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sxan

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Ceterum Lemmi necessitates reactiones

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sxan ,
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Huh. All that work, just for little ol' me? Gosh, I'm humbled. I didn't even know that was going on.

I do try to limit thorn to my piefed account. Sometimes habit tricks me to using it on Midwest.Social, but that's entirely accidental.

sxan ,
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I use a convenience package on top of stow (yas-bdsm), but yeah: stow is foundational.

What are some bare minimum concepts beginner Linux users should understand?

I'm talking about like your mom if she started using Linux, and just needs it to be able to open a web browser and check Facebook or her email or something. A student that just needs a laptop to do homework and take notes, or someone that just wants to play games on Steam and chat on discord....

sxan ,
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IME, beyond the install, it's all distro- and desktop-specific.

  • How to find and install apps varies from distro to distro. IIRC, the Mint menu item is something obvious, like "Install software", but on Arch (you'd have to hate your newbie to throw them into Arch), it requires a chicken/egg finding and installing a graphical installer. If you know the distro, this would be good information - or if you're helping with the install, create a desktop launcher.
  • Showing them where settings are. Surprising to me, this has been super-not-obvious to my newbs. Even though the KDE Settings app is called "settings", I think Windows and Mac folks are used to looking for settings in a specific place, rather than an app name - and in Windows, there's can be several ways to get up different settings, like changing display stuff is always in a weird place. Again, maybe a desktop or panel shortcut would help.
  • One of my newbs used Mint for two years without opening a shell, so I don't think that's an issue. He even found and installed a piece of software he wanted, but I can't remember if I originally showed him how to the first time. But that's Mint. He did, however, need help setting up a printer, but that's because he couldn't find the settings program; he came from Windows originally.
  • Edge cases, like printers and other peripherals, can be hard, and I don't think any amount of extra documentation is going to help, because almost every difficulty is practically unique. There's a ton of online help for stuff like that already. And then, if they want to, eg, attach a game controller... well, that's very specific and again varies by controller. I don't think you can cover all of these edge cases.
  • Games can be hard only because of the indirection of having to install some other software, like Proton or Steam, creating an account, knowing how to check for compatability - there's a lot of moving parts. It's not just: go to the game's web site, buy, download, and install something and run it, like I imagine it is on Windows. So maybe that would be useful - or - again - pre-installing one of the game stores and (surprise) making a shortcut would eliminate that.
  • Network connections. Again, I always find figuring out how to get to network configuration in Windows to be hard, and bizarrely having multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, so I'd guess going the other direction would be confusing. Having a note about how to get to the configuration would be handy.

As I think about it, I realize that configuration under KDE of way more encapsulated and clear than on Windows, and people having learned the byzantine and myriad ways of Windows, KDE's relative simplicity is confusing. Windows people look for configurations in places they've learned to look, which aren't always where they are under KDE (I can't speak much about Gnome - I don't use it or set people up with it). MacOS isn't as bad, having a similar configure-everything-through-a-single-settings-program approach.

Anyway, that's my experience.

Fox News contributor and podcaster Brett Cooper attacks Joe Rogan's criticism of mass deportation, saying it's his "toxic empathy speaking" ( www.mediamatters.org )

But guys, this is what we voted for. There are articles that are coming out now where these podcasters are saying, this isn't what I voted for. I'm sorry. What did you think mass deportations was? This was something that was spoken about every single day. Everybody was in favor of, you know, basically securing our border and...

sxan ,
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Republicans 2025:

  • Toxic healthiness
  • Liberal helpfulness
  • Snowflake economic growth
  • Liberal Elite freedom
sxan ,
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I would still like to understand why Jami is never mentioned in these posts. I'm not aware of any technical or security objections, and the less I hear about Jami, the more concerned I become about using it.

sxan ,
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Yeah. SimpleX has a similar problem, because it's basically creating a bunch of 1:1 connections between everyone to preserve anonymity - IIRC (I freely admit I could be misremembering this). As I understood, it's a decent limit, though - more than the 7-12 friend/family group you'd reasonably trust in a chat group.

