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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2021

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  • kevincox@lemmy.mlMtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlGIMP 3.0 Released
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    29 days ago

    Actually I would pick GIMP.

    1. Says what it is, an image editor.
    2. No popups and random interruptions.
    3. Not only AI editing examples which makes me thing the tool is AI only.
    4. An overview of the variety of major features it has rather than just AI editing.
    5. Links to helpful documentation rather than endless marketing pages that say nothing.

    Really think only thing I would like to see is some screenshots and examples of using the tool, rather than just info on what it does. But the Photoshop page barely has this, just a few examples of the AI tools.


  • It would be nice if there was a shortcut to go “back to previous site”. Because on one hand using back to navigate around map moves is often very convenient, but sometimes I want to go to the site before the map. Having a two-level history with page and site would be super useful.


  • This is a case of the streetlight effect. Evaluating the skills needed to do the job is very difficult in an interview setting, so most of the focus going on evaluating skills that are easy to evaluate in an interview (such as people skills).

    It isn’t wrong, as all else being equal it is still better to hire the person with better skills that you can measure but obviously is not a strong evaluation of candidate quality.





  • Only if they gain possession when the device is running with the drive decrypted and they keep it running the whole time. That is a lot higher bar then being able to turn the machine on at any time and then recover the key. For example if this is a laptop that you are flying with. Without auto-decryption you can simply turn it off and be very secure. With auto-decryption they can turn it on then extract the key from memory (not easy, but definitely possible and with auto-decryption they have as long as they need, including sending the device to whatever forensics lab is best equipped to extract the key).


    1. Wiping the drive is a lot easier, just overwrite the root key a few times.
    2. If you store the key on a different drive you can safely dispose of the drive just by separating the two. (I do on my home server, keeping the decryption key on a USB drive. If I need to ship the server or discard old hardware I can just hold onto the thumb drive and not worry about the data being read.)

    Security is always about tradeoffs. On my home server unattended reboots are necessary so it needs to auto-decrypt. But using encryption means I don’t need to worry about discarding broken hardware or if I need to travel with the server were it may be inspected. For my laptop, desktop and phone where I don’t need unattended reboots I require the encryption key on bootup.



  • For me the biggest benefit is the ease of applying patches. For example in Nix I can easily take a patch that is either unreleased, or that I wrote myself, and apply it to my systems immediately. I don’t need to wait for it to be released upstream then packaged in my distro. This allows me to fix problems and get new features quickly without needing to mess with my system in any other way (no packages in other directories that need to be cleaned up, no extra steps after updates to remember, no cases where some packages are using different versions and no breaking due to library ABI breaks).

    Another benefit that you are pointing at is changing build flags. Often times I want to enable an optional feature that my distro doesn’t enable by default.

    Lastly building packages with different micro-architecture optimizations can be beneficial. I don’t do this often but occasionally if I want to run some compute-heavy work it can be nice to get a small performance boost.



  • To put it another way you want to be using all of your RAM and swap. It becomes a problem if you are frequently reading from Swap. (Writing isn’t usually as much of an issue as they may be proactive writes in case more memory needs to be filled up).

    Basically a perfect OS would use RAM + Swap such that the least disk reads need to be issued. This can mean swapping out some idle anonymous memory so that the space can be used as disk cache for some hotter data.

    In this screenshot the OS decided that it was better to swap out 3GiB of something to use that space for the disk cache (“Cached” ). It is likely right about this decision (but is not always).

    3 GiB does seem a bit high. But if you have lots of processes running that are using memory but are mostly idle it could definitely happen. For example in my case I often have lots of Language Servers running in my IDE, but many of them are for projects that I am not actively looking at so they are just waiting for something to happen. These often take lots of memory and it may make sense to swap these out until they are used again.






  • Vista sucked so bad. I got a nice new laptop and it was constant pain. One of the real breaking points was that it would refuse to let me modify or delete some files even as superuser. If I recall correctly they weren’t even system files, maybe a separate partition or something.

    I tried installing XP but there was some sort of driver issue with my CD drive. It would start installing fine, but then once it tried to reboot off of the HDD to finish the installation it couldn’t find the installation CD to finish copying things, so the install just crashed half-way done.

    I installed Ubuntu on a partition, dual booted for a while. After a few months I realized that I never even used the Windows partition anymore so I wiped it.


  • Likely what is happening is that the game is probing audio devices and triggering the mic on your headphones to get picked up. This switches them into the “headset” profile which has awful audio quality. I don’t know why the UI isn’t showing that, make sure you are checking while the game is running and the audio sounds bad.

    If you want your headphone mic to work there is not much choice. There isn’t a standard bluetooth profile with good audio and mic. If you never want to use your headphone mic you can probably configure some advanced settings in your audio manager (probably PulseAudio or PipeWire).