ulkesh

@ulkesh@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I specifically stated that the technology has moved past that, especially in the fiber business. That is not ignoring it, I’m stating he’s flat wrong. This isn’t coaxial shared bandwidth like the late 1990s/early-mid 2000s. That time has passed. The problem here is a fundamental misunderstanding that the technology no longer requires such data cap/bandwidth tradeoffs (in the wireless business, this may still be necessary due to the congestive nature of wireless signals and how towers handoff/pickup/etc, but it is not necessary in the wired business any more). And if an ISP can’t properly support 1Gbps, they shouldn’t offer it. Anecdotally, for my use case (I don’t saturate my 1Gbps synchronous fiber 100% of the time, but there are times I’m downloading on Steam, many many GBs) my ISP handles it perfectly fine – and not once has a data cap been introduced.

  Outside of the wireless space, data caps are a money grab – pure and simple. And playing psychological games with consumers, as you have alluded to, in order to get them to not use the bandwidth they pay for is also quite unethical, in my opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I ignored nothing. You misunderstand technology. Data caps are not necessary – they are an artificial price hike. Either you see that, or you don’t, and you clearly don’t. Also, a large portion of the United States has a choice of ONE broadband provider, so your point of “I can pick a provider” is complete nonsense. Just because something doesn’t affect you, doesn’t mean it’s not an issue.

  Good bye.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m confused where you believe consumers are given choice here.

  Data caps are usually scaled up with faster bandwidth, not the other way around as you attempt to define. And that’s simple marketing that attempts to excuse the use of data caps.

  Also, data caps are artificial and are literally a money grab under the erroneous guise that data is manufactured and thus has intrinsic value. A congressman literally compared it to manufacturing Oreos — which is complete nonsense.

  Also, if what you say is true, then why does AT&T impose no data caps on their fiber network? Clearly this is a marketing issue, not a technical one. And perhaps in the past with the way coaxial internet was engineered, an argument could be made for data caps. The industry has grown up since then, technically speaking, and there is no cause for data caps except to continue to line the pockets of ISPs.

  I agree with you that working toward consumers having a choice of ISP is where most efforts should lie, but the FCC can walk and chew gum at the same time and remove anti-consumer practices such as data caps, all the while pushing for more competition at the last mile. They’re not mutually exclusive concepts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyone who still uses Twitter either condones what Musk has done and is doing, or is completely oblivious.

  I long for the day it dies the death it deserves and Musk is left holding the bag having to pay all the debt. If only he’d be forced to do that, but like all rich assholes, he’ll get out of it somehow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unified Linux Wine Game Launcher (UMU) gets a first official release⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Been using UMU (with GE-Proton builds) via Lutris for some months now to play World of Warcraft and some other games. Works like a champ :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recall: Microsoft re-launches ‘privacy nightmare’ AI screenshot tool⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I have been using Linux off and on for 25 years (using the server pretty consistently, but always hedged with the desktop for various reasons). Since Proton and GE-Proton allow every game I want to play to work in Linux, back when Recall was first announced, I decided to finally stop hedging and went all in on the Linux desktop.

  And I’m not going back. Everything is working for me and Microsoft can screw off if they think I’m going to allow such blatant spyware in my house. Their telemetry was always suspect, but this is now overt despite any assurances they attempt to make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can now watch Grace Hopper’s famed 1982 lecture on YouTube⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the few giants upon whose shoulders we all stand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I swear all the CEOs on the planet have lost their damn mind.

  And his last name is Cocks, so I guess this tracks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Russia reportedly readies submarine cable 'sabotage'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If Russia wants to start WWIII, that’s a good way to do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GE-Proton 9-13 released bringing in a fix for World of Warcraft⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I had this issue immediately with 9-12. Turns out it was an issue with vkd3d. And I’m very thankful that a new version of GE-Proton was released so fast after the vkd3d fix had been committed/pushed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel: Laptop Processors, Future Chips Not Affected by CPU Bug⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The damage is done, though. And the fact that Intel wouldn’t do anything about damaged CPUs or recall affected CPUs is quite telling. So I’m jumping ship to AMD for my next build.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chrome will block one of its biggest ad blockers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Built on Chromium. No thanks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO - 9to5Mac⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuck spez.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Vision Pro U.S. Sales Are All But Dead, Market Analysts Say⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is what happens when you overcharge for something that has no real apps and its best competitor is 1/7 the cost with a plethora of apps.

  There is simply no incentive to buy the Vision Pro. It was dead on arrival.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I like that last statement. I might steal it 🤣

  Thanks for your insights.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps. I concede maybe it makes mundane tasks simpler and quicker.

  But it should most definitely not be used for fact-based research and testing. Not yet and not until it is proven to produce only credible fact backed by credible sources.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  School shootings, intercom not working, teacher not available and student bleeding on the floor, etc, etc. There are numerous reasons for safety for the availability of a cell phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  When did I mention the use of a smart phone?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They may eventually be useful in this space. But for now, they are more work than they’re worth and completely discredited for proper fact-based research. And the teachers my kid has had who used it for testing resulted in completely wrong answers that the teacher didn’t bother to check.

  Yes that is the teacher’s fault, but so is using it to generate a test in the first place.

  I will die on this hill. LLMs of any kind right now are not something that should be trifled with in a critical thinking-based curriculum. In time, perhaps. But not yet, not when LLMs are so easily manipulated (whether trained on public data or private). The various implementations haven’t earned credible trust despite CEOs drooling over them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hear you. But my child will have a cell phone in case of a real emergency when the adults don’t properly act. While I trust teachers rather implicitly, my experience with most school administrators is far less stellar. Also, a student calling 911 when the teacher is having a heart attack or some other life threatening event will save time and possibly their life.

