“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • I didn’t “think I got you”; I was leading into something: what was it about Photopea prior to this that made them fundamentally different from Digikam, Slackware, and discuss.tchncs? I’ve donated to Lemmy too and various other FOSS projects, so I authentically appreciate that your donations strengthened that interconnected ecosystem.

    You clearly got plenty of use out of them, indicating how integral this apparently was to your workflow. You don’t show any indication you had problems with the Photopea maintainer’s actions or attitude before this. Was it the fact that Photopea isn’t FOSS? I’d agree it’s a huge difference, but at the same time, they’re basically free as in beer, and you weren’t just idly not paying them; you were actively, recurrently using their finite resources. Wouldn’t you agree that, even if you don’t want to give money to proprietary software (assuming again that’s the reason), they at least deserve to break even? If so, you could’ve just whitelisted them on uBO. But I also resent digital advertising for ethical reasons and because it’s a vector for malware, so I’d understand not wanting to turn off uBO and not wanting to give €5/month in compensation. But then it looks like, despite being plenty familiar with the FOSS ecosystem, you never gave it a fair shake. You just called GIMP icky and didn’t do the bare minimum level of searching that’d tell you ImageMagick exists for batch edits. So you weren’t willing to pay for the ad-free subscription (fair in isolation), you weren’t willing to turn off ads (fair in isolation), and you weren’t willing to try something else (fair in isolation), and thus you were just draining their money to your own ends (not fair).

    So realistically, it sounds like you were never going to support the Photopea maintainer regardless of what they did or how they acted, and now that they’ve cut you off from using their service for free, you’re acting like this is some kind of principled stance rather than being a lazy, entitled cheapskate.


  • I am not financially supporting developers who act like this.

    Are you financially supporting literally any developers at all? You made it clear you were not paying for a Photopea subscription and were using uBO, so there’s not a carrot or a stick here for the maintainer of Photopea (I guess there’s a very tiny carrot for losing you as a user in that you’re not using their resources). I mean that as a genuine question, by the way:

    • What software that you use have you paid for and/or donated to?
    • Was it because you had to, or because you felt strongly that they deserved compensation for their work?
    • Did you ever at any point stop giving said software maintainer money when you felt they were no longer acting in a way that comports with your standards?

  • I don’t really understand why you’re using ad-supported proprietary software that you’ve never paid a dime for (or given a dime to, since you use uBO), claiming that you don’t use GIMP or Krita instead because the former “is terrible” and the latter isn’t meant for cropping (a trivial, fundamental feature of the software), and then acting entitled to use the Photopea author’s own personal work with zero compensation. So you have free alternatives (as in beer and as in freedom), refuse to do even the bare minimum to learn how to use them, and then go full “you took my only food; now I’m gonna starve” when Photopea’s author stops you from using their own site/web app for free that they run and maintain at their own expense.

    If anything, you seem entitled and willfully ignorant, and I say that from the perspective of someone who resents digital advertising and proprietary software.



  • Ignoring for a second all the controversy around the term “two-spirit”, even if we say that two-spirit is the extremely Western concept – detached from indigenous culture – of a male and female in the same body (or even just generically two genders in one body), that still doesn’t apply, because all of the entities are male. In set theory, if you keep adding the same element to the set over and over, the set doesn’t change.

    Moreover, even if there were the kind of history you’re talking about, I’m not sure why dissociative identity disorder is being brought up here, because that categorically isn’t how God as multiple entities works within the fiction of the Bible. We see God and Jesus talking to each other back and forth multiple times, and that’s not how DID works. DID – a controversial diagnosis – isn’t a sitcom where two flatmates hang out inside your mind and banter. You’re dissociating so badly that you lose continuity, but God is clearly able to work as all three just fine at the same time.



    • The Father, God, is referred to as “He” consistently thousands of times in modern translations of the Bible, and he’s either literally or metaphorically “the Father”.
    • The Son, Jesus, is unambiguously male in his earthly incarnation, and he’s either literally or metaphorically “the Son”.
    • The Holy Spirit is referred to as masculine in English translations of the Bible, while Greek translations treat the Spirit more like an object-force-of-nature type whose pronouns change at any time to coincide with the type of object describing it (e.g. “comforter” is masculine, but “spirit” is neutral) and Hebrew just sticks with the feminine pronoun of the noun “spirit”.

