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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • Just to chime in with my own opinion on JetBrains’ tooling, my first language was Java - admittedly its been a while since I tried Java (and other JVM languages like Kotlin) in VSCode but when I last did it was a bit of a challenge. I also did some Android development for a while and if “standalone” Java was awkward in VSCode I assume Android development would have been too (Android development in general was nightmare fuel until Android Studio came along, never really did like Eclipse all that much).

    After expanding out into other languages, I have enjoyed the specialization of each of the JetBrains IDEs. VSCode always felt like a “Jack of all trades, master of none” type of experience for me personally. I have tried out Zed recently and while I think its going to be a decent editor, I still have similar issues with it that I have in VSCode (in that how well it works depends on what language you’re using).

    The exception to their tooling that I haven’t really liked though is Fleet - which was their answer to creating an equivalent to VSCode. It hasn’t really seen a lot of development and feels more like the forgotten step child of JetBrains. Also the “Remote Development”/JetBrains Gateway features can be really hit or miss though thankfully I don’t need that sort of functionality often.


  • The p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.

    As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It’s complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they’re a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you’re always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.

    So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you’ll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.




  • If I had to take a guess (which is exactly what this is, a guess) it is because Android doesn’t “know” where the app is from. I assume the Play Store has specific (system-level) APIs that it uses to “tell” Android how it can be restored (or rather, Android can signal to the Play Store to do a reinstall) when you go to unarchive the app.

    It’s been a while since I kept up with the latest in Android’s APIs, I’d heard there were some APIs that third party stores could use to be recognized as a store, but I’m not sure what the requirements are for that (such as being a system app rather than a user app, or signed by the ROM’s keys) and if so, whether archiving even supports third party stores.

    I can’t think of any other workarounds unfortunately, especially if you want to persist app data. Perhaps there’s an app that can make custom widgets that look like an app entry on the home screen (and allows setting an icon/text) but I’m not aware of any, and that definitely wouldn’t save the app data.



  • I always assumed it was more or less targeting the federation of issues/MRs.

    The git side of things is already distributed as you said, but if you decide to host your random project on your own GitLab instance you’ll miss out on people submitting issues/MRs because they won’t want to sign up for an account on your random instance (or sign in with another IdP).

    This is where a lot of the reliance of GitHub comes from, in my opinion.



  • I’m quite confused by some of the pain points that the author mentioned. For example, the Dolphin view switch icon - you absolutely don’t need to click on the dropdown to change the view, you can click the icon itself and it’ll change (and I’m pretty sure this is why the button is “two buttons” and has the divider next to the dropdown icon).

    For Spectacle, regarding the extra mouse clicks - most of the functions include a (global) keyboard shortcut by default and for the few that don’t, you just need to set one.

    Floating panels: Whether you like the design of a floating panel or not is of course subjective. However the author mentions that you need to “aim like an idiot and waste your time hitting the ‘floating target’” - except no, you don’t. They can “slam their mouse into the screen corner” because the target zone for the applets extends below and to the corners of the screen. If you want to open the Application Launcher for example, you can “slam” your mouse to the bottom left corner and click - it will open. Same with every applet (I do not believe this to be something the applet controls, but rather the panel itself so it should work with any applet).

    Kubuntu’s “anti-user move” is not controlled by the KDE team. Not sure how much control Ubuntu spins have over their packages, but it is either a Canonical move or a move by the Kubuntu team - regardless, its not something the KDE team mandated (AFAIK they are not removing X11 support). The only thing the KDE team has done is make the Wayland session the default.

    Regarding the bugs they’ve found, I hope they reported those on the KDE bug tracker.

    This line in particular made me laugh a bit though:

    … plus “simple” interfaces is NOT going to win the hearts and minds of the common people. That’s not how it works.

    Yes, it does. A “common” person does not care in the slightest that libmyfancylibrary was updated to version 1.2.3.4, I mean I’d argue they don’t care in general about updates but I digress.


  • Your son and daughter will continue to learn new things as they grow up, a LLM cannot learn new things on its own. Sure, they can repeat things back to you that are within the context window (and even then, a context window isn’t really inherent to a LLM - its just a window of prior information being fed back to them with each request/response, or “turn” as I believe is the term) and what is in the context window can even influence their responses. But in order for a LLM to “learn” something, it needs to be retrained with that information included in the dataset.

    Whereas if your kids were to say, touch a sharp object that caused them even slight discomfort, they would eventually learn to stop doing that because they’ll know what the outcome is after repetition. You could argue that this looks similar to the training process of a LLM, but the difference is that a LLM cannot do this on its own (and I would not consider wiring up a LLM via an MCP to a script that can trigger a re-train + reload to be it doing it on its own volition). At least, not in our current day. If anything, I think this is more of a “smoking gun” than the argument of “LLMs are just guessing the next best letter/word in a given sequence”.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who completely hates LLMs / “modern day AI” (though I do hate a lot of the ways it is used, and agree with a lot of the moral problems behind it), I find the tech to be intriguing but it’s a (“very fancy”) simulation. It is designed to imitate sentience and other human-like behavior. That, along with human nature’s tendency to anthropomorphize things around us (which is really the biggest part of this IMO), is why it tends to be very convincing at times.

    That is my take on it, at least. I’m not a psychologist/psychiatrist or philosopher.




  • I’d be highly surprised if Wayland actually has a protocol for applications to just type across other applications, we barely even have global shortcuts (it’s getting there but reaaaaaally slowly).

    KPXC might be able to get around it by using whichever method ydotool does (by faking a device AFAIK) - probably needs root to do this though, and it would also need to implement the global shortcuts API to be able to respond to a key bind I believe.

    So perhaps a bit of column A and column B.


  • I mean, sure - but if you really don’t trust Apple to keep their word, then it wouldn’t matter if their Health app was FOSS or not. iOS itself is still (and probably forever will be) a closed source operating system. That gives them the power to do anything, including hijack the data from FOSS apps.