kbal

joined 2 years ago
[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 12 hours ago

The place for it is in screen reader software, for those occasions where proper human-written alt text is not available.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 14 hours ago

Speaking of flashbacks to almost 20 years ago, Paul Krugman used to talk about what he called Flatland and the Zoned Zone. The same forces were at work then, they've just gotten steadily worse and I guess as suburban sprawl took over across the land, almost every place in Canada where it makes any sense to build (and many where it doesn't) got itself to some extent "zoned."

[–] kbal@fedia.io 4 points 17 hours ago

After the financial crisis circa 2008 there was a high-profile international debate about which approach was best for banking regulation: Detailed legalistic rules that try to cover every possible situation, or rules that set forth simple principles to make clear the spirit of the law with the understanding that they might not cover everything and may even need to be violated in case of emergency. I'm not sure what Mark Carney had to say about it, but I suppose we can guess.

In other contexts it can be an interesting debate but when it comes to C-2 it seems beside the point. Regardless of which approach is preferred that bill in its most problematic parts lays out clear and simple principles which are themselves ill-considered, unconstitutional, and deeply out of step with the values Canadians expect our government to embody and respect..

[–] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 20 hours ago

Translation is something the LLMs are pretty good at. It makes sense to use them for it, though obviously it should be a separate product and not part of Firefox.

The rest looks completely useless to me.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 20 hours ago

In the early 2000s I actually thought made sense to buy a console, since not many games would run on linux.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 21 hours ago

Sure, but don't forget to include the basics such as the root name servers: Verisign(A), USC-ISI, Cogent, U of Maryland, NASA Ames, ISC, Defence Information Systems Agency, US Army Research Lab, Netnod, Verisign(J), RIPE, ICANN, WIDE

[–] kbal@fedia.io 16 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

continued innovations from major players like Microsoft

MS using its massive reserves of innovation to acquire many of the major game studios.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 22 hours ago

Is there even a single OECD government that's firmly opposed to what Israel is doing, firmly opposed to what Russia is doing, and firmly opposed to fossil fuels? Asking for that doesn't seem like too much.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 15 points 23 hours ago

“encouraging” responsiveness to new legal guidance

i.e. they've been forced to stop one of the illegal things they were doing.

 

Cyberastrology: The theory that if you know the exact network conditions at the time someone first connected to the Internet, such as ping times to the major servers of the cyberzodiac, you can predict their future.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago

#!/bin/bash # Recursively rename everything in the current directory as necessary # to make it match the case of filenames in Skyrim's "Data" directory,

from=`pwd -P`
to="${HOME}/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Skyrim_1.5.97/Data"
tmp="/tmp/skydata_index"
filez="/tmp/skydata_from"

IFS='
'

match_case() {
    cd "$2"
    find . | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$tmp"
    cd "$1"
    find . -maxdepth 1 | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp ); then
            name=`grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp | head -1`
            if [ "${name}xx" != "${j}xx" ] ; then
                mv "$j" "$name"
            fi
        fi
    done

    # going recursiv
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( test -d "${2}/${j}" ) ; then
            match_case "${1}/${j}" "${2}/${j}"
        fi
    done
}
match_case $from $to
rm $tmp $filez
[–] kbal@fedia.io 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Similar things could be said about things like "real" and "official."

 

PEN Canada joins 39 organizations and 132 individuals in a joint letter demanding a complete withdrawal of Bill C-2. The following letter was sent this week to Canadian authorities…

 

On June 3, 2025, the Canadian government tabled Bill C-2, omnibus legislation that, if passed, would introduce a wide array of new federal agency and law enforcement powers, and would significantly reform substantive and due process laws in Canada for migrants and asylum seekers. Our preliminary analysis of Bill C-2 situates the legislation within the context of existing research by the Citizen Lab about two potential data-sharing treaties that are most relevant to the new proposed powers being introduced in Bill C-2: the Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention (2AP) and the CLOUD Act. Both of which carry significant constitutional and human rights risks.

 

My thumb is itchy.

 

30 years ago somebody told me their opinion about "Changes" but I didn't know what Changes was. I just remembered to look it up, and according to Wikipedia it could've been any of about 50 things.

 

Browsers should probably just stop sending user-agent header at all, ideally.

If anyone else was wondering why some websites and the "Alternate Player for Twitch.tv" extension stopped working in the latest Librewolf update, it's because they changed the userAgent string from Firefox to LibreWolf and way too much shitty code is confused by it looking like firefox but then not being firefox.

 

I am enjoying the Oblivion remaster except for one thing: Lockpicking. I was good at the old Oblivion lock picking. There was a clear audio cue, I have good ears I guess, and it was both easy and satisfying. Many found it impossible, but I had the gift.

In the remaster they've removed that audio cue and now there is only the visual motion of the tumblers to react to. I do not have fast eyes, only fast ears as it turns out. I am bad at the new lockpicking. Curse your laziness, anonymous Virtuos programmer who chose to take that shortcut.

 

Wishing a happy International Bat Appreciation Day to all who celebrate.

 

Even before the election was called, the Greens unveiled their plan to counter the global and domestic challenges posed by Donald Trump’s chaotic government. It’s chock full of good ideas, including many you wouldn’t normally expect: Improving the east-west energy grid to beef up national energy sovereignty; ramping up domestic artillery production; the stoppage of observing U.S-imposed intellectual property laws; and integrating more closely with the European, Australian, and Ukrainian defence industries.

 

Well I decided to upgrade to Debian testing last night on my desktop here, just for fun. It seems fine.

Xfce4-screensaver wasn't in bullseye so I had an old locally compiled version installed, which may have been the cause of some video problems. Replaced with the debian build.

A broken bash completion script I had removed came back and was annoying until I remembered what I'd done.

Old searx install didn't work, neither did latest searxng install script from git. Too many python errors for me, so I gave up and ran the docker container instead. That was the only frustrating part.

Skyrim runs more smoothly and amdgpu hasn't crashed yet. It had been getting bad lately, locking up during video playback sometimes (maybe once a week) in the past month or two. I think perhaps running the newest kernels with the old mesa was a bad combination.

I ran out of disk space on the EFI partition during install, but it recovered no problem.

Other than that no problems so far.

 

They're talking about closing the main support office for the Mauna Loa Observatory — which is "recognised as the birthplace of global carbon dioxide monitoring and maintains the world's longest record of measurements of atmospheric CO2."

 

Changelog once again didn't make it to nexus but it looks fairly substantial.

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