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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2021

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  • Like many things, unfortunately, much of computing is run on feelings, tradition, and group loyalties, when it should use facts, evidence, and hard numbers.

    So true…

    Though I’d say “feelings” is ultimately what always determines the objective… but the means to reach that objective should always be based on facts, evidence and hard numbers. Not tradition nor group loyalties (nor whether any particular group “betrays” any particular preconception we might have had of them).

    I honestly couldn’t care less what the management of Mozilla thinks… I only care about the actions they take that affect the software I use. I agree that we’re still better off with Firefox. The alternatives at the moment are either worse, lacking or counterproductive to the development of their common base.

    I’m keeping my eye on the likes of qutebrowser and ladybird (I would have added netsurf too, but I’ve been waiting on that one to catch up to the level that I’d need for far too long to have any hopes).


  • Is the data and public keys being replicated in the communication between instances? it’s not made clear how the federation actually works, because “enabling users on different servers to share data with end-to-end encryption” (from https://foks.pub/) is something all services with TLS / HTTPS support already do…

    Also… one big plus for the OpenPGP HKP protocol is that technically you can self-host your own key in a static HTTPS server with predefined responses and be able to have it interact with other servers and clients without issue. I’m expecting the more complex nature of FOKS might make self-hosting in this way difficult. I’d rather minimize the dynamic services I expose to the outside publicly if I’m self hosting.


  • I still feel that the distinction is not so clear.

    Why is “banning lead” seen as a biological “change”, but “banning soda” is tagged as a “social effort”?

    I re-read it and I get a feeling that what it’s talking about is not so much “biological” vs “social” but rather… “physiological” vs “psychological”, and arguing that psychology can be a lot more complex to deal with than physiology. Which I guess is fair.


  • The social and the biological are deeply interconnected and there’s a point that the differentiation becomes arbitrary rather than something fundamental. Our instincts, our goals, our desire for survival, our push towards surrounding ourselves with people to feel protected, our desire to feel loved and cared for, our feeling of empathy… all kinds of ideals, objectives and goals, everything that comes “from the heart” is deeply linked to our biology, it’s not something that comes from rationality and logic, they only make sense “emotionally”, and emotions are deeply rooted in evolution and our animal brain.

    I honestly don’t think the left is more social or less biological than the right. It’s true that the right is less flexible to change, but that doesn’t mean they are any more (or less) rooted in the biological than the left is.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.mlPNG is back!
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    17 days ago

    HDR and EXIF are great changes… APNG, if already being used for some apps/services, seems a logic choice. Maybe it’ll finally mean the end of gifs once and for all?

    What I’m more excited for though, is the improvements in compression that the article hints that are being worked on. Specially if it can beat other more modern formats that have added lossless compression like jpegxl. I feel it’s best to have separate formats for lossless and lossy, to prevent the off-chance of lossyness getting through.





  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLibreOffice is pretty damn good
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    2 months ago

    Define lack of design. You mean theming? because Linux has way more customizable theming options than the proprietary alternatives, to fit all kinds of subjective tastes.

    You mean usability? it’s the one system that you can rice up to do absolutely whatever you want to do to fit your workflow, you can configure any key to automate literally anything a desktop can do.

    The catch is that you actually do have to get your hands dirty if you want to mold the system to your liking… as opposed to being your own tastes the ones molding to adapt to whichever the designer of the OS decided should be the new tacky fashion or workflow.


  • “Super” is the one modifier key that you can rely on overwriting without interfering with normal app shortcuts, so I’d personally rather prefer if applications don’t start trying to use the Super key for their own things.

    I have set up Super key shortcuts for all kinds of desktop management operations, opening the launcher/terminal/browser, switching workspaces/windows, closing windows, move/resize, switch tiling mode, audio control, make my package manager install updates, switch between a set of resolutions, activate my password manager, etc.

    That said, Copy/Paste is a general/global enough operation that I would not mind having Super+C/V send to the current active app the Copy/Paste keycode (I might do that actually, now that I know that there’s a code apps are starting to support!). But I think it should be the desktop environment the one configuring “Super” shortcuts, not the app.

    It makes sense for each application to have their own interpretation of what does each control character (or Control shortcut) do. It’s not like all control characters have a very reliable meaning to begin with… I mean, the backspace character (Control+H) was originally meant to move a character backwards without deleting it, but most screen terminals didn’t do that. If what you mean is alternate characters from Unicode and so, then the “Alt” key would be more suitable for that. And in ISO keyboards, “AltGr” is a very common way to have combinations that insert alternate symbols.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoAnnouncements@lemmy.mlLemmy AMA March 2025
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    4 months ago

    It does not have to be something mandatory…

    I mean, there could be some form of “metacommunities”, something like being able to group multiple communities together in a “view” that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated. Bonus points if everyone can make their own custom groupings (but others can subscribe to them… so there can be some community-managed groupings).

