[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 2 weeks ago

Having comprehensive unicode language coverage on a free OS is amazing. I wish the font system was smart enough to hide Noto variants in creative apps but leave them available for browsers. There is a workaround to do that but its a huge pain. I wouldn't delete any files managed by the package system. They will just keep coming back anyway. There are smaller collections of noto fonts in AUR that will satisfy the noto-fonts dependency which should keep KDE Plasma happy. They should be a straight swap if you are comfortable with an AUR dependency for a functioning desktop. The newer one is noto-fonts-main updated this year or there is an older noto-fonts-lite. Not tried either. Usual stuff about backups and taking advice from strangers on the internet.

Segoe might benefit more from the embedded bitmap or autohint settings than the regular open source fonts I am likely to use. Microsoft would optimise the hell out of it to take advantage of their proprietary, patented font rendering system. I wouldn't be surprised if it rendered poorly with distro defaults. Its the kind of blind spot a lot of open source devs and packagers could easily have. Its probably packed full of embedded bitmaps for small sizes and proprietary hinting stuff that linux won't understand.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 2 weeks ago

The US might be a worse place for lower skilled jobs due to lack of public health and low minimum wage but at the other end of the spectrum most people would be giving up a lot of opportunities and income to move to countries like Australia or NZ. Our economies are comparatively small, undiversified and lacking investment.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Bikes are only a small part of the picture. Infrastructure needs huge changes for bikes to be safe and we need to incentivise small vehicles like Kei cars and small cheap electric personal transport instead of going in the other direction. Not everyone is physically able to ride a bike and it can be challenging for those that can in some conditions such as heatwaves.

Virtue signalling hipsters on cargo bikes that cost more than a budget used car don't necessarily have all the answers. Still need to pay rego and service that car you use to drive the kids in the heat and rain when the ABC aren't watching.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You want the most common things available in a Settings app(s) as they generally are on Gnome, KDE, Windows and Mac. If we cram too much stuff in there regular people struggle. Finding a good balance is a dilemma for most platforms. You want the less obvious stuff to be available in additional specialist "tweak" apps for more experienced users as they often are on all these platforms but sometimes less so on Linux. Then the really esoteric stuff you have to edit registry settings, conf files and plists as you do on all of them. Linux tends to provide more power and flexibility but requires reading documentation due to the diversity of config methods and locations.

A Mac user very sensibly contacted me worried about pasting a command to edit a plist into the terminal from a website they found trying to fix an issue. Nobody should be pasting commands they don't understand into terminals. A quick search and I found the GUI toggle to do the same thing. It isn't exclusively a Linux issue. Windows and Mac have complex operating systems underneath and equivalently powerful command line tools.

GUI config isn't practical for hardcore linux users. It isn't scriptable, we can't store it in version control, it is harder to document, it is harder to use remotely. We have to appreciate that we have a growing number of users where it is worth taking a bit more time and sharing an alternative if one exists. However nobody wants to configure services in a GUI as we want to version, document and distribute this stuff and managing services in a GUI is unprofessional because you lose these things.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 4 months ago

Election cycles are seasonal events and there is a traveling circus that supports them across the English speaking countries. There is also trans-national movement within political influence businesses like News Corp and other lobby groups.

Historically Australia has often adapted media from elsewhere whether it be advertising or television formats and much of the country was so isolated pre-Internet that we never noticed that football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars was a ripoff of hot dogs, apple pie and chevrolet.

I expect over negative/false/deceptive campaigning would be regulated as we have a comparatively robust and fair electoral system. AI is built into popular image editing tools and political staffers aren't necessarily great graphic artists so I expect we will see more low effort AI images in political advertising and everywhere else as society continues to embrace mediocrity and deskilling.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 4 months ago

Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Does it use safe development practices though? Or is mainstream Rust development npm leftpad all over again with developers dumpster diving for dependencies to make their lives easier and more productive.

There is potentially a price to pay for colour ansi graphics and emoji and it comes in the form of a large tree of often trivial third party crates of unknown quality which could potentially contain harmful code. Is it all audited? Do I want it on a company server with customer data or even on a desktop with my own data?

The various gnu and bsd core utils are maintained by their projects and are self contained without external dependencies and have history. There are projects rewriting unix core utils in Rust (uutils) that seem to be less frivolous which are more to my taste. Most traditional unix utils have very limited functionality and have been extensively analyzed over many years by both people and tools which offsets a lot of the deficiencies of the implementation language.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Game shows of this sort were around for decades before fake reality tv bullshit. In simpler times when families had 1 screen and 5 or less channels they watched lowest common denominator stuff together. Similar shows were around since the early 60s elsewhere but only took off in Australia in the 80s when we copied a British show.

Our kids were raised almost entirely without free to air tv. These shows will never have the impact on popular culture they once did and I wonder how many viewers and how much revenue they generate. I suspect the bigger Aussie youtubers bring in a bigger audience than most of our local free to air productions. Unless their advertising rates are hugely overpriced it makes me wonder how FTA productions are funded.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 1 year ago

Yes, I noticed this as well. I had to feed my GDPR export into a program to delete comments as the scripts that used reddit to find comment history didn't go back far enough and did a terrible job. Even with that some comments caused errors which may have been due to some subs still being private at the time so I will do another pass.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Many people don't get what Framework is doing and that is fine. Buy a disposable laptop with everything soldered in and throw it in land fill when it breaks if that is what you want. The costs of unsustainable mass consumption isn't properly costed into purchases so the pollution and waste are left to future generations to deal with and plenty of people are more than happy with buying a bigger SUV, rolling coal and throwing out their laptop and phone every couple of years.

The modules are easily replaceable to deal with failure or changing needs without buying a completely new device.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Framework is 2256x1504 in a 3:2 13.5" display and Macbook Pro 13" is 2560 x 1600 16:10. The Mac wins as they should with Apple's massive vertical integration and profit margins but I would argue those numbers are comparable when a lot of laptops are still shipping with 1920x1080 16:9 displays.

The Framework 16" is going to be a 165Hz 2560x1600 16:10 which is well behind the Macbook Pro 16" but they are addressing very different markets. Many Linux and possibly still some Windows users are skeptical about the battery use, performance and os/app scaling of very high res displays while Apple addressed those issues a long time ago. I considered scaling a negative over using native resolution when looking at the Framework 13. It turned out not to be a problem.

Framework is a sustainable/repairable device for Windows/Linux/BSD/ChromeOS and they only really need to compete with what is available to those users. Their Chromebook is way ahead of the Chromebook market. They can't compete against Apple because Apple doesn't licence their OS or processors to other manufacturers so it is a pointless comparison.

[-] shirro@aussie.zone 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Lemmy needs a tag on posts not to export them to federated instances and put the whole of US politics and culture wars behind it.

Meanwhile Rule 10:

A place for major news from around the world, excluding US-internal news.

One of the best things about the reddit migration to the fediverse is having a local tab full of wholesome local non-US content. It would be nice if we could clean up All a bit more. I would be totally fine if my home lemmy instance defederated from all US instances carrying their domestic politics

I don't think continually rage farming us is going to add anything of value. If a whole country wants to drive themselves insane with increasingly polarized and nonsensical crap they need a private space to do it away from the rest of us because it isn't healthy and I don't want to participate.

view more: ‹ prev next ›

shirro

joined 1 year ago