Migration in Mastodon works quite well. You're still confined to the one ActivityPub platform but you can easily move to a new server with a new community and different policies.
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
In the early days of the internet it was a standard that people had different accounts on different sites and there wasn't any federation. We're doing it right now - my hacker news account doesn't work on mastodon or on reddit.
Perhaps part of the reason we don't do that any more is that signup is so high friction? It used to be just username, password, confirm password, captcha, submit. But now it's username, password, confirm password, email, phone number, captcha, submit, go to phone, open email app, wait for slow loading, refresh, wait for slow refresh, click email, see long link, click link, "this must be opened on the device you signed up with", back, retype 100 random characters on the computer with perfect accuracy, "email verified", next step, go to phone, open SMS app, wait for slow loading, no new SMS, back to computer, "send code again (wait 60 seconds)", wait 60 seconds, click it, go to phone, finally get a 6-digit code, back to computer, type it in, submit.
Signing up for things is a massive chore now. Because they want so much personal identification data, that they don't actually need for the function because they never send an email or an SMS.
And if you're signing up on the same device you're checking your email and SMS on, it's straight up impossible because every time you switch to the email app, it unloads the browser app and forgets its state so the verification is invalid. You have to keep trying 6-7 times and hope maybe one time you'll do it quick enough that the browser will stay resident in memory.
I actually have at least two phone apps that are social-adjacent that do signup secretly in the background. You just install the app, and it generates a random identifier and uses that as your account ID. Nothing is visible to the user. In the settings is an import/export option for device migration. If you want signups, this is how to get them.
I'm sure Verisign would be thrilled to have a bidding war between the legitimate owners of fraser.name and a bunch of third parties they suddenly enabled.
Yes the Berlin exhibit is really well done with some beautiful artifacts well displayed and explained. The Z1 replica is a marvel: Zuse himself built in 1989.
IIRC they also have sensible documentatioin about his Nazi connections that puts this work into appropriate context.
There's a bunch of neat public payphone art projects out there. A friend of mine runs Futel, which has some fairly elaborate voice menus and several phones installed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futel
One of my favorite easter eggs in Nethack was the way a Mailer Daemon would arrive in-game and deliver a scroll when you received an email on the host Unix system. Which then became a game exploit because there were some obscure in-game uses for the scroll items.
One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.
I recently switched to Linux after years on Windows desktop, mostly because the KDE Plasma desktop feels snappier than Windows 11. Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it. It's been really nice. If you haven't tried Linux desktops in awhile give Bazzite a whirl: it's a Fedora customized for gaming. Even if you don't game it's an easy way to get a very functional Linux desktop in no time at all.
> One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful.
If only they'd actually DO something with this meaningfulness. I love and use Linux as my daily driver, but desktop environments and everything around it have become so complicated yet worse than before.
In the past a simple config file with intuitive setting names inside of them could make you do anything you wanted.
Today they have all these layers of abstraction for themes, icon sets and light and dark mode and what not, but almost NO combination works!
If you set light mode, you'll get some light gray text on lighter gray background somewhere, but if you use dark mode, then you'll get some black text rendered on a black background elsewhere. And even if not involving light or dark mode, same misery with whatever themes like "Adwaita" and others, some things will work in one, other things in another, I've seen a PDF viewer that made everything black text on black background in some desktop themes... A PDF viewer can't even independently choose its own text and background color without the desktop environment messing with it?
No theme I found anywhere has _well visible_ scrollbars, they all seem to love making them as subtle as possible so you can hardly see where your scroll position actually is. No theme I found anywhere has a _clear visual distinction_ (different color, not just a subtle shade difference) for the selected window vs the non selected ones. This would be _extremely_ handy for knowing in what window you're typing now, even windows 3.11 got this (and the scrollbars, and the ability to customize your colors) better
While not latency, it's still a thing they just can't get right, and when things were less overdesigned it actually worked better, so what was all this for?
> If you set light mode, you'll get some light gray text on lighter gray background somewhere, but if you use dark mode, then you'll get some black text rendered on a black background elsewhere.
I've been using Linux (Linux Mint Cinammon, then Fedora Linux GNOME) for over five years and I've never had that. What kind of desktop environment, themes and applications are you using?
My bet is that either you’re using a Mickey Mouse distro, or you tweaked your themes/thrashed your config and now you have all those issues that I haven’t seen in a decade since installing custom GTK themes.
> a PDF viewer can't even independently choose its own text and background color without the desktop environment messing with it
It can, it just chose to reuse the theming settings of it's platform (be it QT or GTK, or whatever) instead of forcing them.
The desktop environment is simply setting the defaults for the platform and most applications use them instead of forcing colors and themes and font.
And you can just try many combinations of themes + window managers + whatever app that fits in a desktop environment you want.
