MudMan

I am remarkably annoyed by this guy making predictions on measurable things that he then entirely vibe-checks.

It is entirely possible that the entire construct of copyright just isn’t fit to regulate this and the “right to train” or to avoid training needs to be formulated separately.

The maximalist, knee-jerk assumption that all AI training is copying is feeding into the interests of, ironically, a bunch of AI companies. That doesn’t mean that actual authors and artists don’t have an interest in regulating this space.

The big takeaway, in my book, is copyright is finally broken beyond all usability. Let’s scrap it and start over with the media landscape we actually have, not the eighteenth century version of it.

Less bad, maybe?

Either way it’s definitely a good example of why you should write good emails to your customers that explain things properly.

If this is what they’re saying I’m assuming they didn’t want to be too clear about what info they’re storing if you don’t opt out and ended up making an email that sounds like a threat.

Either way I won’t be using Gemini as an assistant any time soon. Or any other voice assistant, for that matter.

Right. They have an opt-out for Gemini storing your in-app activity, which I believe is a requirement to get the assistant to be able to do things in the app. This seems to say you may be able to interact with some messaging apps even if you opt out (presumably they would have a rebuilt way to interact with those that doesn’t store any of your data?).

So there’s an opt-out.

The article seems concerned that the email announcing this doesn’t include a specific path to the opt-out right in the email (which is a weird concern, considering the email provides two links to… presumably that information)?

I’m not sure what this means, either, but it seems the “whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off” line is saying that you can still have Gemini send texts for you even if you disable Google storing your apps usage server-side? I don’t use Gemini as an assistant, so I’m not sure, but looking at the Gemini settings menu on my Android phone that’s what it seems to map to.

And maybe I could get to some more in-depth solution that sorts it out, but that’s me spending time on a problem that a) I shouldn’t have to, and b) I have a functional workaround for already.

Communal troubleshooting is the nature of Linux desktop, but also a massive problem. You shouldn’t need communal troubleshooting in the first place. It’s not a stand-in for proper UX, hardware compatibility or reliable implementation. If the goal is for more people to migrate to Linux the community needs to get over the assumption that troubleshooting is a valid answer to these types of issues.

Which is not to say the community shouldn’t be helpful, but there’s this tendency to aggressively troubleshoot at people complaining about issues and limitations and then to snark at people actively asking for help troubleshooting for not reading documentation or not providing thorough enough logs and information. I find that obnoxious, admittedly because it’s been decades, so I may be on a hair trigger for it at this point.

The other option is to just use Windows, which is the issue with these types of hardware incompatibility. I also have an ASUS laptop that won’t use their slightly weird speakers correctly and, again, that whole thing makes it much less practical to boot into Linux instead.

I tried fiddling with the Windows settings, but that didn’t fix it immediately, and the sound is clearly wrong on Linux even with a power cycle. And googling for it I’m not alone in having issues and support for the thing is patchy. I mean, rebooting should have fixed it anyway. There’s no reason why either OS wouldn’t initialize those things on boot.

I am not particularly commited to the thing, so I wouldn’t buy an upgrade. The only reason I have it is at some point I ended up with a motherboard that wouldn’t do 5.1 out of the box, so I got something relatively affordable to slap in there. It sounds noticeably better than integrated audio, though, so now that I have it I’d like to use it, even if I’m not on the problematic old motherboard.

But again, I dislike the tendency to recommend functional hardware or technical support. It’s kinda frustrating. And frankly, it works on Windows, so if I was looking for a fix, that’s right there. The onus is on Linux for support in this type of setup where the issue is not on the Windows side that’s a reboot away.

That’s fair, and I don’t have a problem with that. I’m just annoyed by the tendency of the community to react to criticism with technical advice, which I find to be a frustrating crutch.

FWIW, the card is a Sound Blaster X AE5 (that name sure has aged poorly), and I’ve had similar issues with it in both a Manjaro and a Bazzite install.

Nah, it’s just not supported. Or rather, it’s poorly supported so it sounds worse than in Windows and it just doesn’t want to properly dual boot without a power cycle. Honestly, I haven’t checked if the soft reboot issue has been reported. Pretty sure it hasn’t. I could be nice and go find where to file a bug, but I haven’t gotten around to it and, frankly, there are enough other problems with this particular setup that nobody is fixing and are getting dismissed with “it’s the manufacturer’s fault” that I’m not particularly inclined to go out of my way.

We don’t talk enough about how spotty new motherboard support is for Linux, either. At least sound is a recurring talking point. But yeah, newer motherboards often don’t pick up networking and audio hardware out of the box and need a lot of troubleshooting. Everybody is so proud of how well Linux revitalizes old laptops but nobody likes to talk about how that’s because they’re old, and newer stuff may not work well or at all. Early adopting hardware platforms on Linux can be a “going on an adventure” Hobbit meme experience.

