nyx_land

worded badly whatever

this isn't even the first time something like this has happened. it's literally a running joke in programmer circles that AWS East going down will take down half the internet, and yet there's absolutely zero initiative being taken by anyone who makes these sorts of decisions to maybe not have every major service on the internet be put into the same handful of points of failure. nothing will change, no one will learn anything, and this will happen again.

The worst thing about the Proton UI that I never hear anyone talk about is that it is objectively a massive downgrade if you're not using a modern 1080p (or higher res) monitor. My laptop is an old X220 Thinkpad, so that change actually affected my ability to work efficiently by pointlessly wasting a ton of screen space, and it's part of the same trend in software engineering of user-hostile decisions that impact people who either can't afford or don't want to use newer hardware for whatever reason. Except in this case it's not even something like making everything a bloated Electron or React app, it was just changing the UI to something that looks way worse for no reason other than to create the superficial impression that Mozilla still cares about Firefox. I run a customized userchrome because Proton sucks so much for me to use.

I'm aware, but I use *BSD on my computers and can't afford to pay for a FreeBSD LW license to compile something from source myself, so I'm shit outta luck. I am aware that the reason why it uses LispWorks is for the GUI toolkit, which is an understandable reason to since there isn't currently a real free software alternative to CAPI unless one wants to be reliant on Qt or GTK (neither of which are native to MacOS or Windows obviously). maybe one day if McCLIM gets better support for backends other than X11 there will be a real alternative, but even then, from digging into Open Music's source code it would be an absolutely massive undertaking to try to rewrite it to not be dependent on LW and it probably is the same for other CL composition software that uses LW.

in my defense this is such a culturally american thing to be opposed to walkable cities that I can scarcely comprehend how a country with a far less car-dependent infrastructure could fall for this nonsense, also I have slept 2.5 hours

Weird, I interviewed with him summer 2021 hoping to be able to land an ontologist job at Cycorp. It went spectacularly badly because it turned out I really needed to brush up more on my formal logic skills, but I was surprised to even get an interview, let alone with the man himself. He still encouraged me to work on reviewing logic and to apply again in the future but I stopped seeing listings at Cycorp for ontologists and started putting off returning to that aspiration thinking Cycorp has been around long enough that there was no rush. Memento mori

Business model: Uber for yuppies LARPing as poor people

My attempts at making a media manager/server (like Jellyfin and Subsonic) have shown that it's easier said than done to reliably sort video files since there's not really a standardized way of embeddeding metadata into video files like music files have with ID3v2. I imagine this is because unlike with music which had the MP3 player craze, by the time it became normal for users to have access to digital AV media due to improved storage and networking, locally saved files were bypassed by streaming. So you have to resort to ugly regexes to strip out all the nonsense from a filename (like if you have acquired a movie file from a torrent or something), which has a whole bunch of edge cases. It's made even more annoying by TMDB not having something like MusicBrainz to rank similarity of searches, so you better hope the file you end up with is a good quality string with ideally also the year of release, otherwise you'll probably have to tag stuff manually.

So I can't blame the devs for just expecting the user to sort their movie files beforehand (maybe with a different tool (except there aren't any for movie files as far as I know)). It's the kind of thing that there aren't any good solutions to. Not sure how Plex manages to guess movie files better than Jellyfin (I just ended up stealing JF's regexes for my thing) but since it's proprietary there's no way of knowing what regex magic they use.

The problem with trying to replace a smartphone with a dumbphone is that most people (young people at least) don't use calling and texting anymore unless forced to. I'd rather have something in between a laptop and a smartphone that is designed to be comfortable for carrying around in a small bag or pocket, but that also has a physical keyboard and is designed to be used productively for programming or writing for example.

As it stands, smartphones are the worst of both worlds though: the form factor of what is essentially a legacy communication device, but none of the human interfaces necessary to make it useful enough to really take advantage of all its computing power (and often also its software cripples the device unless you're running a custom android ROM). What people hate about smartphones isn't that they're constantly plugged in but that they have a device on them all the time that is basically designed to turn the user into the ideal consumer: a passive addict with no attention span. If it was more common to have access to portable hardware that is designed to empower users being creative and productive, maybe it'd be a different story.

But then again, I think most human beings probably want exactly what they're getting with smartphones and are miserable and alienated at the human condition itself of being so susceptible to seeking out low effort short term dopamine feedback loops.

Seems that their plan to do everything possible to sabotage their browser and waste resources on stupid bullshit that doesn't improve Firefox is working.

The fact that this is receiving downboats and 'but muh convenience, artists deserve to get fucked over because Spotify found a better way to exploit human psychology!' is truly an orange site moment. I pirate the majority of the music I listen to (and most artists except for super rich mainstream ones would rather their music spread as much as possible than receive literal pennies from a Spotify stream) and buy stuff from Bandcamp when an artist is actually still around and making stuff. I never listen to ads and have all the files saved locally in lossless formats. I've never had a Spotify account for anything other than a podcast that is exclusive to it and have never cared to switch, and can't even use the excuse that I'm too old and stubborn in my ways.

> All of these things have one thing in common: distrust. Some movements come from the distrust of governments or taxation, others come from the distrust of central services.

This isn't framing the problem the fediverse is solving accurately. What fedi solves isn't not trusting anyone, because it's not a fully P2P network. Rather, it's more about having accountability for the services you use. With a massive centralized social media platform like Twitter where it needs to effectively scale up to be able to accommodate the entire world, it's impossible for a service like this to exist without either being run by a government or a corporation. In the US, the two are more or less the same anyways since we've outsourced most of our infrastructure to the private sector and have been doing that for decades. And in the case of a private entity controlling one of these services that need to scale massively, it's effectively impossible for them to not be incentivized to do all the things that make people not trust them -- mining users' data, etc.

On fedi, you know who your server admins are; they're human beings that you can message if you have a dispute with another user, or there's an issue with the service itself, or whatever. If an instance admin does something shitty, they can be held accountable for it and can have their reputation ruined on fedi, which isn't a perfect system since it leads to things like people being defederated unjustly, but I would say it's far more scalable socially to have a patchwork of different small to medium sized servers run by individuals or teams of people rather than faceless corporations that largely automate all of their user-facing interactions (algorithmic bans and support) where it's basically impossible to hold them accountable for anything unless you have millions of dollars to burn in court.

It is true that centralization/decentralization are implementation details for solving a problem, but this is a case of technological solutions not being sufficient for cultural problems and vice versa. Fedi, for all the problems I have with it, is however closer to striking a balance between solving problems on both of these fronts because it returns the internet to being a community-driven network that has its own culture, and has more ability to handle bad actors or failures in the network with federation as opposed to earlier eras in the internet where for example everyone was using their own separate forums and the centralization of the internet onto social media platforms was really an inevitable consequence of that structure of the internet.