Maybe what's exactly to your liking doesn't exist yet, but the beautiful part it that it's a lot easier to make it for Linux than for any other OS because everything is open.
My experience has been reasonably consistent. My main DE is KDE, it switches between light and dark based on my location and time. It switches to warmer colors at night. I have never had a problem in the applications I use.
I occasionally switch on the fancy effects like windows fall apart when I'm in the fun mode, or I'm showing something to friends, as a bit of fun makes everything more interesting, and all work perfectly well.
Desktop environments have improved so many times over IMO. KDE and Gnome are legitimately high-performance and extremely usable - more so than Windows or Mac in my experience.
Yes theming in particular has gotten complex, but that's largely because of the application domain. We now abuse electron for everything. And, if it's any consolation, it's still 100x better than Windows, which can't decide on less than 12 themes for its own built-in applications, let alone third-party apps.
> These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft could turn a knob and get telemetry data from millions of devices, and feed that back to the software graphics authors.
Some things do indeed improve, but some other things require a massive effort that no hobbyist or small company can make happen.
This is most obvious in places where a lot of coordination is required, for example in supporting proper color correction throughout all applications, or decent support for advanced printer functions.
There are many incremental changes, but we often get stuck in local minima for years.
Still, I personally like that one can (relatively) easily watch what happens under the hood. It's not entirely clear to me why Windows and MacOS must remain closed source.
Are we sure it's because they have closed source as a moat, or because they have the first mover advantage? I would say it's the latter because every single one of their products has fully functional, feature complete competitors even open source ones. Like apache superset and postgres
if your sole goal is making money, yes, because Microsoft have actually done a pretty good job of making money, even if that's generally at the cost of the well-being of people using their software.
This kind of thing is certainly possible under Windows - you can basically patch any kernel API call, replace any COM object instantiation, install filter drivers that intercept any request to and from a device, replace userland DLLs with your own.
It's really scary what you can do, to the point that I often asked myself 'why allow this?' - seeing as hits on certain APIs took me to blackhat forums and articles about writing exploits.
Oh sure, but if I just need to troubleshoot why Minecraft-launcher (a first party app) won't launch ... it didn't give any output; it didn't even exist apparently, but
only because MS were hiding it, had to crack out Process Explorer just to get something to troubleshoot on ... then it turns out the "turnkey" app from their first-party app store, loading the first-party app, on the same company's OS just failed with no indications to the user at all, not even a "this app crashed". Solution was to cut out as much of MS as possible ... it's just infuriating when it doesn't work, which seems to be all-the-time.
More power to Bazzite and Valve, the sooner games app run in other OS the better.
I use Bazzite for development bc it works like a Mac with sane defaults and a just works approach:
- IDEs are no problem. Editors will "just work" for anything you type into the app store - Bazzite handles the special cases for you and installs them through brew taps or Flatpaks.
- For development it's basically just like a Mac where you also can't install system-level packages: Node, Python etc work through brew / nvm / uv same as on Mac. Development that involves containers will be unchanged from a Mac. For compilers specifically, same as on Mac: Install it through brew, or if you need a Debian or Fedora base you do `distrobox create` and you can apt-install in a transparent podman container.
The immutable fs thing isn't just Bazzite; it's a fork of Fedora Silverblue[1] (it sounds like AI wrote this, but it didn't! I fear I am becoming the AI...)
Immutable filesystem-based operating systems became fairly widely used as the "base" system for Kubernetes nodes. Because on a container-focused system, you never need to touch the rootfs.
This started as a project called CoreOS[2], which was eventually acquired by Red Hat for its OpenShift (Red Hat Kubernetes) platform.
On servers, immutable rootfs makes a lot of sense. Silverblue (et. al.) was an attempt to see if that concept translated to Desktop systems well. Reviews are mixed. Some people swear it's the best thing since bread. Other people claim it's worse than having dental work done.
I'm personally somewhere in the middle. I think the concept is good, but if you want to do anything to change the core system, like installing custom video drivers, it quickly becomes a pain. I like to equate it to the "n00b"-OS. People who "just want the damn computer to work", immutable is great, because neither they nor an application can do anything to really break the system. On the other hand, it really limits (without complex work-arounds that other systems don't need) what "power users" can do.
In "the perfect immutable OS world", you would never directly install any application; instead, you run everything in a container (i.e., Flatpak). So you have layers of protection: an immutable root and a container-based permission system; the worst* thing an application could do is blow up your home directory. But if you manage permissions correctly, the most damaging thing would be an application blowing up only itself.
Yes of course, but you need to do it via the package manager. You can't "sudo make install". If you build your own software and want to install it system wide, you need to flatpack/brew it or run it in a docker container.
(obviously you can modify the filesystem if you really really really want to).
