If it relies on SIM cards that means it doesn’t work at all with regular computers or when the device connects over WiFi, right? Seems kinda useless.

Of course, all age verification checks on the Internet are useless regardless but this Japanese method seems extra useless.

Spellmonger.

I wish the author would stop writing side stories about characters no one cares about and focus on the MC and progressing the main story forwards.

Vegan Linux users can compile their own protein from source.

Their purity level is so high that they can kill -9 anyone wearing a leather belt with just a glance.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of cool and useful stuff you can do with KDE Plasma (and Kwin).

Another tip: Did you know that KRunner (Alt-Space) can do unit conversions? Type Alt-Space and 10cm or something like that and it’ll give you that value in inches.

Another: You can bind shortcuts to mouse buttons like Ctrl-Alt-Right (click) And Ctrl-Alt-Left to say, switch desktops right/left.

You can type Ctrl-i in Dolphin to filter files. So if you’re looking at your enormous downloads directory and you want to see all the .png files you can type Ctrl-i, png and it’ll only show you files with png in their name.

KDE’s “get hot new stuff” framework works with Dolphin “actions” (context menu file handlers) so you can go into the settings—>Context Menu and click on “Download New Services” to browse tons of free scripts/tools that let you do things like file conversions, write disk images to USB drives, get checksums, etc.

I actually made a personal script that converts videos to looping .webp files (or just sets WebP files to loop forever). So I can right click on a .WebP, .webm, .mp4, etc and it’ll run ffmpeg on it in the background.

Every decade since 1999 (the year of the Linux desktop—for me) I spend a few weeks trying out all the hot new shit in terms of desktop environments. I’ll switch to Gnome for a few days, get disappointed at how much I miss from KDE, and then try one of the newer ones like Cosmic. Then I’ll play with the latest versions of the classics (xfce) and marvel that they still make you configure everything in a single file or they still lack basic shit that normal people want like a clipboard manager.

All the actually useful or just plain really, really nice/handy stuff is built into KDE Plasma. I’ve been using so many of those features for so long, I can’t fathom having to go back to a world without say, being able to navigate the filesystems on all my other PCs via ssh:// (and other KIO workers).

I remember when KDE 2.0 came out and it added support for kioslaves (now called KIO Workers) and it completely changed how I viewed desktops. That was in the year 2000. How is it that literally nothing else (not other FOSS desktops nor Windows or Macs) has implemented the same feature?

It’s not just the file manager, either. I can access ssh:// (or any other KIO worker) from any file dialog! The closest thing is shared drives in Windows but even that isn’t nearly as flexible or feature rich (or efficient, haha).

Then there’s the clipboard manager (klipper), Activities, and a control panel that lets you customize everything to extreme degrees. It even supports fractional scaling and has supported that since forever. I remember when they introduced that feature over a decade ago and it still blows my mind to this day just how forward thinking the devs were.

Monitors since forever have had a different X DPI than the Y DPI. Yet only the KDE devs bothered to both query the monitor’s DDC info to figure that out and set it correctly when the desktop starts.

There’s other features that drive me nuts when I don’t have them! For example, the ability to disable global shortcuts on specific windows. So if I’ve got a remote desktop open to my work I can send Super-. (Win-.) and that’ll open the Windows emoji picker in the remote desktop instead of the KDE one (locally). And it will remember this setting for that application!

I can make any window I want stay above others temporarily to take notes, enter values into the calculator, or just turn any window into something like a HUD (you can control any window’s transparency on the fly!).

It even supports window tiling! A feature most people aren’t aware of. Like, if you’re already running KDE, why bother with a tiling window manager? You’ve already got it (though the keyboard shortcuts to manage the tiling layout in real time are lacking).

TL;DR: KDE Plasma is the best desktop in existence across all platforms and this is easy to prove with empircal evidence.

Bismuth oxyselenide? You mean it can cure both indigestion and get rid of dandruff‽

The Void already has claims to all of us. The Void actually enjoys and needs the screaming, so it’ll be patient and wait until your warranty runs out; when your particular version stops getting patches and reaches EOL.

When that happens, it’ll welcome you, and you’ll get sent to /dev/random instead of the recycle bin or the trash can.

