LibreWolf on everything that supports it (Windows/Mac/Linux) and Fennec F Droid on Android.

I wrote a program to do just that

https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator

Ugh, I got a fair return from buying to AMD right before Ryzen came out. I sold some of it and bought multiple different chip companies so now I have some AMD, some Intel, some NVDA. Oh well, it’s not a huge amount but still sucks. I hope they can come back if only because AMD needs competition to keep them from becoming the evil that old Intel was. I was hoping Intel would also be a viable third GPU competitor, I like my Arc A770 for the price and I’m hoping they don’t kill off the GPU division.

Linux works well on supported ARM platforms, but the problem is that a lot of ARM platforms aren’t supported. I recently got a Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro (had to import it as it’s a China-only model) and put postmarketOS on it. The experience is surprisingly good. Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard/touchpad, it is basically as functional as a normal light-duty Linux laptop except for the lack of x86 support, which mostly just means no gaming. I have been attempting to run Steam via box64 and FEX, but pmOS isn’t a supported distro for that so I have been trying in a Docker container and in Distrobox. I managed to get it started but it crashes due to steamwebhelper, and I think it’s a dependency or configuration issue. Otherwise, for browsing, coding, videos, terminal use, office, etc. it’s great and the battery life is amazing compared to my laptop. This is on a Snapdragon 870. Open source games run and they can hit 120fps on the 120Hz screen. I hope to see ARM support continue to improve, but I am worried about bootloader locks on these new ARM Windows machines.

Mastodon added text search a while ago.

Who knew that allowing, no, PAYING third parties to inject whatever the fuck they want encrypted proprietary binary blobs into the highest privilege and most dangerous level of your operating system without any user acknowledgement or third party code review could possibly have negative consequences?

This is also why we shouldn’t be allowing kernel anticheat games on our PCs by the way. One day Crowdstrike, the next day it could be Riot Vanguard. Proprietary shitware has no place in your kernel (though in Windows’ case the entire kernel itself is proprietary, maybe do something about that next).

Only buy routers that have OpenWRT support, problem solved. Why trust your entire network and all of the data transferred over it to proprietary garbage?

Is it so hard to just pay using credit cards? Why do we need dystopian biometric nonsense feeding the data mines in order to pay for food? Paying for stuff is a solved problem. Fuck everything about this.

Any dating app where both people have to “like”/“swipe right” each other should allow either side to initiate tbh or at least opt out of the stupid matchmaking system and accept all incoming matches.

I was on the dating apps last summer after having been out of the dating pool for 6 years and the current crop of apps are pretty awful for men (amd probably women as well, maybe for difderent reasons). When I used dating sites in the early/mid 2010s most sites let anyone initiate a conversation so you didn’t need to worry about the (usually paywalled) “like” system. These days literally everything is a Tinder clone and the only interaction you have with the app is like or dislike. I get why they did it because women receive so much bullshit from unsolicited messages, in my experience it devolved into just mashing the Like button over and over again blindly because it’s a shitty numbers game and the odds aren’t in your favor. There’s no sense reading through detailed profiles and making thoughtful decisions when it’s rare to get a match anyways. Easier to like every single profile and then be the one to filter out matches once they come in. If the harassment is going to primarily target women and women are the ones who need to be more selective in their matches, the dating apps should let women be the ones to pick matches, or better yet give each and every user a toggle that lets them accept matches from anyone, because that makes it easier to get over the hurdle of not receiving any matches at all.

I eventually gave in and paid for the Tinder upgrade that lets you like an unlimited amount of times. I just mindlessly mashed the like button until the queue was empty every day. Before long, matches were actually happening. Two months into that nonsense I actually got a perfect match (she sent the first message) and we’ve been together for 6 months now. I absolutely love her and I’m glad it worked out, but damn was dating on Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid, and POF a horrible experience all around. All owned by the absolutely dreadful Match.com now of course. The prospect of your perfect match being hidden behind a stupid loot box RNG style gacha system is absolute insanity, because that’s what it is. You have a limited number of likes and the profiles you get to see are seemingly picked at random.

While I’m not a fan of advertising or marketing in general, brands having a presence on the Fediverse would be great for Fediverse adoption, and sometimes complaining about a brand on social media is needed to get proper customer service in this world of AI and bot controlled customer service channels. I can see this being a good thing, and there are some brands/companies I would likely follow. I already do follow a few who are on Mastodon, such as Framework, Pine64, and Raspberry Pi.

