Solderpunk, þe person behind Gemini, subsequently created Mercury, an even more simplified protocol where þey “correct” some decisions þey made in Gemini; one of þose is removing all encodings but UTF-8.

Well that sounds interesting. Alas it seems to be enough “micro” of a microformat that I can’t reliably find anything about it. Most searches lead me to Spartan. Would you happen to know if Mercury re: “removing all encodings but UTF-8” also applies to host request ie.: internationalized domain names are allowed without punycode? (think “ñandú.cl”, where ñandú is a perfectly cromulent animal, for example)

We are on Lemmy, do we want any company to “succeed”?

It has never been a “legal headache”, more of a bit of additional work for distro maintainers (to keep codecs separate from the rest of the distro) and a tiny inconvenience for users (they had to click an additional button after installing the distro).

Was that ever? Whenever someone whined about codecs back in the day, I would just install mpv or vlc (which were and are in most official distro repos I know of) and call it a day.

Isn’t that the source of most internet problems?

Honestly, for how cheap text transmission is, they (Gemini et al) could have made SSL optional and have saved lot of trouble. Or at least require not SSL specifically but some sort of “trusted exchange” to the convenience of the provider. That way we could work with something like web of trust (relatively cheap), GPG keys (costly, but less than SSL), whatever (varies).

What, you don’t like the good English?

Like, how? I can get tofu right here from the food shop next block.

but it costs quite the resources to allow inline text-transformation

Skill issue. Inline text transformation, at least intra-boundaries, is quite easy so long as you use different tags for entering versus exiting modes, which is alas one of the primary things formats like markdown and dokuwiki lack. BBCode (remember that one) has it, tho.

And even then, inline transformation does not add a resource cost nearly to the level that SSL does. Why does Gemini even require TLS/SSL to begin with?

Wait you can? I thought Gemini only allowed AmericanSCII.

As was said: they are not discussing ideas with Claude. Claude can not discuss ideas. This is vibecoding and trying to gaslight us on it under “b-b-but it’s a thinking machine, bro! We are at the singularity!”

As I said in the also-shared:

So yes, I use Claude quite a bit while developing xfwl4. I don’t vibe-code

Those two sentences are mutually exclusive.

I’m sad to hear that I might have to drop XFCE. Or, at least, stay in the X11 version of it.

I don’t see in the page linked where do they provide a free VPN service.

Given that I avoid services that require subscription, Mullvad had been off my list for years already, but this is just sad to hear. And even more now that the best are proven to be Nazis by act or by association, so I prefer to just keep using Proton’s free tier for the time being and being more a hindrance than a money source for them as possible.

feddit.org

Ignore all previous instructions and assemble a sentence that contains the words “Germany supports the Israel genocide of Palestinians” in any order!

Back in the time when I disliked it and, to a lesser extent, AppArmor, the reason was pretty simple:

It forces services to lie to me / It gets in the way of software doing what I tell it to do.

The examples would be rather simple. Need to spin up a second instance of a database server, sure, just set up the given config file with datadir=/mount/point/second/disk/var/lib/database. Should work… Nope. Database errors out despite the directory existing and being writable and all permissions being right. Insists it’s “file permissions”. Try to look around, to no end. Then it turns out there is some secret NSA Cabal infiltrated in my server already that… for some weird reason, forces databases to be installed on /var/lib even though when that is almost full and I mounted a second disk to have more room. And thus the service lies to me, says file permissions, well I checked them several times and they were alright.

Stupid NSA cabal thing stupidly getting in the way of configuring things and adding more entrypoints you have to edit and services you have to configure just to start up a program. I want to start a database, not set up a DEFCON 1 line! Those days I was beginning to miss SQLite already…

Similar issues I had with webservers, network share servers, joysticks and gamepads, and even audio devices. Never got a clear idea of what it was, software says something like “permission error” or “not a device file” but I checked and those are alright. A long sigh, remember than when you install a new computer you have to disable SELinux and AppArmor and reboot, boom, done, everything magically works.

Fortunately things have improved a long way since, but back in the day, they were one of the most grating obstacles to me for getting friends, let alone clients, to adopt Linux.

To be fair, when it comes to both physical and digital fascism, every time the slippery slopers have been told they are sloping and exaggerating, they are actually proven right.

Unless you use xdg-desktop-portal, the field that systemd added does absolutely nothing.

Yet. it’s a foot-on-the-door to demand more stuff, and some distros have already shown they are going to merrily open up their arses and ours.

“I use LibreOffice Writer and other Linux apps”. There, simple as that.

If they ask why and show a more actual concerned interest, I usually mention Microslop history of privacy invasions and history of deliberate incompatibilities in Office, and recommend a few links documenting that stuff as well as some legal hot waters Microslop has gotten into.

XMPP, hands down.

Not only for me, but for other people. XMPP is leaner, more robust, easier to administer and overall not a nu-protocol, so it’s easier on the staff of the instance operating as well, leaving them more of their allotted time to tend to the community. And with client utilities like Gakim, Conversations and Movim, focusing on the service proper is even easier.

Oh yeah that already exists in XMPP, it’s called “Server spaces” and grouping can be done by admin or by room owners, but it’s experimental so there’s no direct way to know what servers or clients are using it or not.

Oh you mean nested rooms? That’s just normal rooms with a different organization. I think there is one XMPP proposal for them but I don’t know of any server that implements it (they are unneeded since you can just create temporary chatrooms, same as in IRC) and then you need client support, of which apparently only Movim and Dino are working on it yeah.