BananaTrifleViolin

joined 2 years ago
[–] BananaTrifleViolin 24 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

You have a bizarre notion of "privacy". Have you read the terms and conditions, and privacy policies of Brave, Opera and Vivaldi? Have you read Firefox's?

Mozilla have also made clear the data licensing terms:

UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.

And the term that has been causing such concern:

You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

A lot of the posts on social media about this is just noise and overreaction. They're making explicit something that has been implicit for decades and is exactly the same with other browsers (and if anything more murky and opaque)

Edit: and if the concern is the AI chatbot stuff (which is optional) then Brave has the same kind of stuff in its privacy policy alongside a myriad of other commerical uses of your data.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 24 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Or do the bare minimum and find another job. He doesn't owe these people anything and if his job is so shit and impacting him so badly then get out as quickly as possible.

If there is not a realistic option of moving careers (e.g. close to retirement) then maybe what youre suggesting is worthwhile for him. But otherwise gearing up for a fight over a job he doesn't even want isn't worth it.

The costs on his mental health and well being and the continued opportunity cost of being in a job he hates when he could be in one he likes isn't worth it.

I'd do the bare minimum and spend every effort on getting a new job. Its been made clear his company doesn't want him, and they can't fire him for whatever reason - so make use of that window.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

And this is at a time when Bird Flu is raging in US farms unchecked. The conditions are perfect for a major flu pandemic.

This isn't just about seasonal flu, there is a slowly unfolding crisis that could lead to a deadly flu pandemic. It will be pot luck how deadly bird flu is, but it has been incredibly deadly in birds. It had not been deadly in cattle yet - but it could just take 1 mutation to become so. And the farms are also a perfect incubator for it to transfer into humans.

With Trump and Musk disassembling public health infrastructure we are less likely to stop a pandemic, less likely to detect it when it gets going, less likely to contain it and now less likely to be able to vaccinate to save lives.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 83 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The circumstances for a bird flu pandemic are already shockingly perfect in the US and they get worse every day.

Bird flu is running free in US farms, with limited attempts to stop it. The chances of it moving in to humans is already very high in fhe US. And the CDC is barely monitoring this anymore, the US has left WHO and now the US is abandoning flu vaccines.

The US is a perfect incubator for a major flu pandemic. It will be random luck as to how deadly a coming flu pandemic will be, but its been given the best chance to develop and spread. This is increasingly scary.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 4 points 1 week ago

This started in the UK in the 90s with a research paper by Andrew Wakefield linking MMR (measle mumps rubella) vaccines to autism. It was trash research but it for published in the Lancet (a major international journal) before being retracted once other doctors pointed out the massive flaws in the research.

There was and is no evidence of causation - autism happens to be diagnosed usually after childhood vaccines are conpleted but thats because vaccines are mostly in young ages and it takes a while for autism to be diagnosable as its only obvious once children reach a certain age when the socialization aspects of the diseases become more obviously.

However despite it being trash research and eventually being withdrawn, the damage was done. Enough parents of children with autism wanted to believe that this disease was inflicted upon them and have someone to blame rather than accept it is largely genetic and bad luck. A perhaps understandable feeling but that gave an opening for conspiracy theorists to blame the government for a "cover up" even though all the counter evidence and push pack is evidence based and freely unavailable.

Andrew Wakefield eventually got struck off the UK medical register - he was found to have had undisclosed financial interests that would make him millions in selling bogus test kits. The real conspiracy was his but Hes managed to move to the US and make a career as a "victim" and "outsider" to the pharmacy industry.

This whole vaccine conspiracy has been taken up with the US right wing and religious groups. Its a perfect conspiracy for them as it plays into the ideas of the US federal "forcing" then to do things against their will. In this case vaccinating children (which depends on a majority of children getting vaccinated to protect the whole population - herd immunity) and is used as an example of "socialism" vs their preferred extreme individualism. They already rail against being told they cannot indoctrinate children by lying about science in schools (trying to suppress evolution teaching etc) or use the states infrastructure to discriminate against groups they disagree with such as gay or trans people, or be downright racist asis often seen throughout the bible belt.