I did not consider this a blocker - who's using encrypted chat for large groups? Large group chats are fundamentally insecure; is the use case about anonymity, not encryption?

sxan ,
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I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for "whole" was. I ended up asking her what she "did with her hole time."

sxan ,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I was living in Germany and was learning Germman on the fly and was with my sister and her girl friends at Octoberfest, and I wanted to ask one what she did with her whole time, so I asked what the word for "whole" was. I ended up asking her what she "did with her hole time."

sxan ,
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This was many years ago, but since I was learning on the fly and asking Germans for translations of English words and was trying to learn words, I'd gotten in the habit of simplifying my requests. So instead of asking how to say "all of" I asked for "whole". I also may have phrased it differently where "whole" made more sense - this was 20+ years ago, and I don't remember exactly what was said.

sxan ,
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C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

sxan ,
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groan

sxan ,
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I miss the days when every package came with a man page.

Every respectable package; don't come at me, pendants.

sxan , (edited )
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Ok, so preface: this isn't about you. Your comment just coalesced something I've been ruminating about recently.

I wish we, as humans, didn't have this knee-jerk tenancy to make everything a zero-sum competition. Vi vs EMACS. x86 vs ARM. Windows vs Mac vs Linux vs FreeBSD. C vs Go vs Rust vs Clojure vs JavaScript. Arch vs the world.

It really is a zero-sum game, with real consequences. If your favorite distro becomes unpopular enough, it might die, and then you have to give up something you love. Windows winning the OS market for decades meant countless people had to suffer using Windows because the company they worked for mandated it. If I crusade for V(lang) enough, it might become popular enough for jobs to open for it.

The downside is that we're constantly fighting against diversity, and that's bad.

I suffer from this as much as anyone, and I hate that my first impulse is to either tear down "the opposition", which at some point is nearly everyone, or schadenfreude.

"It is not enough that I succeed, but that others should fail." It can't be healthy.

sxan ,
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I have no idea! It seems to be the human material. Have you ever heard of a solution? I can be aware of it and resist it, but what I hate is that instinctive, negative impulse, and I don't think wishing it away is going to help.

sxan ,
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No, not on porpoise.

sxan ,
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That's... a big gap. I think I'd just be confused all the time if I had to switch between them.

sxan ,
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Not that kind of "use!"

sxan ,
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This is really good to hear. As someone who hasn't used Windows since 2004, it's easy to lose perspective of how daunting a self-switch can feel.

I'm glad to hear your experience is going well. I know you're experiencing many little annoyances and things which seem harder than they should be, but are not focusing on those. It's always good to hear the perspective from a new user!

Amazon requires gov-ID photo before refund.

So I bought a product for €200 on Amazon.com. I am slightly ashamed of doing so but I did, didn't know where else to find this type of product. So after a few days they told me they would not be sending me the product for whatever reason. So I would be getting a refund. They said if I hadn't gotten the refund within 5 days I...

sxan ,
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Amazon has a non-existent customer support, so you may have limited options.

If they had customer support, I'd suggest contacting them and tell them to either refund, or else you'd give them the ID immediately followed by a GDPR request to purge your data. That might have gotten some movement, because those GDPR requests have the force of law, and are also a fair PITA for Amazon. However, there's no way to give them a shot across the bow. I think your options are:

  • process a charge-back, as someone else suggested, which might result in an Amazon ban
  • take the loss (that's entirely your call, regardless of anyone else's opinion)
  • give them the ID, get your refund
  • you can still initiate a GDPR purge request. I'm going to guess it's going to result in a block, but maybe not. You might be able to recreate your account

The happy news is that you are protected by GDPR. Many of us are not, and don't even have the option to demand they purge the information.

