dantondwa

You are making connections that are not there. For example, Novell, which owned SUSE, made that deal with Microsoft. But SUSE, the corporate distro, at that point was not using KDE as a default desktop, but GNOME. This stemmed from the fact that Novell had also incorporated Ximian previously and was deeply involved with GNOME (and Mono and .NET). Corporate SUSE used GNOME, and they still do. KDE and SUSE have no relationship of that type, not even today. How could KDE be protected by a deal that did not involve them at all?

This is crap. What happened was a change of paradigm inspired by the iPhone. Windows a few releases later followed exactly the same trends that GNOME and Unity spearheaded. Same thing with macOS.

You’re right. I should discriminate between the seriousness of the tool. A non-essential service can be easily replaced when eventually they enshittify it. Email is an essential one, and reliability is the most important factor.

They’re just closing it, wow.

Someone had recommended me Skiff, but I stayed away from it and opted for Proton, given that they have been around for a while and Skiff smelled like VC money too much. I guess it was the right choice.

At this point, a criteria I try to follow when I have to choose whether or not to rely on a tool is: is it funded by VC? If so, steer clear.

> Brave is run by a homophobic, anti-vax crypto clown. I won’t dignify it here with a link.

And their business model is based on replacing other ads with their ads. Privacy is just a troy horse for expansion, given that their other “””features””” are not really such.

Hah! I spent a lot of time as a child reading and studying that guide, while actually never playing the game until many years later.

Here is a breakdown of a WoW skybox by a Blizzard artist: https://80.lv/articles/how-to-create-skies-for-3d-games/

TLDR. it’s multiple skybox meshes layered

When a website is blocked by the firewall, it doesn’t load.

When a website blocks Chinese users, the website loads but you cannot create an account.

Yes, the firewall does not block everything, otherwise it would be the same as turning off the internet! There are websites that work.

100%. They are even paying developers to work on optimizing Blender for Metal, so that Blender was ready for HWRT from day one.

Unity bought other things that then they just proceeded to close a bit after. Perhaps it was just a strategy to inflate their shares. See for example ArtEngine, which I loved and they just killed after acquiring it.

Now I’m so afraid for Parsec.

> Good point! Have you had any experience with CrossOver? Does it tend to work better than Whisky?

It certainly does. It has presets for most mainstream games and it uses the latest version of Wine.

The author of Whisky, in a move that can't be praised enough, has decided to not update further the version of CrossOver on which Whisky relies. This is so that Whisky does not become a free clone of CrossOver, given that CodeWeavers are the ones developing Wine. So, I'd say it is worth using CrossOver! They also have a free trial, so I'd give it a try and compare it with Whisky for a specific game, and see what runs better!

To change modules order in Darktable, you have to know what to do. By default, the module order is correctly arranged and no intervention is required. Changing the order is an option that you can use only if you want to. No user will ever change a module's order by mistake (and in the remote case that one did, fixing that is a click away).

We have Lightroom, we have Capture One. Let one software for more technically-inclined photographers exist, where you have options and power over the pipeline. Darktable does not aim to be a Lightroom replacement.

In general, I do think that Darktable's UI could be better, and most likely it could be more efficient. His points are not wrong, but they are also not as fundamentally disastrous as the author makes them to be. I feel the damage that the author caused with his behavior is potentially worse for Darktable than the problems themselves.

In a collaborative project run by volunteers, the way one argues and the point one makes are united. Darktable is possible only if there is a group of people working on it. I've seen the author insulting fellow contributors in public forums, I've seen him using the most offensive possible language against people who were being polite to him, just because they disagreed. This is not how you steer an opensource project in the right direction. It is also useless to come and shit everywhere after the changes are done. It is the opensource equivalent of seagull management [1].

I think in a collaborative project, the way you state your point is as important as the value of the point you're making. If you're unable to state your point clearly and effectively, then you should work alone, as the author has now correctly decided to do. Continuing the shitstorm even after his collaboration with Darktable has terminated seems, to me, to be just the continuation of a useless feud.

I say all this as a happy Darktable user, and not a contributor at all. I also loved the author's contribution, and found his Youtube channel to be really informative and a fantastic learning source. Still, Darktable has continued after his departure, and the new release, which will come for Christmas, is really promising, with the inclusion of per-channel curves in the sigmoid module, similarly to Blender's AgX. Many other improvements are coming, and I don't feel the project is "crashing into the wall in slow-motion".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_management

The author, while having contributed greatly to Darktable in the past and being without any doubt skilled, has severe communication issues. When he was in the darktable team, he was abrasive and offensive. There is a limit to how much offensive you can be to others, parlrticulaly when you are all volunteers. So, I'd take his words with a grain of salt and take into account the background of all this: a skilled person with a very little ability to speak to others starting a feud with another opensource project to which he contributed in the past.

For Cycles, it’s in the works but it will take a while.

You can use LuxCoreRenderer with Blender, though!

“The above is the most accurate translation of the ancient classic available anywhere at any price.”

Quite a bold statement that immediately makes me very sceptical. When reading ancient classics in translation, the wisest approach is comparing multiple translations. Only then a more complete picture will emerge.

