Russ

That would have the same effect as just taking the site offline…

No one is giving a random site their photo ID.

Oh interesting, it’s been a while since I have tried to use Apple TV (roughly 7 years or so - I don’t use any Apple devices anymore), this wasn’t available at the time so I’m glad to see there’s finally some native support.

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 think they meant Apple’s “tvOS” - which powers the Apple TV set top box.

There’s no client for it, if I had to take a guess it’s likely due to the costs of doing so.

Edit: Whoops, it appears I’m a bit out of date on this.

According to another user in here, blocking on Mastodon actually works. So seems like it is possible to do in the Fediverse.

I was not aware of this, but their implementation of how they do this does bring up the limitation I mentioned. The other user cannot see your posts only if you are on the same server:

If you and the blocked user are on the same server, the blocked user will not be able to view your posts on your profile while logged in.

I actually thought blocks were public already.

They’re not, well - the operator of your instance could go into the database and view it that way in the same way that they can see your email address. But aside from someone who has database access to your instance, blocks are not public. What is public is the list of defederated (“blocked” so to speak) instances for an entire instance (this can be viewed by going to /instances of any instance), which might be what you were thinking of?

And personally I don’t see how it would be an issue if people that I haven’t blocked can see who I’ve blocked.

How exactly would you enforce that, though? If your blocks were public, all the person who you’ve blocked would need to do is open a private browsing window and look at your profile to see that they’ve been blocked.

If we’re looking at blocks as being a safety feature, I would think that having your blocks broadcasted to every single instance would be classified as harmful and a breach of your privacy. This is why although an instance that you register with has to have your email address that you signed up with, they don’t broadcast it to all other instances (same with the encrypted value of your password) - because otherwise it would effectively be public.

Perhaps I’ve just got the wrong stance, but considering that you can never block someone from viewing your content with an absolute guarantee (if the blocks were broadcasted, you still couldn’t prevent someone from just simply logging out, or standing up their own instance and collecting the data anyways) I would not consider that tradeoff to be worthwhile. Not that my stance has any weight since I’m not a maintainer for Lemmy (or any of the Fediverse software), but I wouldn’t be surprised if that has at least come up to those who are developing the various Fediverse software.

Aside from the rest of the discussion that has already occurred here, I’m not actually sure how this would work from a technical perspective.

You and I are on two completely different instances, if I were to block you, how is your instance supposed to know this in order to stop you from reading my comment?

The only way I could see that working is if the list of users you blocked were federated too, and effectively made public (like votes currently are) - which seems counterproductive to the problem at hand.

Then what happens if you post in a community where someone you’ve blocked is a moderator? Or if you block the admin of another instance? If you can “cloak” yourself from being moderated by just blocking them, that seems like an exploit waiting to happen. As far as I’m aware, on Reddit blocking a user doesn’t hide your comments from them - but they can no longer reply to them, and I assume this is why that is the case. Unless that has very recently changed.

The biggest difference between Lemmy (and all software within the Fediverse - for example, I’m pretty sure Mastodon is this way as well), is that there is not one singular authoritative server. Actions like this need to be handled on all instances, and that’s impossible to guarantee. A bad actor running an instance could just rip out the function that handles this, and then it’s moot. I mean, they wouldn’t even need to do that - they’d have the data anyways.

You could enforce it if both users are on the same instance I suppose, but this just seems like it would only land with the blocking feature being even more inconsistent.

This can sometimes come at the cost of intuitiveness however. As an example that just happened to me the other day, I was using Pinta which uses libadwaita and had opened an image to make some modifications to it.

All was going well until I wanted to save a new copy of it (and not override the original). The toolbar has all of these functions on it, open, save, undo/redo, etc… but not Save As.

Apparently there’s a tiny little overflow button on the far right side, click it and you get a whole bunch of functions - one of them being the holy “Save As” option I was looking for. I almost went down the route of making a copy of the image outside Pinta and then just overwriting the original.

Apparently the idea of making a copy of an image is blasphemy. Even Microsoft Word when they had first moved to the Ribbon UI made the save button have a little dropdown right under the save option to reveal Save As.

Don’t get me wrong, I love how some libadwaita apps look. Mission Center for example? Chef’s Kiss - but it’s a very simple application that all I need to do is open it to have a quick look at the very pretty looking graphs. Although the latest update seems to have gotten rid of being able to have the sidebar open persistently (now taking an extra click to change between performance graphs)… But I still need to double check to see if that’s intended vs being a bug before I judge that too harshly.

I do wonder why Valve hasn’t enabled it by default. It’s only defaulted on SteamOS and in fact, I believe they removed the option to turn it off on SteamOS recently…

Ooh! Is that swap implementation the default? I got back into LE for the launch of the newest season, and while I haven’t had any problems on my Ally or Deck yet, I just finished the campaign so I’m barely into endgame - I hear the issues start as you get deeper into monos…

Funnily enough, I use Cachy on my desktop, but I don’t recall seeing anything regarding this, but I’m definitely happy to run it on my Ally too if it helps avoid future potential crashes.

I definitely don’t doubt their utility, despite my facetious comment regarding them - however it’s not likely I’ll ever be able to actually appreciate them (in this lifetime at least) due to my struggles with understanding far “simpler” areas of math haha.

I can only speak for myself, but honestly I’ve never been able to figure out that root of why it’s so complex to me and difficult to keep track of / understand. The only thing that seems to have a “rational” explanation to me is… Selective memory. It has been a burning question to myself for so long.

For a while I just said “It’s too arbitrary and not logical” except math is built upon logic - 1 + 1 is clearly 2 because if I hold one finger on one hand then bring another finger from my other hand I have two fingers held.