    If you read a modern English version of the Bible, you have three entities in one which all are all consistently identified as masculine. Trying to treat God as non-binary with regard to modern English translations is more mental gymnastics than arguing why Kris Dreemurr isn’t non-binary.

    Given this is all fiction, it’s safe to say that death of the author is in play here, namely that 99.99% of the modern Christians who’d get offended at non-binary people existing would also not think of God as non-binary even after pondering on it, because their culture and holy book categorically treat God as masculine.


  • It’s technically more money upfront, but you’re not just buying the printer itself: you’re also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.

    So that higher upfront cost doesn’t just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages or more. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge alongside the printer for when it near-immediately runs out.

    Basically, if I’m not flat-ass broke, I’m paying another $63 upfront for an XL ink cartridge from HP for one of these printers. And what’s the page yield? 430. I’m still not even near the starter toner cartridge page capacity after spending an extra $63 on ink. To me, the upfront cost of an inkjet printer is pragmatically higher unless I’m so boots-theory-of-economics broke that all I can afford is the printer unit and only print a few pages a month tops.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoToday I Learned@lemmy.worldTIL about Wiki.js
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    13 days ago

    I replied to Scrubbles, not to you, OP. If you saw it, I actually edited in “sorry for the brutal honesty, OP” at the end for just a minute because after I’d already submitted that comment, I misread something you said that made me think this was your work-in-progress hobby project (which is really sad that I could’ve thought that to begin with). I did try it here as linked below, and it’s hilariously horrendous. It’s like somebody made a bootleg Docusaurus where the contents of the page are editable and you can do a poor man’s git diff between edits and said “done, we’re wiki software now”. There are so many things wrong with this in the way of being serious, productive wiki software that I don’t even know where to begin. It’s somehow only barely less terrible than Fandom, and Fandom has 20% of the screen dedicated to actual articles and is a cancer eating away at fan wikis (plugging Indie Wiki Buddy).

    Edit: Is there not even a spot at the bottom of the page for the license the contents of the article are released under? Oh my god. Copyleft is the most singularly important aspect of a healthy, thriving wiki, and instead of telling me a license like CC BY-SA 4.0, it’s saying “Powered by Wiki.js”. I can’t. This is not a serious piece of software created by someone who’s touched a wiki in their life.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoToday I Learned@lemmy.worldTIL about Wiki.js
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    13 days ago

    Fandom uses MediaWiki just like Wikimedia projects do, and that also means it uses wikitext rather than markdown. MediaWiki is especially nice because 1) it’s something prolific editors are already familiar with, 2) it has a great WYSIWYG editor called VisualEditor, 3) it’s basically guaranteed to be rock-solid, 4) it has good support and documentation, 5) wikitext is portable to functionally any wiki (apparently except Wiki.js right now, which is genuinely unacceptable for wiki software), and 6) a lot of tools, extensions, and preferences that let you customize your editing experience are made for MediaWiki.

    Looking at Wiki.js as someone with a decade of extensive experience editing and administrating various wikis, it looks very style-over-substance. Assuming the screenshot of their docs is supposed to represent the wiki, it’s basic as all fuck in comparison to what a MediaWiki page is capable of. It’s literally just text, headers, and hyperlinks to other pages. This is something fiddling around with CSS for 20 minutes could produce.

    The sidebar has a bog-standard telescoping ToC, a standard history button (I hope that leads to a full history, anyway), a star rating system*, and a bookmark/share/print icon trio. This is baby’s first wiki. Where are the templates? Captioned images? Tables? Not all pages have to have these things, but Wiki.js gives the reader one (1) image at the top as a first impression, and it’s something totally unremarkable.

    * As someone with 25,000+ edits on Wikipedia where we actually rate articles (other wikis don’t seriously do this), I can tell you this is absolutely fucking useless. We have a rating system on Wikipedia called Stub, Start, C, B, GA, A (basically disused), and FA. This is on the talk page and is nomimally based on various criteria. Almost always, the people using it actually know what they’re doing. Here, though? You’re encouraging substituting an actual talk page discussion (which I don’t even see here) with a useless star rating. Does the star rating reset every time you make an edit in case you resolved past issues? Do the votes get a corresponding message? Will the votes mean literally anything beyond what you could already glean by looking at the page? If I can edit anonymously, can I vote anonymously? It’s just stupid fluff to make up for how utterly redundant this software is to MediaWiki.





