I can’t recommend emby because their business practices are pretty scummy. After accepting open source contributions for years, they went closed-source in 2018 and took all those contributions with them (they had a CLA). The very next update, they added hardware acceleration and locked it behind a paywall. They had a pretty big ‘security incident’ a few years ago, which probably would have been averted if they were still open source, as users in the community flagged it as an issue long before the devs took action.

Every day from 2021-2025. The UX is already great I just found it very unstable and buggy

When Gnome 3 first came out, it was comically unusable, but now a lot of the big issues have been fixed and I find it only mildly idiosyncratic. I like the KDE user experience more but I also think KDE is much buggier. I switched to gnome last year after getting tired of dealing with my desktop freezing/crashing and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. My main complaints are:

• Switching applications instead of windows on alt-tab (has any computer user ever wanted this?)
• Modal dialogues have window decorations that inexplicably move the parent window when dragged
• Typing in Files starts searching instead of navigating to a file/directory with the typed name
• Opening an archive extracts it automatically instead of looking inside

The default gnome applications are also quite inferior to their KDE counterparts (Dolphin is leagues ahead of Files, Kate is much better than Gnome’s text editor). But I guess you could install dolphin on gnome if you really wanted, so I won’t hold that against the DE itself.

My former boss at an engineering firm had to do an MBA to climb the ladder. He said the secret to success was just to stop thinking rationally

I learned this from a teaching company course named ‘Living the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon’

The French revolutionary government had moderate and radical factions that coexisted peacefully for many years. The terror wasn’t something that happened arbitrarily, it was an escalating conflict between radicals and (mostly) counter-revolutionaries acting in the interests the French burgeroise. During the course of the revolution, the government abolished an extremely oppressive system of feudalism, established universal rights for French citizens, established voting rights that would eventually lead to universal suffrage in France, and abolished slavery in the French colonies. That’s not to say it was all good (terror, wars, economic hardship, etc) but it completely transformed the entire country in a matter of years, from feudalism to a limited form of democracy, which resembles our modern democratic states much more closely than the system that had been created during the American Revolution.

If your take on the French Revolution is ‘they didn’t have a common enemy so they turned on eachother’ then I would say that it’s you who doesn’t know their history very well.

Rocm is the singular worst piece of software I’ve ever used

I had to use Google to work out how to crop to a rectangular selection on affinity 2. Not sure about affinity 3. I was also really unhappy with the ‘personas’ UI pattern which locks away different photo editing tools into whole parallel universe user interfaces. As a new user it just looked like those features were missing and I had to Google again. It’s not hard to learn but my first impression of the software was googling to work out how to do things that are obvious in any other image editor. Maybe it’s better in affinity 3?

I’m already an fl studio user, I was more interested in an audio editing program instead of a daw

A few years ago I replaced Photoshop with Affinity. Affinity’s user interface is pretty awful, even compared to Photoshop, but it does at least run a bit better. A few years ago I switched from premiere pro to da Vinci resolve, and though resolve has a bit of a learning curve, overall I think it’s better than premiere - it’s definitely faster and crashes a lot less.

I’m hoping that audacity 4 is a good enough audio editor to replace audition - we’ll see, audition is actually pretty good imo but I’d accept a slight downgrade if it means I can get away from Adobe entirely.

At the time people thought that you might build new supercomputers with an on-site cryostat (or something like that) housing a bunch of QPUs.

The UK govt announced £162m in cuts to research council funding last month, then this month they announced £2bn for a massive quantum computing project. I’m all for blue sky research but the field is basically a giant money pit. £2bn would have bought multiple general purpose supercomputers that could have been used for biology, materials science, astrophysics etc. The quantum computing research is inevitably going to yield a quantum processor with less than 1kb of memory that can only run for a few nanoseconds. The government is disproportionately funding this stuff because of the siren song promise that quantum computing will help them break encryption, but the field has taken so long to materialise anything useful that we now have quantum-resistant classical encryption algorithms. Also, plenty of physicists are now skeptical of the idea that quantum computers will be intrinsically faster than classical computers for most tasks.

The matrix sequels definitely muddle the pacing and characters, and they struggle to fill the void left by the central mystery of the first film, but the philosophising and action are both as good or better than the first film.

Speed racer has already been critically reevaluated so I guess my wachowski hot take is that Jupiter Ascending is due. It’s idiotic but it’s a sweaty blast of pure cinema.

• machine learning models will continue to improve their output somewhat but gains will be incremental and the intrinsic problems with ml-derived content (e.g hallucinations, context window limitations, long-term coherency) will remain
• open source models will catch up with commercial ones
• the smaller ml companies (like openai and anthropic) will be absorbed, probably by Microsoft and Amazon
• The increasing cost of hardware and energy will force companies to raise prices for ml subscriptions and eventually lock ml features behind paywalls
• Computer parts will remain expensive for a long time
• Programmers will collectively spend the next decade wrestling with the consequences of filling their codebases with millions of lines of ai generated code
• Google images will never fully recover

The article mentions it briefly but sheep farming really has devastated the ecology of the Yorkshire dales.

my mum bought a fairphone 3 about 5 years ago and is extremely happy with it, so far she’s gone through one usb-c port and one battery. it looks and feels exactly like a normal phone but it pops open with just 4 screws. helping her fix it has taught me that phone manufacturers could make repairable phones easily and they all just choose not to

people were saying this about millennials as well. in fact, James Flynn (for whom the Flynn effect is named) literally said that teenagers in 2009 were dumber than teenagers 30 years ago. call me when there’s a consensus from neuroscientists about this. for that matter, call me when standardised testing is a useful measure of intelligence

I looked in stoat’s issue tracker and there is an issue asking for video chat which is 5 years old and still open. Safe to say it’s a dead project.

tailwind is a product born out of complete ignorance for the fundamental technologies that underlay the web and why they exist the way they do. I hope tailwind’s decline encourages people to learn the fundamentals

I hope souja boy plays it