thastings

It's odd to me that Asimov isn't mentioned, because most of his works are centered around human ingeniuity and its applications to reach optimistic outcomes for humanity.

Even if I would not read it back to back on release, it would be a pleasure to have a reliable and citable reference on hand. Whenever I stumble upon new complex problems, outside of the regular, often fairly repetitive statistical questions of my field, I need to rely on many searches and LLM queries to find my answer. I wonder if a book could actually replace all that, but it would be my first place to check.

From personal experience, many apps work suprisingly well on Phosh. The thing keeping me from using a Droidian phone with Phosh was a seemingly device-specific issue with answering regular phone calls. Kind of ironic that the linux phone could do many apps from FlatHub flawlessly with touch and everything, but not regular phone stuff. Nevertheless, the smartphone part is handled quite well with the Settings app, the quick toggles, the support for flatpaks, and so on, especially with Wayland where the android ecosystem is within reach.

If I read correctly, you identified the lack of smarthpone-level apps and distro as the limiting factor. In my opinion, the lack of sufficiently powerful but still open hardware is what we miss. Mainline linux with proper hardware support is pretty good but not complete on the Snapdragon 845, a 9 y/o platform. Anything newer? Nearly impossible without some android-specific layers (such as libhybris in the case of Droidian). Currently mid-high level hardware with PinePhone-like openness would probably let Phosh (and Plasma-Mobile, SXMO etc.) distros strive. The smart features, as in the apps, are mostly there.

This a link to an article that takes place in the Fallout Universe. I hope that the year in brackets shows well enough that posting this is just a joke in connection with current events.

Droidian[0] currently supports a relatively new Motorola phone[1]. A Snapdragon 8+ gen 1 device, so the performance isn't bad, and most features seem to work, including Waydroid. I've noticed incoming phone calls causing a glitch where the call can't be answered, but other than that, daily drivable. Just like a PinePhone, only more powerful. In my region it can be had for ~€250 brand new.

[0] https://droidian.org/ [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPhone-by-Motorola-...

Thanks for this! Haven't heard of this agent yet, but it really seems promising.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I must add this: when we work and focus, especially when using digital screens, we tend to blink a lot less frequently. If tear composition is not good or there are other exacerbating factors (e.g. an AC with high flow), the break-up of the tear film can easily lead to eyestrain and even blurry vision. In such situations, preservative-free artificial tear drops 3-5x a day can lead to pretty good results. In some cases, one needs to try a few, each for a week or two, before finding the correct one. Pro tip: any eye drop can cause discomfort for a few seconds, especially if the dry eye symptoms have persisted for a long time.

Further reading: https://eyewiki.org/Dry_Eye_Syndrome

I got a PSP-3000 during high school, and loved it. In addition to playing native and PS1 games, it was a very powerful media player as well. Much more versatile than most phones at the time, especially with its nice, though not very hi-res, screen. The PSP wasn't very common in our area, but I managed to get some friends to get one, and we had a lot of fun with multiplayer too.

There were some games that had a feature called game sharing. This let you send a smaller version of the game, essentially a demo, to another PSP over wifi, and this let you at least try the experience without owning the game. Burnout Legends definitely did this, but I also remember it on some NFS and sports titles. I just found a list of games that did this.[0] Also, there were some good shooters as well, like Medal of Honor or Battlefront, with pretty nice maps, especially for a handheld. And for racing games, Gran Turismo was incredible with almost all GT5 tracks and 900+ cars present.

[0] https://www.lifewire.com/psp-games-with-gameshare-2792549

Despite the limitations, many games pulled off amazing graphics. Many in the thread compare it to the PS2, but that's unfair. Doing better than PS1 graphics in a handheld was quite an accomplishment back then. Interestingly, the quality of the assets in these games didn't have a chance to show on the 480x272 screen of the PSP. However, many games, including Bloodlines, Gran Turismo, both GTA's, just to name a few, look very close to PS2 when upscaled. So the work was very much put into these titles, and it shows, even after two decades.

I'm impressed! Bloodlines was the only AC I've ever finished completely, and even though the story was odd at some points, I found the gameplay and the graphics to be spot on for the platform. Very enjoyable for teenager me back then, and still holds up quite well. Doing this in 9 months... Just wow.

