This advice feels like “Have you moved to the surface of the sun? Make sure to drink lots of water.” It’s not wrong, but also not particularly helpful. The only solution is to stop buying these things. Ideally take them back and get a refund if it isn’t too late.

It does say “I agree to pay the above total amount” so it is pretty clear.

The fact is that it depends and it is a bit confusing for people not familiar. But it isn’t hard to get used to.

+8Q, Paris isn’t specific enough. There are multiple +8Q inside Paris. It can also be a bit risky to make short codes like this especially with larger cities as different maps may put the city in different spots.

What does work is +8Q Eiffel Tower which is useful for something like “Meet me here by the Eiffel Tower” or “I’m right here” when you are texting someone you are meeting and you know you are close but can’t see each other.

So you end up with a few common options:

• +8Q Eiffel Tower We are pretty close together but need to get the exact spot.
• V75V+8Q Paris, France For exact spots around a known area.
• 8FW4V75V+8Q For fully qualified with no reference needed.

And a few less useful options:

• 8FW4V7+ This large part of a city.
• 8FW4+ This part of the country.
• 8F+ This area of the world.

If I was designing the system I don’t think I would have done this “trailing zeros assumed” approach. Because IMHO for day-to-day use V75V+ Would be more useful as a shortcut for ????V75V+ rather than the actual V75V????+ showing a rough location on a human scale (in this case the Eiffel Tower park is pretty clearly targeted) rather than an area larger than a city. But that is really the only complaint I have.

While Plus Codes are less memorable they are very easy to share verbally. Especially since you only need city + a few characters to be unambiguous. They are very useful any time you need to share a specific location (GPS-style)

There are a few main benefits.

1. For hardware-backed keys they can’t be stolen aside from physically stealing the hardware. So unless your machine has malware there is no way for an attacker to authenticate using them.
2. Even for software keys the site you authenticate to doesn’t learn enough to impersonate you. For example if for some reason your bank leaked some logs with PW + MFA someone could use that to log in as you (although admittedly short timeouts on MFA validity makes that window very small).
3. The browser ensures that you only authenticate to the correct domain. So it prevents phishing. (Although a password manager that only fills into the correct domain also accomplishes this.)

So I think if you are using unique passwords with an automated password manager the effective benefit is quite small. However for the “average computer user” who likely has less than 5 passwords that they use for everything it forces a pretty high base level of security.

No, the DRM wouldn’t work at higher levels so you would have the same requirements with regard to 4k.

Let’s take a little recess and circle back.

Please be civil and polite. This type of aggressive comment insulting people because of the tools that they use isn’t welcome here.

No, but you can still choose to choose software that doesn’t steal and sell your data. You can also support laws that make doing this illegal.

The idea that putting this on your phone is bonkers is bonkers to me. Why would you want to carry around a journal or paper when you have everything on your phone? It can also be more easily backed up and synced.

It shouldn’t be normal that this data is stolen and sold. That is 100% the problem, not the fact that people track things on computers.

Please be polite. If you don’t like a post you can downvote it. If you would like to comment please be more civil.

Nah, 90% chance that they do something stupider.

It’s also super locked down. You are only allowed to use it if Google or Apple says that your device is authorized. So no root, no custom ROMs. Unless your phone is owned by a corporation and that corporation is blessed by Apple or Google you are out of luck. (There are currently ways around this but the gaps are slowly being closed as older devices are phased out.)

I’m also not familiar. But my understanding is that the package maintainers should prevent this situation. Because otherwise even if there are package version dependencies (I don’t actually know if pacman does this) it would just block the update which results in a partial update which isn’t supported. For example if your theoretical unmaintained Firefox blocks the update of libssl but Python requires new functionality you would be stuck in dependency hell. Leaving this problem to the users just makes this problem worse. So the package maintainers need to sort something out.

It is a huge pain when it happens but tends to be pretty rare in practice. Typically they can just wait for software to update or ship a small patch to fix it. But in the worst case you need to maintain two versions of the common dependency. In lots of distros very common dependencies tend to get different packages for different major version for this reason. For example libfoo1 and libfoo2. Then there can be a period where both are supported while packages slowly move from one to the other.

IF no dependency tries to update too. Off course in that case I would stop. Without pacman -Sy, I never do that anyway, only -Syu.

That’s all you need to know. As long as you always use pacman -Syu you will be fine. pacman -Sy is the real problem. The wiki page is pretty clear about the sequences of commands that are problematic https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported.

Right? What i don’t understand is, when I uninstall with pacman -Rs firefox, delete the cached firefox package (only that file), then the system is in the same state as before I installed it. Then -S firefox should be okay, right? And it even looks up the new version.

This isn’t correct. It won’t look up the new version. Assuming that the system was in a consistent state it will download the exact same package that you deleted. The system only ever “updates” when you run pacman -Sy. Until you use -y all packages are effectively pinned at a specific version. If the version that gets installed is different than the one you removed it probably means that you were breaking the partial update rule previously.

But that is my point. Just running pacman -S firefox is fine as long as you didn’t run pacman -Sy at some point earlier. It won’t update anything, even dependencies. It will just install the version that matches your current package list and system including the right version of any dependencies if they aren’t already installed.

But that means if you already have Firefox installed it will do nothing.

I think you are a little confused at the problem here. The issue is that partial updates are not supported. The reason for this is very simple, Arch ensures that any given package list works on its own, but not that packages from different versions of the package list work together. So if Firefox depends on libssl the new Firefox package may depend on a new libssl function. If you install that version of Firefox without updating libssl it will cause problems.

There is no way around this limitation. If you install that new Firefox without he new libssl you will have problems. No matter how you try to rules lawyer it. Now 99% of the time this works. Typically packages don’t depend on new library functions right away. But sometimes they do, and that is why as a rule this is unsupported. You are welcome to try it, but if it breaks don’t complain to the devs, they never promised it would work. But this isn’t some policy where you can find a loophole. It is a technical limitation. If you manage to find a loophole people aren’t going to say “oh, that should work, let’s fix it” it will break and you will be on your own to fix it.

Focusing on your commands. The thing is that pacman -S firefox is always fine on its own. If Firefox is already installed it will do nothing, if it isn’t it will install the version from the current package list. Both of those operations are supported. Also pacman -Rs firefox && pacman -S firefox is really no different than just pacman -S firefox (other than potentially causing problems if the package can’t be allowed to be removed due to dependencies). So your command isn’t accomplishing anything even if it did somehow magically work around the rules.

What is really the problem is pacman -Sy. This command updates the package list without actually updating any packages. This will enter you system into a precarious state where any new package installed or updated (example our pacman -S firefox command form earlier) will be a version that is mismatched with the rest of your system. This is unsupported and will occasionally cause problems. Generally speaking you shouldn’t run pacman -Sy, any time you are using -Sy you should also be passing -u. This ensures that the package list and your installed packages are updated together.

Of course nixpkgs has it. It was added a few years ago, I can’t vouch for if it is up to date or still working.

It’s been fine. But I’m a decently well off young white dude who has never had trouble with borders anywhere. But I will still avoid it as much as I can.

Actually I would pick GIMP.

1. Says what it is, an image editor.
2. No popups and random interruptions.
3. Not only AI editing examples which makes me thing the tool is AI only.
4. An overview of the variety of major features it has rather than just AI editing.
5. Links to helpful documentation rather than endless marketing pages that say nothing.

Really think only thing I would like to see is some screenshots and examples of using the tool, rather than just info on what it does. But the Photoshop page barely has this, just a few examples of the AI tools.