there’s actually aword for this type of mixed idiom: malaphor

Wait, how does that work? It seems like it should take the same energy to melt it either way.

presumably they mean using something besides your body heat to melt it

That’s more of an turn-of-phrase, no?

That interface is called a manual or tutorial, and there are many better ones than neural networks

AI isn’t stupid because it doesn’t possess any intelligence to begin with, the term “AI” is just a marketing misnomer.

Language Models are essentially really advanced Markov Chain generators. Once you understand that, you’ll realize why your question is like “I keep asking these water mills to make me a cup of coffee, but they all taste like dirt”: wrong tool for the job, it just happens to be tangentially related.

You’re also asking if there’s a way to precisely word a request so that the computer will do what you want it to do. Luckily for you, there is! It’s a trick that’s been around for ~60 years and it’s called “programming languages”

none, and gods willing that will always be the case. Civil war isn’t just “good guys vs bad guys”—hell, it wasn’t even that the first time around, despite union propaganda trying to make it seem like their intentions were pure. War is also starvation and loss of access to clean drinking water and constant blackouts as supply chains get interrupted; it’s many people dependent on uninterrupted health care dying off because they can’t get their meds or do their testing; it’s r*pists and pedophiles and nazis and sociopaths having their way with others while society gets distracted; it’s your loved ones dying, not because they were fighting for what’s right, but because they were “acceptable losses”; it’s constant anguish that destroys lives for multiple generations as trauma gets handed down like an heirloom.

Living through a war is about the most extreme form of hate I could imagine wishing upon someone. If someone who lived through one is willing to say “it’s time,” then I’m willing to listen. Otherwise, please excuse me if I don’t.

Since 1968

As for why: arbitrary choice, they just needed a printable character they could show on screen, for when people pressed it and the terminal echoed it back out to them.

vim isn’t required for any files, you just followed online tutorials for how to edit those files instead of RTFM

terminal text editing is convoluted because it has to strike a balance between figuring out when a keypress is part of the text you’re typing, vs when it’s a command you’re using, and making sure that all the editor commands the designer wanted are accessible.

vim is great because it allows for thousands more editing commands and macros, and much more customization of the editor, up to allowing plugins that emulate other functionality. As it stands, my setup basically functions as a full, lightweight-ish, multi-language IDE that rivals Emacs or Visual Studio.

On top of all that, I don’t have to move my hands away from the homerow of keys to navigate or edit, which may not seem like much, but adds up to a lot of avoid typos and time saved from moving my hands to reach the arrows/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn.

Some examples:

h, j,k,l move left, down, up, and right respectively, but they can be combined with a number to move that many rows or columns; e.g. 6j will move down 6 rows

dd deletes a line, but using a number + d + a movement will delete that many characters/lines in the path of the cursor: e.g. 34dl will delete 34 characters to the right of the cursor, 12dk will delete 12 lines up.

gg will take you to the first line, G will take you to the last, and number + either will take you to that line: e.g. 3275gg or 3275G will take you to line 3275

and finally you can use /text or regex pattern you want to search for and Enter to search the document for the first occurence below your current location, and then use n to search for the next occurence, or N to search for the previous

That doesn’t even scratch the surface (that’s just the cheatsheet, which only scratches the surface), but if you can get a handle on only what I’ve said, and switching between input and command mode (i and Esc respectively), the speedup to navigation alone will make it seem more sensible.

And as always, don’t forget to :wq (write to file and quit)

simple

OpenDoas, or simply doas, as in do [command] as [user]

rights are won with your life, everything else is a privilege that daddy (government) allows you to have

out of curiosity, how many wars have you been caught in the middle of?

On the Caveat Emptor (“Let the buyer beware”) side of things, I look at other metrics well before I rely on stars.

How many contributors does it have? How many active forks? How many pull requests? How many issues are open and how many get solved and how often and how lively are the discussions? When was the last merge? How active is the maintainer?

Stars might as well be facebook likes imo: when used as intended, they didn’t say much more than “this is what the majority of people like” (surprise, I’m on lemmy bc I have other priorities than what’s popular), now they mean nothing at all.

searx

great idea, I’m gonna give it a go

I will be using your example of Arch as a great stepping off point, because honestly imo the best way to learn is by having a project to work on

1. RTFM - Read The Fucking Manual. Read the docs, read the code comments if need be. In the case of installing an OS, use the installation guide as a starting point; Arch’s is on their wiki, and links to several other sections that go more in-depth about what each step does and why it does it.