Looking for a CRM for a small team

We’re a small consulting team of five, and it’s been a challenge keeping everything organized as we’ve grown. We used spreadsheets to track leads and follow-ups, which was fine when things were slower. But once we started getting more inquiries, it quickly got out of hand. We have notes in too many places, and it's a mess....

sxan ,
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I need to check, but I think OnlyOffice is a Russian company. Some people might care about the latter part.

The connection between OnlyOffice and Russia has caused some controversy. The company has moved headquarters and attempted to hide its Russian ties through shell companies. The company develops its product in Russia and presents itself in the Russian market as a Russian company. For this reason some Ukrainian businesses have moved away from OnlyOffice.

Wikipedia has more info (with references) for the curious.

sxan ,
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Interesting. Our sensors don't see the cats. Unless I place once of the basement ones directly opposite the stairs; it can apparently see them if they're a couple of feet away at sensor eye level.

But the one that sees people in the kitchen doesn't see the cats on the counters when they get up there in the night.

I think if they saw the cats, I'd have to figure something else out, because our's get everywhere.

sxan ,
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All year? Please tell me "Halloween eyes" is just "scary eyes" and that you do this all year.

sxan ,
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Ooooh! Totally not useless, but I have a version of this.

I have a cheap, but powerful, amp for the home audio system, and discovered it burns out if left perpetually on (yeah, I'm on my third). So I got a wall switch that's turned off after 10 minutes of no audio streaming to that snapclient.

sxan ,
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It's not pointless, but needlessly silly: as part of the alarm system, in addition to the standard siren, the home audio system turns on and plays Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" at full volume.

At 7pm on school nights, one of a number of versions of "Hushabye Mountain" is played, if music isn't already playing.

sxan ,
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Second this.

  • message delivery can be iffy
  • VoIP works well
  • you connect with people like a normal app that isn't going to scare your family off, not trying to get them to put in GUIDS
  • it has all the creature comforts, attached/embedded photos, markup, attached files, attach pictures, share your location for 10 minutes (I'm on my way), history editing, deleting
  • it has concurrent multi device support, so you can get messages on your phone, tablet, and desktop at the same time
  • There's a full desktop client (Electron, i think 🤮 but it works)
  • the dev team is small and they seem to like to work more on features than user issues. development is slow
  • multi-person groups work fine

It's still the best E2E messaging system I've found; the only one my mom, wife, and sisters-in-law reliably use.

I just want them to focus on fixing the sketchy DHT that seems to cause every problem.

sxan ,
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Penalty: the equivalent of $100, probably. And even that will be contested; the second judge will drop it to $50, and the third to $10, and then the Meta lawyer will pay that out of her pocket change.

sxan ,
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My recommendation is to put all of the variables in an environment file, and use systemd's EnvironmentFile (in [Service] to point to it.

One of my backup service files (I back up to disks and cloud) looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Backup to MyUsbDrive
Requires=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
After=media-MyUsbDrive.mount

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/backup/environment
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/restic backup --tag=prefailure-2 --files-from ${FILES} --exclude-file ${EXCLUDES} --one-file-system

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.timer

FILES is a file containing files and directories to be backed up, and is defined in the environment file; so is EXCLUDES, but you could simply point restic at the directory you want to back up instead.

My environment file looks essentially like

RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/MyUsbDrive/backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=blahblahblah
KEEP_DAILY=7
KEEP_MONTHLY=3
KEEP_YEARLY=2
EXCLUDES=/etc/backup/excludes
FILES=/etc/backup/files

If you're having trouble, start by looking at how you're passing in the password, and whether it's quoted properly. It's been a couple of years since I had this issue, but at one point I know I had spaces in a passphrase and had quoted the variable, and the quotes were getting passed in verbatim.

My VPS backups are more complex and get their passwords from a keystore, but for my desktop I keep it simple.

Calibre-Web-Automated v3.1.1 - The Community Update 👬 Hardcover Integration 💜, Calibre Plugins 🔌, Split Library Support 💞, KoReader Sync 🗘 and much more! 📚 ( github.com )

It looks like a massive update. Here are some excerpts, with more changes listed in the link above. I'm especially excited about the companion app:...

sxan ,
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I hope this isn't a step towards replacing the native app with an SPA.

sxan ,
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Salem's Lot.

