There was (is, as a fork) a front-end for Lemmy called "Tesseract." Some folks liked it because it has improved filtering options, better mod/admin controls, et cetera. At least up until it was discovered that several instances had been hard-coded to be filtered while the front end erroneously reported it as an incompatibility issue. Then it was also discovered that it retrieved an additional blacklist from the developers server (as base64 encoded data, which decoded into a gzip file, which extracted to a json file of the actual blacklist - if you're curious about that). Aside from some filtering that most would be indifferent to, it seemed the dev was also hand-curating this blacklist to include individual users. People that must've "wronged" them or posted something they didn't like at some point.

None of this was disclosed in the project's README.md on GitHub. To my knowledge, as I didn't use the front-end, it wasn't disclosed anywhere outside of having to manually review the source code and discover it for yourself. There was supposedly, somewhere in the settings, an option to enable "Toxic Mode." That was the means of disabling some of the above (maybe the blacklist, not sure about hard-coded instances) but it doesn't sound like it was very descript about what was happening when toxic mode was disabled.

Sooooo, tldr:

• Improved front-end for Lemmy
• Dev wants Lemmy to be nice for normies
• Decides they need to hide toxicity from them
• Decides they're the supreme arbiter of toxicity
• Hides toxicity, as they defined it, from users
• Users discover dev is making decisions for them
• People don't like when others make their decisions
• Dev posts unapologetic crash out

And we're now at their last Huzzah: Adding spiteful and malicious code. They were just a coward before that. They might've saved some face in acknowledging that they should've been forthright in their filtering. Now they're a coward and a heaping pile of shit whose work can never be trusted again.

Fave is (Doom) Emacs, even though I haven't used it in a while. It was fun and mostly painless to customize it a tad with no prior Lisp experience. Things like Org Mode and Org Babel let me write a short story around my code blocks if I needed one to remember concepts, purposes, etc in a language I was tinkering with. They could execute in-document or I could tangle them to where they belonged. That just seemed brilliant to me. It being essentially an eLisp interpreter at its core, with the editor functionality and everything else built on top, it was neat being able to just pop open an interpreter window or tab and use what I learned for quick calculations or whatever. Previously I'd open a new terminal or tmux pane and use Python for that purpose. And currently mostly Bash and CLI utils over Python.

Pretty sure my first was EDIT.COM on MS-DOS but I would've been a single-digit age at the time and mostly clueless so I say notepad.exe instead. The window in which I used DOS was very short before the family computer started running Win 3.1. Then 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista... every version except 2000 and 8. We had 8 long enough to back up our data and revert to 7

Future, I'll probably keep trucking with nvim.

Honorable mention, gedit. My first GUI editor on Linux desktop before I leaned heavy into CLI applications.

Loathed, VSCode. I'm not a dev so it was just too much. A Vim plugin made it usable for editing, and I liked how easy plugins were to find/install, but I'm not a dev and full IDEs are wasted on me. Same reason I finally stopped trying to turn nvim into one and minimized my plugins for it.

Current is nvim. I like modal editing and its particular keybinds. I like regex search and find/replace. Multiline editing, motions, and macros defined on the fly. I bet I haven't read 2% of the built-in documentation and know it already does more than I'd ever need right out of the box. For the same reason I still often find neat things I didn't know about it and try to commit to memory for my future editing.

Longest is n/vim. That probably won't ever change for the same reasons above.

I don't have a clue but here I am spreading my whole ass for the world.

Since you're so special and you touch grass, here's an analogy: Imagine buying a mower whose packaging jerks itself off about how great of a mower it is. It improves on regular mowers in X, Y, Z way. It's a mower for Lawn Chads with Chad lawns. You fire it up and then immediately it cuts off and tells you "Incompatible lawn detected." But the reality is it's lying to you. That fucker could mow your whole lot and ask for a second helping... if it weren't for the fact the company just has something against Zoysia or Kentucky Blue or whatever.