2. DuckDuck it - if you don’t understand what something is or why you’re doing it, search it. If you understand it completely, search it anyway and check the docs because no you don’t, you just don’t know how little you know. If you know why we do something and what function it fulfills, but not how… Then you’re a power user.

Using your example of commands from the internet, break the command down into as many parts as you can, and figure out what each part does. If there’s punctuation marks, don’t assume you know what those are doing. man [command's name] is your friend.

3. Do all of the above as often as possible, no matter how slow it makes progress feel. Learning these things the proper way now will save you from days, weeks and months of troubleshooting in the future. I mean it, literally at every step of the process.

4. secondary sources are invaluable, but for this it might help to get into the best way to self-educate. The only gospel are the docs and/or manual that were written by the code/OS maintainers - primary sources - everything else is opinion.

Here’s a source i agree with on the best way to self-educate, but keep in mind even Artem is still just a secondary source.

That being said, here’s a few secondary sources that helped me understand how OSes work and why:

nand2tetris: build an operating system starting with logic gates and working your way up from there. It has a offshoot site that’s slowly being rolled out, that implements it all in a gamified interface: nandgame

os-tutorial: build an OS from scratch

Linux From Scratch: Learn everything about Linux by building your own distro from the kernel up.

Unfortunately everything that taught about the behind-the-scenes aspects of OSes in general—and Linux in specific—were either projects like the above, or just seeing what came up in a DuckDuckGo, Youtube, forum, or wiki etc. search. Below are just resources that teach you about the “power user” level of knowledge, not “super user” but not your average user either.

Fireships’ 100+ Linux Things you Need to Know: it’s not particularly good on its own, but it does introduce a lot of concepts and vocab for you to then look up elsewhere

freeCodeCamp.org offers a lot of courses that will go over using Linux. None go too in-depth on the fundamentals of Operating Systems, but they will still introduce most of what you need to know for day-to-day use. I don’t want to link them all, but just search for linux freecodecamp on youtube and find one that piques your interest. The longer, the more in-depth—you don’t have to watch it all in one sitting.

5. And of course, when all else fails: just ask. Participate in the community, don’t be afraid of looking stupid. The only people that get no respect are the ones who refuse to accept others’ help because they know better than those they’re asking to help them. (ignore the gatekeepers who want to project their own need for an identity onto you)

They are updating their Platforms program policies

You can read the current version, archived here

And here’s the proposed changes

I haven’t read it all, but some glaring changes stand out in regards to fingerprinting (no longer prohibited) and device unique identifiers (no longer prohibited from gathering). Basically, Google wants to become even more lax with how users are tracked by their advertising partners

1. “There are monsters.” Not just the services themselves, but real sick people who want nothing more than to hurt others; whether for financial gain or purely for pleasure makes no difference to how it affects you.

2. Services owning your data isn’t the endgame. It doesn’t get locked in an inaccessible vault as much as they want to make it seem that way. Ownership is just the beginning.

2a. Here’s a list of websites who have had users’ data hacked.

2b. Sometimes companies get bought out, or go under, or just need a little extra cash on the side. And that’s when the users’ data turns into a financial asset that gets sold to the highest bidder. And usually that bidder is just a data broker who sells it to other companies for advertising or for more brokering… And on it goes down the chain until it’s either being sold by people who aren’t vetting their customers and are selling it for very cheap; or one of the many links in the chain gets hacked. Either way it all gets back to point 1.

3. Yes, services are highly likely to report users. There’s no requirement, legally, unless it pertains to a specific investigation, but tech companies in the US famously love to comply with law enforcement and the NSA and the DOD and DHS and really any other agency that asks. Many other governments love to be as nosey about what their citizens do online

4. It’s not just about what’s illegal, it’s also about what could be made illegal. If that sounds paranoid, try asking women in states that have made abortion a felony why the won’t use period tracking apps. Or ask trans people in Texas why they won’t share personally identifying information online. Hell, a month ago “Deny, Defend, Depose” was little more than a nonsense phrase, now it’s enough to get you thrown in jail for threats to commit terrorism; what posts are you willing to have taken out of context and combed for phrases the next domestic terrorist used in their manifesto?