It was forbidden, but on TV, so I'd flip channels to watch it in 30 second clips. It was far more terrifying that way, as I found out later in life; watched all the way through, it was a fairly mediocre film.

songs where towards the end, they sing the opposite of what was originally said?

in женщина, я не танцую (woman, i don't dance) by stas kostyushkin, he at first says Женщина, не танцую, женщина, я не танцую (woman, i don't dance, woman i don't dance) but then he says Женщина, я танцую, женщина, а я танцую (woman, i'm dancing, woman...

sxan ,
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What I love best about that song are the vocal renditions on YouTube. It's quite moving when it's sung without the pop beat.

sxan ,
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https://midwest.social/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.catbox.moe%2Fifzmvl.jpg

That's the plain text editor Helix. In a terminal. Over ssh. On my phone. Which I can do because I'm not using a dumb IDE.

sxan ,
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It absolutely would be. It is, on the other hand, occasionly useful to be able to pop in and change a config file, many of which are actually Turing complete languages. What I do far more often, though, is SSH into remote, headless servers and write code there, which is exactly the same as doing it from a phone, only much more comfortable.

sxan ,
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I thought everyone had the right to choose their own labels.

sxan ,
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Yeah, the whole "taking your business elsewhere" is bullshit in the modern world. It might work in a town without internet that has 3 barbers; sure, you take your little protest purchase to another barber maybe it has an impact.

But I've lived in a neighborhood for 6 years where my internet connectivity choices have been Comcast, or DSL. That's not a choice. When the only competitor is equivalent to no service, it's not competition; it's a monopoly.

sxan ,
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You're just creating more monopolies, with no oversight and less control. At least with government, you can vote.

sxan ,
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It's not uncommon for sites and organizations to actively prompt for pronouns, which are labels. It's generally accepted that minority groups can change their labels by group consensus - Redskins, to Indians, to American Indians, to Native Americans. Labels change, and this is accepted as a good thing, because identity is important to mental health.

Where do you draw the line? At what point do you think it's justified to deny someone the right to decide their own labels?

Personally, I think it falls broadly under the paradox is tolerance, and there's a point where someone is clearly just being contrarian. They resent self-labeling. But if someone consistently insists they're vegan, at some point I have to ask: what gives me the right to insist they aren't? If you go down the rabbit hole is insisting on dictionary definitions, you quickly get into a quagmire with things most of us agree on: many laws and dictionaries are wrong about their definitions of marriage, male, and female.

I think it's an interesting topic, although I suppose almost everybody has already made up their minds one way out the other on the topic, and are frankly tired; most people automatically see anyone debating it as pushing some agenda.

But the paradox is tolerance is something I think progressives (liberals, the Left... that's a whole different fight, on Lemmy) are still struggling with, and I'm interested in how we collectively resolve it. So when it comes up, I'm always interested in how people are thinking about this.

Dogmatic? Morally superior? Angry that people are changing the meanings of words that clearly already have a meaning?

Where does a person's right to choose their labels (e.g., their pronouns, their identity) stop?

sxan ,
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Ah, the rare Christian who's read the Bible!

It's crazy, and I highly recommend people in the US do it, especially if they're not Christian. I have yet to come across a version of the New Testament that successfully creatively edits it enough that Jesus doesn't come across as an utterly pacifist communist. It's funny how so many self-proclaimed Christians will just ignore everything in the New to cherry-pick from the Old, which obviously was about a completely different god. An angry god. a righteous, vengeful, unforgiving god. The god who destroyed an entire city, children and infants, because some guys were buggering other guys, vs the Jesus who re-attached his enemies ear when one of his disciples tried to defend him. A Jesus who, by definition in the book itself, is both the son of, and yet the same being as, the old testament god. The new testament god who forgives the traitor, vs the old testament god who tortures his most faithful follower on a bet.

