Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?

I don’t see this as a negative thing and it is absolutely true to some degree. Most of the incredibly talented low-level developers in the world (you know, those that are actually capable of making non-script kiddie hacks) have a tendency towards Linux.

So no, I’m not dropping the “Linux is a sign you might mean business” thing, especially if their idea of a desktop environment is just a collection of terminal windows neatly tiled together. We should be proud of the fact that some the most talented coders in de world choose freedom of software over anything else.

But luckily most of those people focus their efforts on different subjects. So yes, the problem is definitely on Windows with all the 14 year olds buying cheats off the darknet using their mom’s credit card (dramatized for effect).

those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.

To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.

But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.

Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.

I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.

I think it depends on the adoption of Linux on the desktop. When more people get a taste of what freedom of software brings, they are going to want that for their phones as well.

That or we might just be years away from the next big thing where everyone walks around with AR glasses and the cycle starts all over again with companies competing for a duopoly, and we’re just fucked.

Others in this thread have covered most of the points already, but it is mainly software support for certain key things I want to do using my phone, such as online banking.

I realise most of this is just anxiety about taking the plunge and seeing what it’s like, so if I have money to burn I might just buy a second phone just to see if it’s a viable option for me.

But yeah, I wish mobile Linux was popular enough for there to be support from key service providers. Though it might be a long shot since “desktop” Linux is still growing and we haven’t yet seen the support shift.

It was a big mistake by Google to base the Android Framework entirely on Java. Pivoting to Kotlin because you’ve discovered that working in Java produces nothing but garbage does nothing to fix the situation either.

Can’t wait for generic Linux phones to be a (more popular) thing so we won’t have to deal with this clown world nonsense anymore.

Especially Germans, and your cousins who live in the swamp next door.

We can’t help the fact our languages just arent’t that elegant, no need to apologize for it.

A trend I’ve noticed over the years is that there are just very little jobs available where you “design shit”. It feels like the market is saturated with designers and companies already have all the workers they are looking for.

Meanwhile most people I’ve seen graduate have no real talent for the job. And they never seem to get hired for positions that require talent in design for manufacturing.

You’d think there would be more jobs available, but there simply aren’t. All the jobs are either trade skills, pure CAD or some other part of the product lifecycle that doesn’t require any real design skill.

engineer UK /ˌen.dʒɪˈnɪər/ US /ˌen.dʒɪˈnɪr/

a person whose job is to design or build machines, engines, or electrical equipment, or things such as roads, railways, or bridges, using scientific principles:

• a civil engineer

• a mechanical/structural engineer

• a software engineer

Cambridge Dictionary

I’m all for letting people ramble, but Engineering is, by definition, the design of tecnical stuff.

Risk management is a part of “designing things”, but it is not what makes you an engineer. Converting technology into objects that solve problems is what makes you an engineer.

And there are lots of disciplines out there that started calling themselves engineers while they are objectively very deep into the grey area. If your work does not involve calculus, logic or physics of some kind, it is highly likely that you are not in fact a real engineer. (Looking at you, Sales and Marketing Engineers)

I do agree with you there. Though I don’t consider small changes that are weighed carefully to be in the same category as completely inventing (controversial) story events that go directly against established canon. Or even plain retconning some things to make your half-assed original story work.

Disney fucked this up when they acquired the Star Wars IP: They took a beloved world where lots of authors have spent years carefully and respectfully filling plot holes, expanding upon the source material and they had to wipe it all and do their own thing.

Tons of concepts that neatly integrated into the established canon at the time thrown into the trash, and for what? A clever take on space nazis? Bleeding crystals? A movie we’ve seen before? Grumpy, whiney grandpa Luke? A ripoff of Jacen Solo that was executed badly? “Somehow Palpatine Returned”? All of these concepts sound wild because they are, they make no sense.

The only sane piece of grey area canon we have left is the whole Old Republic era (both the KotOR games, comics, books and the MMO). If those get the same treatment I’m never touching anything Disney again.

They fucked it up when they decided to write their own trash instead of staying true to the source material.

This kind of arrogance is prevalant throughout the whole sector and seriously ruins any attempt at making a proper translation of beloved franchises to any form of filmed media.

The moment I hear “the writing team has taken some creative liberty” I am 100% done with your new project. The only thing you need to do in order to litterally print money is hire a scriptwriter and director that has read and is a fan of the source material. No need for writing teams, no need for adaptation to different audiences, just cater to the fans or fuck off.

With Cavill leaving the show the only redeeming quality is gone and I doubt many people will be interested in sticking around for the whole crash and burn that will follow.

Honestly that probably goes for any interpreted programming language that supports imports.

Many Javascript frameworks just put their configuration into -.config.js files in the project root. Which is a pretty elegant solution that does not require custom parsing. Just import the config and go nuts.

Compiled (and by extension bundled) software obviously requires a different approach, but at that point you should probably consider storing your config in some kind of database.

Maybe there just isn’t a right answer to the config conundrum if all the general solutions are janky in some way.

