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amlib

934 karma · joined September 18, 2016

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amlib··on 1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops
Vibe-coded or not what grinds my gears in those throwback computer interfaces is how imprecise they are. I the case of Windows, 9x had a meticulous pixel perfect alignment of widgets, great looking 2px thick bevel effects and all the proportions needed to be right for it feel "right". But almost all those throwback attempts, and specially now with AI coding, forget about this and seem to only go as far as thinking having a grey background with some tacky bevel is enough to recreate it.
amlib··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
This might sound heretic but maybe running mostly GNOME apps on a KDE desktop might be an interesting "best of both worlds" situation to investigate...
amlib··on F-Droid 2.0
This issue happens to some extent within liunux distros too. I think specifically for youtube maybe it would be beneficial for a single core library that deals with the API and is shared by every single project that cares to interface with youtube. Rather than dozens of projects trying to chase youtube changes and overburdening repository maintainers, there would only be a single library whose updates would be fast tracked. This also requires there to be no embedding it in anything too, I don't know how feasible this would be on android/f-droid, but it kinda already happens with yt-dlp in linux distros, but yt-dlp isn't a proper library nor does it deals with all youtube endpoints that a proper youtube frontend would require.

It would perhaps be nice if yt-dlp could eject it's youtube api handling into it's own project that is then augmented to handle anything youtube related and turns into THE library for dealing with youtube.. maybe even call it libyt :)

amlib··on AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons
Consumers are way too fickle to pursue open models en masse. Even if they are 90% as good and fairly easy to use (works acceptably on most machines, easy installation, whatever), they will still go for the ones controlled by big corportions/big tech.

Look at how consumers deal with free, open source software, alternate Operating Systems, alternate social networks, alternate search engines, alternate chat protocols... even when the barriers are low they just don't give a damn. I honestly think most people would choose to join the Borg out of sheer convenience. It's futile to think this won't happen with AI.

amlib··on OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents
It's already been so much worse, they are digital billboards most of the time presented as genuine organic content, like you and me posting in this platform. That alone has already changed the course of history, persuaded people by changing their views and made then more reactionary than ever. Whole elections were decided on this stuff. I can't begin to imagine the manipulative powers manipulative AI chatbot responses will bring.
amlib··on Fuck it, make it anyway
Hard to do when adapting/innovating means essentially joining the Borg. People have a million analogies to what is happening with AI right now but they often fail to see how unprecedented it is. Is history really just repeating? Are we in a cycle? Or is this just a paperclip optimizer?
amlib··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
An LLM is just in fact just autocompleting a story. There are many fictional stories about "AIs" trying to escape our control, being more clever than we anticipated or having a consciousness of it's own. LLMs do a really nice job of blending such stories with whatever story you initially prompted them with. The human reader is the one giving it credence that it is somehow more than just a soup of words.

The curious thing here is that a story generator can have way more uses than we ever anticipated, and that some shady enterprising individuals are whiling to plug those story generators into real world things, with real consequences.

amlib··on Windows 11's "special" developer edition looks like another marketing misfire
Maybe the main feature they are not telling anyone is that it slurps your valuable code bases faster in order to feed their AI? I guess usurping github ain't enough.
amlib··on AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
If you have something like ublock origin use the block element functionality to target the blinking cursor. It's gone on my end :)
amlib··on 120 days until Google restricts side-loading, declaring war on Android freedom
Except there were websites requiring you to install ActiveX and proprietary plugins to do anything meaningful as soon as 1995? Also banks requiring proprietary security modules to access your account, they were pretty ubiquitous in the early 2000s where I lived.

The difference now is that accessing services through the internet is a necessity rather than a luxury. I guess passing laws could fix this, but it's exceptionally hard to get anything done through the barrage of big tech lobbying.

amlib··on GPT-6 Astra
Are you even gonna have permission to fish when the quadrillionaires own all water bodies?
amlib··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.

A few years ago everyone said _Open_AI is the the most open labs. How did that turn out? Lots of coy, deceiving actions till the whole company was turned into whatever rent seeking amoral borg adjacent shell of it's former past it is now.

amlib··on Nitter project received cease and desist
I'm sure this has already been answered somewhere in slashdot hundreds of years ago, but why not just go with "free as in freedom"? And perhaps use the word freedom insted of free when possible
amlib··on Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
just... never delve into their forums.
amlib··on Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
Use the unhook extension, ublock origin extension and firefox. Also don't hesitate to use the "Block element" feature for ublock. Get some control back from big tech :)
amlib··on The Fedora 45 Sausage Factory
If you use the command line to do the update there is no need to reboot, however, the issues that the offline update is trying to solve still stands.