Everyone should read the Bible, if only to comprehend how utterly un-Christian most Christians are.

sxan ,
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I like your take on it; the issue comes in that conflict where external labels don't align with internal pronouns (or any other form of self-identity, such as identifying as a particular race despite genetic dominance). We want to respect people's self-image, when we can, don't we?

For me, it's the good faith test. It can be difficult, or impossible, to determine bad faith, but sometimes it's obvious. Trans people usually seem sincere about their identities, so I take them at face value. A meat eater insisting they be called 'vegan' is just mocking self-identification and kicking back at the whole pronouns thing, for whatever reason. That's not good faith; that's being contrarian.

That's my line, until someone convinces me of a better one.

sxan ,
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It's not wrong. If the only objective of Linux were to steal users from Windows or Mac, becoming a homogeneous dictatorial OS is the way to do it. Most people don't care about choice, and in fact having to choose is an anti feature. Apple's success proves this, but companies like Microsoft for the same reason: it's all a boring dystopia of sameness.

Linux's strength is diversity. It's both the only functioning communism on the planet, and the best evolutionary testbed for software. It's great for people who value freedom and choice; it's mostly a confusing mess for everyone who don't give a single shit how computers work, or which style that use - they want to be given something that works OOTB and always have it work the same way. They want to be told what to do, because honestly they can't be arsed to figure it out. This doesn't imply anything at all about the kind of people they are, they just aren't interested in computers.

I give no shits about how a car works; I don't care how many HP it has, I don't want to assemble and decide on every single component. I don't even like driving - it's just time out of my day which demands all of my attention, and which I'd rather spend doing something else. I absolutely hate the car buying experience - taking days to test drive and decide. I'd be just as happy to be able to look up "best car this year at this price point" and buy that.

For a great many people, computers are like cars are to me: a necessary evil.

So: it's not a bad expectation that Linux adoption would dramatically increase if it became a monopoly of software. If all the Gnome developers would stop wasting their time and work on KDE instead. (See how that sounds when you swap out "X11" and "Wayland" for "Gnome" and "KDE"? I see people making this argument all. The. Time.) But it'd become a lesser ecosystem.

Monocultures suck.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    sxan ,
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    Oh boy. This is a rabbit hole which, once you fall into, there's no coming back out.

    There is a world of terminal software. You can, quite reasonably, get entirely rid of X (and Wayland) and live in the console. Honestly, the reason I don't is only because there is no fully competent terminal web browser (although there are some quite good ones), and because anything having to do with graphics like photo management, or vector graphics drawing, is really where GUIs are useful. But for everything else, terminal clients are almost always superior.

    Choosing a good terminal emulator is important, and the best one right now is Rio. It's fast, smaller memory footprint, and less CPU use than Wezterm or Kitty, and it supports ligatures, iTerm, and SIXEL graphics.

    In that goes tmux, because it works over ssh and having consistent everywhere is handy, because it survives terminal and window manager crashes, and because you can open multiple clients in different windows on the same tmux session.

    In that runs zsh, because it's the best shell. It's backwards-compatible to bash, but has a ton of extra features.

    I'm conservative about replacing standard POSIX tools with new fad tools, because grep is literally everywhere (even BusyBox) and new things usually aren't; but ripgrep and fd are such nice improvements over grep and find I've been unable to resist. Helix is currently the best text editor. However, having a good familiarity with grep, find, and vi is IMHO critical, because they're the foundations.

    My media player is ostui, which is an ncurses SubSonic client with synced lyrics and cover art support. I use catnip for visualization, because it uses less memory and CPU than cava. For task management I use a bespoke script (tdp) that use fzf with todo.txt files. I use gotop for system monitoring.

    I try to use chawan for terminal web browsing, and it does do CSS layout better than most, and supports sixel image rendering, but it's often a chore so I mostly browse in Luakit, which is a GUI program.

    rook is my secret service tool that uses a KeePassXC DB as the backing store, and provides credentials to everything that needs them.

