toast.al

he/him

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toastal ,

This is how I ended up getting my account deleted as well. 3D scan of my head was a immediate nope.

toastal ,

2.8k seems about the sweet spot on a laptop to be from your face & see no pixels or even have to think about font hinting & the like. The bigger wins are OLEDs for blacks & picking up something with 100% DCI-P3.

toastal ,

Movim is sort of like a decentralized social media space built atop XMPP

toastal ,

I have no idea what channels are… Is this threading?

toastal , (edited )

Paying a tutor or a class might be a good accelerant since you could ask fundamental questions in your native language. Once you have the grammar scaffolding, you could then use flashcards to start building vocab or looking for natives to share conversations with. Note also: immersion rarely works without some foundations to build on (unless the language in question is basically the same as your native language like Dutch is to English). The TL;DR is apps are more entertainment then education.

toastal ,

client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols

Outside of TLS which most any server uses by default, XMPP or not, the server is not responsible for E2EE. Conversations Compliance & Are We OMEMO Yet have existed for a long while & I never see anyone recommending a client not on these lists so while certain features may be fragmented, the communication essentials have been more or less established for years now. XMPP is an extensible format, and some applications that aren’t for chatting with your friends/family, don’t need many of these features which allows the protocol to morph into something stripped down for the task… which is why the base spec is basically barren, & community XEPs are what folks get behind for adding new features for different use cases.

toastal ,

LinkedIn is just another Microsoft-owned account you should just delete for your sanity

toastal ,

Using VS code is definitely bad. Round these here parts, you choose either the Church of Emacs or the Cult of vi… no exceptions.

toastal , (edited )

Does it work in a terminal as a TUI? If no, gates shall be kept. 😠

Help me choose a distro/stay on NixOS

Disclaimer: I know there's a lot of questions and posts like this but generally they're aimed at noobs. I consider myself an intermediate user, and I know generally distros don't matter much and you can have anything another distro has on any distro but I'm looking for something a little "specific" that better suits my need from...

toastal ,

Stick with NixOS. A declarative config will save your ass down the line if it hasn’t already. If you have any interest in programming or IT in the future, the skills you learned will prove invaluable & once you get the hang of it, making modifications & patches will start to feel a lot safer as you can keep pulling updates while your patches still apply. Nix is still going to be one of your better options if you want to avoid the snap/flakpak space (I do not blame you). As for corporate control, something will either fix the Nix foundation from the core or a community-controlled fork will usurp it with probably almost no changes for an existing Nix install just like these things have always sorted themselves out with time (or join the Lix or Aux spheres if you want to actively fix the situation now instead of waiting if it really bothers you).

If you need help, ask in the official Matrix room or Discourse—I can only imagine the spam & bad takes from those residing in a proprietary, data-siphoning Discord chatroom.

toastal ,

Not everything proprietary is inherently bad, but you did more than most ever could. It’s those megacorporations & anything “free” you have to worry the most about.

Steam is a weird one since it is proprietary, & you could lose access to your digital game copies but a) most work if you just download them for long-term storage, b) they provide a decent service with deals & synced saves, c) they are privately-held so they don’t need to chase quarterly profits for shareholders, & d) they have done more for Linux gaming than almost anyone else (even if the selfish goal was to break Microsoft’s shackles & later have a hardware device they could sell you that happens to be mutually beneficial for both sides with so many patches).

Deleting everything Microsoft & Google is very difficult. The former I am locked since too much free software thinks it can sleep in the dragon’s den as GitHub. Google, well good luck finding an employer that isn’t using it in my experience & when it comes to using your own email for instance, there’s like a 90% chance the person on the other end is using a Google or Microsoft email account without encryption to get them the whole message anyhow.

toastal ,

The fact that you mark your omission with an apostrophe correctly does wonders for ESL learners so the can see both what is being chopped off while also getting insight into how some native speakers’ accents might produce the sounds. Native speakers should use ’em more of’en.

toastal ,

I’m still on my 1080 from 2016. It was such a huge leap for the era. I stopped having a lot of time for intense gaming to where I haven’t needed an upgrade (tho I would like to for LLMs, but I would also like to switch to AMD for being less hostile to Linux but those machine learning nerds never bothered to leave the walls of CUDA).

toastal ,

My first WTF moment with British English was walking into a restaurant & the hostess asked: “are you alright?”. “Do I have a bloody nose?” I quaked. Turns out it was just how folks say “what’s up?” as a hello there.

toastal ,

Aux is still keeping all of their code on Microsoft GitHub, Lix isn’t

toastal ,

I would believe that when I see it. They said they would not use GitHub-only features & they already are. These things don’t tend to move once actually set up. You also look at the language around trying to “cast a wide net” being thrown out before “what are our principles” & compromising on that so early is a big oof from me. Folks that can’t be bothered to create a new account or learn a new forge or version control system are not the folks that would be bothered to switch from Nix to Aux.