  Barring any emergency situations, my child’s phone better be put away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed on the teachers getting more pay and time.

  And I agree that checking for objective fact with respect to teaching and testing is necessary.

  But…ChatGPT is not a credible source. So using it in the classroom is not exactly fine (outside of showing it as an example of a source that isn’t credible). It is in its infancy and any educator who uses it in the classroom and relies upon it is doing a considerable disservice to those they educate. That’s like teaching using Wikipedia. I get that it has information, many times accurate, but it should never be used as a source.

  As a commentary…Far too often in this modern world people (not you, just a general sense of society) seem to see something that may be 50, or 75 percent accurate and claim it as fact. This is how entertainment news organizations function to get ratings. And if kids are to be taught critical thinking they must be taught how to discern what is or isn’t credible.

  Otherwise we’re lost. And perhaps we already are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am in full agreement that cell phones should not be out of the backpack or pocket unless there is an emergency or it’s lunch time / outside of class.

  But for the love of critical thinking, also please ban the teachers from using ChatGPT to create their tests for them. I was appalled at finding out teachers at my kid’s school are doing that. While I support any tool (and funding!) that can make the lives and jobs of teachers easier, using a tool like ChatGPT is as irresponsible as telling kids to just Google it. And teachers/administrators should damn well know better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are you embracing AI?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here's what's happening to ad blockers in Google Chrome (and other browsers)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything said in that article makes me very happy to have switched to Firefox.

  Google can dress this up all they want, but a happy byproduct of this is that they can now purposefully ignore rules/filtering for their own sites, such as youtube, since it puts the real control of such filtering with the browser (and the company who created it) instead of the extension. Yes there is a trust concern with extensions. And yes, there is a performance hit with extensions vetting each network call. But that’s the price we, as the user, should continue to have the power to choose to pay, but Google is forcing us to go their way.

  Thanks Mozilla, for providing user choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul Giamatti Boards ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Holly Hunter and now Paul Giamatti. They must have some major money for this project. I can’t wait!!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t find it bragging or preachy, btw.

  Right now, because I’ve basically said good-bye to Windows, I am wanting a distro that caters to gaming. Nobara, Bazzite (though I’m not yet a fan of the “atomic” style distros), and Garuda all seem to deal with this relatively well. Garuda feels more baked than the others at the moment, but Nobara is by the same person who has created and maintained the proton-ge and wine-ge builds (goes by GloriousEggroll) – so once it is upgraded to Fedora 40 base, I may consider switching, but haven’t fully decided.

  I have run Garuda Hyprland and Garuda KDE Dragonized. I loved them both, but I have settled on Garuda KDE Dragonized because it has everything set up out of the box for gaming and I’m more accustomed to that kind of desktop environment. Hyprland was interesting and I enjoyed it mostly, but there were some things that I couldn’t easily get past (mainly, I like to minimize/hide windows, and Hyprland’s method of that is to just shove the window to another desktop, or quit the app, or hope it has a system tray icon for it and can “minimize” to that).

  If I didn’t care about gaming, I’d probably go with either Manjaro (Arch based, but uses its own repos to slow down the rolling release of Arch by about month or so), or Ubuntu, just to guarantee a higher degree of stability (Arch can sometimes break things, but it’s not that often, in my experience).

  While I know the community and NVIDIA are working to get explicit sync pushed out which will help a lot of the NVIDIA woes running on Wayland, about six weeks ago I decided to not wait anymore on that and went and bought an AMD 7800XT video card to run instead of NVIDIA. Wayland, and gaming, honestly feel much smoother to me now (and I don’t have to mess around with video drivers anymore). The only quirk about Wayland has to do with global mouse key shortcuts (namely, I use a mouse button for Push-To-Talk in Discord and had to set up a quirky solution).

  I’m eager for KDE Plasma 6.1 because it’ll have built-in RDP server support which will allow me to remote in easier using an RDP client from my Mac work laptop (I don’t really care for VNC [too slow], Rustbox [too buggy for me], or many of the other remote desktop solutions out there).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s awesome! I began my journey while at college in 1999. But I never once fully committed to the Linux desktop on my personal PC until now with all this CoPilot Recall nonsense. I would always have Windows in my back pocket, just in case.

  Not anymore. I’m done with Microsoft and certainly done with Adobe (not that I did much with their software). I’m able to play all the games I want in Garuda (KDE Dragonized) and have had no issues beyond minor tweaking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree. The problem is there are too many people who make excuses for switching which wouldn’t exist if they just actually switched. Saying the alternatives suck compared to Adobe products…well if everyone stopped using Adobe products today and all switched to the various other software out there that does run on Linux, I guarantee you within a year, they would be all on par with the Adobe products because they would finally have the financial backing necessary to accomplish that goal.

  Adobe still exists simply because they are a behemoth due to existing for 40 years. People have choice, even professionals, even businesses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Doug Jones interview] Star Trek Marks a Turning Point for a Secret Sci-Fi Legend⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  100% agreed. I mean, he is Pencilhead! I always wondered what became of Son of Pencilhead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Doug Jones interview] Star Trek Marks a Turning Point for a Secret Sci-Fi Legend⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a testament to Jones’s acting as well. I thoroughly enjoyed Action Saru in that scene.