Note: You’ll have to wait for enough entropy in order to get to your next destination. How long that takes depends on how many people are screaming into the void at that time 🤷

No, it could be true. AI—especially with .NET—tends to generate exceptionally verbose code. Especially if you use “AI best practices” such as telling the AI to ensure 100% code coverage. Then there’s the, “let’s not use any 3rd party libraries, because we are Microsoft” angle.

.NET is already one of the most absurdly verbose languages (only other widely-used language that’s worse is Java). Copilot could easily push it over the top 🤣

All it would take would be for Microsoft to have AI rewrite some of the core libraries.

Working on (some) AI stuff professionally, the open source models are the only models that allow you to change the system prompt. Basically, that means that only open source models are acceptable for a whole lot of business logic.

Another thing to consider: There’s models that are designed for processing: It’s hard to explain but stuff like Qwen 3 “embedding” is made for in/out usage in automation situations:

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B

You can’t do that effectively with the big AI models (as much as Anthropic would argue otherwise… It’s too expensive and risky to send all your data to a cloud provider in most automation situations).

This doesn’t make sense when you look at it from the perspective of open source models. They exist and they’re fantastic. They also get better just as quickly as the big AI company services.

IMHO, the open source models will ultimately what pops the big AI bubble.

There’s going to be some hilarious memes/videos when these get deployed:

• Dominoes!
• Someone walking up and kicking one over in protest, only to be surprised AF when another one trips over it and they start to pile up.
• News story that reveals the “AI” behind these things stands for “Analog Intelligence” or “Actually Indians”.

Yep! There’s really only ONE operating system that doesn’t do rsync over SSH. Can you guess which one? 😁

BTW: FolderSync does it on Android for free… https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.lite (only OK-ish GUI but it works).

I just use rsync over ssh via a cron job 🤷

It’s been working fine for over 20 years on all my various PCs.

You’ve obviously never tried to get any given .NET project working in Linux. There’s .NET and then there’s .NET Core which is a mere subset of .NET.

Only .NET Core runs on Linux and nobody uses it. The list of .NET stuff that will actually run on .NET Core (alone) is a barren wasteland.

If it’s written in C# that’s a huge turn-off though because that means it’s likely to only run on Windows.

I mean, in theory, it could run on Linux but that’s a very rare situation. Almost everything ever written in C# uses Windows-specific APIs and basically no one installs the C# runtime on Linux anymore. It’s both enormous and a pain in the ass to get working properly for any given C# project.

As an information security professional and someone who works on tiny, embedded systems, knowing that a project is written in Rust is a huge enticement. I wish more projects written in Rust advertised this fact!

Benefits of Rust projects—from my perspective:

• Don’t have to worry about the biggest, most common security flaws. Rust projects can still have security flaws (anything can) but it’s much less likely for certain categories of flaws.
• Super easy to build stuff from scratch. Rust’s crates ecosystem is fantastic! Especially in the world of embedded where it’s a godsend compared to dealing with C/C++ libraries.
• It’s probably super low overhead and really fast (because Rust stuff just tends to be like that due to the nature of the language and that special way the borrow checker bitches at you when you make poor programming choices haha).
• It’s probably cross-platform or trivially made cross-platform.

AI adds too many details. When a person draws an anime/cartoon character they will usually put in minimal details or they’ll simply paste the character on to an existing background (that could’ve been drawn by a different artist).

AI doesn’t have human limitations so it’ll often add a ton of unnecessary details to a given scene. This is why the most convincing AI-generated anime pictures are of one or two characters in a very simple setting (e.g. a plain street/sidewalk) or even a white or gradient background.

Humans can tell when art was put together by different artists. Such as when the background is a completely different style. AI doesn’t differentiate like that and will make the entire image using the exact style given by the prompt. So it’ll all look like it was “drawn” using the same exact style… Even though anime/cartoons IRL aren’t that uniform.

I guess it’s just too late for all those children that viewed porn. The piles of their dead bodies must be enormous!

Crank that knob up to 11: Using multiple computers simultaneously to manage all your shit—with some having special hardware dedicated to the task!

You only use four virtual desktops‽

😬