When they were installing the alarm at my house I noticed that the main guy had nextcloud on his phone and it sparked a nice conversation about privacy. He has no technical background but managed to self-host it on his old laptop with one of those distros that have an easy UI for self-hosting (don’t remember which one exactly). He’s a pretty cool guy.

So, when do we start building robots to preserve humanity?

Imagine using pirated software and allowing it to go online. Loco 🤯

Fortnite OS

Exo one
POOLS

Basically anything that’s just exploration and atmospheric will do.

Damn, never thought I’d live to see the enshittification of F-Droid. I definitely won’t be using it anymore if this happens.

I know, I’ve been using it since 2010, when it was still called CyanogenMod :)

Wow, I never thought I’d agree with the devs of GrapheneOS on something

It means it’s what we in the trade call “a nothingburger”. On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you’d have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)

I’d say ffmpeg is a good example, it’s used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.

I tried using VS Code but the fact that it’s not fully open source (VSCodium has limitations) bothers me a lot, as does the presence of telemetry.

I like some of the convenience features, like having a file picker when you’re writing paths, my students use it a lot, but I’m sticking with Kate.

Ok, I had no idea they were the first to do that lootbox shite, I’m not into multiplayer games. That could be considered worse than allowing third party DRMs, since it pretty much introduced kids to gambling.

That has to be one of the dumbest articles I’ve read in a while.

While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.

The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.

The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn’t always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there’s an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.

There’s barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it’s all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.

Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?

If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I’d say it’s allowing third party DRMs on the store, it’s a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn’t have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we’ve already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.

While I’m sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that’s why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.

Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.

It’s just bait for investors. This is the kind of crap that gets people with money and zero understanding of computers to buy stocks.

I may be partially responsible for this lazy ass implementation.

3 months ago I was playing around with stable diffusion a lot and because I sleep in the same room where my PC is, I used to lower the TDP of the GPU during the night to 150w to keep it quiet. One day while SD was running, I lowered the TDP in LACT and pressed Apply but instead of getting quieter, the fans ramped up and I was shocked seeing that the card was in fact pulling 420w instead of its rated 293w (6900xt).

I tracked down the issue to the driver incorrectly applying the power limit, basically if you set a TDP that’s too low for the current power state, the driver would disable the power limit entirely until the card entered a lower power state, after which, your new TDP would be correctly applied.

Running a modern GPU without power limits is bad and potentially dangerous for everything involved: the GPU, the VRMs, even the power supply cables may melt as we’ve seen with nVidia cards. So I reported the issue immediately to the AMDGPU developers (my issue is linked in the article).

They quickly came up with a fix, which I tested, which wouldn’t allow you to set a TDP lower than the lowest valid TDP for the highest power state. This gets the job done but it’s a kludge more than a fix, ideally the driver should realize that the new TDP is too low for the current power state and switch to a lower power state, and I don’t know why AMD implemented such a shitty solution in their official kernel driver.

The problem with 5Ghz is that it doesn’t go through walls very well compared to 2.4Ghz, resulting in APs having less range (or having to use several times more power)

I don’t use MS Office but I think it looks good and slightly easier to read than Calibri.

People think I can hack anything ever created, from some niche 90s CD software to online services

The electromagnetic field generated by headphones is miniscule and the frequencies are very low, whatever’s causing your headache is not a tiny electromagnet. Depending on the type of headphones and the volume used, however, the sound itself could be causing it, especially if you’re using some 3D spatial filter, those don’t always play well with how our brains and ears work.

Super Mario Bros on an old NES that my cousin gave me when I was a kid in the mid 90s