Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 486 Posts
- 913 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
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3·18 hours agoobligatory FSN links
- https://web.archive.org/web/19991009154641/http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html SGI webpage archive from 1999
- https://github.com/DX94-Quas/3d-file-system-navigator - SGI fsn binaries here, for IRIX versions 5.3 and below
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer - 1999 free software rewrite in C
- https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv - fork of 1999 version, updated 2018
- https://github.com/jtsiomb/fsnav - 2009 C++ free software rewrite, updated 2021
if you’ve never used
ed(1)technically it’s illegal for you to say “it’s a UNIX system, i know this”
41·2 days agoThey had a Republican governor from 2003 to 2011.
Clinton got 46.4% there in 2016, only a 1.5% lead over Trump.
Their House of Representatives is currently split 50/50 (with Republican leadership due to this), and the DFL has a one-seat majority in the Senate.
I wouldn’t call it “incredibly blue”, and certainly not “one of the bluest”.
as i said, it “is about to be released”.
or, one could also say that the the 3.0.0 source code has been released, but the official binaries haven’t been yet :)
edit: i see https://flathub.org/apps/org.gimp.GIMP has 3.0.0 now, and from https://testing.gimp.org/downloads/ i see that https://download.gimp.org/gimp/v3.0/linux/GIMP-3.0.0-x86_64.AppImage is also there. presumably https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ will be updated very soon.
StartPage/StartMail is owned by an adtech company who’s website boasts that they “develop & grow our suite of privacy-focused products, and deliver high-intent customers to our advertising partners” 🤔
They have a whitepaper which actually does a good job explaining how end-to-end encryption in a web browser (as Tuta, Protonmail, and others do) can be circumvented by a malicious server:
The malleability of the JavaScript runtime environment means that auditing the future security of a piece of JavaScript code is impossible: The server providing the JavaScript could easily place a backdoor in the code, or the code could be modified at runtime through another script. This requires users to place the same measure of trust in the server providing the JavaScript as they would need to do with server-side handling of cryptography.
However (i am not making this up!) they hilariously use this analysis to justify having implemented server-side OpenPGP instead 🤡
Could anybody in short explain, what I have to understand from “it’s tagged”?
Git is the most popular version control system, which lets developers track changes to software source code. A “tag” applies a name (or version number) to a specific point in the history.
The commit shows that there was a longer with 3.0.0 tag before and now its just 3.0.0
The link goes to a commit which is tagged
GIMP_3_0_0, and shows the change made in this commit. This commit happens to change theversionline in a file calledmeson.build- this file configures Meson, which is used to build GIMP. The version is being changed from3.0.0-RC3+gitto3.0.0. The string “RC3” in the previous version number is short for “release candidate 3”, and “git” here means that there were additional changes since “release candidate 3” was released.What does that tell us? :D
So far the news and downloads pages still haven’t been updated, but the version being changed to
3.0.0and this commit being tagged tells us that GIMP 3.0.0 is about to be released: official binaries and an announcement about it can be expected to appear very soon.The tag means no more changes will be included in 3.0.0; if some show-stopping bug were discovered now, the version number would be incremented to 3.0.1 rather than to include a fix in 3.0.0. (Technically, a tag can be updated/replaced, but by convention it is not.)
4·2 days agoThe “VP Engineering for Ubuntu” being a NixOS user is hilarious and reminds me of the CEO of Ford saying he’s been driving a Xiaomi EV “for six months now and I don’t want to give it up”.
The fact remains this article is titled in a very clickbaity way
The link is to a youtube video, not an article, so apparently you resisted taking the bait… but aren’t letting your lack of a click prevent you from commenting :)
Like one of the bluest.
False. It's almost a swing state.
In fact, if you sort the table here you can see that of the states Harris/Walz won there was only one (New Hampshire) where they got a lower percentage of the vote than in Minnesota.
However with the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party having a majority (by a single seat) in the Senate, this bill will obviously not pass, and if it did, obviously the governor (Tim Walz) would not sign it.
This is just trolling by some deeply unserious politicians.
Tuta’s product is snake oil.
If you don’t care about their (nonstandard, incompatible, and snake oil) end-to-end encryption feature and just want a freemium email provider which (purports to) protect your privacy in other ways, the fact that their flagship feature is snake oil should still be a red flag.
