[–] 1 point 6 hours ago (1 child)

That's news to me. I'm not overly cautious with privacy so I'm not expert. My general ethos isn't to maximise privacy but to minimise advertising, and get as much customisability as possible.

Often that ends up with me using privacy focussed software by chance, and I may have applied that here, but looking at desktop, it blocks discord telemetry and limits system access, which is at least something.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    I use vesktop, a heavily customisable and privacy friendly Discord app for this exact reason.

    I literally want to video chat my friends for D&D and the occasional Minecraft and get one of the most tedious and bloated pieces of software in existence. Why does my calling program have mini games, paid emotes and lag like a truck? I genuinely don't believe I have a hope in hell getting my friends off it, so that's my compromise.

    Discord being used like a wiki or forum can die though. Who thought a chat log was a good place to have guides and news, and how the hell has that not died long ago?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    We all know that part, but that's the comparison many very casual users would use. I would look uncool describing the difference to someone who told me my OC takes a long time to boot, and to a community of nerds, looking uncool to someone may be terrible. I'm sure this doesn't impact everyone, but I understand the super short boot dream.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    I don't care for a 5 second boot time instead of 8, but I understand the desire to work towards a sub 1 second type of boot, even if it's still farcical. We are surrounded by other tech like laptops, phones and TVs which go from standby to on in an instant, and as a PC user, where one puts personal stake in their PC being on par or better, chasing minimal times here matters.

    I'm sure many people know the feeling of their Linux PC or pride of place mechanical keyboard modded ThinkPad suddenly looking crap to a casual tech user with a different understanding of what quality means. While the MacBook user may never gain the features of your device, you may theoretically beat them at their preferences, because you can technically do anything.

    I'm eyeing up an oled monitor upgrade in the next few years. When I get it, I'm gonna use an old raspberry pi to basically make a simple, lightweight dupe of my PC desktop, then use a HDMI switch to have the oled screen have an instant useful boot while the apC actually boots in the background. My desk doesn't face a part of my apartment otherwise used, so I may get a motion sensor too, so being at my desk turns on the pi's "always on" display, which has the dual purpose of obscuring the PC boot. I don't need this in any way, but it'll feel 𝓈𝓁𝑒𝑒𝓀, and I want that.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    I think it's worth reminding people where the general left wing FOSS conscious was before AI. Every week we'd see an article that was the antithesis of ownership, from celebrating the end of Disney copyright to loopholes in trademarks and the like, it was the heart of a lot of content.

    There is a fantastic foreword foreword in The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde about art for art's sake that I think about a lot, which really boils down to a litany for art for art's sake, (and by extension education for education's sake), that is overlooked in favour of being for the sake of profit or capital.

    I am of the opinion that in response to AI, we have drifted from a left wing overall movement that rejected ownership in this way, to a protective, defensive style that is largely that stance of a neo-luddide, without any awareness of what ended that era, which was an insufficient boycott and misspent manpower.

    I want to say, I'm someone who is overall against AI, I'm not sure how to prove it, any any time I try to explain points like this, people claim AI wrote my comment.

    AI is evil, and has enormous destructive capacity, but making the walled garden of large capitalist software irrelevant in favour of FOSS solutions is a huge win, even in regards to being a result of AI.

    I'd rather the water, electrical and creative debt that is incurred by AI is paid off by programs like this, than see companies like Adobe operate, particularly considering they literally changed their TOS to train their internal AI on user data.

    Either way, your data is being used to train AI, regardless of if you use Photoshop or Photocraft, but one is FOSS, and openly made with that data.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I was dual booking between Linux and windows 10 on the year better Win 10 end of life being announced and coming into effect.

    The reality was that I was just familiar with Windows and it was easier to boot straight into that.

    In my first month of only having Linux installed (Bazzite), I shamefully relied on LLMs to help me actually configure the deeper parts of my setup to actually make it how I wanted, which I felt I needed to escape windows.

    But that's literally the opposite of choosing the lesser of two evils by most people's book. There is very little incentive to learn a new OS when you're already familiar with one.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    That's exactly where spic games will end up, as the gaming industry crawls towards playing on their remote hardware and renting that space.

    Epic games is probably an ideal candidate to buy if this is your expectation for the industry AND you own streaming giant.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    To add to that, if weight loss peptides like Ozempic are working, let them work.

    My mother, in her late 60s is obese. She was forced to retire early due to this, she has had lifelong self image issues due to this, and she's very aware that it's both robbing her ability to enjoy her later years, and years of her life. Until this year, she was staunchly against taking Ozempic due to potential side effects, but the reality is that the side effects of Obesity are so much worse.

    For an analogy, there is a lot of evidence that the quantity of people who need to wear glasses has increased because in infancy, children are not looking at distant objects, and irreversible damage is occurring to their vision as a result. Of course this is something we want parents to consider in how they realise their children, but it would be monstrous to then deprive that person of glasses because the fault is societal.

    Everything on your list is the equivalent of encouraging children to exercise their eyes, and is absolutely the best way to treat obesity, but medication should be considered as a treatment beyond this.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    If you ever start watching YouTube tutorials around cooking, there's a reason Binging With Banish is a huge name.

    Between ingredient cost, recipe difficulty, taste and the product actually coming out right, I've always found him super reliable.

    But a huge part of cooking doesn't come from recipes, it comes from experimentation. Learning how to make a simple pasta sauce from tinned tomatoes and other things is a useful step, because 90% of the ingredients last a while, so you only need to buy a few cheap bits, and can control the flavour yourself to find out what you like.

    It's worth noting that eating at home can still easily become accidentally expensive. Pasta and pasta sauce is a reliable way to keep prices low when cooking, but once you're cooking with 20 ingredients, it can creep up quickly, although most of these can last weeks, if not months, so you only need to buy them once in a while.

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    This is for D&D 5e.

    I'm currently making a reoccurring antagonist NPC that is a master thief. It's CR 6 and I want it to be capable of making three attacks per round like multiattack but also have their thief subclass's enhanced cunning action with fast hands.

    This would normally mean they'd get 3 attacks and a varying options for bonus actions, however I'd want them to be able to trade up to three if these attacks to have more uses of cunning action (this would of course stack the ability to dash 4 times per round but I'd just not do that while running the monster). They also have a special once per day ability that I'd want them to be able to swap a single attack for.

    It got me thinking, instead of trying to make an unwieldy combination of multiattack, a special action and cunning action, could I just give them three actions?

    The simple way this NPC works that I want them to pick 3 options from:

    • Dagger
    • Crossbow
    • Special action
    • Dash
    • Disengage
    • Hide
    • Make an ability check
    • Use an object
    • Use a set of tools

    At this point, what do I actually lose from letting them take 3 actions? They aren't a Spellcaster so I'm not worried about them throwing out three fireballs or the like.

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