Some programs can crash when all their files are suddenly swapped for new ones. I've seen multiple linux systems bork themselves during an update because the update itself caused the desktop session to crash, which caused the update process to be interrupted just as it was modifying some crucial files, thus rendering the system unbootable.

amlib··on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps
I don't think apple makes actual tvs
amlib··on Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team
I'm not sure if this is what you want but you can set two lists of tags for each user that works as items blacklists and whitelists. Then you tag whatever media you want with those and they will appear or disappear for that user.

You can find this feature in the admin control panel -> Users -> select an user -> Parental control (tab)

There is also an Access tab, together both can be used to lock things down fairly well.

amlib··on Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
It would even be common for phones to have 2 or more TB integrated had we not been co-opted to move all our data into the cloud.
amlib··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
Let's ignore this point of the discussion. For how long do you think users stayed on wayland back in 2016? The vast majority of users experience was... nothing because it wasn't even being shipped by 99% of distros yet, and if they cared to sought it they used it for 5 minutes until it crashed or even 0 minutes because it couldn't even display anything on their graphics card. Very few people actually experienced and tried to use wayland for real back then. Most of them were either devs or enthusiasts.

Fast forward to 2021 and most users experience with wayland was that GDM (on some distros) would try to start on wayland mode but couldn't for some reason and would fallback to X11. Note: I do think that the distros that were pushing for this were being reckless with their users. Introducing it as an opt-in would be much better and would still lower the barrier for testing. Also, KDE didn't even offer a wayland mode, taking until 2024 for it to start defaulting to it and any other wayland desktop had to be sought after by the user.

So really, I think people only started to "suffer" wayland's wonky-ness for the last three to five years depending how you view it. And honestly the last year or two has been pretty usable.

amlib··on S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
Maybe that is far fetched, but I could see them specializing for some super high dimension multiplication and meanwhile 5 years later turns out "all you need" are 3x3 matrices and suddenly 90% of your specialized hardware is now dark silicon :)
amlib··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
> I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken

Yeah, because it wasn't ready. Pretty much no one recommended using it back them, if you thought it was ready you were either misguided or misled. It's time to put your skepticism aside and give it another try, there is a pretty good chance it's going to work great now.

Even Valve Steam OS is now adopting it. It's a pretty good sign wayland is a viable replacement for X11, while bringing it own things.

amlib··on S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
Isn't specialized hardware also a big risk? GPUs are more amenable to any big changes that may happen in the next 5, 10 years of AI research. Maybe we won't even be talking about LLMs anymore. Maybe matrix multiplication won't even be the main primitive.
amlib··on An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation
> If Anubis were to be even more widely adopted, botnet operators would surely adopt and optimize native code solvers en masse.

Then anubis adopts it itself, increases the amount of work that needs to be done and the bar stays the same again for everyone? Seems like mostly a non-issue unless there is an arms race towards ever more optimized solvers which I don't believe is possible.

amlib··on Yt-Dlp Sequence Diagrams
>Yeah at some point in the past I had it mostly working. But basically now, what should I do? Maybe host a VM with an actual browser (not headless: just the real thing) and log into a Google account and then what, use yt-dlp from the same IP?

What I've been doing is sshing to my main pc running fedora that has a legit firefox with my google/youtube cookies, have a distrobox with archlinux on it, entering that machine and then running yt-dlp there. Since distrobox has mounts your host /home dir into the guest /home it can easily source cookies from your host pc.

The reason for Archlinux is that it seams to do a much better job than Fedora at keeping yt-dlp updated and with the necessary dependencies to successfully download videos. So this synergy between your main machine (where google cant't tell you are "illegitimate") + a guest machine with the "clandestine" software (in google's view lol) all stitched together by distrobox works well.

amlib··on Yt-Dlp Sequence Diagrams
You always had to keep whatever youtube video downloader you were using updated at a minimum. For a good while login cookies were only required for downloading restricted videos (whatever youtube considered 18+). Now you need half a web browser to do anything and the update cadence is even crazier.
amlib··on PlayStation can delete all your digital games after 3 years of inactivity (EU)
Except for the hundred thousands if not millions of people who lost their Minecraft account due to the way Microsoft handled multiple successive account migrations, also including the many accounts that were stolen due to lax security.

And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.

amlib··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.
amlib··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
I mean the devices where steam operates are fully open, even the ones valve makes. You can install any OS you wish, any software or competing store front and thus give them 0% cut.

You wouldn't complain that Walmart takes a X% cut when you have a healthy competitive market and can chose other store fronts with better prices.

amlib··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
They are the only platform owners championing for an open platform. That should be enough to consider them above all others, no trust required.
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