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I think the issue is that most vibe coders believe it is professional quality code, or is sufficient moving forward.

It produces code (in the hands of an amateur) that is good enough for a demo or at best an MVP, but it’s not at all a stable foundation.


Holy hell, AI is not at all perfect at refactoring. Absolutely terrified on your behalf if you believe this to be the case.

Really only Photoshop is the big gaping hole I feel as a linux user. Gimp is just atrocious.

There is a desktop webview of PhotoPea, but it's not the same.


I thought the same about Gimp, until I sat down and tried to learn it's workflows. Once you adjust, it's pretty great. imo, ymmv, obviously.


2.5 hours of battery is a serious gaping hole imo.


Year of the Linux desktop perhaps; Year of the Linux laptop perhaps not..


2.5h of battery life is absolutely not typical though. Linux on laptops is often fine.

Picking hardware with good support helps a lot. I would expect system76 to be a safe bet though (but I haven't tried their hardware).


I removed the batteries in our laptops because we use them like desktops all the time and it's one less fire hazard to worry about.


I guess it works out for you but I’d be inconvenienced for not being able to move around and paranoid that I may jerk the wire powering the machine. Still glad you were able to find a solution for your setup though.


Even if you are plugged all the time you may want batteries as it prevents crashes when power is cut off or the cable randomly disconnects (especially with USB-C that can easily happen as it's designed to disconnect easily). It's not that file system of today are immune to stability issues when power randomly cuts off not to mention losing your work/state. Batteries are like UPS for a desktop computer.


Depending on what you are doing, if you don't fancy Gimp, then maybe one of: Krita, Darktable, Inkscape?


Have you tried running Affinity products via Wine? I've heard good things. I personally ditched Adobe years ago for Affinity on Windows & Mac. Only people I know still using Adobe for photo or vector work at a company that doesn't blink at paying for it.


Have you tried Photoshop's online version that runs in a Web browser?

(it uses wasm)


I'm in my 60's and have never run Photoshop. Nor my wife, my kids, none of my relatives I'm aware of for that matter. Come to think of it, of all the people I know, no one runs PhotoShop that I'm aware of.


So? It is still a pretty popular and useful piece of software even if your circle doesn't use it.

One of the big barriers to having more people use Linux is having the software packages they use to actually do work available on the platform. Image editing is the most popular software type that isn't really available on Linux with an equivalent to the commercial package that everyone uses.


The point is that if of the hundreds or thousands of people I know don't use it then it seems mathematically provable that the largest majority of people don't use them either and so it's not a strong argument against Linux becoming the standard OS which is what is happening now regardless how much some people don't want it do happen.


gimp is actually pretty good, but things are in different places than photoshop and that's a huge change.


As I understand it, .NET, developer tools, and VS.

Basically you have tight OS integration vs developer friendly cross platform.


I think it also includes GitHub now.


I believe GitHub is under a different group (CoreAI), not DevDiv.


Thank you!


I'd have a lot more sympathy if the music industry didn't try all of the worst available options to handle piracy for years and years.

They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.


You have been able to buy DRM free digital music from all of the record labels since 2009 from Apple and other stores.


“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.


It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.


I don't even know the last time I pirated music. Gotta be at least 10 years.

Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.


I've used spotify for a decade. But the other day I opened one of my playlists and noticed that almost all the songs were greyed out as "unavailable" despite a quick search showing those songs still existed.

Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.

So I'm thinking it's time to buy music again.


And Netflix’s profits have been on the rise for over a decade. I retired my plex server over six years ago. It just wasn’t worth the hassle of finding decent quality torrents. Everything ends up on streaming anyway.


Is that still the case? The option to do that quietly disappeared from Amazon Music a couple of months ago, for example, and they were one of the last few holdouts where you still could. It might be only Apple now?


There's still plenty of options around, Qobuz and 7digital in particular offer drm-free flac downloads.


Quboz, bandcamp, etc.


Bandcamp is still my go to for owning music. Nice platform, just works.


I still buy DRM free music from Amazon.


You've been able to buy DRM free digital music since the 1980s.



I think OP was referring to CDs, which AFAIK don't have DRM.


My link is to the CD DRM!


This is rather misleading. Standard CDs as sold had (and have) no DRM.

The scheme you link to is intended to prevent further copies of CD-Rs but you can copy a CD you bought as often as you like.


Unless the CD comes with a root kit that interferes with that copying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...


> DRM free digital music from all of the record labels

Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?

Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free


Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.

https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/

While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format


ALAC is open source and royalty free since 2011. https://macosforge.github.io/alac/


Wow. How did I miss that!!!



I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.


A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.


Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?


If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.

Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.


