[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 49 points 1 week ago

I am a touch screen enjoyer. At least in theory. I like having time to browse, look at pictures, easy access to customization options and most importantly no feeling of pressure. I am not spending a cashier's time and potentially blocking someone behind me (at least there is usually less of a line for the self-ordering).

However there are negatives for sure. My biggest annoyance is that these devices are often annoyingly slow and unresponsive. They just display a tiny bit of text and images, they should switch between screens at 60fps, not 2s per click. Also if I know what I want it is often faster to tell the cashier and let them enter the order (on their more expert-optimized and less laggy keypad).

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 44 points 1 month ago

Because some people want to filter it out. So it gets a label.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 130 points 1 month ago

Because people don't understand how copyright works.

In most countries any copyrightable work that you produce is automatically covered by copyright. You don't need to do anything additional to gain that protection.

Most Lemmy instances don't have any sort of licensing grant in their terms of service. So that means that the original author maintains all ownership of their work.

So technically what these people are doing is granting a license to their comment that allows it to be used for more than would otherwise be allowed by the default copyright protections.

What they are probably trying to accomplish is to revoke the ability for commercial enterprises to use their comments. However that is already the default state so it is pretty irrelevant. Basically any company that cares about copyright and thinks that what they are doing isn't allowed as fair use already wouldn't be able to use their comments without the license note. So by adding the license note all they are doing is allowing non-commercial AI to scrape it (which is probably not what was intended). Of course most AI scraping companies don't care about copyright or think that their use is not protected under copyright. So it is again irrelevant.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 65 points 2 months ago

IDE is one thing, Go refuses to compile. Like calm down, I'm going to use it in a second. Just let me test the basics of my new method before I start using this variable.

Or every time you add or remove a printf it refuses to compile until you remove that unused import. Please just fuck off.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 64 points 3 months ago

if staying outside EU

I'm pretty sure this is explicitly not allowed because most of the EU laws apply to EU citizens and residents. So if an EU citizen stays outside the EU they aren't allowed to stop following the EU rules.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 58 points 4 months ago

Gabe Newell really nailed it there. I buy tons of games on Steam. I also used to subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from Google. But now Netflix has junk and I need to subscribe to 10 services and they occasionally deleted my partner's downloaded shows while traveling because they couldn't validate the license. I can't even play HD videos from any legal retailer on any of my devices other than a Chromecast as they aren't under the media lobby's control.

But say I was to download a movie from a torrent site. It would probably be a higher quality than streaming services would give me, I can play it offline with no concerns about license expiry and it will still be 4k on every device I choose to watch on. I could also take a screenshot and share to my friend (which may cause them to purchase that content!). It's basically all upsides. Maybe slightly more difficult to find the content than something like Google Play rentals, but really not much and the tradeoff is the greater choice of content available.

It is reductive to say that piracy is just a service problem. There are lots of people who will try to save the money. But a lot of those people wouldn't spend much if any money either way. They would just skip most content, or watch with friends or similar. There is a huge group of people (myself included) that would happily pay a significant amount for content if they provided a good experience. But they are too busy failing to stop piracy to bother giving a good experience.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 145 points 5 months ago

Back in the day X was a great protocol that reflected the needs of the time.

  1. Applications asked it to draw some lines and text.
  2. It sent input events to applications.

People also wanted to customize how their windows were laid out more flexibly. So the window manager appeared. This would move all of your windows around for you and provide some global shortcuts for things.

Then graphics got more complicated. All of a sudden the simple drawing primitives of X weren't sufficient. Other than lines, text and rectangles applications wanted gradients, rounded corners and to display rich graphics. So now instead of using all of these fancy drawing APIs they were just uploading big bitmaps to the X server. At this point 1/3 of what the X server was previously doing became obsolete.

Next people wanted fancy effects and transparency (like drop shadows). So window managers started compositing the display. This is great but now they need more control than just moving windows around on the display in case they are warped, rendered somewhere slightly differently or on a different workspace. So now all input events go first from X to the window manager, then back to X, then to the application. Also output needs to be processed by the window manager, so it is sent from the client to X, then to the window manager, then the composited output is sent to X. So another 1/3 of what X was doing became obsolete.

So now what is the X server doing:

  1. Outputting the composited image to the display.
  2. Receiving input from input devices.
  3. Shuffling messages and graphics between the window manager and applications.

It turns out that 1 and 2 have got vastly simpler over the years, and can now basically be solved by a few libraries. 3 is just overhead (especially if you are trying to use X over a network because input and output need to make multiple round-trips each).

So 1 and 2 turned into libraries and 3 was just removed. Basically this made the X server disappear. Now the window manager just directly read input and displayed output usually using some common libraries.

Now removing the X server is a breaking change, so it was a great time to rethink a lot of decisions. Some of the highlights are:

  1. Accessing other applications information (output and input capture) requires explicit permission. This is a key piece to sandboxing applications.
  2. Organize the system around frames to avoid tearing except for when desired (X doesn't really have the concept of a frame).
  3. Remove lots of basically unused APIs like fonts, drawing and many others.

So the future is great. Simpler, faster, more secure and more extensible. However getting there takes time.

This was also slowed down by some people trying to resist some features that X had (such as applications being able to position themselves). And with a few examples like that it can be impossible to make a nice port of an application to Wayland. However over time these features are being added and these days most applications have good Wayland support.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 45 points 8 months ago

Yeah, people are getting really upset at Google/Mozilla here but SafeBrowsing is actually a very good service. I legitimately believe that it frequently prevents malware infections and phishing on a regular basis. It is also architected with a privacy-first approach that reveals very little data to Google. And the SafeBrowsing privacy policy is actually one of Google's very tight ones.

I think Mozilla made the right choice to enable it by default. They also make it fairly easy to disable this for advanced users under the "Deceptive Content and Dangerous Software Protection" setting. (No need to crack open about:config, disabling it is fully supported.)

I understand that this may be a controversial opinion.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 56 points 9 months ago

The rant comment will be forever changed.

And dare I say improved.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 49 points 9 months ago

This is https://www.hyrumslaw.com/.

Basically there are two types of breaking changes:

  1. The change may break something.
  2. The change breaks a contract of the code.

What you are experiencing with debugRepr() is that you have triggered 1. You have made a chance that may break a user. But you have not triggered 2 because the new output is still within the previous contract. What level of stability you want to uphold is up to you.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 48 points 9 months ago

Not only that but the EU doesn't want to make it seem like people can come and go as they please. So they will make serious demands for rejoining.

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 43 points 11 months ago

They are just complying with the law here. As much as I don't think Meta are great people I'd rather that they follow the law than make their own decisions. Of course we should also consider fixing these laws, but that isn't really Meta's responsibility.

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by kevincox@lemmy.ml to c/rss@lemmy.ml

I know the Email isn't everyone's favourite RSS reader but it works really well for me. I wasn't happy with any of the existing services so I started my own.

https://feedmail.org is a low-cost RSS-to-Email service with nice clean templates. I'm happy to answer any questions.

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Backups with IPFS (kevincox.ca)
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submitted 3 years ago by kevincox@lemmy.ml to c/ipfs@lemmy.ml
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