Fwiw I was avoidant of arch for a long time and took the deep dive a few years back. I’ve really not had to do any more debugging work than I have to with Debian (which I’m also a fan of and use).

EndeavourOS helps a lot with smoothing over the possible gotchas and my machines with it tend to run steam games (proton or native) out of the box the majority of the time.

IRN BRU

Also Zen exists, which is a Firefox fork that implements the concept of Arc

Arizona has several long-standing laws on the books requiring both public government properties and businesses to provide drinking water without cost or other barrier to access. Businesses can’t even charge for the cup.

Common courtesy unfortunately doesn’t go far enough, especially when it matters most, so law is required.

This isn’t exactly the type of work tons of astronomers are doing, nor does it cut into their jobs. Astronomers have already been using ML/algorithms/machine vision/similar stuff like this for this kind of work for years.

Besides, whenever a system identifies objects like this, they still need to be confirmed. This kind of thing just means telescope time is more efficient and it leaves more time for the kinds of projects that normally don’t get much telescope time.

Also, space is big. 150k possible objects is NOTHING.

https://tasks.org/

I use it with etesync, but there are plenty of caldav and other sync options available.

I’m not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I’ve used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a “I’m kinda thinking about this…” Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I’m writing. So I don’t really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it’s always kinda funky)

I’ve avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I’ll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an “open source” model doesn’t solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)

You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren’t done with LLM’s.

Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better “lasso” select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.

I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they’d need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it’d incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current “LLMs for everything” nonsense right now.

National debt doesn’t work like consumer debt bud. Learn some economics. Nor is the trump admin actually using it to pay down the debt.

Anyway, defunding the NOAA to pay off the national debt is like skipping a coffee, once, to pay down a mortgage on a house.

Good to know. I only lost about 30 out of 5000 or so going from Spotify to Tidal. Seems like the catalog gaps for both Tidal and Quobuz have become less of an issue over the last few years.

The big annoyances were some playlists with orchestral and jazz albums that I had to find again via slightly different album names, but those are a mess on any platform due to re-releases and compilations being chaotic enough in that space as it is.

I’ve heard (annecdotaly) that Quobuz is much better for orchestral and instrumental music in general. Spotify wasn’t great for it. Tidal is a bit worse, but far superior than Spotify for Jazz at least.

I’d rather have it in my desktop workspace than nested in a web browser, plus it can integrate better with native media API’s for media buttons, notifications, and other items being aware of the audio, which the tidal web app doesn’t do out of the box.

Yep! It’s a good app overall, even has some improvements over what is shipped on macOS.

https://github.com/Nokse22/high-tide is new and promising for a better experience overall. I’d always prefer native over electron.

Absolutely! It works fairy well. A little clunky since the Linux support is bolted on after, but it’s not noticeably worse than the macOS experience. The extra options it offers over what tidal ships to macOS are also nice.

These non-native electron apps are all kinda junky for native music listening anyway. (This is a problem with Spotify’s desktop app as well)

Tbh, podcasts through a “storefront” is a poor way to experience them. It’s meant to be decentralized via RSS feeds. Tho having some cross-device metadata about what you’ve listened to is definitely helpful.

I’ve been using Pocket Casts for a long time for that more refined experience and ease of use between listening devices. Their new owners are ethically complicated nowadays (Automattic), and the cost for their pro features is a bit high unless you are a podcast fiend (I was grandfathered in from their old mid-2010s pricing scheme that was pay once/own forever), but it’s a good app (for now).

This is great to see. I ended up moving to Tidal from Spotify, and even though there are some nice to have features missing from Tidal (an equivilant to spotify’s sync between devices/speakers as well as a better Android Auto experience), it’s a far superior experience.

Quobuz is also on my radar, but they’ve traditionally lacked in the music catalog space. I need to give them a try again now that it’s been a few years.

That said, Tidal barely has Linux clients and I don’t think I’ve seen much movement for Quobuz on Linux, unless I’ve just missed it.

May the Great Green Arkleseizure bless the author

Thats absolutely possible via the underlying WebPayments API. The payment “wallet” is linked in the HTML (at least for web pages, RSS, podcast RSS, etc) so someone could design an app that reads these links as QR codes.

The whole point of WebPayments is that and payment solution that you (the “spender”) wants to use which is compatible can be used to send money to any compatible wallet.

Whether the payment solution is via government backed, banking systems, or crypto, all it needs to be is compatible.

A valid concern. However, nothing is stopping people from doing the same right now with a big old forced Kofi/patreon/whatever banner, and I’m not sure that this changes that.

The advantage of this over current options is that like RSS, you can consume/deliver it however best suits you without needing to have different accounts of different platforms.

Ah. I think I jumped to assumptions about interledger based on the wallet terminology.

Looks like it’s based on the Web Monetization W3C proposal.

https://webmonetization.org/docs/

Looks neat, though I’m always a little hesitant when the thing involves crypto. while Interledger is the main driver of the peer-to-peer payments so far, there is nothing stopping a government or banking service from creating an OpenPayment compatible service, so long run there might be a lot of flexibility and less being tied to a specific cyrpto.

Its basically a meta tag that points at a tip jar that’s embedded in web pages… This is the same implementation as RSS and only matters to you if you are looking for it or have the ability to act on it.

That means its entirely opt-in and entirely detached from any one company