Just fitting objects into the smallest box isn’t everything according to the article. This is trying to identify fragile objects and recommend appropriate protective packaging where required to minimize the risk of damage in shipping. If you use a conventional packing algorithm to pack dishes and vases into the smallest box you will receive a box of glass shards on your doorstep. Is AI the best solution? I’m not sure, but using actual statistics of damaged goods and their means of packaging sounds like a worthwhile consideration.

This…actually seems like a good use of AI? I generally think AI is being shoehorned into a lot of use cases where it doesn’t belong but this seems like a proper place to use it. It’s serving a specific and defined purpose rather than trying to handle unfiltered customer input or do overly generic tasks,

I mostly use Linux but have a Mac Mini as a TV PC. I use the same browser everywhere - LibreWolf. It’s Firefox but with Mozilla’s bullshit adware/sponsored garbage removed and some extra privacy-focused features/default settings. Firefox has become adware itself, with its home page having sponsored garbage and suggested stories from partners. I generally love what Mozilla is doing and we need competition in the browser space, but I don’t want Mozilla spamming up my homepage with their “suggestions”.

I am not in love with the idea of pure hydrogen cars due to the inefficiencies involved, but I can see a hydrogen/BEV plug in hybrid being a good option if hydrogen infrastructure gets built out. As is, I drive a Chevy Volt, and while its battery range is low it is enough for the majority of my daily driving. The biggest downside of pure EVs is charging time when you’re driving on long trips, and in my Volt I don’t have to worry about that as I can just fill up with gas. Well, do the same thing but with hydrogen rather than gasoline and you have a car that can refill quickly like a gas car but can be powered entirely from renewable energy sources like a pure BEV. You need some lithium but less than you would for a full size battery. You still have the capability to charge at home and assuming the battery can do a reliable 50 miles or so you would only need hydrogen for longer trips. You could leave the hydrogen tank empty to avoid leakage and safety issues when you aren’t doing a road trip. Also, hydrogen cars are EVs anyways so the drivetrain doesn’t need the extra complexity of a conventional hybrid, just switch power between the battery and hydrogeb fuel cell.

Plug in hybrid usually refers to a car that has some amount of purely electric range, charges like an EV, but after depleting its battery falls back into conventional hybrid mode where the battery is maintained to some level of reserve power using a gas engine. The Chevy Volt is probably the best example. I drive a Volt and all my daily commute is purely electric unless it’s super cold outside.

I love my 2014 Gen 1 Volt and would love to see the technology continue to improve. If they made a Gen 3 Volt with at least 100 miles all electric range and a heat pump system that didn’t halve the battery when it’s cold outside I would absolutely consider it over a pure EV for my next car.

AMD’s integrated GPUs have been getting really good lately. I’m impressed at what they are capable of with gaming handhelds and it only makes sense to put the same extra GPU power into desktop APUs. This hopefully will lead to true gaming laptops that don’t require power hungry discrete GPUs and workarounds/render offloading for hybrid graphics. That said, to truly be a gaming laptop replacement I want to see a solid 60fps minimum at at least 1080p, but the fact that we’re seeing numbers close to this is impressive nonetheless.

Pretty much all the alternative SBCs are either Rockchip or Allwinner if you want ARM. There are a few RISC-V SBCs now but software support isn’t as solid and many of these lack GPUs. There are also a few x86/64 SBCs based on either older Intel Atom or newer mobile parts too.

There are plenty of alternative SBCs out there, many mimicking the RPi form factor as well. Look into Radxa, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Pine64, ODROID, etc. I picked up an Indiedroid Nova board last year that is RPi form factor but has the more powerful RK3588 processor. Drivers are still WIP but it is quite fast. I also run my home server on a Radxa Rock Pi 4, which has an RK3399 processor and is very comparable to the RPi 4. Drivers for it are pretty solid these days and it doesn’t require extra work to set up. Just download an Armbian image and go.

I’m fine with Apple retaining interoperability between their first party software products, they just need a way to bypass the walled garden. If they have sideloading (everywhere and without restrictions) and ideally also bootloader unlocking, they provide a sanctioned path around the walls of their ecosystem and now it’s up to the user to choose to leave that garden. If the user is comfortable there, they can stay. Trying to fuck over sideloading is the issue here. I’m fine with the App Store being restrictive if there’s a way around it, and simply sideloading an app shouldn’t break the rest of the OS’s capabilities.