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MiddleEndian

3,469 karma · joined March 11, 2014

middleendian.com
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MiddleEndian··on Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users
>I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)

It's been a few years since I tried GIMP but the last time I did, I couldn't rotate text and then edit it without losing my rotations. Rotating text isn't some obscure feature. This wasn't only shockingly behind Photoshop, it was behind Microsoft Word or even Clarisworks. A quick Google search suggests this remained unsolved as recently as 2024: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/19ckuo4/text_layers_a...

This isn't blind hatred of OSS or learning new things. I've gotten annoyed with Photoshop now that they decided to replace their UI with web components, and so far Krita has been quite pleasant to use despite not also being identical to Photoshop.

MiddleEndian··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
Mac OS used to have the benefit of a more native application philosophy. So even though the OS got out of your way, all the applications felt unified and consistent with each other.
MiddleEndian··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
Close Windows laptop and leave it on desk, open in morning... 50/50 chance:

1. Laptop has most of its battery life still because it slept successfully and predictably

2. Laptop drained battery to 5% and only then slept

MiddleEndian··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
Yeah I've found modern KDE's shortcuts are not only similar to the best parts of Windows, but also slightly better (Win arrow keys reposition without doing minimize/maximize, only win pgdn/pgup minimize/maximize) so I can move shit around more fearlessly.
MiddleEndian··on Online age verification is the hill to die on
And people should be free to pick and choose whether they want to use sites that do that or not. Whatever hacker news does seems to be fine for me, and I did not need to verify my ID in any way (even though it's very easy to figure out who I am from this profile)
MiddleEndian··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
RCS barely works on regular Android.

In the last week or so, multiple people have told me they cannot text me. I found that I was getting a "verification limit exceeded" error (perhaps because of my unusual behavior of usually being at work or at home, both which have known wifi networks, and sending maybe half a dozen texts any day?). I got the error to go away for half a day and they were still unable to message during that time, and now that I have it disabled I still appear as online on RCS (yet still unreachable?) so they still cannot message me lol.

I've been on the other end many times across multiple Android devices across multiple years, being able to send messages to some RCS users, being unable to send messages to other RCS users, not being able to receive messages in group chats entirely comprised of Android users, etc.

SMS/MMS: Handled by carriers, you can send messages to people who are offline and they'll get the messages when they turn their phone back on.

Telegram/FbMessenger/Whatsapp/etc: Handled by individual corporations, you can send messages to people who are offline and they'll get the messages when they turn their their device on.

RCS: Handled by both Google and carriers at the same time for some reason, maybe 80% chance of being able to send a message to somebody who's online, let alone offline.

I'm sure there are multiple reasons it was challenging, but Google and friends have not risen to the occasion at all. Truly a garbage protocol.

MiddleEndian··on Email could have been X.400 times better
Not The Silliest Contrivance to happen to video standards :P
MiddleEndian··on Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it
Anecdotally, my (smart but doesn't really care much about computers) fiancee was able to get all dozen of her mods for The Sims working on Bazzite Linux without any help from me besides a chmod +x to one script.

But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.

MiddleEndian··on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
>Apps require you to sign in again all the time, and send a verification code to your e-mail to do so. Changing locations is, yes, a reason to require sign in.

What? TicketMaster is the only app I use that does this. Probably because it's too hard for end-users to get rid of it. If some Telegram or some food delivery app or something tried to periodically re-prompt me to log in because I went outside my house or whatever, it would get uninstalled and replaced with something that didn't.

MiddleEndian··on 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
>For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets

Even as a person who does have a smartphone, I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster. It's only a positive trade-off for venues or whoever. If they texted or emailed me a QR code, that would be a positive tradeoff (and a texted QR code would probably work for this guy's flip phone too)

MiddleEndian··on I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version Is A-OK
It's already been beaten into acceptance that I have to use the Ticketmaster app (shockingly awful) or Dice app (not quite as bad but still sucks) to get into a lot of music venues in Boston.

But at one club they wanted me to install another app just to check my coat. I elected to hide it under a some furniture instead lol

MiddleEndian··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
One of the straight-up benefits of TV gaming that Bazzite (and presumably any KDE environment, but it's been a bit since I used another) has over Windows is that you can label your Bluetooth devices. I have blue controller, pink controller, white controller, damaged white controller. 90% of my gaming is local multiplayer games and I switch between an actual PS5 and PC, so this is super useful.

Can't do it in Windows 11 for some reason. No option to label them in the new settings app and the option to label them in the old control panel does not work. They all got saved as "Dualsense Controller" and you just had to guess which one you were reconnecting.

