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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Generally, I tend to think more in the direction of that there is some misunderstanding happening, then people being stupid. Maybe that is just the optimist in me.

    What exactly is meant when people say they don’t know git. Do they mean the repository data format? Do they mean the network protocol? Do they mean the command line utility? Or just how to work with git as a developer, which is similar to other vcs?

    I think if you use some git gui, you can get very far, without needing to understand “git”, which I would argue most people, that use it daily, don’t, at least not fully.


  • It also means that anyone can make their own instruction set extensions or just some custom modifications, which would make software much more difficult to port. You would have to patch your compiler for every individual chip, if you even figure out what those instructions are, and what they do. Backwards, forwards or sideway (to other cpus from other vendors) compatibility takes effort, and not everyone will try to have that, and instead add their own individual secret sauce to their instruction set.

    IMO, I am excited about RISC-V, but if the license doesn’t force adopters to open their designs under an open source license as well, I do expect even more portability issues as we already have with ARM socs.



  • Also state owned is only really useful for infrastructure, where it doesn’t make sense to have multiple providers and monopolies are easily attainable. Like roads, rails, electricity, internet backbone infrastructure and providers, social media, etc. Democracy is the currently best way we know of managing monopolies.

    For other stuff, you probably want employee owned democratic collectives. You would still have competition on the market, but its ordinary people that have the say. This would give more power to the people enthused about the tech and long term success, then all the short term gains.





  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldActually, Winamp is not going Open Source
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    1 month ago

    Maybe someone can explain to me why Winamp is still so popular?

    I have used Winamp 2, 3 and 5 around 2000ish, and it was a fine player, but nothing really special. After Winamp I think I switched to MediaMonkey, which IMO was easier to manage my music collection. Then I used VirtualDJ, which supported cross fading between music with synchronized beats. I think I also used foobar2000 a bit.

    Winamp was an okayish player, but there was much more powerful software around at that time. It this just nostalgics or is there really something that people miss today that Winamp provided or still provides?






  • I used to use Aegis, but after setting up my own vaultwarden, I use the normal bitwarden app/plugin on all my systems for passwords and TOTP.

    The advantages are that I don’t need my phone to login, the keys are synced and backuped in the encrypted vaultwarden database, which I can then handle with normal server backup tools. It still works offline, because bitwarden app caches the password.

    This is IMO much more convenient and secure (in a way that loosing access to a device doesn’t shut you out, and you don’t need to trust third parties) then most other solutions.





  • Nvidia has created a bit of a sore spot for many Linux Developers and thus users. Through their actions and non actions made it impossible to create FOSS drivers for their hardware that work well and are integrated and tested with the rest of the system.

    Many fresh users don’t seem to recognize the reason why they are having a sub par experience using their hardware is Nvidia and not the open source community. They often blame and complain to the developers of the open source drivers or applications, who either have to hack around hurdles placed by Nvidia or cannot inspect closed source drivers written by that company.

    It is IMO understandable that at some point the community stops providing free and unpaid customer support for hardware and software, they have no control over or don’t even own.

    If you would start paying them, then I suspect you might get better answers. Otherwise you just get information about stuff people are excited about.



  • Well, there are also the mobile variants of Firefox, which are more of their own thing.

    IMO Mozilla limited itself a bit too much on Firefox. Which results it their web engine not attracting many developers for it outside Mozilla.

    Embedding gecko in your own app was much easier in the past. This is now mostly taken over by CEF and WPE for Blink and WebKit respectively.

    Also stuff like B2G (Boot 2 Gecko) or FirefoxOS are dead as well.

    A goal of open source should be to be hacker friendly as well, were currently Blink/WebKit is leading. There are so many more projects around those engines than Gecko, which is sad.