I don’t know about Mountain Fever, but for anything I haven’t been able to find on Bandcamp, I’ve been able to find on Qobuz.


Piracy went down quite a bit since that is possible.


they made cd singles and single song purchases long before streaming


Ya know, I was ready to downvote this (AI scraping is not my favorite) but I’m not going to.

It really does have its niche - one off complex scrapes where it’s kind of questionable if it’s worth writing a scraper.


Haha I appreciate that! And that’s exactly right. Our goal is to make it so that you don’t have to ask the question “but is it worth the time and effort…” when you want to use or explore a new dataset.


Linux is not fucking mainstream

If anything is mainstream, it’s BSD, because OS X is BSD.


OS X is XNU. BSD code is in the kernel and BSD tooling is in the userland, but the kernel isn't BSD in license or architecture.


Linux is the most-user kernel on consumer devices (Android) and servers by a very wide margin.


In my head: “Oh yeah, I forgot how to use one of those”

This article: “lol, is that the depth of your commitment”


It’s interesting to see the casual slide of Google towards almost internet explorer 5.1 style behavior, where standards can just be ignored “because market share”.

Having flashbacks of “<!--[if IE 6]> <script src="fix-ie6.js"></script> <![endif]-->”


The standards body is deprecating XSLT with support from Mozilla and Safari (Mozilla first proposed the removal).

Not sure how you got from that to “Google is ignoring standards”.


There's a lot of history behind WhatWG that revolves around XML.

WhatWG is focused on maintaining specs that browsers intend to implement and maintain. When Chrome, Firefox, and Safari agree to remove XSLT that effectively decides for WhatWG's removal of the spec.

I wouldn't put too much weight behind who originally proposed the removal. It's a pretty small world when it comes to web specifications, the discussions likely started between vendors before one decided to propose it.


The issue is you can’t say to put little weight who originally proposed the removal if the other poster is putting all the weight on Google, who didn’t even initially propose it


I wouldn't put weight on the initial proposer either way. As best I've been able to keep up with the topic, google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal. I thought they were also the first to announce their decision, though maybe my timing is off there.


It doesn't seem like much of a charge to be led. The decision appears to have been pretty unanimous.


By browser vendors, you mean? Yes it seems like they were in agreement and many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation.

Users and web developers seemed much less on board though[1][2], enough that Google referenced that in their announcement.

[1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578 [2] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523


Yes, that's what I mean. In this comment tree, you've said:

> google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal.

and

> many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation

I'm saying that I don't see any evidence that this was "driven by google". All the evidence I see is that Google, Mozilla, and Apple were all pretty immediately in agreement that removing XSLT was the move they all wanted to make.

You're telling us that we shouldn't think too hard about the fact that a Mozilla staffer opened the request for removal, and that we should notice that Google "led the charge". It would be interesting if somebody could back that up with something besides vibes, because I don't even see how there was a charge to lead. Among the groups that agreed, that agreement appears to have been quick and unanimous.


In the github issues I have followed, including those linked above, I primarily saw Google engineers arguing for removing XSLT from the spec. I'm not saying they are the sole architects of the spec removal, and I'm not claiming to have seen all related discussions.

I am sharing my view, though, that Google engineers have been the majority share of browser engineer comments I've seen arguing for removing XSLT.


Probably if Mozilla didn't push for it initially XSLT would stay around for another decade or longer.

Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members.


Mozilla's board are basically Google yes-people.

I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google.

Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat.

If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go.


> If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust[…] Those people have since been let go.

The first sentence isn't wrong, but the last sentence is confused in the same way that people who assume that Wikimedia employees have been largely responsible for the content on Wikipedia are confused about how stuff actually makes it into Wikipedia. In reality, WMF's biggest contribution is providing infrastructure costs and paying engineers to develop the Mediawiki platform that Wikipedia uses.

Likewise, a bunch of the people who built up MDN weren't and never could be "let go", because they were never employed by Mozilla to work on MDN to begin with.

(There's another problem, too, which is that addition to selling short a lot of people who are responsible for making MDN as useful as it is but never got paid for it, it presupposes that those who were being paid to work on MDN shouldn't have been let go.)


So the idea is that some group has been perpetuating a decade or so's worth of ongoing conspiracy to ensure that Mozilla continues to exist but makes decisions that "keep Mozilla itself impotent"?

That seems to fail occam's razor pretty hard, given the competing hypotheses for each of their decisions include "Mozilla staff think they're doing a smart thing but they're wrong" and "Mozilla staff are doing a smart thing, it's just not what you would have done".


You're not wrong.

And where philosophical razors are concerned, the most apt characterization of the source of Mozilla's decay is the one that Hanlon gave us.