Clickbait. The VP Engineering for Ubuntu made a post that he was looking into using the Rust utils for Ubuntu and has been daily driving them and encouraged others to try
It’s by no means certain this will be done.
Here is that post. It isn’t certain to happen, but he doesn’t only say that he is daily driving them. He says his goal is to make them the default in 25.10:
My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.
yep. (see my other comment in this thread)
The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what “the web” is today are Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s WebKit, and Google’s Blink.
The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.
After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google’s fork of Apple’s fork of KDE’s free software web engine.
Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)
How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?
They’re allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.
BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of
it’s about the ladybird browser. i edited my comment to add details.
with mandatory male pronouns for users in the documentation.
(and no politics allowed!)
note
this issue was resolved eventually by another dev;
afaikthe lead devstopped commenting on it after heclosed a PR and said people who wanted to remove the docs’ implied assumption of users’ maleness were “advertising personal politics”.edit: ok, i went and checked, here are the details:
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https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 is the first PR he closed in 2021 saying “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
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https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648 is the PR where it was eventually fixed, after it was publicized in july 2024
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here https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1808294414101467564 the day after the fix was merged, he sort-of almost apologized, while also doubling-down on his defense of his decision to reject the first PR 🤡
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser) was later spun out of SerenityOS in to its own project
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subtitles “fixed” in them without separate SRT file
can you turn them on and off? meaning, is there a text track embedded in the video file, or is the text actually rendered into each frame?
if the former, you can easily extract them into an SRT file (or another format) using ffmpeg: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ExtractSubtitles
it was an unfortunate choice to make the video thumbnail include the headline the video refutes, without any indication that it is being refuted, given that presumably far more people will see the thumbnail than will watch the video 🤦
that is a fascinating map; i noticed that despite making projections about 2025 the date of that post is actually 2012; Business Insider attributes it to McKinsey, but via ZeroHedge (who charges for access to their archives).
I wanted more context so I spent a few minutes searching; in case anyone else is curious it comes from a report called “Urban world: Cities and the rise of the consuming class” by McKinsey Global Institute.
Here is their summary of it, and here is the 92 page PDF of the full report.
here is MGI's 'economic center of gravity' methodology
The center of gravity analysis is based on country-level historical estimates from Angus Maddison for the period AD 1 until 2007, and country-level growth rates from Cityscope 2.0 until 2025. We then allocated each country’s GDP value to the approximate center of landmass of the respective country. The same center of each country was used throughout the entire time frame. To calculate the global center of gravity, landmass radian coordinates were transformed into Cartesian coordinates with a tool from the UK Ordnance Survey that uses ED50/ UTM data and projection (see www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gps). We then transformed these coordinates into respective momentums and averaged these to a true economic center of gravity for each year, located within the sphere of the earth. To illustrate the shift of gravity, we lengthened the vectors from the center of the earth to the center of gravity so that they lie on the earth’s surface. Although the concept of “surfacing” might create problems for interpreting data, both the resulting direction and the magnitude of the surfaced shifts were directionally consistent with the internal shifts, too. The four periods with the fastest shift, 2000–10, 1940–50, and 2010–25, maintain the same rank order, while the 1500–1820 period ranks 11th on surface but eighth on the “true” center of gravity.
here is what they say about ~500 years ago
Until 1500, Asia was the center of gravity of the world economy, accounting for roughly two-thirds of global GDP. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, urbanization and industrialization vaulted Europe and the United States to prominence. We are now observing a decisive shift in the balance back toward Asia—at a speed and on a scale never before witnessed. China’s economic transformation resulting from urbanization and industrialization is happening at 100 times the scale of the first country in the world to urbanize—the United Kingdom—and at ten times the speed (Exhibit E2).
but wait, where did they get that GDP data from?
They actually cite Angus Maddison’s Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992 which doesn’t sound like something that goes to AD 1. It looks like Maddison also published The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (currently only a limited preview on archive.org) in 2001, which this reproduces Appendix B of - which seems like probably their source:
World GDP, 20 Countries and Regional Totals, 1-2001 AD
I’m not sure how Geary–Khamis dollars (“a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the U.S. dollar had in the United States at a given point in time”) are supposed to work for time periods prior to the existence of the United States, but i think I’ve spent enough time on this rabbit hole for now :)