Unfortunately, you still need a level of trust with Proton. Even aside from trusting that they will not bend to pressure to terminate your service, you’re also trusting them with your network of contacts, because metadata (including the sender, recipient, and subject line) are not end-to-end encrypted in Proton.

Just wear disposable faces.

You humans wear the same face your entire life and then get upset when people recognize it?! Get over yourself! Aside from the obvious privacy issue, let’s be real: it’s also gross.

That can’t be good. But I guess it was inevitable. It never seemed like Arc had a sustainable business model.

It was obvious from the get-go that their ChatGPT integration was a money pit that would eventually need to be monetized, and…I just don’t see end users paying money for it. They’ve been giving it away for free hoping to get people hooked, I guess, but I know what the ChatGPT API costs and it’s never going to be viable. If they built a local-only backend then maybe. I mean, at least then they wouldn’t have costs that scale with usage.

For Atlassian, though? Maybe. Their enterprise customers are already paying out the nose. Usage-based pricing is a much easier sell. And they’re entrenched deeply enough to enshittify successfully.

Better yet, use borg to back up. Managing your own tars is a burden. Borg does duduplication, encryption, compression, and incrementals. It’s as easy to use as rsync but it’s a proper backup tool, rather than a syncing tool.

Not the only option, but it’s open source, and a lot of hosts support it directly. Also works great for local backups to external media. Check out Vorta if you want a GUI.

Why? It’s Japanese and your browser should display it as マリウス. But I don’t know what that means.

Yeah, that’s true for a subset of code. But for others, the hardest parts happen in the brain, not in the files. Writing readable code is very very important, especially when you are working with larger teams. Lots of people cut corners here and elsewhere in coding, though. Including, like, every startup I’ve ever seen.

There’s a lot of gruntwork in coding, and LLMs are very good at the gruntwork. But coding is also an art and a science and they’re not good at that at high levels (same with visual art and “real” science; think of the code equivalent of seven deformed fingers).

I don’t mean to hand-wave the problems away. I know that people are going to push the limits far beyond reason, and I know it’s going to lead to monumental fuckups. I know that because it’s been true for my entire career.

If I’m verifying anyway, why am I using the LLM?

Validating output should be much easier than generating it yourself. P≠NP.

This is especially true in contexts where the LLM provides citations. If the AI is good, then all you need to do is check the citations. (Most AI tools are shit, though; avoid any that can’t provide good, accurate citations when applicable.)

Consider that all scientific papers go through peer review, and any decent-sized org will have regular code reviews as well.

From the perspective of a senior software engineer, validating code that could very well be ruinously bad is nothing new. Validation and testing is required whether it was written by an LLM or some dude who spent two weeks at a coding “boot camp”.

Android uses MTP as the transfer protocol. The Debian docs suggest Gigolo to mount devices with MTP. See: https://wiki.debian.org/mtp#XFCE

I’m on Bazzite now. It certainly made my life easier as far as GPU drivers go.

However, be aware that it comes with its own learning curve. It’s an “immutable” distro, and it has like half a dozen different ways to install software. You can’t use dnf like you would on regular Fedora. The idea is to get apps from Flatpak, or use Distrobox, or use Homebrew — all things that run on top of the base OS so you can use a monolithic “immutable” OS image. There are pros and cons to this approach.

Once I familiarized myself with Distrobox (BoxBuddy makes this a lot easier) and using Flatseal to grant Flatpak apps direct access to the folders they need to operate (like my music library on an external drive, in the case of my music player), it’s been pretty smooth sailing. But I do miss just being able to run sudo apt install <whatever>.

Well that sucks. You might be able to try “The Debian Way” mentioned here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upgrades#The_Debian_way_of_upgrading

(Ubuntu is derived from Debian, which is why “the Debian way” works.)

The gist is to replace all instances of “noble” with “oracular” in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, then run some commands to do the distro upgrade.

Cool. I could well be wrong about the double-step requirement. It sure sounds that way, but the Upgrade Notes page is very old so maybe it’s easier now? Keep us posted!

On further investigation, it looks like you’d need to do an in-between upgrade to 24.10 before going to 25.04. I didn’t realize that before. It’s been a long time since I upgraded an Ubuntu system.