I guess that’s my biggest issue: what you don’t know can harm you, so why is the default action to lay back and let the rest of the internet do whatever they want with your personal information? Why is the question “why should I care what they do” and not “why do they want it so badly”?

I came here because of the clickbait title, ready to lambast thunderbird for the empty promises… But it turns out that they’re pretty clear on the specifics of what separates them from Thunderbird.

But I’m not gonna let that righteous indignation go to waste, so instead I’m gonma rip Sourav Rudra('s writing skill) a new one. Prepare your (writing skill’s) ass for a kicking Sourav.

Betterbird: A Thunderbird Fork That Promises Better Features

Better features?! Can I also have updated elements and improved aspects? Maybe superior components too??? Ah. A girl can dream.

Vague buzzwords and nothing more. “Better features” is not only subjective, but also vague enough to be almost entirely meaningless. Let’s hope the rest of the article does better.

Thankfully, the author included a shortlist of “Must-Know Bits.” I’m sure that’s a good summary of what’s to follow.

— Features many long-requested features.

I’m glad they’re finally listening to my request of compatibility with the Lovense remote control vibrator app’s API. Now I can feel good about receiving emails instead of stressed! They sure took their sweet time, it’s been long [time units] since I requested it!

How long and who requested? Or better yet, what features??? Why should I care??? Please, give me somethinbg concrete to grip onto!

— A more streamlined alternative to Thunderbird.

Streamlined! Wow! Is it also more efficient, and higher quality? Will they make it sustainable? Maybe it can also be more ethically sourved.

Could you be more vague please? This almost accidentally told me something about the changes they’ve made.

— Highly customizable, thanks to Add-ons and Themes.

Like Thunderbird? Like the addons you can find at the official Thunderbird site at addons.thunderbird.net?

Do they also plan to send and receive email in betterbird? Will it work with a graphical desktop environment? Will it be computer software? Or does the failure to mention these assumed “features” imply that it will diverge from Thunderbird in these key aspects?

Deeply shit lead-in. The rest of the article stands in stark contrast, being actually specific and informative. It’s like ol Sourav wrote an actually good article, then some idiot editor slapped it in ChatGPT and told it to fart out a title, subtitle, and highlights list. And then ChatGPT ignored all that and made the most generic tech article heading of all time.

FWIW, itsfoss.com: you should fire that editor for being a completely incompetent moron.

That’s a very poor way of comparing wealth. For example, the difference between $1,000 and $1,000,000,000 is also about a billion, but $1,000 is 0.0001% of $1,000,000,000 while $1,000,000 is %0.1

Buying power is not linear in today’s world, either; at best, it’s logarithmic. Because the law of diminishing returns is a thing, you can sink as much labor (and value) into goods and services as you want, and the quality will eventually reach an asymptote: it will approach perfection, but never get there. This means that in general, the difference between what millionaires and billionaires can afford is measured in quantity and not quality: billionaires can afford 100 yachts or one megayacht, but millionaires can still afford one of those near perfect yachts. Billionaires can afford many mansions, millionaires can still afford at least one. The millionaires have more in common with the billionaires than they do the average incomers ($60,000/yr in the USA). I make 3/4 of the average income, but I’d be lucky to afford a used jetski, much less anything resembling a yacht.

Put another way, in a society where everyone’s a millionaire, the richest possible billionaire is 1,000,000 times more wealthy than the poorest possible person, and the average billionaire is only 1,000 times more wealthy than the average millionaire. Whereas right now, they are infinitely more wealthy than the poorest person, and the poorest possible billionaire is still 17,000 times more wealthy than the average person in the US.

So what I was originally getting at is that the mere fact of billionaires existing can only approach some semblance of morality in a society where their wealth doesn’t put them on an entirely different plane of existence from the poorest people.

I have no problems with billionaires, in a society where everyone’s a millionaire.

A society that allows for such wealth disparity to happen is deeply corrupt. Anyone who not only participates in that society, but voluntarily becomes the cause of such disparity is irreparably morally bankrupt. They are a burden on society, contributing millions of times less than what they take.