Tesseract is a Lemmy front-end doing just as much. Advertised are it's enhanced admin/moderation features and blah blah blah. Meanwhile it has hard coded filters and retrieves a blacklist not disclosed in the GitHub readme. Not "hidden" per se, because you can dig through the code base, but not made known in an upfront and honest way.

If they just bothered to disclose their position, it wouldn't be an issue. I mean, some terminally online justice warrior can go on a tirade about how much of a Nazi they are, how their software isn't inclusive, blah blah blah. End of the day, if someone wants to write software that explicitly aligns with their positions - so be it. Don't like it? Don't use it. However, in that case, at least others will know outright where the developer stands and whether or not they want to use it, manually delete the offending code in their own deployment, or even maintain their own fork.

When a creator omits the fact that they've done such a thing, leaving the end user to figure it out for themselves, it's just fucking cowardly on their part.

This has been my solution. Subscribe to a playlist or an entire channel, set up the schedule, and you're done. If you're a supporter of the project I believe it has real-time monitoring for new uploads.

I will note that, somewhat recently, YouTube changed the URL format for playlists and this has broken subscribing/downloading playlists that use the new format. I haven't checked today but there's a patch that was still waiting to be merged. Unless there's a new release incorporating it, you'll have to apply it yourself or feed the URLs in manually for now.

Beets for importing, ascii only, lastgenre, fetchart, whatever other plugins I'm forgetting, /artist/yyyy_album_name/ directory structure, 01_title.ext for single disc, 01-01_title.ext for multi disc. I invoke beets manually just to keep an eye on how things get matched up and tagged during the process. I deal in full albums, LPs, compilations and such because it's often easier to maintain and match metadata than with individual tracks. I guess it's a data hoarder / archivist compulsion too, but it's rare I can't find at least one other track on an album appreciable so... why not?

A weekly rsync pushes the beets DB and library from my TrueNAS server to another server with a 8TB external dedicated to backing up my most important stuff (personal projects, password store, compose files, confs, etc). I've got an rsync alias set up on my laptop I invoke manually because I'm nearing the limit of what I want to allot to music. At least until I decide to get a larger drive.

That's local in triplicate, with zraid on the NAS and a fourth copy on my phone, which leaves me feeling pretty good about not losing any music outside of a house fire or tornado. I was also rsync'ing all my media (music, movies, shows) to another TrueNAS setup at a relative's but some things have changed with that so it's on hold. Not fond of missing my off-site backup but hopefully can resolve it soon.

Everything is local only right now. The library is mounted read-only in Jellyfin so can play music from pretty much any phone, TV, computer, my Steam Deck, etc throughout the house. If I ever decide to open things up, reverse proxy or whatever, I might look into Finamp but I buy a flagship phone every six to ten years for the storage space so I can just take my music with me. Might eventually switch that to a dedicated music device.

Games shared on the Archive frequently have a working CD key in their descriptions. If you've got a disc with no key, it's a perfect place to check first.

The Half Life GOTYE can probably be installed and played no problem. The CD key is probably already bound to a Steam account, otherwise that'd be another way to play it and easily have all the updates.

Starcraft/Brood War and Warcraft are all still playable as far as I'm aware. ActiBlizz hadn't killed off old school Battlenet last I'd checked. Private servers are also still a thing for classic blizzard games. Same goes for C&C. Private servers a'plenty. PVPGN was still the thing for Blizz games (up to a certain patch because they changed some server side stuff) and Westwood Online games. There's also a separate project specifically for Red Alert games whose name escapes me. Also the OpenRA project.

The last flight sim I played was Red Baron II/3D, back in the Sierra Online and MPlayer days (pre GameSpy Arcade), but I'm familiar with IL2. Been a few years since I checked in on it but it had a fairly active player base and modding community. VFWs (Virtual Fighter Wings) were a thing in that and in Microprose's Falcon 4.0 where some players took it very seriously and were quite skilled at formation flying and such. I still have my copy of Falcon 4.0, 3 ring binder manual, map and all. Wasn't good at it but I was always amazed at how technical it was.