And you’re right that it’s not so much about audio getting reingeneered again as it getting done right. I just don’t know that the current patchwork barely holding together can be salvaged by bolting more pieces on top. Every time Linux needs to replace something this way it’s a years-long argument between nerds and a whole damn mess (see Wayland still being litigated, somehow). Audio never gets enough attention anywhere and I have very low trust that a new attempt wouldn’t end up in the same mess they have now, at least for a long while. It extra sucks because Windows audio used to be kinda bad, but now it’s… kinda not? So being a dual-booter it’s just an extra reason to make that choice of which boot option to pick from the menu.

We’re not doing this. People in the Linux community are so tweaked by years of bad support that they assume every complaint is a call for help.

It is not.

I know what’s broken, I know why, I know it’s not easily fixable, I have a workaround. This is not a tech support thread.

I don’t need information from users more savvy than me, I need the bad sound firmware they’re loading in lieu of specific support for my audio card to be fixed, or even better, replaced by actual specifically supported firmware so my card works. In the meantime, crappy on-board audio and wasting money on hardware I’m not using it is.

You would friggin’ think.

And yet.

Turns out a DAC is a fairly complicated and self-sufficient bundle of software and hardcore electrical circuitry, so apparently you can mess it up so badly it will remain broken across soft reboots. Who knew!

So in my dual boot setup Linux messes up the dedicated audio card so bad it not only sounds like ass on Linux but it somehow garbles Windows audio until I power cycle the entire thing. It is entirely possible it does permanent damage to the hardware. Some of the electrical clicks you hear from it are genuinely concerning.

Had to plug in Linux audio via the motherboard audio and use different sources for each OS to work around it.

Does change how the meme reads to me.

Also, maaaan does Linux need to completely redo its audio systems from the ground up. It’s so bad that saying that isn’t even that controversial, which is insane in these circles.

This may be a regional concern. Google has very outdated information where I am, too. You definitely don’t want to default to Google Maps to know if something is open here unless you want to show up to a closed business, and for learning where a place is so you can go look it up on their site they are all mostly interchangeable.

I mean… Organic sorta works, although apparently there’s a new fork and some drama around it? If you’re less hardcore DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead.

I’m not sure I understand the question.

Heh, what can I say, nerding out about UI design is definitely part of my general dysfunction.

But yeah, if you’re already in a 19:10 display you generally won’t want the sidebar as much because you already have a naturally taller display, so your workspace is shaped the same as mine when you use horizontal and I use vertical. It’s probably more a problem of proportions that sizes.

Which, hey, is why being able to have a vertical and horizontal tabs option is good. We’re in a world where browsers need to fit not just horizontal and vertical displays on PCs and phones, but a whole bunch of screen aspect ratios.

You made me count, because I could have sworn it was thinner than the top bar, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. On a 4K display the single-icon vertical tabs on Firefox are 75 pixels wide. The horizontal tabs bar is a sliver narrower, at 65 pixels tall. Of course that stacks on top of the address bar, which itself is 60 pixels tall, so you end up with 125 pixels of top bar.

I don’t know if I could notice the 10 px difference between the two, given that they’re in different orientations and 10 pixels is 0.5% of the horizontal pixel count and 0.3% of the vertical, but human perception is weird. Like I said, I keep the bar much wider to read the titles and just… hide it when I’m not tabbing, so it’s not an issue at all for me. Although I’ll say that even with the wide sidebar deployed you get a pretty comfy square-ish space to work with that turns a 16:9 display to 16:10 in a satisfying way. And on ultrawide 21:9 it’s a no-brainer, just like having a side-aligned taskbar (hear that, Windows 11?).

I should add that none of that changes that Firefox is… quite ugly in general. Zen is definitely sleeker at a glance, regardless of your setup.

Hah. Well, that and a good fullscreen browser for OLED displays were my main motivations. Both of those are addressed by FF now.

Also, the vertical bar can be set to whatever width you want on both, I think. On FF (which is what I’m typing this in, so I can check) you can shrink it down so it only displays a single row of icons.

The idea is to hide it altogether when you’re not using it, in any case, but you can definitely make it as skinny or skinnier than tthe top bar.

It’s been a while and I forget the details of exactly what flow or set of steps led to me impotently clicking on things that were unresponsive because a Glance popup was on. I remember being annoyed by it relatively frequently. The memory I have of it was that Glance was cool to have going into it, but almost always frustrating to have to close again.

To be clear, I have no horse in this race. I encourage people to try Zen and Firefox and pick either of them over any of the Chromium hordes. I’m just explaining why I went into Zen, used it primarily for a while, side-by-side with Firefox when vertical tabs came in and then phased it out because FF was a better fit for me. There is no us vs them here at all.

It works, though. And the UX is basically Win10 with a modern big data business coat of paint.

Even if I buy that the brain drain in a company with a staff the size of a mid-tier city can’t sort out the tech side, which is debatable, that is still a functional OS.

One can make excuses for Vista, but it had absurd compatibility and performance issues in the hardware it was targetting. 95 and Me were barely stable enough to run software. Windows 8 was a (bad) tablet OS crammed into a desktop environment.

I’m not saying Windows 11 is good, I’m saying the bottom of this particular barrel is in the Mariana trench.