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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    I would point at Android as an example of what would happen. It’s not public domain but the end result is similar, namely that the open source originator (AOSP) suffers from a severe lack of features compared to the commercial offerings.

    The default AOSP apps are incredibly barebones compared to the ones Google and the carriers put in their ROMs. You have to choose between “have nothing more than the basic features and compatibility with only well-established services” or “get the latest and greatest with all the bells and whistles (plus a huge heaping of telemetry and invasive advertising)”.

    It turns out it’s really hard to compete with a major corporation who can throw entire teams at a problem and can legally copy anything you add to your own version. That’s not even getting into the things that open source projects lack due to their haphazard team structure such as unified UX designs (Blender pre-2.8 and GIMP pre-3.0/unified window mode being the most famous examples of terrible user interfaces that lingered for far too many years).


  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlThe Best Lemmy Client
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    7 months ago

    The crash I referenced was caused by having the scrollbar enabled IIRC, and it was fixed earlier this year. It made it impossible to launch the main activity without crashing if you’d enabled that setting, so users were sharing workarounds to launch directly to the settings screen without loading any communities so they could disable it.


  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlThe Best Lemmy Client
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    7 months ago

    Sync has had serious issues in the past such as an easily triggered, reproducible, guaranteed crash on open, with the dev not putting out a fix for months. This neglect goes back several years, to back when Sync was a Reddit client. Most infamously he disappeared for over a year when his UI refresh wasn’t well received.

    The app is great (I’m only on Boost due to user tags requiring a paid subscription in Sync), but his response time to issues is glacial. And it doesn’t help that it’s by far the most expensive client if you want it ad-free, and features that used to be free now require an even more expensive subscription to use on top of that.



  • I just updated to the newest Ubuntu LTS, which puts pip into system managed mode so you can’t easily install packages outside of a virtual environment anymore.

    If you (or anyone who stumbles upon this comment in the future) run into this problem, the new recommended way to install yt-dlp through pip and keep it in your path and up to date is via pipx (sudo apt install pipx). The syntax is a bit gnarly for pre-releases, so I figured I’d post an update:

    To install the nightly: pipx install --pip-args '\--pre' "yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]"

    To update the nightly: pipx upgrade --pip-args '\--pre' yt-dlp

    I alias the update command and run it before every download session.

    (You may need to delete your old yt-dlp binaries before it’ll let you install the new one - use type -a yt-dlp to find them.)



  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlFavourite sandwich?
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    9 months ago

    The best sandwich I ever had was a panini I randomly threw together for a snack at three in the morning. The next day I went to make it again since it was so delicious, but realized I’d forgotten some of the ingredients I used. I was in the middle of a sandwich-making phase at the time so I had like a dozen types of bread, meat, and cheese to pick from.

    This was a decade ago and I’ve never been able to recreate that perfect sandwich despite several attempts. It’s my culinary white whale. The only ingredients I am sure of are the spread (light mayo in one side, applewood-smoked bacon mustard on the other) and the meat (honey-smoked turkey), and that it was only a simple meat-and-cheese. The bread and cheese continue to elude me.



  • We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

    It’s strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.

    I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) would have been to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives on their profile page, without showing their total karma. That’d help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.

    Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.

    (But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)




  • Day one patches exist because the devs continued to work on the game after the physical editions went gold, so the data on disc versions will be behind. They’ll stick around even if the industry goes entirely digital due to online stores offering encrypted preloads that won’t have the patches either.

    Day one DLC usually (fuck Capcom) exists for a similar reason - the art and asset pipelines finished their work months before launch, so rather than lay them off or pay them to do nothing, the studios have them work on DLC for the last few months before release.

    No arguments about P2W. That and the death of persistent lobbies in favor of matchmaking destroyed my enjoyment of multiplayer games.


  • I’ve never heard anyone else mention Dungeons of Dredmor! That’s the game that taught me how much I loathe total randomness in roguelikes. Without it I wouldn’t have discovered Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a host of others where your skill actually matters, so even though I hated DoD I’m glad I picked it up after TB’s video.

    (And the artist of Dredmor later ended up on the development team of my literal favorite game ever, Starsector. Weird how things turn out.)


  • I followed Shamus Young’s blog in 2007, and kept following him long after I dropped every other blogger. I didn’t always agree with him (*cough* Dark Souls *cough*), but his reviews were the best and most in-depth in the business (seriously, his Mass Effect retrospective covers the entire trilogy and is longer than most novels). He had a way with words where even when he was arguing for/against something you hate/love, you’d still be entertained by the read.

    His death left a void in my consumption of media criticism. I don’t think anyone I follow is as articulate or entertaining as Shamus was. RIP Shamus.





  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    1 year ago

    Who else is better equipped? In my view it would solely depend on the lawyers that internet archive hires, and money plays a big factor in that.

    The EFF. This kind of thing is why they exist.

    The Archive making themselves an easier target was a huge misstep IMO. All it takes is one overreaching judge telling them they need to purge all copyrighted data (a common judgment in lawsuits like this) and the world becomes a worse place.