Here is the relevant documentation you’d need for upgrades:

From 24.04 to 24.10: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OracularUpgrades/#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_24.10

And then basically the same thing again to go from 24.10 to 25.04: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PluckyUpgrades#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_25.04

In case you’re not familiar with Ubuntu’s naming and update conventions, I’ll explain briefly, because it’s confusing for beginners: Each release has a name and number. The names loop through the alphabet in the format “Adjective Animal”, and the numbers are the release date in format “year.month”, with new releases every six months, in April and October. Then there are the “Long Term Support” (LTS) releases that are released every two years, matching the April “xx.04” main releases. You’re currently on “Noble Numbat” (24.04), which is followed by “Oracular Oriole” (24.10) and “Plucky Puffin” (25.04). Totally intuitive, right?! -_-

OR you could back up your stuff and install a clean 25.04. I’m not sure if the installer has an option to retain an existing home folder. Again, it’s been a long time since I used Ubuntu specifically. Perhaps someone with more recent experience can chime in.

You didn’t mention which version of Ubuntu Studio you’re running. Is it 24.04 LTS by any chance?

My initial thought is that you are probably running Wayland, and that your version of Ubuntu has KDE Plasma 5 instead of 6 and/or outdated Nvidia drivers that don’t work super well with Wayland.

A quick search shows that this is all default on Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS, which is the first version you’ll find at ubuntustudio.org. :(

Ubuntu 25.04 (non-LTS) has Plasma 6, which is a very important upgrade if you are using Wayland, especially with Nvidia GPUs.

Just a guess. If I’m right, you have a few choices:

1. Upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.04 (non-LTS). It has newer stuff like Plasma 6 that fixes a LOT of problems like this.

2. Switch to X11 instead of Wayland. This will likely introduce a new set of problems though. X11 has no future.

3. Switch to a different DE than KDE. I am not sure what is best in this situation.

4. Install the latest Nvidia drivers manually instead of getting them from the Ubuntu repo.

Option 1 is by far the simplest choice.

The Linux desktop is in a big transitional phase these past few years, as more distros default to Wayland even before a lot of their packages are updated to fully support it. It’s a terrible time to be stuck with outdated “LTS” distros. This is why I hopped away from Debian 12 (13 is out now so yay, but it was a year too late for me).

XMPP is still around! Despite Google’s best efforts to kill it.

Oh wow, they already have a 2.0 prerelease build. That was fast!

I’m in no rush. 1.x has been doing its job without demanding any of my attention since I set it up a year or so ago. Setup was a bit complex, but it was definitely worth learning.

There are interesting and important points being raised here, but the particular programming language used is irrelevant. The author is only undermining himself by focusing so much energy on the tired old holy war between C and Rust proponents.

The “free market” solution is for malpractice suits to be so ruinously expensive that insurance companies will apply sufficient pressure to medical practices to actually do their fucking jobs.

Same in the legal field, plus we should see a wave of disbarments already.

I’m not holding my breath. AI is shaping up to be history’s greatest accountability sink and I’ve yet to see any meaningful pushback.

Seems like most mods work fine on Linux, but I’m sure it depends on the game. For games with built-in mod managers like Baldur’s Gate 3, it all just works. For games with manual mods that involve replacing or editing game files, they should generally work since you’re running the same game files to begin with.

I haven’t had any big compatibility problems recently, though again, I’m sure it depends on that game. Proton (built into Steam) works very very well nowadays.

Just a few years ago I found the experience frustrating. It seemed like everything had something wrong with it, even if it wasn’t big. Lots of games had glitchy input, whether using a controller or keyboard/mouse. But somewhere down the line it totally flipped, and everything I play runs great now. I still have a bootable Windows 10 system, but I haven’t actually booted it in…two years, maybe?

This must depend on country and carrier. My carrier has never removed 4G or 5G bands. They’ve added new ones and they’ve phased out 2G and some 3G but that’s all. My phones from 10 years ago can still connect just fine, although obviously newer ones are faster.

All major browser engines are FOSS.

Chrome and Edge are proprietary wrappers around Chromium (BSD license). Firefox and derivatives are FOSS (Mozilla Public License). Safari is built around WebKit (LGPL/BSD).

The problem, however, is governance. These projects are all too big for anyone to realistically fork and maintain independently. So in practice, they are under control of Google, Mozilla, and Apple — all of which have questionable priorities (especially Google).