Literally any other option would offer easier escape …with the exception of the size of Nixpkgs & the fact that most developers don’t understand how to do patches without a pull request on the host platform rendering the D in distributed version control system moot so everyone clamors nothing can scale without Microsoft (allow requests off the centralized forge, allow patches to a mailing list, seed it with Radicle, etc.). The foundations are being built wrong.

toastal ,

Signal & WhatsApp are not secure enough. Meta/Facebook regularly give data & metatadata to the cops & Signal is centralized & not self-hosted by your crew so while messages are encrypted, the metadata still isn’t. If you must use Signal, I would pick Molly as an Android client since you can a) encrypt the messages under a separate password for storage on seizure & b) you can use the UnifiedPush version to make sure your notification metadata isn’t going thru Google’s Firebase servers. Protests are the ideal place for Briar as it is works via mesh net so internet & SIM cards are not required (but years ago wden I tried it, the app was a major battery drainer).

toastal ,

Also worth noting that OpenStreetMaps works offline too.

toastal ,

Those components are not really meant for self-hosting, its open to be looked at. You would need to patch out the SIM requirement, point the hardcoded server/clients elsewhere, find some way to sideload modified clients to those using iOS lol, & it’s not federated so you would need a separate app for just this task. At this rate you are 100% better off using a choosing systems where server & clients are actually built with this in mind… Signal’s chat features are not novel

toastal ,

With the right intel you could piece back some of the pieces, especially with some pieces from other sources, with just that metadata. With metadata, it’s about putting together lots of sources to see the picture clearly which is why Facebook bought WhatsApp for just the metadata (& address book). The thing is that you, can skip Signal & you will still have several free software messaging alternativ where nothing is on a US-based server where they can subpoena.

toastal ,

In the corpo cases, I’m sure all they have to do is ask. There are better alternatives & this guide feels radically incomplete stopping at such pedestrian option instead of labeling them in a bottom tier of like suffiecent-if-you-literally-can’t-use-anything-else.

toastal ,

Not saying you are wrong, but I think the argument a) should mention WhatsApp in the same breath as Signal & b) stopping at Signal instead of linking to where to find more info

toastal ,

If your next machine has a higher pixel density than 1080p, the need for aggressive hinting diminishes as pixels are smaller & needing to extrapolate subpixels accurately is less important (and less taxing to compute). That wouldn’t help you now, but in the future you may want to consider something like 2.8k which isn’t overkill like 4k on a small laptop display at arm’s length.

toastal ,

It was the 4 that removed the jack not 5—despite user complaints about wanting it to return on the next model. But yeah, big L dropping the jack.

toastal , (edited )

Kinda wild these weren’t really a thing. A lot of these DAP/DACs were already running Android & many folks don’t like carrying a second phone-sized device (my DAP is small on purpose for this… well & my previous phone didn’t haze microSD for extra storage). Was it something to do with complaince for the cell radios?

The big question mark to me would be if they open source those drivers & what not or make any required apps downloadable & sideloadable. I would make something like this my next device if I knew I could flash LineageOS for microG on it & not, you know, lose all the audio stuff that makes it special. A lot of these Chinese brands haven’t even done the bare minimum GPL v2 compliance of releasing their kernels so we would have to see on that front. The ability to control your software is just as important as repairing your hardware.

toastal ,

I had an inkling of hope the 5 would bring it back after so many complaints. Instead they launched wireless earbud & doubled down on it. Dead to me too.

toastal ,

This is not so much as an edorsement or recommendation, but you might check out the DAPs by Shanling or Hidiz if you have coin to spare. They use Linux & don’t publish kernel mods, but they do have inexpensive, very small, lightweight options that may fit your needs. I have one & it has a place to have a dedicate device to not chew thru my phone’s battery as well as function as a high-quality USB DAC in scenarios where you don’t have a jack (like my old laptop) or the DAC is horrible (like in my dock for my laptop).

toastal ,

SSDs* HDDs*

f2fs does one of the weirdest things with compression by default: the files are compressed but they still take up the same amount of blocks as the uncompressed files. This can get you the slight performance boost of compressed files, but doesn’t actually save you space which is an odd choice. You can enable a flag in the kernel but it has other effects as well.

toastal ,

Not yet, but bcachefs will be the future as the goals replicate most of OpenZFS while not having that licencing issue.

toastal ,

This is why self-hosting matters. Why distributed version control is more resilient. I haven’t yet used it but this is the sort of use gave for Radicle where folks seed the repo like a torrent & there is no meaningful centralized server that you could even go after.

toastal ,

I still kinda like the restrictive takes of copyfarleft that prevents for-profit entities to use anything without contributions. Workers, co-ops, nonprofits do not have any of those restrictions.

My biggest issues with those licenses are specifically that they are & never could be GPL-compatible which would encourage permissive licenses for libraries which is part of what both license types want to avoid.

Has anyone gone so far as to dual-license under copyleft & copyfarleft?

