• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • This, and Bangladesh. All places that rely on wage slavery, child labour and unethical working conditions, because that which is unethical is also very cheap.

    You can’t really compete with slavery, because again: it’s very cheap, and the way the Chinese state leads Chinese farmers and villagers into social lock-ins, whereby they legally become stuck in an area where there’s only grueling, deadly, soul crushing and back breaking labour that leads to a life of poverty becomes a problem for the rest of the world if it’s used to manipulate the markets.

    I do of course realise this article is about “too big to fail” companies that corner every market, but I also think that the west and the east needs to think about what it means to partake in a race to the bottom where wage slavery is part and parcel of the market. It creates conditions whereby competition involves who can make the most horrible living conditions in the world, and do you really want that?

    There are Chinese labourer families who have been trying to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” for generations now, and it’s all thanks to other nations enabling the Chinese regime - especially the west.


  • This is why Godot is so important and that source available can be something the EU has to consider for all newly designed games. Sorry, small, mid and big time game studios, and screw you publishers, what we need is to make sure that the barrier to entry for game developers is significantly lowered. What, you think I’m taking about video game conservation? Leave that to AccursedFarms.

    What I’m saying is that you can more easily pitch games to publishers, using assets and engines that are already “standardised”, like Bethesda’s several Rube Goldberg machines, if they are available. I’m looking at Fallout London as saying to myself: why isn’t this on Steam, Switch, and every other platform Fallout 4 can run on, being sold by Bethesda?

    Even split prices, one for people who already owned Fallout 4, one for who recently purchased Fallout 4 if they don’t have Fallout 4 - if you wanna be pedantic. But the point remains the same: these lovely modder devs, though they shouldn’t be forced, could have pitched this game to Bethesda, even as an “off-universe” game. Whatever.

    But then we remember the Fallout 76 Store. Oh my god, no. And DMCA takedowns, claims of copyright infringement - even though “modified works” doesn’t exclude software - and what about actual live services and competitive games? Like could the community make the server instead? Can it be something even the Olympic Committee has a hand in, so the game can be vetted for the Olympics?

    Like update your EULA. “May be used, modified and deployed for free if it’s used for education and development purposes”. I’m not a lawyer, so take them scribblings with a grain of salt, but something like that would really just add an extra level in participation in schools, clubs, organisations, etc, even as an easy way to recruit and receive games and new worlds, for free.

    Free the engine! Free all of the engines! NOW!!! “The secret sauce” fallacy has been stupid, is stupid right now, and will continue to be stupid into the future - unless we do something about it.

    Free the engines!





  • Been using it for the last couple of weeks… because I am your king, king of the nerds, and also I run NixOS, because I’ve abandoned all prospects of having an actual life.

    That being said, it’s still buggy, still unstable, still lacking features… but, my god it is nimble and quick. Like my CPU and memory usage dropped substantially when I moved from Plasma. The keyboard workflow will maybe be a bit grading at first, as there’s no Alt+Tab.

    But… you use Super+up/down to move between workspaces, and Super+Left/Right to move between windows in a workspace - or windows inside a tab stack, and you can put any window inside a tab stack. Take that, Microsoft.

    Tiling is a mode you can turn on for all workspaces, or per workspace, but you can also float whatever window to be outside the tiles. Closing all windows on a workspace and moving to another one will automatically destruct that workspace, and the workspaces below will be pushed up.

    All in all, it’s a pretty great experience and I can’t wait to see everything hit alpha, as System76 is really pulling out all the stops for this one. The first fully Rust based DE is going to shake the Linux DE world, mark my words.





  • Hopefully rpm-ostree is just the beginning. When SuSE Mint, Zorin, etc have some form of ostree tooling, then it’s over for you bitches, and by it being over for you bitches, i mean the need to do a full system reinstall will be over because you bitches can just rebase.

