• 89 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Seems like a bit of a waste to launch an intercontinental missile at a country next door, on the same continent. Isn’t Russia supposed to have plenty of short and mid range ballistic missiles? I guess they must be running low.

    I was under the impression that ICBMs weren’t all that great for conventional warheads. Their payload capacity isn’t enormous and their accuracy tends to be relatively low- which matters not a jot if you’re firing nukes (which do a lot of bang per kilo, and where a few hundred metres either way isn’t likely to be critical), but not so great for dropping normal munitions.


  • PatchtoLinux@lemmy.mlXFCE Vs MATE
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    11 hours ago

    For me it’s MATE.

    For some reason I’ve never really gotten on with XFCE. Tried it in earnest many years ago, and have dipped into it a few more times over the years, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t gel with me. Always feels like I’m fighting it to get it to do what I want it to do.

    MATE has the familiarity and comfort for anyone who spent serious years running GNOME 2. It’s pretty much as lightweight as XFCE these days, but feels more polished and intuitive for it.

    Ubuntu MATE is still one of my go-to distros for limited hardware (even though that project specifically seems to have stagnated somewhat in recent years).


  • The thing to remember about investing (forex or otherwise) is that it’s an enormous global industry. One of the largest and richest there is. If you’re a normal person, with a normal day job, tinkering around in the evening trying to pick stocks or write algorithms, just remember that there are countless thousands of professional, experienced, trained analysts all over the world doing the exact same thing 40 hours a week, week in week out.

    There are no easy bucks to be made. If it was easy, it’d already be done.





  • Bridgy Fed is pretty straightforward. You just follow the account and away you go.

    It doesn’t make your bridged posts particularly attractive-looking (essentially you appear as a bot under a subdomain of a server), but it’s searchable and discoverable in the target network.

    I’m now mostly using Blue Sky, but I bridge to Mastodon, so all my posts form part of the content that’s available to fediverse users. For little old me that’s not all that important, but if every big organisation or journalist or celeb did that too, that’d do a lot to build vitality into the fediverse network.




  • Apple made the transition a little easier for those who weren’t ready to give up on their wired headphones by including a $9 adapter. However, it looks like it could now be confined to the annals of history, as the Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter has sold out in the US and other countries, suggesting Apple may have quietly discontinued it

    It says “sold out” and “discontinued”. The latter is currently just speculation.





  • All of the uses so far are bad, and I can’t see any that would work as well as a trained human.

    I’m no AI enthusiast, but this is clear hyperbole. Of course there are uses for it; it’s not magic, it’s just technology. You’ll have been using some of them for years before the AI fad came along and started labelling everything.

    Translation services are a good example. Google Translate and Bing Translate have both been using machine learning neural networks as their core technology for a decade and more. There’s no other way of doing it that produces anything close to as good a result. And yes, paying a human translator might get you good results too, but realistically that’s not a competitive option for the vast majority of uses (nobody is paying a translator to read restaurant menus or train station signage to them).

    This whole AI assistant fad can do one as far as I’m concerned, but the technologies behind the fad are here to stay.






  • PatchtoLinux@lemmy.mlA Linux Desktop for the family
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    5 days ago

    A regular reminder that ChromeOS is Linux. It’s Linux you can buy from a bricks and mortar store, preconfigured for the average low-knowledge user, and with minimal to no maintenance overhead.

    We enthusiasts obviously mostly hate it, but we’re not its target audience. Its target audience (non-techies who mostly just like to use their phones) get on great with it.

    People need to accept that any Linux distro made for mass market is going to look more or less like ChromeOS. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as traditional distros also continue to exist. But people need to get out of their heads that the “year of Linux on the desktop” looks like Ubuntu or Fedora or Mint. What it looks like is ChromeOS.



  • Considering the fediverse microblogging scene includes Threads, which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users, I’d say its death is greatly exaggerated.

    Yes, I know a lot of Mastodon servers refuse to federate with Threads, and yes I know their active user figures are likely very different from what they claim. But at the end of the day, it’s an ActivityPub microblogging platform with a considerable userbase and a very rich corporate backer.