  • OP:

    Through the years, archaeologists have found similar results at many other sites in Indonesia, India and China. As the evidence accumulates, it appears that people were able to survive and continue to be productive after Toba blew its stack. This suggests that this eruption might not have been the main cause of the population bottleneck originally suggested in the Toba catastrophe hypothesis.

    While Toba might not help scientists understand what caused ancient human populations to plummet to 10,000 individuals, it does help us understand how humans have adapted to catastrophic events in the past and what that means for our future.

    It’s a good article, and I enjoyed reading it, but did you? I think you should leave this post up, but you could instead retitle it to something like “TIL humanity survived an eruption 74,000 years ago that was 10,000 larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption”. (Also, Toba is in Indonesia in North Sumatra.)




  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldMaths
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    2 months ago

    … okay? Yes? Nobody thought otherwise? Do we now have to clarify every statement about algebra by specifying that we’re talking about an algebra over the reals or the complex numbers? Or the polynomials or the p-adic integers, whose multiplications are also commutative?

    No one would call these “n-dimensional” number systems either. The algebra for each of these operates in R1 and R2, respectively, but, like, you would describe their algebras as being over an n-dimensional vector space. It’s not wrong, but I don’t think “two-dimensional number system” is something you’d hear mathematicians say.

    This pedantic aside feels so “I just watched a 3blue1brown video and feel verysmart™” that I don’t know what to do with it. It’s good to be interested in math, but this ain’t it. Everyone knew what they meant.


  • They struggled to deliver their ambitious mainline Linux phone on time during Covid yes, but they eventually delivered.

    And for the people who requested refunds who waited months if not never received them? Despite them moving back their timeline literal years with repeated delays? I don’t care what challenges they faced; they knowingly took people’s money and refused to give it back to them when they couldn’t deliver. It’s their responsibility to be prepared for challenges. And in some extreme edge case where they couldn’t have been prepared, it’s their responsibility to be transparent about that to the people who gave them over a million dollars (let alone purchased the product after the Kickstarter was finished). I suppose too that the pandemic affected Purism in January 2019 when they were supposed to deliver their product?

    The fact that they did is a huge win for the mobile Linux ecosystem becoming a real contender just when we need it.

    The Librem 5 is not a contender for shit. It’s so overpriced that it can only be successfully marketed to people who care so deeply about their privacy that they’re willing to use an inconvenient mobile OS, get completely boned on hardware specs, and deal with a company notorious for fucking over its customers. Purism’s behavior is a fucking embarrassment to the Linux ecosystem.

    NXP i.MX family debuted in 2013; Intel i7 family in 2008. Their phone uses a 2017 i.MX 8M Quad, the same year they crowdfunded their phone.

    That CPU is based on the ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-M4, launched in 2012 and 2009, respectively.

    2017 i7 computers are equally not from 2008…

    When I say “2013”, I’m not talking about the debut year of i.MX. I’m talking about the fact that you can compare this phone side-by-side with a Galaxy S4 or S5. 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC storage, a 720 x 1440p IPS display, no NFC, USB 3.0, an 8/13 MP front/back camera (which they inexplicably call “Mpx”; good job, guys), 802.11n Wi-Fi, no waterproofing, and a shitty-ass i.MX 8M CPU. I still remember watching a trailer for the Librem 5’s continuing development, and as they were scrolling through a web browser, it was noticeably stuttering. This was years and years ago; I can’t even imagine it today.

    It still today remains one of the best ARM processors with open source drivers without an integrated baseband. It means basically any flavour of Linux can install on the device, with a significant layer of protection from carrier conduited attacks. Other modules have similar tradeoffs between performance and interoperability/security.

    I do not give even the slightest inkling of a shit try to confirm or deny this, so I’m just going to assume it’s 100% true, because it’s not relevant to the point that the spec is absolute trash and being sold for $800. If you are not absolutely married to privacy, this is not a sellable product in 2025.

    Want better specs? We either need SoC companies to release more of their drivers open source, or more people to patiently reverse engineer closed source ones.

    Actually, if I want better specs, I’m just going to go out and buy a phone that isn’t from Purism. It really sucks that it’s not open, private hardware, but Purism is such a scummy company that so wantonly fucks over their customers that I wouldn’t touch the Librem 5 even if I could justify spending $800 for that spec just for privacy’s sake.