(Imaginary numbers though can fuck off)

I got into programming long ago because it is logical - there’s (almost) always a reason why a computer does $THING even if I can’t tell you, someone surely can. Though generally the answer is “someone told it to do the wrong thing”. If I dig deep enough, I can usually find the answer. My life is full of so many questions that I’ll probably never have the answer to, and I found refuge in the fact that I can get the answers here.

However… computers follow a set of rules, just like mathematicians do. So for me to call it arbitrary would just be wrong. I mean sure, a lot of the rules and formulas certainly seem arbitrary to me, there’s a reason why they are the way they are and it can be tracked down just like you can track down why a computer does $THING.

When it comes to numbers though, my brain just doesn’t seem to hold on to it properly. I can randomly recall weird functions and quirks in libraries that I use - even remember plenty of arbitrary “things” like Vim motions… Yet ask me what nine times seven is and I can’t tell you what the answer is without doing the weird finger trick.

So the only explanation that I can come up for that is just selective memory. I like computers and as such my brain is willing to actually memorize these things. Whereas I’ve never liked math and so my brain doesn’t see a reason to “memorize math”.

It really frustrates me because math and computer science intersect in a lot of ways, and I’ll always be held back by this. Games for example, they run really well on your GPU because GPUs happen to be excellent at math, specifically in parallel. Encryption? Fancy math equations! Almost everything at a low level comes down to math.

Similarly, for as much as I love logical things, I could never hold the concepts of logic gates in my head. I mean, logic is literally in the name! Even when I was heavily into Minecraft I couldn’t pick it up through Redstone.

As such, I think for me, the “logic” argument doesn’t hold up as much as I like to think it does. The analyst in me says that I want it to be something as logical as “math is illogical” because that’s easier to admit and sounds better than “I just don’t like math”. Even worse, perhaps that subconsciously stops me liking it, thus blocking myself from ever being able to excel at it… And yet, here we are (or rather, “here I am”).

For me personally the advantage is that since the editor is opened by your user, it has all of the same config that I’m used to (such as my souped up Neovim config).

Whereas if you sudo nvim /path/to/file then the editor is opened as root and you don’t have the same configuration.

Welcome to Lemmy!

For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn’t occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would’ve shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.

Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the “someone else is using the other computer” spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that’s more than fine - I’ve never been one to “proselytize” Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.

As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I’m not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.

If you hit Ctrl Alt Delete very quickly in succession (I believe it’s 7 times in a row) it will bail out from a stop job and proceed with shutting down

Learned that trick because I was so tired of seeing that occur ha. Along that research I swear I recall seeing that it’s a KDE/SDDM issue but I might be getting some wires crossed on that (and thus, don’t quote me/take my word on that 😅)

You absolutely do not need AI in order to sound different in one context versus another. I mean, I highly doubt most people on Lemmy speak to their bosses in the exact way that they write their comments here.

Hell, I’d be surprised if they spoke to their friends and family the same way all the time (yes, I’m aware that you can generally be more lax around friends - but there’s a time and place for it, whereas comments on message boards tend to just be lax all the time).

That very concept has been around far longer than “AI” has.

I really don’t think there was any malice intended by them. Pretty sure the intent was more along the lines of"Yes, it has gotten better. Here’s a quick demonstration using the current conversation as context." (which reads very similar to what they said)

They could’ve left it at “Yes it’s gotten better” but I suppose it’s similar to the idea of “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Rather than “Ugh your grammar is terrible.” Of course no one should expect perfect grammar on Lemmy or similar platforms.

(Unless I’m just missing a giant ‘whoosh’ moment here - in that case, I’m sorry)

I did get one of those at one point! Definitely no longer have it anymore, but it was really cool that Canonical provided those for quite a while (from what I know).

Ah, perhaps that’s what I’m missing. I do have a Windows install for playing the odd games every now and then that don’t support Linux, but I don’t actually back anything up since all of my games are via Steam and utilize Steam’s cloud saves for syncing (and these games are usually multiplayer online-only games and wouldn’t need syncing anyways). I know that when I originally used macOS (back during “Mountain Lion” I believe?) Time Machine did utilize an external disk, but I would’ve thought these days it also leveraged iCloud Drive.

I did know about Windows’ File History mechanism, but I also made the assumption that Windows tech would integrate with OneDrive since they’re made by the same company… doing a quick search though seems to indicate that it “should” be possible, but actually getting it to do so definitely doesn’t have a simple toggle like you’d expect.

That’s what I get for speaking about features I’ve not used myself, whoops!

I’m sure both Linux and (I know) Windows have something similar, but it’s not immediately active and trying to get you to save your stuff.

Funnily enough, Microsoft does try to do this with OneDrive, prompting you during OOBE. A lot of the tech space demonizes Microsoft for exactly this.

Which to be fair, a lot of that does come down to legitimate concerns (such as being far to eager about this even when you say “No” and not offering a “don’t ask me again”) - but at the same time, some of the push (likely) comes from a good place of trying to set up backups for users.

It’s definitely not completely altruistic - companies hardly ever are (cough cough, forced online accounts). But I also don’t think it’s as black and white as “Microsoft is bad for this”. And though even I complain about this, the same goes for Microsoft being aggressive with Windows Updates.

IIRC, flatpaks do work with NixOS so long as it’s enabled (and you’ve installed GNOME Software / Discover / etc - since I assume they’re not using the terminal to install programs, and that’s assuming that they don’t need more than a web browser).

So, if OP already set that up, then if Flathub has all you need, then it would make sense.

Though the Nix philosophy would disagree because that’s imperatively installing software rather than declaratively. You could probably wire up something to dump flatpak list to a file every so often and then load that in from configuration.nix or a Flake, but I’m not well versed in Nix at all haha