    • vdirsyncer syncs my calendar and contracts to a VPS, and thence to my phone
    • mbsync syncs all of my email from my IMAP server, and I use notmuch to index and tag it
    • khard is a terminal address book that uses standard vcard directories
    • lbb is a super-fast address book search tool which also works on vcard directories
    • khal is a TUI calendar app, which works with vcal directories
    • aerc, which someone else mentioned, is a fantastic TUI email client that can use notmuch.
    • tasker is what I use for scheduled cron control; it uses standard crontab files.
    • devmon and udevil handle automounts of USB media
    • mosh is a UDP-based ssh, with interruptable sessions and network resilience
    • mpdris2-rs is the agent I use to hook up various media control tooling to ostui (which supports the mpris protocol) and other players - mpris is a sort of standardized glue for media players.
    • gomuks is an excellent TUI for Matrix
    • weechat is a TUI for IRC. I prefer gomuk's interface, but you can get a Matrix plugin for weechat if you want to use only one. I find I often have to restart weechat because otherwise it end up eating all of the memory; there's a memory leak, or something in it.
    • syncthing-daemon for syncing between almost everything
    • restic for backups

    dinit handles all of my user task management, because systemd is fucking broken for user tasks. dinit is a better init system.

    Almost every application I use is a cli or TUI client. The exceptions are the web browser, for reasons I've explained; Jami, which doesn't have a CLI client; Factorio, which is a game; and darktable for photo management. I'll also occasionally open Gimp or Inkscape for graphics, vlc for movies (which I could probably watch in the terminal, now that I think of it), and I usually view PDFs in a GUI client such as mupdf.

    My philosophy on software is to use standards wherever possible. I avoid programs that insist on using their own DBs when there's a perfectly good standard, such as ics, maildir, and so on. It's just another form of vender lock-in. Hence notmuch (maildir), khard and lbb (directory of .ics), khal (directory of .vcs), rook (KeePass DB), and so on. This drives most of my tooling choices.

    sxan , (edited )
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    This seriously got an out-loud chuckle from me. It's funny, because it's true! Thanks!

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    A good water bottle is a friend for life. We have a dozen in the cupboard:

    • several are plastic, mostly swag but a couple that are for bikes. They're cheap, and one leaks from the lid, but I'm not going to buy another little, metal water bottle just for the bike. Plastic is mostly useless as they don't keep liquids cool.
    • there are a few workout ones that are just tall cups with lids. Again, plastic; their one use is working out, because they don't break or break things if they get dropped on the treadmill. I hate the lid mechanism.
    • there are a few metal ones; again, mostly swag. Two are actual thermoses with great insulation, but they're relatively small (16 oz), and their sippy lids are clearly optimized for hot liquids the other metal ones have screw tops and are a PITA to use. In fact, one is my second most recent one, which I replaced because unscrewing the top in the middle of the night was fussy so I'd just leave the top off, except I kept knocking it over by fumbling for it in the dark, spoiling water all over the nightstand and carpet.
    • we have two glass ones, and one with an electric mixer base that I got for my wife for when she travels, so she can more easily have protein shakes in the morning. The glass ones are insulated and nice, but the tops don't seal and you don't want you drop them, so they just live in the cupboard.

    And then there's my prize, the black widow. Isn't she lovely? Oh, wait, sorry, wrong song.

    The one I have now, that has taken me decades to refine, is 1 liter - not too large, so it's easy to carry around, but enough so a couple of refills a day are enough. It has a little handle to facilitate carrying. It's metal, and robust. It's vacuum insulated, so it keeps ice water cold all night. And it has a little sippy spout with a sprung button orifice so that when I knock it over it doesn't leak. It's the perfect water bottle, and it took me a couple decades of trial and error to refine my requirements for a water bottle: the size, the mechanism, the material.

