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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • If the quote is accurate, he went a step further and put pirated games on the devices. Even if pirating the game is legal in some way (he owns it legitimately so putting a copy is fine or something), sending such devices out to customers then means he’s also distributing pirated games.

    That said, somebody in the comments claimed he didn’t distribute games, but rather software that made it easy to pirate games - I don’t know what the precedent is for that being considered illegal, but it does call the original claims into question.


  • Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.

    You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?

    Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.

    Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.





  • PDFs are… Not an image format? It’s a document format that is difficult to edit, and thus mostly meant to be read-only, but a document nonetheless.

    An image viewer can’t open a pdf, unless for some ungodly reason it also has a whole pdf reader built into it, which just sounds inane. Defaulting to a browser is icky, and I think stems from browsers having gotten good PDF support before Microsoft could figure it out. This is something that ideally belongs to a reader, either dedicated to PDF, or supporting similar formats, be it documents or ebooks.

    That’s like saying that a 3D project file is basically an image format, if it’s built to be rendered out from a viewpoint into an image.



  • I do have my screen set to sRGB, and it is possible it’s simply incorrect in SDR - when I enable HDR, everything looks greenish IIRC. As for color profiles, I think there might’ve been a built-in profile that was automatically enabled in the settings? It’s possible I’m looking at horrible colors and not realizing, but at least I’m not doing things like a friend, who “optimized” his colors to improve gaming performance, and keeps complaining about colors being weird 😅

    Color management is annoying, since you need a correct reference to verify anything, and I never looked into that.

    As for the monitors, I specifically meant good screens, not screens with good HDR - I feel like if you go for a good screen these days, it’ll likely have some HDR support, letting people simply try it out with little effort on Windows.


  • I use Wayland exclusively, and I’m on up to date Arch. I’m talking about issues like screenshare issues with software, XDG desktop portal screenshare randomly breaking, steam notifications started positioning wrongly, steam’s search stopped working (not 100% sure if those two are Wayland)…

    I also tried running a game in game scope with HDR enabled, experimenting with options and env cars I found online, but it just didn’t work. It was a sample size of one, but it was one game I wanted to play with friends, so I gave up in favor of just playing.

    I also don’t use MPV - I tried testing HDR with it, and it probably worked fine, but I don’t have the right media to test it. (Side note: I should try mpv more seriously, but I haven’t needed a video player much in general)

    An extra annoyance is the fact that the LDR colors are quite off with HDR enabled on Plasma. I suspect this is the fault of the display or configuration, but it’s still something I’d have to spend time researching and fixing, only to barely get any use out of it.

    I haven’t tried setting up steam itself in gamescope, but wouldn’t it be limited to one window then? Could try it just to experience an HDR game, but otherwise it’s a bit of a deal breaker.

    You might be right about it being for enthusiasts in the first place, but I feel like there’s a lot of people who will just pay up for a good screen that includes HDR, and on Windows I’d imagine you can just turn it on and start getting HDR from various sources - something that will surely become possible on Linux, but will take a while longer.

    All that said, I’m not saying this to shit on Wayland or the developers’ work on HDR. Not long ago HDR was something that just wasn’t possible, and people were whining it’ll take another 10 years at this rate. I’m excited to see the next update on this, as well as stable wider adoption, but that’s the thing - that’s something I’m anticipating, not something I’m gonna be using now.


  • Pretty sure HDR is “working” in the sense that KDE went ahead and implemented unfinished specs, so that the very few apps that also went ahead with it can do HDR, but only on Wayland which breaks other things that are behind, and also often requires very recent versions and specific obscure parameters to be passed to enable HDR support?

    Yeah, it’s a great step forwards and great for enthusiasts, but unless I’m very behind on the state of HDR myself, it’s still something I’d consider “coming soon” and not proclaim it’s just “working for me”. It certainly feels like a “year from now” kind of thing - something to anticipate, not try to force just yet.


  • Except when you’re doing calculations, a calculator can run through an equation substituting the given answers and see that the values match… Which is my point of calculators not being a good example. And the case of a quantum computer wasn’t addressed.

