enthusiast101

enthusiast101, 20 days ago

@RL_Dane
For a long while now, captchas on certain sites exist seemingly to spite me. I once spent 15 min trying to get to a page because the captcha refused to believe I was human. It's gotten to the point where extension stores have paid extensions that use AI to solve captchas.

I'm starting to think that since I use adblock and clean my browser session on close, certain sites are seeing the lack of collectable user data as an indicator for bots.

enthusiast101, 20 days ago

@RL_Dane
Yeah, funnily enough there are extensions that auto solve captchas for you. I tried them out once and they seem to work decently quickly too.

These captchas are like anti cheat now, those sufficiently determined to be bad actors can still do so, but the honest users that have a slightly different setup get caught in the crossfire.

enthusiast101, 22 days ago

@RL_Dane
I'm currently using this. It works pretty decently for me. Its not perfect, I prefer it over other FOSS options

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.afkanerd.deku/

enthusiast101, 25 days ago

@kev
I honestly think what DuckDuckGo is doing is fine. Their results mostly come from Wikipedia and that is clearly stated. It also isn't a chatbot, but rather a tool that summarizes pages. It also tries to stick with straightforward answers to minimize the chance of it being wrong.

It also can be turned off in the settings for ddg if you really don't want to deal with it.

enthusiast101, 1 month ago

@BrodieOnLinux
Given how fast CPUs have become, I honestly think that speed should no longer be a main concern for most people and Intel should probably not market processors based on speed alone. In fact, I'd argue that most people's systems are probably over-specced for what they actually use.

I'd much rather these chip manufacturers actually focus on things like security and stability and market that instead. Though I guess it's easier to market raw performance.

enthusiast101, 1 month ago

@thelinuxEXP @tlenewspodcast
I honestly hope Gentoo doesn't stick to its stance on AI. I hope AI doesn't become another crypto. Where pretty interesting tech with a lot of potential is permanently discredited due to bad actors.

AI can be an incredible accessibility tool, even for stuff like translations. Like my dad knows English and can read it well, but isn't the best at writing. AI can likely help him a lot during work where he has to use specific language while having a friendly tone.

enthusiast101, 1 month ago

@thelinuxEXP @tlenewspodcast
I still think we shouldn't just discredit the concept even if big companies do it unethically.

So long as people still want ethical AI, people will make ethical AI. It might be less popular, but some people will still use it. I know that if it comes with the benefit of being run locally, at least some business's will want it just to avoid data leaks.

Not to mention that if ethical AI is out there governments can use that as a metric to ban unethical AI specifically

enthusiast101, 1 month ago

@BrodieOnLinux
I think the most important lesson anyone can learn from this is that it is kind of dumb to expect project lead developers to always manage the community.

Vaxry has indicted before that he doesn't particularly like managing the hyprland community. To me it just looks like it was thrust upon him and he didn't have the ability nor the motivation to manage it.

I'm not saying Vaxry is a bad or good person, just that he is much better at writing code than being the face of a project.

enthusiast101, 1 month ago

@thelinuxEXP
I feel like it's getting too late at this point. Many companies have started adding weird clauses where if you post anything on their website, they own all intellectual property to that content.

So while it be a bit more expensive, the AI companies will still get your data to by licensing companies for the data (this will still be cheaper than fair compensation). Of course the added expense will simply be passed on to the consumer and all blame will be placed on the regulations.

enthusiast101, 1 month ago

@thelinuxEXP
Flathub does have a repo that ships beta packages. Though it isn't installed by default on any distro I have used

enthusiast101, 1 month ago

@thelinuxEXP
Also I think AI in anti cheat software is a horrible idea. It could result in false positives where players may have actually paid money for the game but now the account gets banned because an AI decided what they were doing was suspicious.

