Hmm, I’ll have to double-check it on my build. Pretty sure it was working, but it’s possible I was only getting OpenCL or Vulkan acceleration. Out of curiosity, what’s your GPU model? I think only the 7900XT[X] is officially supported for ROCm.

Another problem with DRM’d platforms is that you don’t really know how long this will be easy or even viable. I recall these tools breaking in the past as Amazon changed their encryption, and it took time for them to be updated.

For anyone with a large library on Kindle, Audible, or any other DRM-infested platform, I recommend stripping that DRM sooner rather than later. You might think “I can always do it later” but there’s no guarantee that will be true.

Also, shoutout to ebooks.com for having a dedicated DRM-free section and a simple checkbox to filter search results to only show DRM-free items. Not sure where to go for DRM-free audiobooks though. Anyone got suggestions? Personally I will simply not buy books with DRM, regardless of how easy it might be to crack it. If I’m going to have to break the law anyway (thanks, DMCA!), I might as well pirate it and find some other way to toss the author a few bucks.

I recently tried Bazzite, and I have to agree. Switching from a traditional Linux distro to an immutable distro is harder than switching from Windows to Linux. I’m not kidding. When it comes to immutability, my experience can be split into two general cases:

1. I don’t notice any difference at all.
2. It’s a giant pain in the ass.

I have yet to encounter a scenario where immutability offered a tangible benefit. The supposed advantages seem rather abstract. I can’t break my system? Okay…but…well, I already had snapper for the rare occasions when something got royally borked. This is a problem that has already been solved without major compromises, so why are we now compromising so much to solve it again?

It comes with 4 different package management systems (or 6 if you count Distrobox and Waydroid), and they all come with big caveats. I’ve had to reboot more in the past week than I previously had in the past year on Debian, because every time I need to install something from the main Fedora repo with rpm-ostree (which has been many times already), it needs to reboot. They recommend against using rpm-ostree, but there is no reasonable alternative for a rather wide array of software. It’s either rpm-ostree or build a whole mess of things from source and manage them manually. Both options suck very hard.

Still, overall, Bazzite delivers. Everything you see on their web site works out of the box. It’s hard to recommend, but it’s also hard to criticize. I’ve never had a smoother gaming experience, and this is the first time I’ve ever had to spend zero minutes configuring my GPU drivers (outside of macOS, anyway). You get CUDA and ROCm out of the box. You get the latest drivers. It’s awesome.

If you’re wondering if an immutable distro is right for you, the answer is probably “no”. But if you’re up for the, erm, “adventure” of learning this new paradigm, Bazzite fucking rocks.

I forget the exact terminology but I tried putting it into the most permissive mode available. Is still could not work with external hard drives. This was several years ago so I can’t say what might have changed since then, but I did spend some time troubleshooting and at the time that functionality did not work. I’d read that it was possible in the previous version (maybe 18.04?)

Edit: Come to think of it, it might not have been as simple as “couldn’t access external drives”. It might have had something to do with how my disks were mounted and their permissions and mount points. I remember that I hit a wall at some point and further troubleshooting would have required more surgery on my system than I was willing to attempt.

Yeah, this kind of things drove me batty on Ubuntu. So many things were delivered as Snaps when they just don’t work that way. The funniest one to me was Filebot. It’s a media file naming/organizing tool…that doesn’t have disk access. Are you kidding me, Canonical?

Flatpak is easier to work with, but has similar issues. Great for simple things, but I’m always worried that at some point I’m going to need some features that just won’t work, and then it’s going to be a hassle to migrate to a native installation. And it has no CLI support.

And yeah, the bloat is wild. Deduplication on btrfs (or similar) helps but there’s no getting past the bandwidth bloat.

I miss the Nexus 4.

This is Kaspersky, so the only answer you’re going to get from them is “use Kaspersky Premium”.

The only non-Play apps they mention in their report are modified versions of otherwise-clean apps (like Spotify or Minecraft). They didn’t mention anything on F-Droid or other app stores.

My favorite episode of the season so far. It was just fun.

I loved Encyclopedia Brown when I was a kid, and I enjoyed seeing Leela and Bender play Sally and Leroy.

If anything, it demonstrates that the law has mathematical validity. Fact-checking simply requires more work than making shit up. Even when AI gets to the point where it can do research and fact-check things effectively (which is bound to happen eventually), it’ll still be able to produce bullshit in a fraction of that time, and use that research ability to create more convincing bullshit.

Fact-checking requires rigor. Bullshit does not. There’s no magic way to close that gap.

However, most social media sites already implement rate limits on user submissions, so it might actually be possible to fact-check people’s posts faster than they are allowed to make them.

See also: the Gish gallop. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic

I’d assume bad actors (or at least chaotic neutral actors) are slurping up the entire fediverse already. It is trivial to do, and nobody would know.

I mean, the whole point is that anyone can spin up a server and federate with others. I could start my own server, which would by default federate with almost all other servers. That means I wouldn’t even need to write a scraper. All that data would be sent straight to my server. All I need is access to my own database at that point. With Lemmy, I’d even get users’ upvote/downvote history, which is not visible in any clients AFAIK. The only barrier would be to subscribe to communities on different servers to kickstart federation.

As long as you don’t run obvious spam/bot accounts, nobody would block your instance.

Alternatively, if you want to write a scraper, that’s also pretty easy. Most servers are publicly accessible. Every community has an RSS feed. You don’t even need an account in general. Again, the whole point is to be open and accessible, in contrast to closed-off data-misers like Facebook, Reddit, and X.

The fediverse is friendly to users, with very little regard for what those users might do. I believe this is the correct philosophy, but I won’t pretend that it doesn’t leave us open to bad behavior.

This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users’ computers.

It is absolutely doublespeak to call it “local”. Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.

Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers “locally hosted”. It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.

If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”

Then that would also be an oxymoron.

Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.

Mine doesn’t have @ signs. This might be easier to do in the lemmy web UI than within Sync. When you start typing an instance name, it will pop up a list of matches that you can click, so you don’t have to worry about typos or syntax.

Why does local mean local? I’m not sure I understand your question.

“Locally hosted” means it’s running on the local host. In this case, that would mean on the same computer running Firefox.

Calling something that is only accessible over the internet “locally hosted” is outrageous doublespeak.

Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.

Hmm.

>locally hosted

>Google Cloud

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust

There’s one called Redox that is entirely written in Rust. Still in fairly early stages, though. https://www.redox-os.org/

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

In theory, phones would be cheaper if they had longer shelf life.

Similarly, we don’t need new cars every year, but the beast must be fed, right? Right?!