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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.

    Yep. Lightroom is the one piece of software I tolerate paying a subscription for. Alternatives do exist, but they all suffer from the typical FOSS problem of never having had a designer look at them and help them build UI that’s meant to be used by humans.

    I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to learn Darktable, and at the end I still couldn’t arrive to the same results I could in Lightroom by watching a 5 minutes tutorial and adjusting a few sliders. Not to mention that searching for a few of the issues I had led me to a bunch of threads of people complaining about the exact same issues only to be met by a developer telling them “if you don’t like the UI use another tool”.


  • And it’s not like the output is saved for the next time; you need to do it every time.

    You can cache transcoded content in Jellyfin. So use a large enough cache and you basically only have to transcode once for every resolution. It’s easier for me to set up transcoding than it would be to manually figure out which resolutions I’ll prefer having around and transcoding them. Most of my stuff exists in 1080p, with 4k files for stuff I REALLY like, but I sometimes find myself watching on very low resolutions on my phone when away because I have pretty limited data.

    I find that in a few movies the 4K versions have a generally better image quality and are worth it even if you are sitting far away or not watching the content in 4K resolution at all. But like you, I only keep around 4k files for stuff I really like.

    EDIT: I’ve also run into problems with codecs on other people’s devices when not transcoding. I could keep my files in whatever the most compatible codec is nowadays but having the ability to transcode on the spot is easier.






  • I get what you mean. My pet peeve is more with “real life” people. I don’t spend that much time on Lemmy anymore because, well, in a lot of ways it’s a lot like the worst parts of Reddit. And, in general, I’ve started to notice that “internet opinions” hardly ever represent what I see when I talk to real life people. So I tend to not care much about anything coming out of Lemmy, Reddit, Twitter, etc, as I find it’s often the loud very tiny minority.

    But I have the habit of reading opinion pieces on a couple of national newspapers, and I’ve noticed the “you’re an anti-semite if you disagree with me” pattern a lot. Most opinion pieces by usually left leaning political writers have been more level headed than I actually expected them to be - in the sense that there’s a couple of them who usually hold far more extreme positions on pretty much everything else and have been surprisingly “center” on this issue. Whereas on the right, a few people who I would say are usually fairly moderate and level headed have gone hard on the “the left actually hates jews, they don’t care about civilians” trope. And it’s very confusing to me because I have yet to find any actual left leaning person who’s any relevant in my country’s political scene actively sharing that discourse. So it all feels like baseless deflection. It was the kind of behavior I expected out of Reddit - it’s been the case for years I feel that in most bigger subreddits any critique of Israel’s government would immediately make you an honorary anti-semite. Though that seems to have changed a bit after we entered the “Bibi is trying to turn Israel into a dictatorship” arc and he’s not seen as the savior of Israel anymore. But it weirds me out to see these talking points coming out of real life political commentators who I would usually expect to be at least somewhat level headed. In general, with exceptions from the usual crazies and outside places like Twitter, I have yet to find the big leftist pro-Hamas discourse everyone seems to pretend is all around.


  • It’s why I happily soak up the downvotes all the time from the pro-Hamas crowd on here.

    The second part of this sentence is likely why you’re downvoted. The whole “everyone who disagress with me is pro-Hamas / anti-semitic” is tiring, disingenuous, shoves aside any possible good faith discussion, and I’d argue it’s actually destructive as it muddies the definition of these terms. Anti-semite specifically is a term I don’t think people should be throwing around willy nilly, but by this point, 99% of the time I see it used in online discourse it describes someone who doesn’t think mass civilian bombings are OK, and maybe 1% actual anti-semites. It’s basically the right wing version of some “leftists” calling people fascists for having the slightest right of center opinion.

    I usually either scroll past any mention of these or downvote and move on because it’s too tiring to devote time to people who, most of the time, are arguing in bad faith.



  • He was in the opensuse board of directors at some point I think. I knew him from his Youtube channel that talked about Linux and related topics, it was fairly popular in the Linux community for a while. I mostly watched it for Linux related news and technical opinions. A bit after he left that position, he started occasionally mentioning how now that he wasn’t representing opensuse anymore he could finally “speak freely”. That’s when the channel started taking a weird turn.

    At first he started going on weird political tangents while doing the whole “I don’t talk about politics” thing. Some videos started popping up where he would attack some person or organization for what seemed to be mostly political reasons, but under the guise of his reasoning being purely technical.

    Eventually, he just started sounding like someone who fell into a conspiracy rabbit hole, or some weird far right cult. I stopped watching then, most of his videos by then had little technical interest anymore and they sounded more like someone who was losing their mind. I don’t know if it’s a mental issue or something, but his whole persona shifted dramatically into something… weird. I haven’t kept up in the mean time, though.


  • While I understand the sentiment, I hate this trend that whenever someones talks about how soulless the internet has become, the answer is always Web 1.0.

