The web is designed for humans to use, so if Atlas can monitor us - how we book train tickets for example - it can learn how to better navigate these kinds of processes.

That is called malware. Or at the very least, Open AI should be paying the users for basically getting their browsing data for free, not other way around.

Second, I object to it being called a Google killer in the article. It is based on Chromium whose future is basically in Google’s hands right now for all Intents and purposes. The days of multiple Web browsers are gone. We have the same thing in new clothing. Opera ditched it’s rendering engine for Chromium, MS ditched Trident for Chromium.

Currently, there are basically only three real browser engines : Chromium, Gecko which powers Firefox Derivatives and Safari(Blinkit? I am not sure of its exact name). Even if Open AI’s new browser (or Perplexity 's for that matter) takes market by storm, they will remain dependent on Google because the underlying code is. They can’t be truly independent unless they have their separate engine. And if the new Ladybird project shows one thing, it is that shipping a new browser might be easy, but a new rendering engine is very tough.

Feel free to DM.

I wasn’t expecting tommydan from YouTube to be mentioned here :p. Best of all he does, what companies themselves couldn’t do, maintain the original aspect ratio. I remember that Shemaroo restored certain old Hindi films but the original aspect ratio for them was 4:3 whilst the restored ran into 16:9.

In fact, I have been seeing the odd old Hindi film from an unexpected source. The Russian site Ok. I am still not sure if it is a social media site or not since the English UI is not there for me but for all Intents and purposes, it is used to upload videos only. Some guy ended up uploading whole filmography of Rajesh Khanna on the site (much of it mirrored later to Archive.org). Whilst the irony remains that there is probably not a single legal hub to see the lesser known films.

Heck, I was hunting an out of print (like literally unavailable to stream or purchase anywhere short of anyone having the original CD/DVD) 1996 film and the only way was to pirate it (from a single source).

In some cases, piracy becomes an act of media preservation ( cues back to when BBC wiped some Doctor Who episodes in the late sixties and only way few were gotten back was because some folks had gotten audio transcribed or something at home).

From Kinks to Camel to obscure Krautrock stuff like Dissidenten, Out of Focus, Embryo. Ironically I have < 50 Hindi songs in my collection because the era I like the most [50s - 60s], good quality stuff is hard to come by. Like the files even on Soulseek or torrents are so incredibly compressed that it is a pity. The vocals sound so tinny that one wonders that how did the original masters sounded like.

I didn’t knew foobar2000 was available for mobile as well. I only knew it because it was so popular as a lightweight modular player for Windows. I used to be on Strawberry, a Clementine fork on Linux before moving to Deadbeef, which is like Foobar2000 but misses few features.

It is law of diminishing marginal utility. There would be more sonic distinguishness between a 64 kbps and a 128 kbps file, than say when making the same upgrade to 256 kbps. It becomes less and less obvious as one approaches 44.1 kHz/16 bit flac (beyond which it is useless to hoard unless one is mastering the albums themselves).

I have a DAC paired with Sennheiser IE 600 which is not audiophile level, but ought to be decent enough.

Either case, my point was not about audio quality and whether or not a person can distinguish a flac from say, 320 kbps mp3. Countless threads are made on that and viewpoints presented. My argument was that YouTube Music does not present first, to stream music in high quality and second, even if the quality was indistinguishable, there is no way to manage a library since most of the desktop third party clients remain without login.

Once can stream audio from YouTube via terminal on Linux but problem is all of that is limited to 128 kbps AAC. There is no way to stream proper 256 kbps AAC that YouTube Music Premium provides. One can download such streams via yt-dlp (it needs to be given authorization cookies) but there is currently no way to stream high quality audio from YouTube without using the webpage.

Could you tell me an alternative that allows for third party clients? On Spotify, I can configure a terminal client even on Linux and stream music with very low overhead [contrast with YTMusic with required a permanent browser tab opened]. Yes, local media streaming can do that but there is only so much space at one time on my HDD.