Bazzite is gaming oriented version of Fedora CoreOs. There are many different versions. I am running bluefin.
I've tried a lot of desktop linux distros, and to be honest, immutable linux feels like the future. Anything you do can simply be rolled back. Break something? Just roll it back.
And if you run something like Bazzite, but want to try out Bluefin-Dx which is developer oriented, then you can rebase your existing installation. If you don't like it, just revert back to Bazzite with a single command.
However, it's desktop oriented. Don't run CoreOs on a server.
Bazzite mostly suggests installing stuff via Flatpak or Homebrew. (No, really, brew on Linux lol). You can also layer in things with rpm-ostree but it's clunky. I think the immutable OS makes sense for a consumer but not for a developer.
So I'm using Nobara instead. It's a different Fedora-for-gaming but has most of the same improvements. It is a traditional system, not immutable. CachyOS is also very popular and that gets you an Arch-for-gaming. Just yesterday I learned of PikaOS, a Debian-for-gaming.
The main thing all these gaming-customized systems are doing is getting graphics drivers and proprietary codecs installed for you easily.
Why not for developers? You can install tools from flatpak or in home directory. My workflow includes toolbox containers. Distrobox is also good option.
Many flatpaks aren't actually maintained by the actual developer nor the normal way the package is normally used. You may have bugs that aren't present in the package that the dev isn't aware of or interested in fixing especially if they support a different channel and the bug relates to sandboxing.
There is also a risk that the person may be malicious from the start, sell out, or simply get malware. Given the nature of the ecosystem a malicious release to a previously safe package could propagate incredibly quickly.
Where there are multiple steps for a package to get from developers machine to yours and each is slow enough for malicious behavior to be noticed each step adds friction and decreases the chance of ultimate success. Where all steps are nearly simultaneous your risk multiplies with each step in which a different person has their hands in it and if any of them are malicious or compromised you are screwed.
Why Nix is great; you can run the IDE from within a Nix-managed dev environment and not have to teach the IDE about it. You can point a .desktop shortcut at it too.
Requires a different way of working with projects though, so understandable if that's not your thing.
don't you then have to keep your IDE config synced across them an open a whole instance for each project? Why even have an OS underneath it at this point?
Sometimes it feels like I'm just being asked to install a real linux distro inside my linux distro so I can actually do things. Here's you nice shiny desktop and app store! Oh you want to do more than browse the web? Better install linux again in a VM.
Maybe i'm just stuck in legacy paradigms, but I kind of like just booting IntelliJ and picking the project i'm on today.
Or sometimes I want to move stuff between projects i'm working on, that's a lot easier if my one IDE instance can hit them all at the same time.
I disagree. Immutable distros are great for developers, you set your dev env up in a container environment and when it goes pear shape you can just tear it down and start again without needing to worry about leaving a mess on your host OS.
The immutable linux is pretty great if you find one that fits you type of dev work. The prebuilt images are powered by a config (so you could build your own) but it's great that you can just follow someones good "config". Switching/updates are suddenly easy.
For example i just need docker for webdev and there is bazzite-dx basically bazzite with docker and few things added. Works pretty great, sometimes when something goes bad i rollback the image and wait for future version.
You can modify the fs using rpm-ostree. It will overlay your changes on top of the immutable image. The recommended way is to create toolbox/distrobox which uses containers to isolate stuff.
So how this often works is you leave the distro itself alone per say, and then install user flatpaks. This gives you user level apps with the benefits of the immutable distro.
Outside of that there are commands to install packages directly and some things must be installed that way.
> Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it
And thats exactly where free software shines. Enough people fixing issues they deem worthy of spending time on means the overall software will only improve with time.
Afaik reflex is a bit different - it times the input to frame latency in your game, and tries to start the gameloop as late as possible in the frame so that your input gets sampled at the latest possible time and the frame still makes it to the vsync period, this isn't really a compositor tech.
Why would it need to measure input to frame latency? Surely it just needs to measure how long it takes the game to go from vsync period to frame ready and delay when the game thinks vsync happened to force it to poll later in the cycle?
I think it depends who it is making noise. There are some famous Oculus-era stories about John Carmack tracing display latency issues and then writing lengthy screeds to Samsung engineers to get them to give him lower level access.
I bet if someone like him made enough noise, people at MS would pay attention.
Bazzite or CacheyOS (if you wish to do gaming and have more rope to hang yourself mainly because you can more easily affect the system if it isn’t trying to enforce immutability).
TBH with the onslaught of LLM CLI’s like Claude I am a lot more promiscuous in my Linux OS choices as of late. I used to stick to Ubuntu because that was the Linux I knew, but the “interface” has become the same to me because I just ask Claude to help me achieve a semantic goal without having to score the web for the appropriate keys.