    I don’t want web 1.0. I like having CSS and Javascript around. I use them to build things I couldn’t with HTML alone, and I’ve seen countless incredibly creative websites which fundamentally couldn’t have been built without Javascript. It’s weird to me how the article mentions the creative aspect of the old web, versus the commercial aspect and “sameyness” of the current web, only to then toss out tools that allow for even more creativity and personalization in the current web.

    Whenever I finish reading one of these articles it always feels like it’s mostly nostalgia and not much else.


  • I used to be an Arch guy, I had a pretty stable setup for a couple of years, until I had some problem with a printer and I just decided to toss the whole thing out and just go for a distro with neat defaults in which I wouldn’t be having problems with printers.

    I’ve been using Solus since then and it’s been fine. Even during the “bad times” of no updates, my laptop kept working fine so I didn’t bother switching to something else and I keep using it since it’s been more stable than distros I’ve used in the past which were supposed to be stable. I’ve seen mentions of the possibility of it eventually having an AUR style thing which would honestly make it the perfect distro.



  • I’d love to say the same but on my Lenovo laptop I get frequent disconnects with bluetooth earphones on Linux alone. Apparently it’s a firmware problem with the AX200 board, but even after having updated the firmware and following all the online fixes I still have the problem.

    My whole use case for my laptop is getting away from my desk when I want to read something and listen to music at the end of the day, but it’s annoying to have to reconnect the earphones every 10 or so minutes. Like everything Linux, it’s incredible as long as you have supported hardware and you don’t bump into some weird edge case.


  • I don’t understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their “photos” were made by AI, it’s only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.

    As for your friend’s comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who’s butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn’t produced some pretty decent work.


  • This is a really well thought out post, cheers. I think your choice is fair in the end, but I also think that it becomes impossible to do this for every word that people decide is racist or offensive to someone.

    Especially because it all comes from american internet culture and it’s hard for non americans to keep track. By this point, every few days some word or internet term or even the name of something in everyday life that I thought was perfectly normal is suddenly deemed immoral by american users. English is a secondary language to me, a lot of my knowledge of it comes from internet forums and such which only makes it even harder because I don’t have a deep knowledge of the roots of the language, especially when it comes to slang or “internet terms” I mostly copy what I see. And while my stance used to be the same as yours, that I could just avoid using that word and it wasn’t a big deal, I feel like at some point I started losing track of the list of words and I just gave up.

    I remember there being a big fuss around a similar situation in home gardening subreddits because the most common worldwide name of some flower offended someone in the States, and a similar situation in baking communities, and it’s just… I give up. There’s no winning this fight. Someone is bound to be offended by something eventually. If people are refusing to look at context and intent, too bad I guess.

    Also, on a side note, I noticed you tagged me while scrolling through the thread, but I didn’t get a notification or anything, I don’t know if tagged users are supposed to be notified? Just as an FYI as you might’ve expected that I would get a notification.


  • This is a really well thought out post, cheers. I think your choice is fair in the end, but I also think that it becomes impossible to do this for every word that people decide is racist or offensive to someone.

    Especially because it all comes from american internet culture and it’s hard for non americans to keep track. By this point, every few days some word or internet term or even the name of something in everyday life that I thought was perfectly normal is suddenly deemed immoral by american users. English is a secondary language to me, a lot of my knowledge of it comes from internet forums and such which only makes it even harder because I don’t have a deep knowledge of the roots of the language, especially when it comes to slang or “internet terms” I mostly copy what I see. And while my stance used to be the same as yours, that I could just avoid using that word and it wasn’t a big deal, I feel like at some point I started losing track of the list of words and I just gave up.

    I remember there being a big fuss around a similar situation in home gardening subreddits because the most common worldwide name of some flower offended someone in the States, and a similar situation in baking communities, and it’s just… I give up. There’s no winning this fight. Someone is bound to be offended by something eventually. If people are refusing to look at context and intent, too bad I guess.

    Also, on a side note, I noticed you tagged me while scrolling through the thread, but I didn’t get a notification or anything, I don’t know if tagged users are supposed to be notified? Just as an FYI as you might’ve expected that I would get a notification.


  • Gimp is one of the few FOSS projects with some notoriety outside of tech circles. It, VLC and Linux are possibly the only names I could expect some random person to have heard of. Changing its name would probably torpedo years of work to become seen as a reliable piece of software and send it back to the realm of “software that only people who watch the code repository know about”.

    And the whole changing the name to avoid offending someone is a losing battle in the first place. According to this thread, “rice” is potentially racist. I had no idea anyone could find “Gimp” offensive, but apparently they can. By this point, it’s part of american internet culture to be offended and no word is safe from americans turning it into a slur, dog-whistle, etc etc and advocating that everyone else in the world should stop using it.


  • Being a non-american, I never really liked the term “rice” because it’s not an intuitive term to convey modifying or customizing a system. But I have used it because that’s what the subreddit used to call it. I never thought it might be racist as I never saw anyone use the term in a racist manner - I can’t even understand how it could be racist - outside of this community, rice is just a word for something I eat for most of my meals. But again, I’m not american, so I might be lacking some cultural context - the whole culture war thing kind of escapes me and I’m not up to date on the list of forbidden words.