I moved to weechat. It is terminal only. I had setup some keybindings either ways on hexchat to navigate faster via keyboard between channels / servers and weechat can replicate them (albeit it takes a little time to read documentation in this case). Many folks also are hard on users of irssi but weechat met my simplistic needs.

Not to mention almost any distro will have a packaged version of weechat in its repos.

I don’t generally use LinkedIn. I opened it today after long time and got logged out and was shown this.

It is ironical because Microsoft owns LinkedIn but for rescuing a Microsoft account (which is arguably more important because emails at the least are linked to it. And then there is One drive, Authenticator apps and what not) none of this is required. But for rescuing what is essentially a fruitless social network, they need an ID.

I don’t understand why Mozilla is so smitten with this extension. They already removed it from AMO, why are policing it now. A tiny minority of folks use Firefox(as a percentage of market share) worldwide and only some part of it use this extension. Why go after it so hard?

They are policing it today, tomorrow they may say uBlock Origin violates our policies as well. Sure, technically one might be able to install via changing about:config toggle but that’s a bridge too far for most users.

It might seem I am making a huge mental jump for equating a paywall bypass extension to an adblocker extension, but in the eyes of corporations, both kind of users are equally loathed by them.

If you have a YTM subscription, it does not make sense to play in Outer tune. Any YTM Streaming client streams in 128 kbps whilst YTM Premium streams at 256 kbps when set at High.

One can download songs at 256 kbps though if they have YTM Premium via yt-dlp using setcookiesoption. This is useful if someone has large custom playlists where searching via Soulseek is a chore.

Of course, it made a mockery of everything you know of Windows because it’s not like Windows. Neither is it meant to be used like one nor is it heading in that direction (not to mention that Windows is one monotonous thing, like if you know your hands across one install of Windows, you know it all. The same is not true about Linux. A Void Linux user might still not be as adept at a Gentoo install).

You are contradicting yourself. First you call it magic and then you call it not very deep. If it’s the latter, why do so many production servers run on Linux?

Some Linux distros like Debian have a fantastic reputation for stability. Sure, bugs still exist. I personally struggle with a distro agnostic bug that breaks workflows often on my current setup. But things have come a long way. And it’s better than Windows non customizable privacy invading approach any day.

The twin advantages Windows has is wrt games (though that is slowly being covered) and more importantly, specialized software. I know folks IRL who have to use Windows just because their work requires it.

Google is pushing towards WFF (Watch Face Format) styles. The new Wear OS 5 watches, IIRC, (not the upgraded ones) didn’t even support Facer or Watchmaker initially.

The Watch faces published on Play Store, majority of them, are now in WFF format which translates to improved battery life as well.

I am almost sure he meant it as just kidding as well but I couldn’t oversee Vim in an emacs post :p

Is jk a subtle reference to Vim navigation!!

I remember using Cent OS (dual booting it alongside Debian) multiple years back. I think it had more or less feature parity with RHEL then and meant for personal use case unlike RHEL.

Too bad it was discontinued. I think the closest fork of it is Rocky Linux.

It seems like you updated your webpage in the wake of the meme incident. But it has made it unbearable to read. Whilst I was able to read the article in reader mode, the ~ page is virtually an eye sore to browse right now.

While Void isn’t exactly under rated ( it is very highly rated on distro watch for one ), for someone looking for a systemd free distro or a light weight one in general, it is a decent choice. The repos aren’t as broad based as Arch but they do have newer versions of the software that they host.

I could be wrong, but aren’t Linux Mint and Pop OS ultimately based on Debian? (Mint is based on Ubuntu which in return has a Debian base). Debian was my main entry way to the Linux world and there is a reason why so many distros are built on it. Very old as well (not as old as Slack ware but Slack ware isn’t exactly noob friendly).

Whilst YT-dlp supports many sites, it’s primary function is still downloading from YouTube and that doesn’t have flac. Even YouTube Music Premium only streams at 256 kbps Aac when set at high, I think.

Using one of those deezer or qobuz bots might be better incase someone really wishes for flac. Or if one wants to invest time, then Soulseek is always there.