describe, but this is an instance where I calculated differently, and I just want to provide context that, compared to other proprietary options, Obsidian is way less a concern. I’ve personally gone down rabbit holes with foss alternatives because i’ve been overly concerned about things and ended up not being productive. I’ve also chosen foss tools before that I thought would be safe or easy to migrate out of, and then ended up having a terrible time anyway when the day came that it became abandonware or a new maintainer took it in a different direction.

Perhaps you are doing that thing where you forget that not everyone can easily use a fully foss option and that not everyone can reliably install a tool from github in the event it isn’t available on an app store or via an installer? (I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes myself)

Even for a tool like Trillium, while it wouldn’t enshitify the same way a proprietary tool could, it could also just be abandoned, no forks could arise, and someone without a ton of self-hosting/compiling/cli-based install troubleshooting experience would be in just as bad a situation for migrating or going elsewhere. Even right now, Trillium is technically unsupported on macOS, so it’s not a great option for some out the gate. (Nor does that make Obsidian automatically better)

100% agree that Notion is fantastic compared to OneNote. I also switched back in 2018.

Unfortunately, their mobile app is still fairly sub-par, their data format is proprietary and not markdown, and it is only slightly cheaper than Obsidian Sync. Also, their integration system has basically gone nowhere. Which sucks because it could be good. I also have lost data on numerous occasions due to their sync system and their official policy is “oops”. In that respect, OneNote is better.

I used Notion for about 5 years before switching to Obsidian recently. Notion was far better than anything id used and generally it is a good tool, but i also was never able to make notion work as well for me as Obsidian, esp. in a way that i optimistically keep information in it. Notion often was just enough effort (esp when on the go with mobile) that i just simply could never use it to its full potential.

However, obsidian, imo, does require some plugins to meet my needs. But i think this is a good thing. Projects basically does everything i like about Notions databases. Dataview takes care of database views.

Might as well switch now to something which largely works better and is more feature rich.

Which is relative to personal taste and needs.

If I was going to trust obsidian, their code would be fully foss.

I definitely agree that I wish it was fully foss, but i also think it is a far better option than notion, onenote, etc for most people (as long as it meets their needs and preferences) since with obsidian you do actually own your data and you don’t need to pay unless you want their sync.

Since it isn’t, there is nothing future proofing my notes in their software.

Even if, worst case, Obsidian enshitifies, all the notes are markdown or json (json for config and things that don’t work in markdown, but the community and the devs work hard to keep that to a minimum) so you can still access your stuff in any text editor and it will be fairly easy to get the important data migrated into anything else. (I often use vs code to manage my notes, for instance, esp for big find and replace or re-org tasks) Even the non-standard markdown from obsidian and the most popular plugins reads well and could fairly easily be replicated with remarked or other markdown libraries. In this way, i think Obsidians approach is far superior to a tool which uses a database to store its data, since a database would require some effort to use standalone, or some work to migrate it to another tool or some sort of minimal client interface.

By its design, Obsidian could also be replaced by reverse engineering their api. If obsidian takes the dark path, we will probably see a foss community grow from the plugin dev community to replace it and be as compatible with plugins as possible, even if its just the basic text and display components. Tbh, it could totally be a vs code plugin, an emacs mode, [insert any text editor with plugins here]… thats how portable the data is. The obsidian devs know this, and they are intentional about staying this way. A shift in attitude here would be noticed by the community very quickly.