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Cake day: November 16th, 2023

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  • Microsoft’s design philosophy in any of their products has gone from well organized menus to relying instead on a search bar. Copilot is a further addition to that design, with yet more pushes to never use a menu, but instead just tell it what you want and have it spit it back out. They want everything you make to go on OneDrive as well, so it can also be indexed this way. Teams works the same way. The big search bar at the top is unavoidable.

    Windows search is complete garbage, which you might think is a counterpoint, but instead it’s just that they only put work into having it serve results for cloud-indexed items or web results.




  • It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they’ve pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that’s a fair argument still.

    Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone’s mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don’t blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.



  • This is…kind of stupid? There’s such a plethora of options in the Linux space for desktop environments, workflow customizations, configurability, etc. nothing is locked down by taking a Windows-style approach to a DE. Instead it follows a tried philosophy that’s only really been hampered by Microsoft’s decision to funnel users into an frustrating hole that removes the choice to disable or modify features you don’t like. KDE in particular has always been a Windows-style DE, and it’s currently one of the best options for modern features and extensive customizability. Hyprland is literally designed for linux enthusiasts. Gnome is the Mac analog, Xfce is your light-weight but functional, etc.

    You’re upset because people are looking for more options? That’s bizarre. I came from Windows, but I guarantee my setup is different than someone else who comes from Windows because that’s the flexibility that’s offered. No one coming from Windows wants it to be exactly like Windows, they just want to be able to use their computer in a way that allows them to work, to play games, to watch media, etc. It’s a computer. It’s your computer. It should be able to do what you want.






  • Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It’s pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you’ll have multiple seeds for a single source, you’re connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you’re also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.

    It’s survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it’s so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it’s basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay





  • I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time, and of course, the need for miners to exist to process these confirmations/transactions. The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

    It’s not really feasible on a broad scale. Bitcoin is a holding stock, not a valid currency. Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity. And as its scarcity increases, it naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit. You can argue for proof of stake to eliminate the need for mining, but then you open the doors to centralization more immediately.




  • Imo, plugins should have separate config files, with uniform, consistent formatting. Separating them ensures that plugins never modify primary configuration details, they can be updated independently, or deprecated without affecting future functionality. It also means you can take regular and reliable backups of each config.