OpenSSL goes GitHub only ( openssl.org )

We’re no longer using our old ftp, rsync, and git links for distributing OpenSSL. These were great in their day, but it’s time to move on to something better and safer. ftp://ftp.openssl.org and rsync://rsync.openssl.org are not available anymore. As of June 1, 2024, we’re also going to shut down https://ftp.openssl.org...

toastal ,

Microsoft GitHub is riddled with bugs, is down at least once a month, & throttles non-Western IPs.

toastal ,

I doubt many commenters here have used a wheelchair ramp to access a public building. Guess we should just remove all those ramps since that accessibility doesn’t affect them. The barrier to entry for setting up a wheel chair ramp is more expensive than offering at least one non-corporate code contribution method.

toastal , (edited )

The one I ran into 2 days ago was a user approving a pull request while I was requesting their & other maintainers review. It canceled their approval & I had to fetch them to reapprove since in that project no-green-checkmark-no-merge. It should not have erased their approval.

I bet you live in the West. My daytime, there are heaps of outages.

toastal ,

Maybe. Maybe if the back steps required an account with a US-based service owned by a publicly-traded megacorporation that is collecting your data as per the ToS just to enter. That’s a helluva barrier that should never be expected for free software.

toastal ,

Microsoft is not your friend. GitHub is owned by thah US-based, publicly-traded, for-profit megacorporation & will do the bidding of the other megacorporate wishes like taking down youtube-dl for the music industry and so on. Get your projects & communities on another platform.

toastal ,

I think folks bought into SUVs since they were bigger & selfishly less likely to take more damage in a crash. As such, with SUV tanks everywhere, being a pedestrian or in a small car on the road on in an SUV’s trajectory can often lead to lethal injury.

toastal ,

more popular

That’s not true at all. There are a ton of business applications for XMPP from IoT messaging, to Nintendo’s user presence, to being a 90% chance your favorite online game’s chat back-end. Behind Jitsi & Zoom & WhatsApp is an XMPP server.
Matrix by design will never scale to these demands if history needs to live forever & all servers need to duplicate data.

More trendy would be a more appropriate phrase since Matrix wants to chase after proprietary Slack & Discord, where as XMPP is extensible & more generalized for all sorts of applications. Even with all of these proprietary applications, there are plenty of open communities hosted for MUCs & also blog/community thru Movim/Libervia & as an alternative back-end for UnifiedPush, etc. With the server resource usage being much lower, it’s cheaper & easier to maintain an XMPP server alongside another application in a VPS or even on a home network with dynamic DNS. If you are inclined, set one up & test it out.

Ask: How do you handle your résumés?

Usually I rely on my network & haven’t needed this kind of document in ages, but I’ve been tasked with creating a résumé for myself. I’ve grown more privacy-conscious every year & I think it’s weird that we are expected to give out so much information about ourselves to companies that lie about their culture & don’t...

toastal ,

Didn’t watch the video, but… Traffic is often already encrypted with TLS or other encryption & you don’t have to use the ISP for DNS. This would cover a lot of the data you would be discussing. Instead if using these advertized commercial VPNs you are giving the data to those corporations instead which is hardly better in many cases—luckily most of your traffic is encrypted with TLS & you don’t have to use them for DNS …which takes us back to the previous statement for concerns.

There’s still value in VPNs for a several online activities (censorship, piracy, activism, etc.) & threat models to certain folks, but assuming the ISP is the bogeyman in most common scenarios for non-niche use cases is incorrect—but it isn’t how these commercial VPNs are selling themselves. If the ISPs possess the ability to break TLS encryption we’d have bigger issues to worry about & VPNs wouldn’t help. I would assume the video goes in this route but chooses the clickbait title for views.

toastal ,

If it’s all encrypted & they don’t have the DNS requests, all they can see is that you sent X bytes to some IP which isn’t very helpful. Who’s to say these VPNs aren’t selling their data back to the ISPs anyhow?

toastal ,

What metadata? The headers are as encrypted as the payload. That there was a key exchange between you & a server isn’t too useful.

“Usually” is a strong word for DNS as well since all OSs let you change it & the megacorporations like Google & Cloudflare have already compelled a lot of folks to use their DNS ta resolve faster since the ISP ones are slow (& the smarter, curious folks used that as a launching point to find other provider or self-host). Some platforms have even been shipping DNS-over-HTTPS to get around some of these issues (since the payload & headers are encrypted under TLS).

toastal ,

Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.

— Matt Lee, https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/opinion-github-vs-gitlab

toastal ,

Will the source code ever move off of proprietary Microsoft GitHub where users need to have an account to contribute & search code—or certain users are blocked due to US sanctions? If the idea is wanting to stand up against centralized US-corpo-controlled social media for forums, why use that US-megacorpate-controlled code forge / social media platform?

toastal ,

Kitty can’t use bitmap fonts because of how it draws to screen & bitmap fonts don’t scale. You would need a different terminal for bitmap fonts or choose a different font.

toastal ,

I moved to Iosevka (custom) a few years back after a) switching to Kitty & b) realizing my eyesight was getting worse so I needed a bigger font than what Terminus provides

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