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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Things have changed in the last year or so. This is about the next releases of distros, nobody’s going to go back and retrospectively remove X11 and Xwayland will continue to exist when needed.

    All the hubbub is because Gnome recently decided to drop support for launching X11 sessions from the login manager. Gnome’s login manager is Wayland based and Wayland handles handing off graphics to different users properly. With X11 you have to have ugly things like killing the login X server and then spawning a new X server as the new user among other things is ugly and unfixable without serious security issues.

    Wayland wasn’t stuck with design decisions that made sense almost 50 years ago in the '80s and does things far more sanely and with less complex code.

    Anyway at some point someone has to pull the plug and Gnome has done that. Many distros are built on Gnome so that’s that.



  • Can we just let X11 die with some dignity? I don’t know who this guy on the video is? Is he important? My impression is he seems like a generic popcorn feeder.

    Go fork X11 or whatever, nobody is stopping you! Feel free to try and solve the puzzle of making X11 not suck while subject to the constraints of having to satisfy specifically those users who will not allow you to make any changes that inconvenience their rickety 40yo software that nobody cares enough to update to fix whatever is keeping it from running in Wayland (pro tip we’re not talking about open source software here, the things that break are closed source blobs). It’s well worth the effort rather than spinning up a container or kvm to run that proprietary binary.






  • I keep seeing this analogy and unfortunately that’s not how email servers work so it never really helps honestly. The servers are the To: fields, not the From: fields. And there’s also no real analogy about privacy. With most email providers the intent isn’t that everyone reads everyone else’s email. So frankly I really don’t know what insight this is supposed to provide if it doesn’t behave like email.

    And there’s a big safety difference. With something like Bluesky you have to trust the server admins to behave. With ActivityPub you have to trust each and every user of the service. Which is why server admins get shirty about whether they will forward messages to or from other servers. That whole situation doesn’t really exist with email. It’s not like you have create a Hotmail account because Gmail has decided to defederate with Google or whatever.


  • I recently started using TriliumNext (Trilium’s active fork) as a personal knowledge base for work and it’s really cool.

    One thing I didn’t expect is the multi-user editing feature means I can leave it open on multiple computers (and open it on others) and all the open copies are updated in real time (and it opens to exactly where I had been) so I don’t have to think much about merging edits or saving work before changing locations. I was very pleasantly surprised by that.

    My job has me jumping around computers a lot with various amounts of downtime in different locations and I want to continue at home etc. Being able to just browse to my server and be exactly where I was in Trilium is perfect.

    I was basically looking for how to run LogSeq entirely remotely as a PKM (without touching work computers). You can self host LogSeq but it still runs locally so you have to sync each time and other issues. Trilium is what works best for me.

    Another interesting option I came across is silverbullet.md





  • Doist is very much remote work and there were a lot of stories about them and how they operate during the pandemic because they had been doing it for so long. Global headquarters are in Portugal and CEO lives/works from Italy from what I can tell. They have offices/legal presence in many countries.

    Founder/CEO was born in Bosnia, grew up in Denmark, started todoist during college, used a startup incubator in Chile, later moved headquarters to Portugal, now gives lots of talks about internet entrepreneurship in EU.


  • After O’Connor died, there was a discussion on The Political Junkie podcast where they were talking about her autobiography and in particular, about Bush vs Gore and what they were actually thinking about that case. And it had more to do with the whole maze of where things go depending on which contingencies (i.e. what cases happen next between Bush and Gore).

    So according to her it was more about the structure of the laws and government than the decision itself. Which I don’t think is something that Cannon is dealing with. Cannons is a trial court judge. The questions at the Supreme Court are more about structure and function of the government.



  • I haven’t tried it, but I am interested. The main feature I’m looking for is hands-free use (reading messages aloud, replying, responding to commands). This doesn’t mention any of that but I might give it a try.

    In the old Android Auto you used to be able to just turn it on and get all those functions but after Google got rid of that and keeps changing how we use phones while driving betwwen apps they keep cancelling, the only thing I know to access it now is to turn on Google maps with navigation to a destination which is pretty freaking annoying when all I’m doing is driving back and forth from work and I don’t need all Google Maps commentary about which turn I should or should not be taking or that I’m in the parking lot rather than driving into the front door.

    Edit: I installed it. I first tried to find it on F-Droid, it wasn’t there which seemed odd. So I installed it from Play Store. It’s a FOSS frontend that requires you to sign up for damoov account. Basically it seems to just be a demo app for damoov API. No idea what damoov is and what they’re doing with the data. Based on what they mention in Play Store and the startup screens, my guess is they are an API intended to be used by insurance companies to develop apps that monitor policy holders.


  • Do you use a VPN? I’ve noticed a lot of cdn’s have become very hostile to VPNs over the last year. Initially I blamed the VPN but I’m pretty convinced it’s the cdn’s at this point*.

    *This is because I started using a private linode server as a tailscale exit node and boy does the internet hate that IP with a passion. Toggling between using that and my home computer as exit nodes is somewhat fascinating. The web is so rude when I browse from my linode box. So… now I use the linode exit node to let the jerks take themselves to the curb. Anyway images not loading randomly is one of the telltale signs of a jerk website. It even happens when using Google One VPN or Cloudflair’s WARP+ nowadays. Switch them off and use my residential IP exit node and presto it all works again.




  • That Online Corpus of Founding Era American English seems like a pretty cool database. This is five years old (pre ChatGPT) and seems to have relied on manual search (which itself seems like a vast improvement). I wonder whether large language models are being built to assimilate the entire dataset to answer questions about “original meaning” nowadays and how close to useable they are. It would be even more compelling to have longitudinal versions that can identify when changes in meaning occurred. “Based on all existing written words, it didn’t mean X at that time and that meaning first appeard 60 years later.” Newspapers and legal rulings/documents seem like relatively convincing data sources that have been well curated and relevant to the task. Particularly since SCOTUS post-Scalia has become even more insistent about original meaning. I don’t think it works well post-hoc but it will be interesting for these things to be interpreted when presented as arguments in new cases.