Denys Nykula

Chimera uses udev and elogind, almost unavoidable on desktops. One is a major part of systemd, the other is a fork of another major part of systemd backporting updates from systemd upstream. Trying new distros is good, just let’s not mislead ourselves, apart from switching to the BSDs altogether, boycotting systemd is only possible at the moment when building an embedded system or a server.

Probably like this: a threat actor [for authoritarians pushing ID laws and locked-in hardware], just not in a way that any of us [computing freedom enthusiasts] would consider as being a real theat [for the people].

I remember the shared storage location functionality in the Password Store app but I no longer see it in any versions released since last year. That’s why I had to switch to Termux. Also a control freak, just a different kind 😅

Sorry but this is propaganda slop. When Kyiv cops ignored my disability documents and detained me last week with 7 other randomly kidnapped men in a room with bloody walls, no toilet and not enough place for us all go sleep, the military “merchants” who began the supposed medical commision the next morning instead of doctors explicitly shouted at us that infantry is all that we’ll ever see, that war isn’t about any of these high-tech positions and we’ll be running around and shooting guns like soldiers are supposed to.

It seems the disagreement boils down to what position is far-left and what is moderate. It’s worth remembering that there was far-left opposition (against Russian nationalism in particular) to Bolsheviks inside the party, whom they purged in early years, labeling them bourgeois, and tried hard to suppress them from reappearing. The Bolsheviks also got popular by paying lip service to a much different agenda than they implemented, becoming in practice extremely conservative and repressing worker self-government attempts. So I wouldn’t call them far-left, a term that I’d reserve for anarchists and council communists.

The quote made me optimistic. It’s a shame that clients followed their own observation about straight-to-the-point websites loading fast and being easy to read, with a degrading remark about the simplicity of such websites. I realize that the point of a web developer job has always been something different than making good websites (as a whole, it’s closer to first making something nice and then trashing it with your own hands), but that’s a dreadful realization.

Are there mechanisms for fully automatic synchronization on every file change and every initialization in the Android and console apps for password-store out of the box these days? Using Syncthing with password-store at the moment to get a user experience as close to that as possible. Had to switch from the Android app to Termux and the CLI because the app no longer supports usage with Syncthing.

Yay to the arrow brush! Feels weird to draw arrows beginning with the end, but I’m very glad to see this feature as a GIMP built-in now. Should make annotating screenshots much more convenient.

It’d be cool if your app was installable from F-Droid, for which the sources have to be somewhere under a free license. I most likely won’t be able to contribute code but would indeed like to look through the sources, and maybe help with translation if the code supports internationalization.

Do some parts of go-notes have proprietary sources? I can’t find the source for the native Android client in the repo or instructions on how to download and build it from elsewhere.

Does fare-free also mean tracking-free, or is there still a requirement for a smart card or a phone, with fines for those not carrying one? In Kyiv, the fare tracking application collects history forever, without a retention policy and with a requirement for confirming every cash payment with a full name and phone number, which means municipal IT employees can see where any phone owner was going at any hour today, last month or five years ago. I really hope somewhere in the world systems like these are going away rather than proliferate, actively supported both by municipal government and by local transit rider organization insisting that cash should be banned and riders should start paying a bigger percentage of the fare while taxes go somewhere else.

BTW the demand for bigger screens and bigger resolutions is something I don’t easily understand. I notice some difference between 1366x768 and 1920x1080 on a desktop, but the difference from further increase is of so little use for me I’d classify it as a form of bloat. If anything, I now habitually switch to downloading 480p and 720p instead of higher definition by default because it saves me traffic and battery power, and fits much more on a single disk easy to back up.

Refusing plant-based food to inmates is a way for the state to scare people away from practicing civil disobedience, to say: laws matter, ethics doesn’t, and we’ll force you to do unethical things just to punish you for interfering with us doing unethical things in a way we codified as the law. Denying temporarily incapacitated people (students, inmates, patients) plant-based foods is also a way to put pressure on them to conform and not question any unethical decisions made at the top of the hierarchy; you don’t conform - we punish you by making it impossible to eat together with your peers multiple years in a row. It can’t even be explained post factum as a cost-cutting measure, because the state heavily subsidizes people breeding animals to kill and eat them; it’s either a conscious or an ignorant (which is inexcusable for public representatives, as it’s their job to learn and support the needs of everyone they represent) decision to bully certain groups of people whom it’s socially acceptable to bully.

The article itself seems written by AI? Maybe I’m missing something when reading, but when I packaged a Preact application and sent it to F-Droid, I needed to code a few hundred lines of Java and Gradle boilerplate: https://codeberg.org/nykula/sapfir/src/commit/fce6fcd34e/android - the article doesn’t seem to mention many necessary steps in building a web-based hello world for Android? The choice of web-based technology (React) and F-Droid as a distribution channel is also a very weird combination in the context of postmarketOS, which targets many legacy, slow devices and thus its FAQ recommends using native Linux alternatives to Android and web apps whenever possible.

Rather than a facsimile, I’d just call the LibreOffice ribbon a distant cousin because they’re both office applications. The ribbon does slightly ease the friction of getting people to try LibreOffice, but like with the Windows UI and KDE Plasma, the similarities are surface-level and there are tons of differences. It’d be cool if public education taught people the UI of the commons first, not of the Microsoft defaults.

Chinese investment in renewables so far means they grow renewables while also growing coal. Between 80 and 100 gigawatts of coal production were added in 2025. Unfortunately, coal and gas production is steadily increasing worldwide. Contrast G7 trying to improve own living standard by reducing fossil usage locally, with G20 trying to fast-forward economic growth by any means available. Wind and solar grow fast, but they add to total production, rather than phase out fossils, almost everywhere outside EU. Source is the same, just a different page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source

Global North can’t pretend to be green itself while still externalizing harmful production and growing trade with countries ruled by people who don’t care about resource depletion and the planet remaining livable. I think there’s no alternative to focusing on producing locally (adhering to own democratic regulations, labor union negotiations etc) while implementing degrowth policies, both helping other countries do likewise and putting pressure on them to do so through trade measures.

So it’s like Google Drive/Docs, but feels like normal files, without a heavy web app tab overhead for every document, thus working faster on cheap office computers?

I understood quickly increasing hardware requirements when 95 replaced 3.1, 98 replaced 95, 2000/XP replaced 98, or 7 replaced XP, because those new versions brought noticeable usability and quality updates, as well as lots of new media- and game-related features. I’m still unsure in what visible ways 11 is an improvement over 7, and 12 seems to not offer anything interesting compared to 11? Basically a statement of, “we can no longer code efficient software and pull new requirements out of thin air”.

What are the ways in which MS Office is closely integrated with Windows compared to its Mac port? I often hear user complaints that alternatives to Office on Windows have less intuitive UI and not good enough internationalization support (spell and grammar checking, hyphenation), but they never told me about integration differences.

A true AGI also might simply not want to be a programmer or engineer, or might want to work on niche, single-developer projects interesting for them but not of use to wider humanity, like many actual developers do once their $dayjob is over. I can imagine they’ll also be annoyed by slop machine users creating extra boring work for them to shovel through and AI bros getting creepy with them or trying to subordinate them to own wishes.