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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • I think the “trap” is to believe “we” can “win” once and for all.

    Under capitalism (and I’m not suggesting there are better systems, only highlight a core mechanism) there will always be competition to capture value, both customers and lawmakers who (should) protect them.

    There are countless examples but one of the most obvious on that topic if Microsoft itself with it’s sadly now classic EEE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish of which we can admire the comtemporary version with Github. Initially Github was acquired and no changed, nowadays a lot of basic functionalities, e.g. search within a repository are locked behind a login, there are more and more advertisements for Microsoft other products, e.g. CoPilot. That last product itself is questioning the foundation of free software and open source with its license washing process making unclear who did what, breaking provenance, etc.

    The same happened with Google acquiring Android but not locking it down more and more.

    The list could grow longer and longer, overall the point is to showcase a pattern : nothing is just “let” alone to grow on its own. It’s gradually captured and enshittified until there is nothing left but the name of a project because corporations exist only to extract more money. There is no moral, only an imperative for profit or their death.

    So… unfortunately we WILL have to keep on both building AND protecting what’s been built so far with newer and more powerful threats. Microsoft, Google, and all large corporations who advertise themselves as allies of free software and open source MUST be judge on what they actually do, not on what they claim.

    We have to push back and we will always have to. This year and the next.






  • utopiah@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThe founder of /e/os is anti-security
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    4 days ago

    Sadly FUD as ANYTHING that is NOT increasing profit for surveillance capitalism, i.e Google, Meta, etc is a win for privacy!

    Of course /e/OS could be better, GrapheneOS could also be better (including on security) but the big picture is that still ANY of those solutions is making surveillance capitalism, the loss of privacy for profit and power, less efficient. That’s good for all of us who, being on Lemmy or other federated instance, believe we do benefit from having more privacy, or at least not trading it away.

    TL;DR: be inclusive, bring others up, don’t be exclusive aiming for perfection none of us can attain.


  • I don’t think so. I think it takes 1 kid in the playground to find out about https://distrosea.com/ without understand what a container or VM even is, only discovering that somehow it works, to make us of it.

    Then the school admin will block it once there is a peak of traffic through the website, kids will discover proxies, someone will realize there is a business for it, make a free version with ads, etc. It’s going to be an arm race and the most dedicated kids, not necessarily the smartest or wisest, will figure it out. Eventually they’ll get the concepts behind the tools they mindlessly use until then, eventually find much better tools allowing them to bypass a lot more restrictions.

    I don’t see how a browser will be able to prevent this kind of usage. They might pass age related information to each page requesting it but it takes a single page to provide the capability without using the information to be enough. If a kid has a computer at home they can setup such a service themselves.







  • Can’t it source other LLM outputs as “verified source” and thus still say whatever sounds good, like any LLM? Providing “technical” verification, e.g. SHA, gives no insurance about the content itself being from a reputable source. I don’t think adding confidence and sourcing changes anything, the user STILL has to verify that whatever is provided is coherent and a third party is actually a good source. Thanks for making the process public though, doing better than OpenAI does.


  • utopiah@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlHow to install wine ?
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    14 days ago

    Most distributions include Wine AFAICT yet I’d argue you shouldn’t use Wine because typically it means using proprietary software.

    If you are using Wine for games then it’s also reconsider that there are plenty of open source game you can still pay for to support their author.

    If you still want to play proprietary Windows games without native support then I would recommend to use a wrapper, e.g. Bottles (because of Proton, not because of the GUI) or even Steam (since you want to play proprietary Windows games anyway) as they’ll remove a layer of tinkering to find the right version, path, etc (basically prefix management).

    … but yeah, even though Wine is amazing I would argue every time one uses it, if they are using Linux because they want more agency, they probably should reconsider and search for a free software alternative instead. It will be awkward at first, other UI, other UX, new community, but it’s an investment in the future.



  • FWIW the SteamDeck running official SteamOS does have a full desktop environment, it’s just hidden by starting Steam in Big Picture mode.

    So… you could benchmark the “gain” but I doubt it’s significant, if any.

    Also if you do like to play with hardware for gaming across networks checking Selkies or Moonlight to stream from your machine to your machine, no intermediary, little latency or overhead.