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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • I was a reddit Sync user and was super bummed when (large scale) API access was shut off, so I jumped on the chance to use Sync for Lemmy. It defaulted to world for signups, presumably for ease of use for migrating reddit users. Knowing that Sync already had a loyal audience that was willing to put in a little effort to migrate, it seems the dev opted to make everything as similar to the reddit UX as possible, including registration.

    Now that I’m more familiar with the fediverse, I’ve been considering migrating to a more specialized instance that matches my interests. Truthfully, though, it seems unlikely that much of anything would change if I did since I’m going to keep using the same app, so I’ve been slow to move.

    To compare this with my experience with Mastodon, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the idea of instances and really had no idea which to join, nor did I have a familiar app to work with. I figured it out eventually, but a lot of the artists I follow didn’t or didn’t have time to, so overall I haven’t spent much time on it. I’ve spent way too much time on Lemmy so far.


  • I remember at the time there being a lot of pushback on blender UX changes, too. I watched a talk on it where a guy really said “I had to Google everything so these guys should, too”. I know a lot of FOSS guys abhor the idea of conforming to an industry standard, and I get it, but the truth of the matter is that people would rather pay than have to relearn their entire workflow.









  • Unfortunately that popularity directly translates to the AIs ability to digest and paraphrase a book. LLMs have been trained on what is available in computer text format, which means mostly internet sources. English has an outsized presence on the internet compared the to actual number of native speakers, so there’s magnitudes more training data for it than any other language. The models of other languages will be severely limited, if AI companies have spent the resources to train them at all.


  • My real concern is that AI in its current form is not great at context and continuity. I see it similarly as translating between languages: Google can do a decent job of directly translating a phrase, even adjusting grammar a bit, but it can’t tell when it needs to explain or replace an idiom, or which details it definitely needs for symbolism and which can be safely disregarded, or detect when a word is being used in an archaic or unusual way.

    So I think this would be a great project for a human with a keen understanding of literature to undertake, but honestly I think an AI paraphrasing without a large amount of editing would would give you a fairly bland and possibly confusing read.


  • I think the rub here is that most developers aren’t developing/publishing their own software, but honing their skills on writing proprietary code while also putting food on the table. To that end, a permissively licensed library is better because the company will actually use it and the developer will gain experience with it that they can then use outside of the proprietary environment to contribute to FOSS projects (some of which may well use GPL). If a GPL end user product gets popular enough, it will eventually be able to use all of that gained experience to compete with the propriety alternatives, so I do think the two can work in tandem.



  • The problem is that a lot of users aren’t building a new machine for Linux, but converting an existing Windows laptop or desktop. In my case, I’d already bought an Nvidia card about a year before I decided to switch to Linux for gaming. Not ideal, of course, but it work a good 95% of the time and I can’t really afford to get a different card right now. I’ll definitely keep it in mind for my next pc upgrade, though.


  • I know this is just adding to your problem, but I wanna add to the majority and say go with Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian, so most anything you can do on Debian, you can do on Mint. This is handy to know whenever you see a “.deb” file.

    One of the things that makes it an easier transition from windows is that it’s a lot less strict about including proprietary drivers and codecs (though apparently Debian now includes a few by default). It also includes a few more GUI tools by default, like the package update manager.

    I also have found Mint’s Cinnamon desktop environment to be the easiest transition from a Windows environment. KDE is also a good choice in that regard and it’s what I use now, but its plethora of options can be overwhelming for new users.

    The distro wars can be pretty overwhelming, but I’d say pick whatever appeals most and go with it. If you get to a point where you can’t do something that you want to do, you can always come back and ask for advice and maybe switch up a different OS.



  • I mean, there’s something to be said about adhering to an industry standard. Of course no project has to do so if they don’t want to, but people trying to get on with their work don’t want to spend a bunch of time relearning everything. I think Blender really thrived when they loosened up a little on their ideas of what a workflow should be and gave people industry standard options out of the gate.

    Whether we like it or not, GIMP isn’t going to be most people’s first experience with image manipulation. Whether they had a free PS license through school/work, had a subscription at some point, or once got it through ahem alternative means, people will be coming into GIMP with certain expectation of what the workflow should look like and will get frustrated pretty quickly.