    A water bottle that meets all of your specific use case needs really is wonderful; it's a pleasure to use, is convenient, and by its nature encourages you to hydrate. Honestly, it's one is those weirdly and unexpectedly useful things that you'd never expect to have as big an impact as it does, that you find yourself using more than any other single gadget you own.

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    Maybe! There's a product that's like alka-selzer for bottles. It works well for metal; I don't know about plastic.

    However, if it were me, I'd start with putting some baking soda in it and add some vinegar. That stuff will clean clogged drains, and I don't think it'll harm plastic. Vinegar is sold in plastic bottles, and maybe the baking soda interaction would damage it but I doubt it.

    If you don't want to take that risk, just try vinegar. It's a pretty good cleanser all by itself.

    Good luck!

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    So, you're basically running the KDE infrastructure, just not using the KDE WM? Have you done a ps and counted the number of KDE services that are running, just to run KDE Connect?

    Here are the (KDE) dependencies on the Arch KDE Connect package:

    kcmutils 
kconfig
kcoreaddons 
kcrash
kdbusaddons
kdeclarative
kguiaddons
ki18n
kiconthemes
kio
kirigami
kirigami-addons                               kitemmodels
kjobwidgets
knotifications
kpeople
kservice
kstatusnotifieritem                           kwidgetsaddons
kwindowsystem
pulseaudio-qt
qqc2-desktop-style
qt6-base
qt6-connectivity
qt6-declarative
qt6-multimedia
qt6-wayland

    When you run KDE Connect, you're running most of the KDE Desktop and Qt; you're just not using it.

    Have you ever tried running it headless? I have; it doesn't work.

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    I'm not talking about your application at all; I was responding to @chrash0's comment that JSON may not be great, but it's better than YAML, and TOML is better than both, for configuration.

    I was agreeing with them and adding more reasons why YAML stinks.

    Nothing at all directly to do with your project, just having a convo with @chrash0.

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    Yeah, tarpits. Or, even just intentionally fractionally lagging the connection, or putting a delay on the response to some mime types. Delays don't consume nearly as much processing as PoW. Personally, I like tar pits that trickle out content like a really slow server. Hidden URLs that users are not likely to click on. These are about the least energy-demanding solutions that have a chance of fooling bots; a true, no-response tarpit would use less energy, but is easily detected by bots and terminated.

    Proof of work is just a terrible idea, once you've accepted that PoW is bad for the environment, which it demonstrably is.

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    From the Anubis project:

    The idea is that genuine people sending emails will have to do a small math problem that is expensive to compute,

    "Expensive" in computing means "energy intensive," but if you still challenge that, the same document later says

    This is also how Bitcoin's consensus algorithm works.

    Which is exactly what I said in my first comment.

    The design document states

    Anubis uses a proof-of-work challenge to ensure that clients are using a modern browser and are able to calculate SHA-256 checksums.

    This is the energy-wasting part of the algorithm. Furthermore,

    the server can independently prove the token is valid.

    The only purpose of the expensive calculation is so the server can verify that the client burned energy; the work done is useless outside of proving the client performed a certain amount of energy consuming work, and in particular there are other, more efficient ways of generating verifiable hashes which are not used because the whole point is to make the client incur a cost, in the form of electricity use, to generate the token.

    At this point I can't tell if you honestly don't understand how proof of work functions, are defensive of the project because you have some special interest, or are just trolling.

    Regardless, anyone considering using Anubis should be aware that the project has the same PoW design as Bitcoin, and if you believe cryptocurrencies are bad for the environment, then you want you start away from Anubis and sites that use it.

    Also note that the project is a revenue generator for the authors (check the bottom of the github page), so you might see some astro turfing.

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    There is negligible server overhead for a tarpit. It can be merely a script that listens on a socket and never replies, or it can reply with markov-generated html with a few characters a second, taking minutes to load a full page. This has almost no overhead. Implementation is adding a link to your page headers and running the script. It's not exactly rocket science.

    Which part of that is overhead, or difficult?