Can you say more about the teams let go who worked on MDN and Rust? Wondering if I can read anything on it to stay up to speed.



> The standards body is deprecating XSLT

The "CORPO CARTEL body" is deprecating XSLT. WhatWG is a not really a standards body like the W3C.


I think the person you’re replying to was referring to the partial support of XML instead of the xslt part.


Then standards body is Google and a bunch of companies consuming Google engine code.


I guess you mean except Mozilla and Safari...which are the two other competing browser engines? It's not like a it's a room full of Chromium based browsers.


Do Mozilla and Safari _not_ take money from Google?


Safari yes

Mozilla…are they actually competing? Like really and truly.


Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete.

Safari is what I'm concerned about. Without Apple's monopoly control, Safari is guaranteed to be a dead engine. WebKit isn't well-enough supported on Linux and Windows to compete against Blink and Gecko, which suggests that Safari is the most expendable engine of the three.


If your main competitor is giving you 90% of your revenue they aren't a competitor.


I really can’t imagine Safari is going anywhere. Meanwhile the Mozilla Foundation has been very poorly steering the ship for several years and has rightfully earned the reputation it has garnered as a result. There’s a reason there are so many superior forks. They waste their time on the strangest pet projects.

Honestly the one thing I don’t begrudge them is taking Google’s money to make them the default search engine. That’s a very easy deal with the devil to make especially because it’s so trivial to change your default search engine which I imagine a large percentage of Firefox users do with glee. But what they have focused on over the last couple of years has been very strange to watch.

I know Proton gets mixed feelings around here, but to me it’s always seemed like Proton and Mozilla should be more coordinated. Feel like they could do a lot of interesting things together


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45955979 this sibling comment says it best


>Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete.

This gave me a superb belly laugh.


Mozilla used to compete well but that ended... at least 10 years ago?


I don’t get the comparison. The XSLT deprecation has support beyond Google.


It's just ill-informed ideological thinking. People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil.

HN has historically been relatively free of such dogma, but it seems times are changing, even here


Completely agree. You see this all the time in online discourse. I call it the "two things can be true at the same time" problem, where a lot of people seem unable to believe that 2 things can simultaneously be true, in this case:

1. Google has engaged in a lot of anticompetitive behavior to maintain and extend their web monopoly.

2. Removing XSLT support from browsers is a good idea that is widely supported by all major browser vendors.


Safari is "cautiously supportive", waiting for someone else to remove support.

Google does lead the charge on it, immediately having a PR to remove it from Chromium and stating intent to remove even though the guy pushing it didn't even know about XSLT uses before he even opened either of them.

XSLT is a symptom of how browser vendors approach the web these days. And yes, Google are the worst of them.


Maybe free of the "evil Google" dogma but not free from dogma. The few who dared to express one tenth of the disapproval what we usually express about Apple nowadays were downvoted to transparent ink in a matter of minutes. Microsoft had its honeymoon period with HN after their pro open source campaign, WSL, VSCode etc. People who prudently remembered the Microsoft of the 90s and the 2000s did get their fair share of downvotes. Then Windows 11 happened. Surprise. Actually I thought that there has been a consensus about Google being evil for at least ten years but I might me wrong.


"relatively" is meant to be doing a lot of work in my previous comment. Allow me to clarify: Obviously some amount was always there, but it used to be so much less than it is now, and, more importantly, the difference between HN and other social media, such as Reddit, used to be bigger, in terms of amount of dogma.

HN still has less dogma than Reddit, but it's closer than it used to be in my estimation. Reddit is still getting more dogma each day, but HN is slowly catching up.

I don't know where to turn to for online discourse that is at least mostly free from dogma these days. This used to be it.


> It's just ill-informed ideological thinking.

> People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil.

Sure, but a person also needs to be conscious of the role that this perception plays in securing premature dismissal of anyone who ventures to criticize.

(In quoting your comment above, I've deliberately separated the first sentence from the second. Notice how easily the observation of the phenomenon described in the second sentence can be used to undergird the first claim, even though the first claim doesn't actually follow as a necessary consequence from the second.)


Interesting to watch technologists complain rather than engineer alternatives, ignore political activism.


So-called "standards" on the Google (c) Internet (c) network are but a formality.


It’s also worth noting that non AI investment has basically dried up, so anyone wanting that initial investment needs to use the buzzwords.


In the 90s I did a lot of AI research but we weren't allowed to call it AI because if you used that label your funding would instantly be cancelled. After this bubble pops we'll no doubt return to that situation. Sigh.


Conversely, if you're doing any mathematical research nowdays, you better find some AI angle to your work if you want to get funding.


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