So the vaccine conspiracy theory is basically one of many tools used by the right wing and religious allies to rail against supposed state interference in their lives. Instead most people who believe in this nonsense are either extremely ignorant and easily manipulated or deliberately using the nonsense to further their own goals. So some of these people are highly intelligent and don't care whether this is true or false - only that it aligns with their world view and goals so they dont challenge it. Some will even know its all bullshit and go along with it to further their own goals.

The covid vaccines has supercharged this debate. The roll out of vaccines with massively reduced testing and safety steps to try and control the pandemic, and then the side effects seen has all helped fuel this conspiracy and grow it within the right wing echo chamber.

There is no evidence whatsoever that vaccination causes autism. However parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated with MMR and now you have outbreaks of diseases like Measles in the US. People will die, people will become infetile - all from a disease that is easily prevented by a vaccine.

Tl:dr: The vaccine conspiracy is a right wing aligned nonsense started in the 90s andnuper charged by covid, and is a sign of the extremely polarised and disinformation heavy nature of right wing US politics (and is seen in other western countries if you dig into it even if fringe stuff)

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It does seem strange. It may be a liability issue - easier for Meta to make it entirely the users responsibility to clear an area rather than meta be responsobke for a safety system that should show you objects but may go wrong.

The example of it not showing the dog is a good one - if you trip over the dog and hurt yourself who is liable? If you have a system that shows objects and people/animals in your play area then it has to work 100% perfectly and Meta is responsible for making sure it always works. While if ypu say "thats your problem, keep your play area completely clear", and remove the feature, from the get go it makes it harder to sue Meta if you get injured. Having no Safe Sense system takes any responsibility and potentially liability away from Meta.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 29 points 1 week ago

This needs to be called Trumps Tax Rises, and repeated over and over again until it sinks in with the morons who voted for him.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

This looks like a good build.

A couple pf considerations; which really come down to your budget and future plans.

The Ryzen 7700 X is a good value per £ spent, and a good chip. But if your budget allows then £140 more gets the Ryzen 9 7950X, which has twice the threads at 16, better specs generally and nearly double the bench marking scores. Obviously prices vary in different regions but I'm seeing the 7700 X at £330 and the 7950X at £470. For 40% more you'd get about 100% more power. Those sorts of things are worth considering when you build - a higher budget now may save you money longer term as you may not need to upgrade for longer and youre already sinking the £330 in which you wouldn't get back when you upgrade.

However you would also need to think about CPU cooling and may end up spending more on a fan too. But fans are generally cheaper and if youre already getting a good fan it'd be moot. Do get a fan; I dont think the 7700 X cones with one and generally stock fansnwith CPUs are OK but not the best for high performance use like gaming.

For graphica the RX 7900 GRE is a slightly better AMD graphics card. Its about 11% more powerful. I'm seeing t at £560 versus £520 for the 7800 XT. About 7% more expensive. 11% is a more marginal boost but again might be worth it. I'd definitely go with AMD at that price range - Nvidia 4070 is similar performance to the 7900 GRE but I'm seeing the 4070 as more expensive and Nvidia drivers are not as good on linux.

Thats not to say the drivers dont work - I do have a 3070 on Linux and I have a good experience gaming. The problems are ive had bad driver updates ive had to roll back, and I have problems with Wayland so use X11.

However if money were not a limit, the top end cards are Nvidia and you'd still get your gaming power from them on linux. Its just frustrating and annoying when drivers lag Windows, or have buggy updates. In terms of value for money and Linux, the AMD RX 7900 GRE is the better buy.