    I agree that LLMs have many issues, are being used for bad purposes, are overhyped, and we’ve yet to see if the issues are solvable - but I think the analogy is twisting the truth, and I think the current state of LLMs being bad is not a license to make disingenuous comparisons.


  • That’s not really right, because verifying solutions is usually much easier than finding them. A calculator that can take in arbitrary sets of formulas and produce answers for variables, but is sometimes wrong, is an entirely different beast than a calculator that can plug values into variables and evaluate expressions to check if they’re correct.

    As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that argument would also make quantum computing pointless - because quantum computers are probability based and can provide answers for difficult problems, but not consistently, so you want to use a regular computer to verify those answers.

    Perhaps a better comparison would be a dictionary that can explain entire sentences, but requires you to then check each word in a regular dictionary and make sure it didn’t mix them up completely? Though I guess that’s actually exactly how LLMs operate…






  • Applications disappearing from the launcher because you changed the greeter sounds very weird… And that’s kinda what I mean. You had to give up on using this software, and instead go for an alternative, because of an issue that shouldn’t even be related.

    Granted, a lot of people are probably fine with it, and it sounds like an annoying issue to debug… But it still rubs me the wrong way.

    You do raise a good point about replacing software - even just in my example I neglected to mention myself switching to pipewire a couple times and figuring out how they work. Interoperability between software is valuable and knowing you can always switch out one part of your system for an alternative is indeed a useful skill - I sometimes see people complaining about things like Linux’s clipboard, or archive manager, being bad, something like that, without realizing that’s just one option you can use.


  • Depends on the issue, but many issues come from misconfiguration - fixing the issue can help you understand your system, what went wrong and why, and not only fix that issue ans help you fix further issues, but also reveal things you didn’t know about the software. I find it valuable to know how things work, so I can understand what I’m using, what I need, and what I can do with it.

    As an example, messing around with pulseaudio and pipewire I understood a bit more about how it works. I found out I could enable the built-in echo cancel module and get rid of virtually all of my echo when using speakers and microphone. I then later also knew how to configure multiple virtual streams, so I can separate games and voice chat from my browser, so when I record clips when playing with friends, I can have those separate. And then also configured RNNoise for systemwide noise suppression for that bit more audio clarity.

    I could find instructions on how to do each of those without understanding them, but when I wanted to ensure noise suppression happens after echo cancellation, I knew what to mess with to set that up.

    I understand it’s not for everybody, it’s not feasible for most people - but I see the system as a complex machine you need to operate, and while having simple controls is a good idea, understanding how the machine is built can help not just with complete breakages, but also with avoiding smaller inconveniences that come from using it in unintended ways


  • To me that’s part of the ideology I associate with Arch. If you actually use -h in pacman, I find that the help is presented in a nice and contextual way. You only need a few commands on a daily basis, and most of the other things you might need are easy to figure out when you need them.

    In regard to -S being confusing, I think it’s basically making the external operations map to how the software works internally. I feel like learning what the software is doing, rather than expecting the software to hide away the details, is also part of it. When you want to do more complex operations, or when something breaks, you’ll have a better understanding of what happened.

    I wouldn’t mind a better interface, I’m not claiming it’s the best it can be or even close to it, but I wouldn’t want the improvement to come at the cost of obscuring how the software works. I don’t want the commands categorized just by convenience rather than logic, or magic buttons that automatically perform a sequence of hidden operations. I want something I can learn, understand, commands I can dissect into their components, not something I’m expected to use in the 10 ways provided and hope it does what I need.

    I see this in the same way as people tend to use git - some GUIs will offer convenient buttons with their own made up names, and when git throws an unexpected error, the user will have no idea what the error means, or what the software did to get there.

    People often complain that git doesn’t make sense. They might have a point in terms of it being unintuitive… But I find that with a general understanding how it’s built and what the commands do, the complaints are often people trying to force the issue using the wrong tool for the job.

    And, honestly, sorry for the rant. In the end it’s just my opinion, I don’t want to force it on anybody, I just started writing and kept finding things I wanted to elaborate on. If you’re reading this, I hope you have a good day!