MiddleEndian··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
I agree that development sometimes takes extra steps, but honestly setting up dev environments almost always takes too many steps anyway lol. Overall it's worth it for the stability.
MiddleEndian··on Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)
Yeah I have a Surface Laptop Studio. Windows 11 is generally awful to the point where I have switched to Bazzite for my desktop, but the form factor with touch support (and pen support) is great. Easel mode is great for drawing, tablet mode is pretty good for drawing as well and also for casual browsing or for displaying DND character sheet info. Even in laptop mode sometimes I find myself using it to scroll a bit on pages.
MiddleEndian··on Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
I'd say it was both. I gave a pretty detailed explanation before, far more detailed than my post here, including a timeline of when it filled in one shot, then two shots, and then three or four (can't remember). I doubt they actually checked before the video. But I was very motivated to fix the issue so I gave them proof lol
MiddleEndian··on Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed
Or even non-software tickets at large corporations. I reported a water dispenser filling too slowly at my office because it took me a few tries just to fill my 1L water bottle. They said it was fixed and closed it.

It was not fixed. So I took a video of myself refilling my water bottle, attached it to the ticket, and re-opened it. They actually fixed it after that. The video was 2m12s long (and I spent god knows how long making the video file small enough to attach to the ticket lol)

MiddleEndian··on Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised
You can have both. Bazzite Linux lets you sandbox applications and also control your own device.
MiddleEndian··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
Eh they can be added to my contacts and then fall under "friend" I guess lol
MiddleEndian··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
>walled garden

Makes sense to me. Ideally, people outside of my friends and family would not be able to call me on my regular phone either.

MiddleEndian··on Passengers who refuse to use headphones can now be kicked off United flights
Pretty sweet. Do you have it hosted anywhere? Seems github doesn't want to let you load HTML directly (for obvious reasons lol)
MiddleEndian··on We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster
Now they just need a third party who's never seen the original to rewrite their TypeScript solution in Rust for even more gains.
MiddleEndian·
>Interesting. What would happen if it was found later that the match was thrown on purpose by either the judges or the fighters?

This was over a decade ago so I don't remember the exact details, but I'm sure this was covered by the wording of the agreement and I'd have been out of luck with the bookies.

Can't comment on unrelated legal penalties, but in Japan there was match fixing in sumo and nobody got arrested (couldn't prove gambling) but a lot were fired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match-fixing_in_professional_s... https://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat21/sub138/item1779.html

Unfortunately, combat sports are relatively easy to fix because you only have a few people involved in the live action at a time.

>This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.

As far as I can tell, it seems like the betting market sites explicitly encourage insider activities, and I would not be surprised if this happened for real. See:

https://www.rawstory.com/leavitt/

>Gamblers cry foul after White House briefing ends seconds before key betting cutoff

A slightly different example because if true, the insider would be changing her behavior rather than changing the reporting of the facts. But it still shows that a small number of insiders (or a single insider) can change betting results.

MiddleEndian··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.
MiddleEndian··on CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
Ad networks yes. Also the website operators and application developers.
MiddleEndian··on Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-page-...
MiddleEndian··on 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, so I fixed it
If 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, big email providers like gmail should automatically mark all of their emails as spam by default until they fix it.
MiddleEndian··on Facebook is cooked
The default experience probably sucks, but I aggressively block anything even mildly annoying on my Facebook newsfeed, and I like what's left:

Mostly Simpsons memes, Seinfeld memes, Pro Wrestling memes, Sopranos memes, and then intersections of those memes (Seinfeld Pro Wrestling, Simpsons Pro Wrestling, etc.). Some nerd shit. Stuff from the handful of friends of mine and local groups I interact with who still post on Facebook. Maybe <1% total garbage like what the article describes but I immediately block any groups or users who post anything even slightly annoying. I almost never watch any video content at all. It's unironically better passive content than anywhere else left on the web, probably because all the people trying to be hip have gone somewhere else lol

However whatever their UI is sluggish as hell and I'm surprised this wasn't discussed. You'll click block user/group and it will respond multiple seconds later (on my symmetric 1Gbps FIOS connection) and UI elements will jump around. FB messenger is slow as shit and occasionally will fail to decrypt/load messages entirely, even though it works fine on my phone (don't have regular FB on my phone so can't make that comparison). There's an anti-performance cargo-cult among web devs. Perhaps their metrics only show what it saves them on server costs. But if I did not already use the site it would be impossible to convince me to start.

MiddleEndian··on There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming (2024)
A friend of mine says he was convinced by https://xkcd.com/1732/
MiddleEndian··on Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026
That sounds about right. I've never used Kopete myself but the KDE team always puts out good work for OSS UIs
MiddleEndian··on Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026
It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.

* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.

* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages

* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on

* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).

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