This website allows one to compare some translations side by side: https://ttc.tasuki.org/display:Code:gff,sm,jc,rh

With this said, the Tao Te Ching is one of the most astonishing texts to ever be written. It hovers around what I see as an essential truth, pointing at it while intentionally avoiding defining it. Any translation and any form is worth being read.

I have recently been reading a new Italian translation of it, by Luigi Maggio and published by Bompiani, and I have been really appreciating its care for the mystic, shamanic origin of the text, and the deep discussions of each translation choice, together with the presence of the original text.

I agree, I use it on Windows and it’s an amazing piece of software.

just commented to write this as well. By coincidence, I have listened to the Assyrian episode today. There is really nothing like it. I also recommend the youtube videos of the same podcast. They are really the perfect companion to this incredible history podcast.

On the topic, I can absolutely recommend this sublime episode of Fall Of Civilizations on the Neo-Assyrian Empire: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jpAphcaVJIs

This reminds me of Bergson's theory of memory and present consciousness. In his essay "Memory of the Present and False Recognition", he argued that memory and present consciousness are the same, and what changes is a sort of "past tag" that is associated with the memory flow. He saw déjà vu as a mistaken tagging of the present flow, which we then perceive as past

I don't like Starlink. It increases light pollution, even in places without much human activity, which is a disaster for astronomers.

Moreover, sending satellites to space is really inefficient. It wastes a lot of energy and pollutes a lot. To increase coverage, the amount of satellite they'll need will be more and more. And the skies will become more and more full of space junk (each satellite lives for 7 years).

I think there are other solutions. But of course, other solutions do not favour Elon Musk as much.

I will post here the first paragraph of [1], as it directly provides this bit of information:

"The Haiti indemnity controversy involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding a 150 million franc indemnity to be paid by Haiti in claims over property – including Haitian slaves – that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition, with the debt costing Haiti $21 to 115 billion of economic growth over a period of two centuries and affecting the nation to this day. The payment was later reduced to 90 million francs in 1838, comparable to US$21 billion as of 2004, with Haiti paying about 112 million francs in total.[4] Over the 122 years between 1825 and 1947 the debt severely hampered Haitian economic development as payments of interest and downpayments totaled a significant share of Haitian GDP yearly, constraining the use of domestic financial funds for infrastructure, public services and ultimately making the nation ungovernable."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

This is really spot on. I find myself helping a lot of friends and acquaintances with digital bureaucracy, and it is so counterintuitive. I, as a person who is used to buggy software and weird, complex rules, manage somehow to move through that, but I am always under the impression that the rules are applied in a way that actively (and sometimes, I suspect, intentionally) disincentivizes participation/use of a service.

It is not nostalgia for paper: technology was applied badly to bureaucracy, widening the divide between the physical, in-person bureaucrat and the person using their service. When things were not digital, at least, it was easy to deal with things in person, talk, get explanations.

However, one could argue that geopolitical matters are a lot less interesting for you, private citizen. If you're not a world leader or someone involved in said geopolitical events, you will live the consequences of "the enemies of the West" from a mostly economic perspective.

On the other hand, the same cannot be said about your own government. They collect data on you and your fellow citizens and they use it. And they can mess up your life much more than what China will ever do. One recent example: the worry over period tracking apps and the recent decisions of the US Supreme Court. Those apps are a weapon against citizens who, until yesterday, were not doing anything illegal.

All tracking is bad, and the FCC should do something about it all.

It’s not a disaster, because in Germany there is Roman law, as opposed to America’s common law. It’s different and it makes a sentence something much less disastrous.

This stats are bad and this article doesn’t account for a few points:

- in Italy the amount of jobs that are carried illegally, without a contract, is huge. Particularly when you’re young or in certain sectors, having a contract is a dream. The state counts these illegal workers as unemployed.

- in general, the work market is toxic. There is no minimum wage and salaries are so low and work conditions so shitty that, sometimes, people feel it might not be worth it

Really, the country has so many structural problems that these stats can’t be just read in such a superficial way.

I'd be careful making such statements without data. For example, one could wonder if what you observe is a correlation, but not a causation: cities that are close to the sea are rich, as seas allow easy trade. And cities that are close to the sea have a good climate, obviously.

Preview is amazing and I miss it very dearly, now that I'm not running macOS anymore. There's simply nothing like it anywhere else. The amount of things it can do, and what a sleek UI.

I only suffered a bit during the El Capitan-Sierra era, as I think they rewrote the PDF engine and there were some regressions. Anyway, it's the best and I wish something like that existed elsewhere.

On Linux, GNOME's pdf viewer could be close to it, but it is lacking all the annotation features except for highlights. KDE's Okular is a bit better, but it's UI is bad. On Windows, there's just nothing like it. I use Sumatra, but I miss Preview all the time.

It has happened to me that my nice and clean PDF was rejected because my signature was digitally applied. I can definitely see a use case for this!

You can download the appimage from the website or you can install it using flatpak. Then set up an alias for "neovim" pointing either to the appimage or to the flatpak command.