Tell us more! I still beleieve that the PSP is a killer platform, those games are beautiful with 60 fps mods at high resolutions. I never really stopped playing them, just moved them to my phone.

I can add that Linux is also pretty solid on Asus machines well, despite the company actively advocating for MS on their sites. I have an old G46, some i7-1065 Zenbook Flip, and a newish Zenbook with a 6800U. All of them running Debian 12 with GNOME or KDE, all hardware components supported. That also includes the sensors for tablet mode in the Flip! Also used to have an 8000 series Intel AsusPro something, same good support.

It takes around 1 to 2 years for the kernel to catch up on more stable distros, but I can wholeheartedly recommend Asus laptops for Linux use.

Exactly! The Minimal Phone[0] seems to be headed in a better direction in this sense, as the 'limitation' of that device is the screen being eink, but the OS is more or less vanila Android. Interestingly, I got used to using my regular LineageOS phone in reading mode (greyscale) with a similar effect: I used it less and my usage is more on the point than before.

[0] minimalcompany.com/

I'm really looking forward to this phone. However, their limited take on Android is very limiting, as a phone often needs to be at least a 2FA device as well. Without some support for Play Store/F-Droid, this can't really be one's only mobile device, which is sad. I love the overall design.

If you need to enter the BIOS: bring up the terminal, and write `systemctl reboot --firmware-setup` This reboots systemd-powered systems to the UEFI menu. May not work on other init systems, but SteamOS is based on Arch with systemd.

As others have already stated, without either actual paying users (not the celebrities) or some form of advertising costs can become very high quite fast.

Even though you are against all forms of advertising, some really privacy oriented form of it may be acceptable by your intended users. Some thoughts:

- Users need to disclose some topics/subtopics (either broad or even very niche interests)

- The ads need to be conformant to some predefined, non-intrusive style guide: maybe black-and-white or a limited color palette and font selection. This could lead to interesting and even creative ads on the platform

- Advertisers could get anonymized click-counts for their specific categories, and maybe some other category-based info, but user data would be immediately aggregated and not used for specific targeting

- Base users would see 1/3 ads in their feeds, but some payments could reduce this to 1/5, 1/8, all the way to zero.

This approach might provide the intended privacy benefits with much less noise, but also not alienate the average user that expects social to be free of any cost.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I must add COSMIC here, as most comparisons seem to occur between GNOME and KDE. I've used the former for years, but slowly realized that needing to use various extensions to achieve a usable desktop is just plain wrong. Then I switched to KDE Plasma for a year or two, and it also felt off a bit, partly due to the overwhelming number of options with often odd defaults. Fonts were awesome though, and so was Dolphin compared to Nautilus. Finally, the week the alpha was released, I installed the COSMIC version of Pop, and never looked back. Why? Because it has the correct amount of desktop-related settings for me (and hopefully many others as well). These settings are: - dock or panel or both? - place them anywhere - populate them however you want

In this sense, GNOME is too strict and inflexible. Plasma, on the other hand, lets me create the look I'm used to without adding extensions, but also feels "wobbly." This wobbliness comes from the overwhelming amount of tickboxes, radio buttons and whatelse almost calling for interaction to change stuff. COSMIC fixed my problems of the duopoly and feels stable enough for daily use even in its alpha state.

Yes, a similar pattern can be seen in Toyotas, where the RAV4 became enormous, and the C-HR filled the gap of a similarly sized SUV. No. 1940[0] from xkcd comes to mind.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1940/

This is an awesome library. I've used it for multiple, mostly internal tools. The more complex one were a tool for cardiac action potential analysis and another for the evaluation of multiple choice tests. Complexity exploded over time, but that hinged on my coding skills, or lack thereof... PySimpleGUI did enable me to make GUI tools without getting my hands dirty outside my Python world, so kudos for that. Protip: the 'Reddit' theme looks way more modern compared to the other ones. Use that to get away from the 90s looks.

I used to work with a cardiac electrophysiology group. The software used for acquisition and analysis was quite old, written for DOS back in the mid-1990s. At acquisition, files were named like YYMMDDXX.0nn where XX stands for the setup where the acquisition took place, and the nn in the end was the ordinal number of each file. These were encrypted binary files, so we were completely dependent on the original software.