Yeah not a fan of YAML either. I simply don’t see the benefit of getting rid of delimiters and replacing them with indentation. Yes, it does save several bytes, which might be important if you measure space in kilobytes I guess. It does provide cleaner files which may or may not be more readable.

It does not provide any advantages in parsing complexity. It does not provide any protection against typos.

I guess the same can be said of python, which forces indentation and therefore readable code formatting. Which is a problem that does not exist since the invention of code formatters and linters.

I like python for what it does but delimiters are actually useful in terms of readability. They provide an extra hint that the text you’re about to look at conforms to a specific structure.

The python community would like to have a word with you.

Sounds like it’s not really SQL as a query language but rather the whole database paradigm that’s the problem here.

Look into noSQL databases and their respective drivers. They often use JSON-like syntax and are more likely to be seamlessly integrated with whatever programming language you’re using.

If a search engine won’t point you in the right direction I’d suggest having a look at MongoDB, which is well documented and fairly accessible to mess around with.

Regular companies have an obligation to deposit their annual accounts with the chamber of commerce, but social enterprises tend to go above and beyond because their focus is not on economic gain, but on socio-economic gain.

There is no legal obligation to do anything special when you call yourself a social enterprise, that I know of. But using the description for bragging rights does put your company under increased scrutiny from the community and from researchers.

All kinds of modeling methods have been invented to make social-economic impact part of the businessmodel. Some of those methods are even similar to Alex Osterwalder’s widely used Business Model Canvas.

Some social enterpreneurs also make use of specific constructions using certain legal forms to prevent shareholders from steering the company away from its original goal. For example: some will opt to make a “stichting” (foundation) the majority shareholder of the main company. The stichting having auditing and course correction as their main purpose.

If you would like to know more about social enterprises, the dutch chamber of commerce has published a great article (in english) on the subject.

Fairphone is a social enterprise, and most Dutch companies presenting themselves as such are actually held to certain standards.

I haven’t confirmed this myself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually publish all of their expenses so you can do the math yourself.

They have published a full breakdown for an earlier model: Over here

It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.

The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.

If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.

Seconded, depending on what your goals are with transcoding, you might want to reconsider your strategy.

Hardware encoding (with a GPU) is mostly useful for realtime transcoding applications like streaming video. There are definitely some caviats that come with the realtime performance, and you’ll find that NVENC encoded video is almost always inferior to the slower equivalent software encoded variants.

So let’s talk codecs: While h.265 might seem like the holy grail, it is way more computationally intensive than h.264 is. In some cases the difference in encoding time will even be as high as 3-5x. Not really worth it if all you’re gaining is a slightly lower filesize.

Your results will vary by the media you’re encoding, by your encoder quality settings, tuning and encoding speed. As a rule of thumb: slower encoding speeds equal more efficiently compressed video (a.k.a. relatively higher quality for lower file size).

Handbrake is my choice of software for encoding video. It includes pretty much everything you could ever want if you’re not looking for niche codecs and exotic video formats.

I find myself mostly using x264 because it is relatively fast and still provides awesome results. My encoding speed is always set to “slow” or “superslow” (not much difference for my setup). I usually set the quality by making use of the preview function in handbrake, which transcodes just a short section of the video which I use for pixel peeping and checking for any major artifacts that would ruin the content. The resulting file also provides an estimate for how large the final transcoded file will be. If you’re happy with the quality setting, you can opt to mess with the encoder tuning. There are different presets for film, animated content and such. I usually do use film tuning if transcoding live-action media.

All this generally leaves me with pretty compact file sizes for 1080p media. And transcoding usually happens at a rate of 60-75 fps depending on the resolution. Going up from “slow” to “medium” improves fps by about 25% and increases file size by about 10%. The ideal balance is up to you.

Advanced tips: try using VMAF (objective video quality analysis algorithm developed by Netflix) to score and compare your different encoding settings. VMAF is neatly integrated into FFMetrics, which is a GUI for FFMpeg and a couple of video analysis algorithms. I also use MPV (open source media player) with FFMpeg command line arguments for playing videos synchronized in a 2x1 or 2x2 matrix. This helps compare the results for quality.

You might want to consider setting up a VPN tunnel to your own network. Main benefit is that you can access your home network as if you were connected to it locally. Which makes switching between mobile data and WiFi a non-issue.

This requires some sort of VPN server and usually a single port-forwarding rule for the protocol which your VPN software of choice uses. For the simplest default configuration of OpenVPN this means setting UDP port 1194 to point to your OpenVPN server.

Generally, keeping things simple, there’s two types of VPN you can set up:

• split tunnel VPN, which gives you access to your home network but accesses the internet directly.
• full tunnel VPN, which sends all of your traffic through your home router.

It is a little more complicated than that, and there’s more nuance to it, such as wether to user your own DNS server or not, but all that is best left to some further reading.

I’ve setup an OpenVPN server myself, wich is open source and completely free to mess around with. (Save for maybe some costs for registring your own domain or DDNS serviced. Those are all optional though, and mainly provide convienience and continuity benefits. You can definitely just setup a VPN server and connect with your external IP adress)