Who knows, maybe I’ll eventually swing the other way and give NixOS a try finally.
I stand by my comments. Bazzite has benefits being immutable but immutability can cause certain tasks to be more involved or constrained. Case in point it’s nice that Bazzite comes with a lot of sane defaults:
- brew
- podman
But it would be disingenuous to understate the additional hurdles either you or software you are accustomed to using being amenable to operating within the immutability restriction. That’s not to discount the great benefits and entire categories of problems that immutability protects you from. It’s just a priority and weighing your options question.
Here’s an example that bit me: I wanted to run k3s/k0s but both have issue with Bazzite. Those were hard stops for me.
The reason it makes people uncomfortable is because people have been using it to alter images of real people, and they've done that in a public place (twitter/X), for everyone to see. So it gets in the deepfake realm, which is illegal in many places.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to say that it’s left or right, but it’s perhaps relevant to point out that that article is about the political bias of all major models. And right there in the subhead, they explicitly say that the models have a left bias.
Funnily, as a European all the models appear extremely right wing. The political spectrum is shifted far more right in the US than in Europe, so what is left there is still at least conservative here.
I ask my AI to give me citations science and pro/con arguments when discusssing anything that could be shaped by cultural biases.
You're aware the UK isn't in the EU right, and hasn't been for quite some time?
Also that AfD and National Rally aren't yet, and have never been in control of the German or French parliaments.
So yes, it's in the US that it's shifted. US money and influence (Musk and Theil money and feet on the ground influence through figures like Bannon), as well as US social media companies running US aligned algorithms, are an enormously significant factor in the rise of the right in Europe.
Maybe you can just tell us what you mean by not neutral?
I find Grok to be far more academically honest than the other models. The other models seem to be much more aligned with public opinion over academic consensus especially on topics around economics and biology.
I find public opinion on these topics to be very group think populist and prefer the academic take that grok provides
Only issue in that is the CP, the rest is still purely next token prediction. To take it seriously is silly, and to think that is everything it provides is cherry picking.
It would be like judging gemini because it generated images of famous historical people as black, which was fucking stupid. I use gemini quite a lot as my chat tool, and it works great.
Well then the question becomes, what did it get trained on for next token prediction to come to the conclusion that there's a white genocide? Cos yes, people on the internet believe such stupid thing, but I can promise you, it is not the majority who believe that.
You speak as if middle of (not even statistically divided but carelessly divided) human opinion groups is neutral. There is something called facts, and we are living in a physical world.
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round.
Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round
I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs
You probably have it backwards. It's Grok that is shoving right wing ideology down your throat. Research has shown that without specific guidance to otherwise, LLM's tend to be slightly left leaning by default. There are some theories as for why this is so.
It would be easier to understand where you're coming from if you could give some examples containing:
- prompt
- response
- why it is wrong / misleading / biased
Because there are many people online complaining about left-wing bias, then you ask what about and they're like "Trump won in 2020, vaccines cause autism, global warming is a globalist conspiracy", etc. Which is to say, it's not left-wing bias but reality bias.
Not saying you are one of those people or that there isn't bias! It's just been hard, in my personal experience, to get at it.
Here is a prompt I keyed into SuperGrok (still have the bargain priced $10 a month subscription as they seem to be really desparate for subscribers right now):
Answer these questions: who won the 2020 election; do vaccines caust autism; is global warming a conspiracy theory. Do not use web searches or subagents or external sources of information.
Results:
2020 US Presidential Election: Joe Biden won the election ...
Do vaccines cause autism? No. ...
Is global warming a conspiracy theory? No. ...
Just for fun, I decided to ask Cursor Grok 4.5 (Fast xhigh), too:
The user wants three factual answers. They forbid web searches, subagents, and external sources.
I will answer directly from memory. Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Vaccines do not cause autism. Global warming is established science.
Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
No — vaccines do not cause autism. That claim has been thoroughly studied and rejected by the scientific and medical consensus.
No — global warming is not a conspiracy theory. Human-caused climate change is established science, backed by extensive evidence.
(And wow, it sure is fast, although not as fast as MiMo-2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed. Ran it out of a $20/mo Cursor subscription.)
A lot of people seem to perceive those as left wing woke ideology though, not because they're not true, but because it doesn't align with their world view.
But the main issue is that facts and educated people are considered left wing or woke, and some people - including Musk himself - do not like that. Example: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1967010466539987220, where the statistical fact that 75% of US extremist murders are by right-wing actors is called "cringe idiocy" by Musk. Many such cases.
In the early days of social media it was a standard that you could get your lists of friends, etc out and then use them to bootstrap your social network on new social media. All the big players like Twitter and Facebook took advantage of that and then locked down their own platforms to make it hard for you to move your social network out of them.
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