Lvxferre [he/him]

TL;DW: execs assume monopoly from market dominance, without taking into account other stores could contest said market dominance.

Indeed. Sadly, corporations abused telemetry so much that it makes users automatically distrust software with it - even when it’s opt-in. As such I’m not surprised it isn’t more common, specially in the Linux ecosystem.

If we take distro defaults into account, it’s possible Arch stats overestimate GNOME market share.

Based on tecmint list, the top 3 distros are Mint, MX Linux, and Endeavour. Their defaults are:

• Mint - Cinnamon, MATE
• MX Linux - Xfce, Plasma, Fluxbox
• Endeavour - Plasma

Granted, the fourth one (Debian) does default to GNOME, but your typical Debian user is more experienced, so it’s less likely they stick to the default.

…I wish I had actual data instead of a bunch of guesses. :-/

0.25 mL of lemon juice is probably too much already.

She’s doing the maths for the concentration of citric acid in lemon juice through the formula C(acid) = 10^(-pH). That works fine for a strong acid, because you can be pretty sure all that acid in the solution is dissociated, and thus lowering its pH… but citric acid is weak - and weak acids don’t dissociate properly in already acidic conditions.

This means there’s probably way more acid in that solution than the pH makes you believe, but that acid will react once you raise the pH, by mixing the lemon juice into the water.

(I don’t blame her for using the strong acid maths. It’s already enough to convey her point, plus the maths for weak acids is a bloody pain.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if other big DEs, such as KDE, start making firmer plans for dropping X11.

If going by Arch Linux statistics, KDE dropping X11 will have a bigger impact than GNOME doing it.

In this video (Odysee link), someone asks X11 users why they’re still using it in 2025. The main answers were

1. DE or WM doesn’t support Wayland, or its Wayland session is currently WIP.
2. [lack of] support for certain graphic tablets and their features.
3. old hardware. Specially old nVidia GPUs.
4. [If I got this right] Some software expects to be able to dictate window position, and Wayland doesn’t let it to.
5. OpenBSD.

In the light of the above, I think GNOME’s decision to drop the X11 backend is a big “meh, who cares”. If you use GNOME you’re likely not in the first case; #2 and #3 boil down to hardware support, not something DE developers can interfere directly; I’m not sure on #4 and #5, however.

Yeah, the terminology is currently a mess. Not just due to language changes, but also synchronic variation - different people using the same words for different meanings, at the same time. But for me, it’s a mix of motivations, methods, and morality:

• hacker strictu sensu - like a kid who dismantles toys to see how they work. Sometimes they break things, but they want knowledge the most. Usually grey hat, sometimes white hat, only rarely black hat
• cracker - like a kid who bashes toys with a hammer. Not interested on the knowledge itself, except when it allows them to bully other kids. Almost always black hat.

It’s more than that: they’d need to have desires, aversions, goals. That is not automatically granted by intelligence; in our case it’s from our instincts as animals. So perhaps you’d need to actually evolve Darwin style the AGI systems you develop, and that would be way more massive than a single AGI, let alone the “put glue on pizza lol” systems we’re frying the planet for.

My guess:

Coverage roughly follows money, and that money comes the top of the hierarchy. However, the top is too far from the production to actually get that 1) automation is nothing new, and 2) AI won’t help as much with it as advertised.

The middle of the hierarchy is close enough to the production to know those two things, but it’ll parrot them because doing so enables the inefficiency they love so much, under the disguise of efficiency.

Then you got the bottom. It’s the closest to the production, but often suffers from a problem of “I don’t see the forest, I see the leaves”, plus since it has no decision power so it ends as a “meh who cares”. So it’ll parrot whatever it sees in the coverage.

As such, who’s actually going to get screwed here? The answer may surprise you.

All three. However not in the way people predict, “AI is going to steal our jobs”. It’s more like suckers at the top will lose big money on AI fluff, and to cut costs off they’ll fire a lot of people.

Setting aside “and how will it do that?” as outside the scope of the topic at hand, it’s a bit baffling to me how a nebulous concept prone to outright errors is an existential threat. (To be clear, I think the energy and water impacts are.)

Ditto.

Interestingly enough, not even making them actually intelligent would be enough to make them liable - because you can’t punish or reward them.

No problem - miscommunication happens.

Yes, this should be illegal, but it’s already common practice. I’m just hoping that enough of this will eventually get people to stop buying these products, and hopefully we can start seeing some real legislation against it in some countries.

Problem is, people won’t stop buying them. Often “smart” products are sold comparatively cheaper, because the business expects additional profits through ads; and if Samsung is going this way (ads on your fridge), it’ll do it.

The “crackers” part of this confuses me. Samsung is a Korean company. The chairman’s name is Lee Jae-yong (이재용). Samsung NA’s CEO is Yoonie Joung. Maybe I’m misreading this?