(Edit: worth saying too for single player gaming the ones youre playing are the ones that make good use of ultra high end graphics - so for example Witcher 4 is going to making use of top end graphics in the years ahead. GTA VI too. Not sure that justifies the cost of high end cards though - they are rediculousl overpowered and overpriced fr current uses)

Last thing, again coming down to budget vs future proofing. 32gb of ram is good but maybe worth getting 64gb if you can afford it to future proof. However if sticking with 32gb get a brand and combination you'd hopefully he able to buy more of down the line. Its not a good idea to mix ram sticks so you could get 2 16gb sticks now, and then another two 16gb sticks in the future - so make sure its a decent brand like Corsair that will still sell in 3-5 years. However if you get 64gb you might be OK for 5 and maybe even 10 years.

RAM is also always one of the cheapest and first and easiest ways to boost performance in a systemif you had to pick just 1 item to boost. (Edit: but in your case 32gb is already top end so you probably wouldn't notice the 64gb unless you have some very memory intensive scenarios. I do have 64gb - which I do use for Cities Skylines as I load so many mods. So 64gb can still be a good buy if you'd use it)

Edit 2: also get a 4k gaming monitor because with the specs youre considering you'd be playing at 4k. I play at 4k with high and ultra settings still on my 3070, and that's less powerful than what youre buying.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Sure, just ban private and exclusionary clubs and give everyone the right to join and play of they wish. Then its fair.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You can convert using Evernote as an intermediary: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Onenote

You'd need to hunt down a copy but there are mirrors since Evernote ended legacy version, and it'd need to be set up in wine to run in linux but it should do the job.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 159 points 2 weeks ago (18 children)

Well, Europe needs to grow a pair and tell Trump to fuck off. We need to accept that he is leaving Nato, and European countries need to take it over or set up a new organisation. He can make any deal he likes with Russia; Europe and Ukraine can just tell him no and show him the true limits of his power. He cannot dictate to Europe and he is not our president.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin 28 points 2 weeks ago

Conservative commentators criticized the portrayal as outdated and offensive, calling it an unfair caricature of Trump voters.

Who cares? Time to stop giving a crap about racists and biggots feelings. What a bunch of snowflakes.

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by BananaTrifleViolin to c/[email protected]
 

New adventure game "The Phantom Fellows" has released on GOG and Steam, with a 10% discount until 4th Oct.

It's a comedy mystery game featuring a guy and his ghost friend, who perform jobs and investigate mysteries over 7 days in a small Colorado town. The game has a pixel art aesthetic, reminiscent of recent games like The Darkside Detective, and synthwave music.

I have no connection to the company, stumbled across the game and been playing for a few hours. So far, it's a fun game, good production values for £11. Certainly scratches that adventure game itch.

EDIT: it's made for Windows, but I've been playing it on Linux via Lutris/Wine without issue.

 

The New York Times has used a DMCA take down notice to remove an open source Wordle clone called Reactle

 

I'd been having problems with the scale of the VLC interface at 4K on my Linux machine (KDE Plasma, Wayland).

I found a solution from a mix of previous solutions for Windows and other Linux solutions which did not work for me. The problem is with QT (which is used by VLC) and the linux solution was to put extra lines in the /etc/environment file but I found while this fixed VLC it mucked up all other QT apps including my Plasma desktop.

The solution is to use VLC flatpak and set the environment variables for the VLC flatpak app only using Flatseal or the Flatpak Permission Settings in KDE.

Add two Environment variable:

Variable name: QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR Variable value: 0

Variable name: QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS Variable value: 2

For the second variable, scale_factors, set it to match the scaling you use on your desktop. 1.0 means 100%, 1.5 is 150%, 2 is 200% and so on. My desktop is set to 225% scaling, so I set mine to 2.25 and it worked. In the end I went up to 3 for VLC because I liked the interface even more at that scale (it's a living room TV Linux machine)

Hopefully this will help other people using VLC in Linux.

If you don't want to use Flatpak, you can add the same variables to your /etc/environment file (in the format QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0) but be warned you may get jank elsewhere. This may be less problematic outside of KDE Plasma as that is QT based desktop environment. For Windows users it is a similar problem with QT and there are posts out there about where to put the exact same variables to fix the problem.

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