AnAmericanPotato

One of the things I love about all the old Jackie Chan movies is that they always include stunt outtakes in the credits. You can see how some things go wrong. Bloody nose here, broken foot there. Even the best of the best get hurt. I don't think you'll find a professional stuntperson who's never broken a bone.

whyAreYouUsingCamelCaseInAllYourTitles?

The promise of the fediverse is that no single entity can have control of the ecosystem. That if an instance goes rogue, or is bought by a nazi billionaire, or is otherwise Evil™, then we can just leave it behind.

This has yet to be tested in practice. If there is an instance that is "too big to fail", then we're not really in better shape than if we were on a corporate platform.

Sometimes I have to wonder, what's it going to take to make people leave X?

I mean, it was a shithole even before Musk bought it, 4 years ago, and it's gotten predictably and steadily worse ever since.

LOL no.

You are in no way morally obligated to go out of your way to protect some corporation's exploitative business model.

"Descent". As if they were not obviously and explicitly fascist from day 1. How dumb can you be?

Fuck these fuckers. I'll forgive them when they start actively sabotaging every single thing they can from the inside.

I'll keep using AES 256 because why the heck not? The additional cost is a rounding error.

I mean, sure, don't panic. But also, don't hit the brakes. You might as well use the best encryption that's readily available. Encrypted data does not have a short enough or predictable enough lifespan to justify using less than the state of the art.

It depends on what you want. I use Kagi but I have not sold it on my friends and family because for most of them, it doesn't really make sense.

I've found it to be the best search engine, but I also think DuckDuckGo is generally fine. The $5/month plan with 300 searches per month is too limiting, IMO. I feel like anyone who searches that lightly will struggle to justify paying for Kagi over using DDG. For unlimited searches you need to step up to the $10/month plan.

When I started using Kagi, I did the free trial and every time I did a search, I'd do it in both Kagi and Google or DDG. It quickly became clear to me that Kagi was better, but I suspect this will vary a lot by your field, your tastes, and your personal search style. I mean, maybe there's someone out there who actually wants to look at Pinterest results. I guess?!

If you ever considered paying for ChatGPT Pro or Claude Pro ($20/month), then Kagi's Ultimate plan ($25/month) is probably a better value. It includes unlimited search, plus access to all the major premium models. On the other hand, ChatGPT Pro gives you access to image generation too, if you care about that.

Kagi's research agent is legitimately great. It is nothing like the bullshit generator Google has. It will take a prompt, then run multiple web searches to get relevant info, recursively if needed, and then give a meaningful response with citations. It shows you the exact search queries it uses, along with the results it pulls from. I've used it to find accurate answers to problems that I realistically could not have found with traditional search engines; in one case the actual answer was something like 18 results deep in the 5th search it performed. I think most people would give up before digging that deep in search results.

This is what AI is good for: automating gruntwork. Not doing things I couldn't do myself, but doing things I don't fucking want to do myself because they are tedious and frustrating. 99% of AI applications are pure garbage. Kagi's is part of the other 1%.

there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.

How do you mean? I don't think there's any way to incur charges for AI usages beyond your subscription fee unless you are coding against their API.

Have you ever wondered why we celebrate Richard Stallman as a visionary prophet of digital freedom while simultaneously abandoning every principle he fought for?

...

This is the Stallman Paradox: the growing chasm between our intellectual reverence for genuine free software principles and our practical convergence on venture capital-optimized extraction models that merely cosplay as "open source."

I'm not entirely sure who "we" refers to, but it sounds like they are either very confused, or they are liars. Perhaps they have been bamboozled by corporate interests trying to undermine and co-opt the free software movement and philosophy, or perhaps they are agents of those corporate interests trying to bamboozle you.

That's not new; it's been happening since the moment free software started picking up steam, decades ago. Consider some of these choice quotes from Stallman himself at his speech at a Web3 conference just last year:

I'd like to say more about the difference between Free Software and open source because it's a topic of great confusion. I founded the Free Software movement in 1983 with the announcement. The term Open Source was coined fourteen years later in 1998 when Free Software was becoming widely used and starting to be something people knew about. But not everyone who worked on or used or promoted Free Software agreed with the philosophy of freedom behind it. And the people who didn't agree wanted to get out of connection with it by and many of them were working for businesses or with businesses that didn't care about freedom at all. So, they found a new term, Open Source, which they defined differently but it overlapped a lot... But the biggest difference is that the term Open Source has never had any implications about right and wrong. It was, that idea was launched that way by people who didn't see it as a matter of right and wrong. So that's why I decided I would not start using that term.

And what does Stallman think of cryptocurrency?

I've never used cryptocurrency. There were things I found disappointing and worrisome when I learned about BitCoin. And it's not clear to me that others are much better... I don't want to do currency speculation myself at all.

He prefers GNU Taler as a distributed payment system. Taler is not a cryptocurrency, but it solves a lot of the problems that cryptocurrency pretends to solve.

Now with Taler the payer is anonymous but the payee is always identified, which means that Taler does not help millionaires hide lots of money from taxation. The world has a tremendous problem with wealth that is hidden and cannot be taxed. It's part of the way that billionaires have been transferring more and more of the world's wealth to them leaving less and less for everyone else. And this change is on the order of twenty percent of the world's wealth. It's an enormous change that impoverishes people who are not rich but even worse it gives the rich people the power of oligarchy, the power to buy governments and that threatens democracy. That threatens the rights of all of us but if we insist on payment systems that don't permit the hiding of large amounts of wealth, that problem will get less instead of more.

"How much do you know about Web3?"

Not a tremendous amount, that's not my field.

So again I wonder who this "we" refers to. Who is so confused as to associate Richard Stallman and Free Software with cryptocurrency and web3? I mean, the fact that he was invited to speak at a web3 conference suggests it's a lot of people in the field, but god damn.

panel is 1366×768 but only 1360×768 is accessible over HDMI

Weird. Did they decide that resolution wasn't cursed enough to begin with?!

I wonder if HDMI requires resolutions to be evenly divisible by 8. 1366 was always strange. I'm not sure I've ever seen it on an external monitor, mostly just cheap laptops.

yt-dlp requests a specific format and downloads that in its entirety. When you use the YouTube web site, it dynamically adjusts based on your internet connection. If there's lag, then it'll drop you to a lower bitrate. So that's one possible explanation.

There's a little gear button on the YouTube page that lets you manually select the quality you want. If you specifically select e.g. 1080p then it won't drop you down, it'll just lag if your internet is too slow. I'm not 100% sure if that also applies to audio.