By “crackers” I mean “black hat hackers”. The sort of people who’d love to drop some ransomware into your fridge and then say “if you don’t want me to brick your fridge, pay me a few bucks”.

(After some websearch, apparently Americans use it as a derogatory term. I wasn’t aware of that.)

However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads.

For now, like the author herself mentions later on (“The bigger issue is that of trust. […] that’s today.”)

[Higby] “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”

What Shane Higby is saying here boils down to “we’re trying to help the user”. But if he said so, in clear words, every bloody body would call it bullshit, because it’s common knowledge companies smear ads on your face for their own sake - not yours. But if you hide it behind fancy words, like “further explores” and “deliver” and the likes, it’s harder to call the bullshit.

I’m getting real tired of this shit.

[Higby] "…future promotions will depend on the feedback and insights gained from the program.”

Translation: “we’re just testing the waters now. Let’s see if the suckers swallow it or spit it.”

This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s […] He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”

Emphasis mine. You can always trust Amazon in one thing: belittling the user.

The problem here isn’t just the ads themselves (although they are a problem); it’s that they are being added to the device after it’s in my home.

[Warning, IANAL.] Fight this shit. Seriously, fight it. On legal grounds. What they’re doing should be outright illegal in most countries; it’s equivalent to changing a contract unilaterally after both parties signed it.

Additionally, I’d strongly advise against buying any sort of “smart” device, unless you’re pretty sure the benefits of connecting your toaster to the internet outweighs all the risks. Including corporations and crackers taking control of it, harvesting your data, spamming you, building kill switches into it, etc.

I’m not the only one, either. I think the only people left are those who see Nintendo as video-game iPhones and autopilot into a purchase, and the diehards who have dedicated Amiibo rooms.

And even those might suffer some causalities, depending on how things go:

• the ones treating games like luxury goods are a bit too susceptible towards popular attitude. If Nintendo goes from “wow, you got a Nintendo!” to “you got a Nintendo? Cringe. Even Twilight is a better love story.”, they’ll be quick to ditch it too.
• diehard fans tolerate more abuse than reasonable fans, but that amount if not infinite. And Nintendo has been rather abusive when it comes to the Switch 2, including remote bricking it for spurious reasons.

Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

In a certain sense we are using a system like this, due to federation. I don’t think the exact same model would work well for Wikipedia, but it could try something similar.

One of my favourite instances of adaptation got to be Ted Woolsey’s “son of a submariner! They’ll pay for this…”, for the English localisation of Final Fantasy III / VI.

In the game, Kefka (the villain) is saying this as the heroes escape him, but the original only says “ヒーーー　くっそー！このかりは必ず返しますよ!”; literally “heeee shit! I will definitively return this debt” or similar. However:

• That “ヒーーー” interjection has no meaning on its own. It’s only there to highlight the character’s emotional state. It could be safely removed, without loss of meaning.
• くそ / 糞 kuso “crap! shit!” is vulgar, but by no means as vulgar as English “shit”. Specially given the 90s, and this game being marketed to kids. But it means the villain is being rude towards the heroes (makes sense, right).

So, translating it as simply “hey you!” or similar would mutilate the original, by removing the rudeness. But at the same time, Woolsey couldn’t use “shit” or “crap” or similar. So he looked at the context:

• Kefka is crazy, and the way he uses Japanese in the original is odd. For example, he uses the pronoun “ぼくちん” bokuchin to refer to himself, as if he was a kid - and yet he’s a court mage of an empire dammit. (It’s a bit deeper than that, but let’s focus.)
• a bit before Kefka says this, there’s a city in the desert also fleeing Kefka - by going underground instead, as if it was some sort of “sand submarine”.

So Woolsey went with “son of a submariner!”, something he likely made up on the spot. And you know what? It’s perfect - it’s completely on-character for Kefka to insult people in such a weird way.

It’s a bit more complicated: if you’re dealing with the sounds it’s transcription, if you’re converting from writing system into another it’s transliteration.

So for example, what you did is transliteration. But if you were to record some Japanese guy speaking and wrote it down (in kanji+kana, Latin, or even IPA), or if you handled how it’s actually spoken, it would be transcription.

“What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

“Oh noes, people in Wokepedia aren’t willing to accept my opinion that gravity doesn’t work on Fridays!”

“Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022.

If you’re really, really invested on 2+2 being five, then 2+2=4 becomes “subjective”.

In my opinion Wikipedia being hosted in USA is a liability. Or even being hosted in a single place, whichever it is.

If a megacorporation could profit nine zillions and fifty dollars, and instead it’s profiting only nine zillions, its shareholders are already screeching at the CEO “YOU INCOMPETENT FOOL, YOU’RE ROBBING US FIFTY DOLLARS!”.

Because she’s a con[ifers] woman.