It could also lead to an arm's race with cheating software where they try to out-compete the AI. I mean just look at CAPTCHA. Most AI CAPTCHA solvers are better at solving them than I am.

enthusiast101, 2 months ago

@BrodieOnLinux
I'm honestly surprised that we're not seeing this more in Flathub. Or maybe Flathub just has much better screening than I thought they did.

But I'm curious to see what happened to the snap store now. I imagine a lot of such issues would be solved if certain keywords like crypto or popular brand names prompter manual review.

enthusiast101, 2 months ago

@BrodieOnLinux
I did not know that. I guess that's one more reason for me to avoid SNAP. Honestly, I would think a company would be able to fund reviewers better than an entity that relies on donations..

enthusiast101, 2 months ago

@yakkoj
Yeah for whatever reason developers don't realise that mobile phones are just laptops with smaller screens. I use firefox with ublock so ads aren't a problem, but I do see sites that refuse to show certain functionality for android.

enthusiast101, 3 months ago

@fedora
I definitely appreciate this. I was good for a bit, but at some point the names just got too confusing. Even community projects started using scheme, like vauxite, and I'm pretty sure I saw a lazurite image on the Ublue website too.

I still don't know what lazurite is

enthusiast101, 3 months ago

@niccolove
As someone in the US, it probably is a result of cashback bonuses, hoping to improve credit score, not bothering to cancel the cards, etc.

But yeah, the US definitely has issues to work through. I'm considering moving to Europe. I'm sure it has its own problems, but it sounds great as someone currently living in US.

Like just today I got charged $20 for a health checkup a few weeks ago that I was told was already covered by insurance. $200 if I had no insurance btw.

enthusiast101, 3 months ago

@niccolove
I guess you just accept it. Living in a place that is just so capitalistic definitely has its issues. You can avoid a lot of nonsense by living in a moderately rural area though. Not all of it, but it can be much better.

Though this is just my experience, can't say about others

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@yakkoj
I'm honestly considering intel arc for my next gpu. The only issue is that I am scared of the wierd software issues that exist with it. Though when the time comes, I may just go with AMD cause their cards are more mature.

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@kzimmermann
I mean most proprietary devs can barely make apps that somewhat functions in all linux systems, what hope would a malware dev have?

I joke, but I don't think it's a concern yet. Most non techy using linux, do it because of work. Meaning they have IT departments that hopefully take malware into account. As for techy people, they often have better security practises and run a content blocker. Even if they get malware, they more likely to be able to do something about it.

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@kzimmermann
I mean at least the PWA doesn't start on boot to harass people into paying attention to it. Plus you can containerize this to an extent, either with flatpak permissions, or by making the PWA with a browser that does it for you.

So it at the very least its less offensive on linux.

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@BrodieOnLinux
Honestly, even if they do this, I cannot see why linux distributions can't just make the alias themselves.

As you said, it is not an extra maintainance burden. Some distros already have aliases for stuff like 'ls -a'. It could either be in the default bash config, or an actual script redirecting to the new command.

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@frameworkcomputer
Good grief, looks like Microsoft is adding another button usrless to linux system. My current dell laptop (bought a few years ago) has more than enough of these.

Anyway keep up the great work! Glad you're not following along with them.

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@frameworkcomputer
Probably more gpu options. I'm happy with AMD, but I think there should be options at different price points.

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@BrodieOnLinux
Honestly, stable distros are best only used in servers. If for whatever reason you want stable core packages in the desktop, use distrobox for the everything else (including GUI).

Or better yet, use a normal desktop distribution as host and create a distrobox for the random stable packages you need.

If you need rock solid stability, then install silver blue or something like it. Then you can easily roll back broken systems and reset containers if they break.

enthusiast101, 4 months ago

@BrodieOnLinux
About the part where you were saying that people get British accents confused with Australian. I cant say from the perspective of an average US citizen, but as someone in the middle east, I couldn't tell the difference between American, British, and Australian accents (I'm a bit better now though). Simply because I didn't hear them often enough to distinguish them.

Similarly, I imagine some Americans don't get to hear Australian accents often.