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.

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’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.

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.

Same on macOS. Apple has “case-sensitive HFS+” as an option for UNIX compatibility (or at least they used to) but actually running a system on it is a bad idea in general.

What part of this is misinformation, exactly? Seems pretty well-supported.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.

I agree completely.

I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn’t be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn’t need to be granted full location access.

F-Droid link for the lazy: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/

Definitely going to check this out. I’ve been using yt-dlp via command line in Termux but that experience is less than ideal.

Most of Apple’s history, actually.

Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That’s reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you’re into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.

From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple’s specs as closely as possible, you’d find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from “okay” to “so bad it feels like a personal insult”), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple’s own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).

Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/1666267/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html

Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let’s say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.

As for the “does more”, well, that’s debatable. Considering this is using Apple’s 90s logo, I think it’s pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its “beleaguered” period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don’t think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn’t boil down to “we’re used to it” or “we’re locked in”.

For sure. It’ll never be enforced completely, but it gives teeth to go after some big offenders.

Hopefully they have better defenses against legal action from Nvidia than ZLUDA did.

In the past, re-implementing APIs has been deemed fair use in court (for example, Oracle v Google a few years back). I’m not entirely sure why ZLUDA was taken down; maybe just to avoid the trouble of a legal battle, even if they could win. I’m not a lawyer so I can only guess.

Validity aside, I expect Nvidia will try to throw their weight around.

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

The linked article focuses on Mastodon. I’d be interested to hear more about how this relates to Lemmy in your experience.

Yes. Homomorphic encryption is for data processing, not data storage.

Are there any that are cloud-hosted, secure, and private? My experience is limited, but I’ve never found an easy way in. I can’t imagine anyone who’s not tech-savvy getting started without walking through a minefield of scams.

Every now and then I look at options for how I might actually use crypto, and everything looks either outrageously scammy or way too much trouble. Pretty much every exchange I’ve looked at holds the keys to your account, and several have gone under or outright stolen their users’ funds.

The question is, when Proton embraces bitcoin, should it make me trust bitcoin more, or trust Proton less? I don’t know. I’m still skeptical. Their blog post is interesting, but also doesn’t answer a lot of questions. https://proton.me/blog/proton-wallet-launch

I mean, look at this:

Buy Bitcoin securely in 150+ countries

If you are new to Bitcoin, Proton Wallet also has integrations that make it easy to buy Bitcoin in 150+ countries, and we have also put together a comprehensive Bitcoin guide for newcomers.

That “comprehensive” guide spends three paragraphs talking about the “Blocksize War”, and makes absolutely no mention of how a user can actually buy bitcoin using Proton Wallet. WTF, Proton? Who is your target audience here exactly?

It works, though IIRC there are some features that only work in Chrome. I only use it once in a blue moon so I forget the details.

Do I need a 20TB boot drive? No. Do I want it enough to pay $250? Yes, absolutely. I’m running 1TB now and I need to manage my space far more often than I’d like, despite the fact that I keep my multimedia on external mass storage. Also, sometimes the performance of that external HD really is a hindrance. I’d love to just have (almost) everything on my primary volume and never worry about it.

It’s kind of weird how I have less internal storage today than I did 15 years ago. I mean, it’s like 50 times faster, but still.

I’m not super-skeptical about the pricing. This stuff can’t stay expensive forever, and 2027 is still a ways off.

This is how we got these monopolies in the first place.