    In theory you could have multiple “metacommunities” for the same topic still… but at least they could be sharing the same posts if they share communities. I feel grouping like this would be helpful because small communities feel even smaller when they are split.

    I think reddit has something similar to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.


  • But, whichever command I put in autostart.sh will run as if I run in terminal with the & sign. E.g: dunst & to run in the background.

    Well, only if it’s one single command, if you have multiple commands inside of the script, they will still run sequentially (the next command will only run after the previous one completely closes) unless you add & to them as well.

    The difference is that dwm itself will not have to wait for the autostart.sh to complete before launching itself (thanks to it being run in the background with &)

    However, autostart_blocking.sh (which isn’t run with a &) will stop dwm from fully launching until the script completes… I guess this is useful if you need certain things to be set up before dwm actually starts… but it would potentially add a delay on dwm startup.



  • Yes, I understand that more mining could be done, but what I was saying is that I don’t think it could be sustained to the level of silicon. Bismuth is a rare mineral, and 100 times more expensive than silicon.

    China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors (50% of the chips in the world are traded there), if they want to use locally produced bismuth chips they would only be able to tackle a very small fraction of that. Either they are only used in special applications (like some particular specialized hardware at smaller scale) or it would be impossible, the Earth does not have enough resources to produce bismuth chips at the same scale as silicon. So I’m not sure if it could work as serious competition to silicon.

    But we’ll see, maybe I’m wrong.


  • Silicon is like $3/kg (and that’s the higher price, it’s actually cheaper than that outside USA). I’m not sure if we could sustain the same level of manufacturing using bismuth without side effects. One of the best things about silicon is that it’s the second most abundant element in Earth’s lithosphere (the first being oxygen)… I don’t think the “line must go up” attitude around pushing for Moore’s law is a worthy effort. I’d rather we pushed for software to be more efficient, I don’t feel my PC is significantly faster than it was 10 years ago, despite its Hz having doubled.

    I could understand using this for specialized applications, but I’m not convinced it should be something that should be made as widespread as silicon tech, so I don’t think this should really be seen as a replacement for it.



  • But I didn’t say or imply that ethics is moot. Following our instincts is not moot, it is healthy, it’s a proven way to our survival.

    I think the wider term is “evolutionary ethics”.

    What it implies is that ethics is relative to our biology. It’s not something universal. However, given that our biology is relative to nature (which is universal) and our development relates to our relationship with nature and the circumstances that made us what we are, ultimately there’s a certain set of instincts that most living beings are likely to have if they are to develop to a certain level of complexity.

    If someday we meet with some alien species out there in the Universe (if that’s possible), it’s likely they will have a different set of instincts and conversely a different set of morals. But many aspects of it are likely to be very similar if not identical… things like the survival instinct, the desire to seek sustenance and the aversion towards things that can potentially be harmful, probably they will experience something equivalent to pleasure and suffering, like we do, as a mechanism for punishment/reward through which they have been conditioned to seek certain stimulus over others. They are likely to experience some form of empathy if they frequently interact with themselves and depend on one another (which is likely a requirement for the advancement of communication and joint engineering feats). It’s more likely that our ethical frameworks will have more similarities than differences.

    Of course this also means that our ethics are clearly biased towards living creatures… it would be very hard (if not impossible) for an ethic framework to defend the ultimate death of the Universe as something good to seek. Even if it were true that this might be the ultimate destination / goal the Universe moves towards.

    I’ll have a look at those books if I can, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just attacking straw men or caricatures of the idea instead of actually engaging in honest argumentation. That’s what I’ve often found.


  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoComics@lemmy.mlCamus Teaches Elementary Scohol
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    4 months ago

    I mean… he isn’t wrong. Goals / objectives are not something rational. Rationality is just maths and logic. A computer does not have an objective (not even the objective of preserving itself), unless you program it into it.

    It’s perfectly possible that at some point in our evolutionary past there were creatures that didn’t really care about looking for food to stay alive, the only reason we do care is because we are descendants of the very few weird mutants who had the urge to seek food… most of the ones who didn’t seek it are not here anymore. To think that it’s somehow a miracle that we exist, and that there must be something special/supernatural about us, is a survivor bias fallacy…

    We have objectives programmed into us through our evolutionary development. We define things as “good” or “bad” based on our instincts (our… “heart”), only because they happen to have been selected through evolution. They aren’t really based on rationality (although reason can be used as a tool to try and predict if the action is really consistent with achieving the goals).

    So any response that’s in line with our animal instincts that we’ve developed across our evolution is as good of an answer as to what our motivations are.