    It truly will be the evolution of distro hopping, codifying a “of fuck, GO BACK” function by way of image handling, rather than barfing your operating system file system hierarchy on to your root partition like some caveman.

    The future… is OCI images and layering, like in containers, because cloud native containers is the way - for the desktop… no, seriously. Stop laughing.


  • The RISC-V is an extensible ISA, so yes. All those vendor extensions are optional, when fabricating the processor, which can be replaced by other extensions over time.

    Both Intel and AMD have had vendor extensions in the designs that they no longer use, even ones that have been “retracted” (i.e whatever in the heck Intel is doing with their AVX extensions).

    But yeah, currently, there are a lot of proprietary extensions, which could still be declared as open hardware as well. So yeah.




  • TL;Dr licensed firmware is garbo - open firmware ftw

    This - is what we need.

    The only ones who can really push the envelope on getting RISC-V into the hands of consumer, and indeed up to an IPC comparable to ARM, are companies like Deep Computing and Si-Five.

    The biggest problem in the computing world, bar none, are not the predatory companies, vendor lockins, or proprietary operating systems, it’s always been licensing. This is why BSD existed in the first place, because a $1000 a month per seat to copy a file without pulling and pushing bits around is a bit too much, even if it was the 70s.

    Similarly, in a time of green washing, eWaste and even planned obsolescence, one of the things that help to underpin all of these afformentioned evils is secret sauce firmware.

    No matter what you say, if you don’t have access to the source code for firmware and bootloaders, you’ve got a lifetime set by the vendor based on how long they can actually support the hardware - because employees cost money. You can’t realistically expect a company to support something they’re not making money on anymore, and they’d most likely just want to sell you new hardware.

    This is where RISC-V comes in swinging. I’m not saying that all RISC-V hardware will come with open firmware, but the ball is rolling and with it we can finally bridge the gap spanned by tech companies, where the average Jane or Joe can in effect easily modify their firmware code, albeit through security principles of course.

    Unlike Open Source, Open Firmware is a bit trickier. Decades of industrial precedent, and indeed vendor lockins the OEM’s are beholden to, like proprietary BIOS, makes it that much harder to establish - especially when designing an entire ISA and getting it to prefab is a Lord of the Rings length journey. There is no griffin shortcut.

    No doubt I’ll have naysayers. Just mentioning open firmware in the average matrix chat riles the gallery, as is the style, but even the likes of NVIDIA are opening up their code (thanks, AI) to the point where NVK is not that far from stable, untainting your kernel. Yay.

    Everybody ♥️ open source, don’t they? But how about giving some love to Open Firmware? In the FUTURE 🐙 we’ll hopefully have vendors and foreign interests shoved tf out of our hardware, and good riddance, because they shouldn’t be in control of it in the first place.

    I await your ire.

    And shout outs to the libreboot maintainer. What in the ever loving Carmack is FSF up to? Libre ain’t a brand, it’s a philosophy.


  • I’d say that there are some differences, but whereas Plasma 3 to Plasma 4 design-wise broke the mold, going from 4 to 5 was seemingly less of a major version milestone and more of a major version touch up.

    I’ve used both, a long time ago, and I might be off base here when comparing Plasma.4 with 5, but what’s also good about the transition from 5 to 6 is something called skeumorphism, i.e continuously developing a design language rather than making ground breaking changes. Plasma 6.1 hits a little higher mark, but considering all the UI work KDE has gone through the last year, it’s time to reap the rewards and hard work of the community.

    That being said, backend wise, a ton of new stuff has come and even gone. The last years there’s even been an attempt to rewrite a lot of old stuff into modern code, in preparation for Wayland support in somecases- which was a doozy. Wayland is not an easy protocol to implement - or so I’ve heard.

    We lost the cubic desktop, and got it back again, it’s been a wild ride. Kudos to the Plasma team for finally starting to catch up to GNOME in the UX department and that their efforts have been fruitful. I’ll be trying out Plasma 6.1 as my daily driver once it is released as stable.