At analysis, files were containing multiple sweeps were averaged to reduce random noise (YYMMDDXX.Ann files), then these files were exported as a CSV-like series of time-voltage paires (YYMMDDXX.Tnn files). Tables containing the calculated variables were also generated, and exported (YYMMDD.Nnn files). The fun part is that these files had to be named MANUALLY. Each and every one of them. I can't stress hard enough how repetitive this got... We generated double-digit number of files every day, and analyzing each file thorougly required around 30-50 keypresses to move around in the menu and to name the files. Lucky for me, no mouse use was required, and keypresses could at least be automated.

I used DOSBox on Debian to do the analysis, and I ended up creating a bash script that could automatically analyze whole folders of these files in a few minutes. To achieve this, I generated xmacro files that would be played back while the DOSBox window was opened. Opening the file was also put in these xmacro files. The generation of the files was wrapped inside a bash script that kept track both of the files in the folder and of the files generated by the analysis. If a file was supposed to be there but some something broke inside DOSBox, it would just stop playing the macro for the next file, so it could be restarted relatively easily.

A few months later, I met the guy who wrote the software for our team, and asked him if he could write us a script to unpack the binaries into CSVs. From there, I could come up with my own completely automated solution for analysis, and everything was much-much faster. I also showed him the macro-monster I created. I'm still not sure if he was amazed or he just thought that I was impatient.

Reminds me of an Asimov short story where the world's whole economy was managed by four supercomputers [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict

Exactly, came here to write this. Disclosing the contribution of ChatGPT is quite important though from a transparency standpoint. I wouldn't mind seeing it in the methods section either.

It's quite odd, as I tried with a few devices from the local network, it seemed offline. Even a down detector[0] showed it to be offline, but I can access it via mobile date. ISP issue maybe?

[0]: https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/microsoft.com.html

Sorry if this was already mentioned, a quick search didn't turn up exact matches to what would be my $0.02.

A simple and relatively safe option would be to go into a computer store that has many machines that can also be tried. Look for a machine with something like 11th gen Intel or AMD 5600U/5800U CPU-s with enough RAM for your needs and decent build quality – this is why it'd be the best to do it in person.

If you find a machine you're happy with regarding its specs and build quality, just throw a reliable GNU+Linux OS on it (Debian with Budgie has been my go-to choice lately), and enjoy your hardware. If you plan on gaming, AMD discrete GPUs will cause less headaches, but nVidia drivers can also be easily installed if you follow the tutorial for your distro of choice.

TLDR: 1–2 year old hardware in a decent chassis running GNU+Linux will likely make you pretty happy for a lot less money.

EDIT: I see Dell being recommended everywhere... All the dead motherboards I've seen in laptops were only in Dells. If you choose a Dell, be sure to get some excellent return policy with it, but even then you may be left without a laptop for a while in the case of failure. This is not the case with business-oriented models though, but Asus, Lenovo, MSI, and even Clevo have proven to be more reliable in my experience. The build quality vaires between brands and model lines, so that you need to experience in person.

Being a fan of the good old Codemasters racing games, I've always wished for an open-world game containung the combined areas and tracks of DiRT 1–3 and maybe DiRT Rally 1–2, as well as some GRID originals connected with NFS Hot Pursuit 2010-style huge highways.

If the roads had enough intersections, a random race could be defined on the existing map instead of dynamically creating a new road for each race, as in DIRT4.

Basically, this would be a Criterion-style (Burnout Paradise, NFS Hot Pursuit 2010, Most Wanted 2012) racing game with Codies physics and visual style. I'd be a fan of that.

This is a very important point. Xiaomi is selling premium phones with unreal amount of ads (like im their Calculator app...), but these phones have amazing support from the communities, both from Lineage and upcoming alternatives like Ubuntu Touch. So for cost-conscious, privacy-oriented people, Xiaomi is a good option. And so are the Pixels, because they also recieve similar community support, and unlocking the bootloader is a single command.

In the end of the day, every company have their own incentives (Google, Xiaomi or Apple), but the users still have power over Android, while that is so not the case for Apple and iOS.

Edit: fixed typo

What sort of error did you see, if any? I had a similar issue, but a wiping the disk and setting up partitions again fixed it.

I use the exact same setup, works like a charm. I can definitely recommend it for anyone concerned with the privacy issues of current mobile OSes. Furthermore, it never feels limited after getting used to this suit of apps, which may take up to a week at most.