Rose

My first instances were mastodon.lol and kbin.social. Guess I was unlucky.

I started out with Slackware 3.0. It broke all the time. Tried Debian. Was happy ever since. Tried Ubuntu on laptops but later decided it’s just Debian with extra steps so I went with Debian after all.

I’m always like “du shows disk usage of files, and df shows how much of disk is free”.

“YESS! YESSSSS! GIVE IN TO YOUR EMACS SIDE!!!”

Google Search really sucks these days. I can’t find any images of Richard M. Stallman as a Sith lord, even though I’m sure vi fans have made several edits by now. …It’s been a while.

The only “real” computer (that is, a non-SBC one) I’ve installed Linux lately on was a work laptop. Touchpad, GPU and Wi-Fi worked straight off in Debian. Though I think it only installed Nouveau, never bothered with the real Nvidia driver. And it had some weird thermal regulation issues. Once it somehow left the filesystem in “plz boot in single user and fsck with a toothpick” state. The day before my internship ended, the thing crashed hard for some reason and took the filesystem with it. (Never use btrfs I guess?)

Linus was a bit of a trendsetter what comes to standing desks. In an interview he also commented on the walls, saying the paint colour is also used in mental institutions because it has a very calming effect on the human mind. (Goodness knows Linus needs all the chill he can muster.)

What Fediverse could use was some kind of equivalent of Linktree. “Here’s my personal accounts on Fediverse. Here’s some related to my projects. Here’s some other random links.”

Because currently I’m like “maybe check out my Mastodon profile, it has links” - it works, kinda, but I’m not sure it’s the best solution. For example, you could include support for this in the fedi software, so once you specify where your link page is, it’d pull the links and show them on your profile.

…I know, this would be too beautiful for this world and it’d get run over by spammers. But for glorious few days we’d have sensible Fediverse profiles! Think about it!

Private use of the copyrighted works is pretty much a separate topic entirely.

And while the law isn’t settled on the topic, it’s wrong to argue AI training is something that happens entirely in a private setting, especially when that work is made available publicly in some form or another.

Sure, there’s a problem with the current copyright laws that has to be addressed. It’s quite similar to the “TiVo loophole” in OSS licenses. It was addressed, and certainly not in favour of the loophole exploiters. That one could be fixed on licence level because it was ultimately a licence question, but the AI training question, however, needs to be taken to the legislation level. Internationally, too.

You either use Debian, or Debian With Extra Steps, so I went with Debian

Er, yes, my point was copyright very much concerns what you’re allowed to do with data. But that goes beyond distribution. Derivative works are a complicated topic.

My point stands, whether you technically can copy stuff has no bearing on whether you’re allowed to use it and for what purpose.

The way copyright law works, by default you don’t have any right to make use of anything, even if it’s posted publicly. Why do people allow Fediverse platforms to do the thing they do? Leniency on their part.

Gathering data from Mastodon for AI training is technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally justified. Many people will object to that. Many already do!

“systemd is the worst implementation of init, except all those other inits that have been tried from time to time” -Churchill, if he had been a nerd

Pinterest is mostly useful for saving images from the web, so you can keep all images from related topics together and have a handy backup too.

I mostly use it for saving all the cute turtle photos I found.

Unemployed people use LinkedIn mostly for the job board. The employed people use LinkedIn for the social media features, and oh boy

What do you like most about BookWyrm? Which features do you use most frequently?

Been using BookWyrm for a few months. I add books to my shelves and track reading progress, mostly.

I loved it when I realised that it just lets me add all random books and edit data from the get-go. The service may not have all of the books I have, but I can just add them.

Are there any features or interactions that you find frustrating or unintuitive? What features do you think are missing or could be improved?

BookWyrm absolutely needs far better abilities to split/merge/consolidate author and book information and do more of the Librarian Stuff. The current system of “you can bring in data and stuff just sits there on its own” is nice if you want to manage a personal library and track individual book progress, but a well-maintained book database is an entirely different beast, and pretty much mandatory for enabling more social stuff.

Also, the ability to import book information from sources is nice, but could use some more integration to a whole lot of other places. I really loved LibraryThing’s integration to bazillion different library services.

One minor quibble I have about BookWyrm is that there’s still the notion of “shelves” and that one book can be on one shelf and different editions of one book don’t count. This is good for casual use - “oh yeah I read this one” - but it’s not enough for true book nerdery. I may have a physical, ebook and audiobook edition of one work in multiple languages and the UI doesn’t show me that yes, I own/have borrowed these exact editions and I have reading activity on this and that and that one.

On that note, yeah, should also have some kind of labeling system for individual editions, along the lines of “I own a copy of this and I’ve stored this in the closet” vs “Borrowed this off the library” vs “I had this one, before the drama queen of an author removed it from Kindle”.

How do you feel about the interface (design, readability, navigation)?

It was a little bit confusing at first, but once I got over the initial weirdness I realised it wasn’t that much harder to use than, say, Goodreads. I don’t really have much complaints at this point. It’s good at what it does.

Do you mainly use BookWyrm on a mobile device or on a computer? And why?

Book nerdery is a big girl thing so I use computer for this. The mobile UI is adequate but could use a dedicated app.

Do you also use other platforms (e.g., Goodreads, StoryGraph, LibraryThing)? If yes, what makes you prefer one over the other?

I used LibraryThing long ago, and Goodreads more recently, both with librarian privileges (i.e. ability to edit data, which BookWyrm gives you from the get-go). I think Goodreads is pretty good at what it does, but it did have some mild jank, and of course, I always got the impression that I was doing unpaid labour for Bezos. So I think I’ll go with BookWyrm in the long run, thanks.

I agree. It’s quite unlikely the setup will finish in 33 minutes. Not really, anyway.

Long ago I was exploring some MUD, and it was the usual fantasy game experience. But one area was basically a weird dimension representing the server itself. Instead of monsters it had zombie processes you could kill. And child processes looking at you sadly. Trying to kill them was one of those “top 10 video game moments that made you feel like a total monster” things.

In the late 1990s/early 2000s, there was some satire article about how to get most effective Linux support. Just write an angry news/blog article about how Linux sucks because it doesn’t (insert the thing you’re having problems with here). You bet someone will immediately respond how you’re an idiot and you should (insert detailed explanation of how to fix the thing here).

Debian girl here. We may not have updated anything in 5 years but boy howdy are things stable or what.

Me, I’m old, so I just keep using apt-get, because that’s all we had back in the day, and I never bothered to learn what’s the big deal about apt. It’s just a frontend, isn’t it?