Baldur's Gate 2 should still run. Same for the original and Icewind Dale, if they're hiding in the box somewhere. I installed those from CD a while back and they worked fine.

I should probably try in my Deck next. Dollars to donuts I bet they'd work - I've installed other games on it from CD just for shiggles. Truth be told, Linux is probably preferable for a lot of older games since a lot of work has gone into wine/proton explicitly for compatibility. A lot of really old Windows games, that are unplayable on Windows today, run amazing on Linux.

I don't think you'll get consensus on the "it's disrespectful" reasoning. It might not be inherently religious (although most religions I'm aware of expand upon it to specific procedures or prohibitions) but "respecting" the vessel which once contained a life seems very much tied up in sentimentality and woowoo more than sound reasoning or pragmatism. It's just engrained into social norms at this point but, purely speculation, burial and burning were probably done for the same reasons other animals do it - you don't attract other predators or suffer the scent of death inviting maggots, flies and other vectors for disease. It probably became more ritualistic and religious over time. If I'm dead someone can dangle my lads from their rearview like a pair of fuzzy dice for all I care - which will be not at all because I'm dead.

Desktop design decisions. A lot of folks hated Unity. I know I did - they turned something familiar into something Apple like and I couldn't stand it. I'm genuinely not a fan of the unified menus and such. It didn't help that users were basically forced out of Gnome 2 into it when Unity became the default.

Within Unity they Integrated Amazon results into the Desktop Search. That was likened to spyware since your queries were being shared with Amazon, much like MS integrating web results into their own search. Ubuntu fucked up harder because, absent any filtering, their search occasionally produced adult products in the results - ie sex toys and such. Imagine telling your kid Fluffy needs a new knotted rope chew toy. They start searching "dog knot toy" just to have the results filled with BadDragon knockoffs.

They've leaned heavier into enterprise over the years and that has alienated a lot of the Desktop audience which helped bring attention to OS in the first place. They went from "Linux for Human Beings," making desktop computing more accessible throughout the world, to becoming essentially the Microsoft of the Linux world.

Their snap backend is proprietary. You can't just host your own snap repository. Even if you host your own local snap cache, it ultimately must point to and retrieve from their repository to populate that cache.

I'm sure there's other stuff worth pointing out that I've forgotten.

Prefacing with my usual "I'm not a dev, just a tinkerer" disclaimer: new wave, goth rock, industrial and EBM are my gaming/coding gotos (my musical tastes go far beyond that but I definitely never "outgrew" my angsty, anti authoritarian tatses). I've been a big fan of Nine Inch Nails and Reznor's work, and his influences and collaborators. New Order, Gary Numen/Tubeway Army, Bauhaus, Thomas Dolby, Peter Schilling.

I lean more towards industrial while scripting, messing with my self hosted stuff, wrenching on my truck or mower or whatever. 16volt, Sister Machine Gun, Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, KMFDM, ...

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If you are asking whether or not I draw a distinction between "the screen is blank" and your now clarifying "the home screen is blank" ("blank" meaning "devoid of advertisment," because what home screen is ever literally blank?) then yes, I do. Words have meaning and "blank" doesn't mean "no ads on my home screen."

Maybe I'm the dumbass you're trying to make me out to be but I'm pretty confident my interpretation of what you said wouldn't be uncommon, or that there many people who don't realize a smart TV's connectivity is always active.

"It's blank therefore not connected" makes as much sense as saying "my phone's screen is off, therefore not connected." If you've got a smart TV, "Off" is more akin to "Standby." If it's connected to internet you should assume it's receiving updates, the latest ad rolls, etc at all times if you haven't completely firewalled it off.

Can't speak to them utilizing open APs or mesh networking like Sidewalk but I wouldn't trust that they couldn't if they wanted. Thought I'd read up that some of Amazon's devices even use LoRa which, while low bandwidth, can cover quite some distance.