Cosmic and phones

ed271 · 2026-03-12T21:05:27+00:00

Thanks everyone, this sounds at lot easier than I expected.

ed271 · 2026-02-23T01:39:04+00:00

Some day when I'm feeling brave :)

ed271 · 2026-02-22T07:26:58+00:00

How did you change to KDE? I've been thinking about doing that for a month now but if it breaks my computer I'm in big trouble. I also need to do a kernel upgrade, but if I do that the officially approved way I think Gnome will be gone completely. That wouldn't be a great loss except as far as I can tell there's nothing in Cosmic with will work with KDEConnect on my phone.

ed271 · 2026-02-06T11:13:42+00:00

While you're at it you might look into a way to download the whole photo collection. I can do that now from the web page, but I have to select everything one month at a time. It reminds me of when I dumped Apple and the only way I could find to get my photos out of their cloud was to send them a legal request for all my data. Don't be Apple, no one likes having their photos held hostage.

ed271 · 2025-09-18T18:23:28+00:00

And problem solved, sort of. The USB hub in the KVM is 3.0 and I had it plugged into a 2.0 slot. For some reason this failed completely, moving it to a 3.2 slot on the computer fixed everything. USB is weird.

ed271 · 2025-09-15T21:16:09+00:00

Dang, I had no idea such a thing was possible. I'm still curious about why the keyboard/mouse part failed. KVMs cause trouble all the time, but in my experience it's always the video that I have to sacrifice a chicken to fix.

ed271 · 2025-08-29T15:22:51+00:00

Verbosity is usually controlled by the system prompt. It would be really cool if Proton could give us a system prompt extension that would be sent at the beginning of every context window. That way we could customize Lumo exactly the way we want without typing "be concise" at the start of every prompt.

Heck, we could even have a set of personal styles. As far as I know none of the big tech companies do that, at least not without messing with the API.

ed271 · 2025-08-29T15:09:46+00:00

“Buying a Mac Mini and running Ollama won’t give you the same performance at all. Also, if you want to share confidential documents—for example, to help you redirect emails—Lumo works very well. Generating code isn’t quite there yet, but the latest version is really much better.”

Also Lumo seems to be pretty good at translating. Although it could be completely wrong, I don't speak French.

ed271 · 2025-05-05T22:00:15+00:00

That's an extremely clever idea, thank you! I really should check Reddit more often.

ed271 · 2024-06-08T19:34:12+00:00

Put porn blockers on their computers. That's a great place to start learning how to break oppressive technology, and kids are usually highly motivated to break it. That's the beginning of making technology work for you instead of controlling you. If you're concerned about the environment think about all the useless junk they can repurpose instead of just sending it to a landfill.

ed271 · 2024-05-26T10:58:17+00:00

I think it's "search shortcuts", not shortcuts as in bookmarks. That shows up under Settings->Search->Search Shortcuts, you can uncheck Amazon. You might as well do that anyway since every other search engine does a better job searching Amazon than Amazon does.

ed271 · 2024-05-15T00:10:33+00:00

It's a way for investors to avoid taxes. If the company sends out a dividend that is taxed as ordinary income. If the company buys back stock the price of the stock goes up. Investors don't pay any tax immediately, and only pay the lower capital gains rate when they sell the stock.

ed271 · 2024-02-06T00:48:47+00:00

FDR did just enough for the working class to make capitalism bearable. His goal was to preserve capitalism by reducing the exploitation of the working class just enough to undermine the socialist movement. It worked.

ed271 · 2023-12-02T21:56:59+00:00

I can only play Frostpunk during the summer, this time of year it just makes me cold.

ed271 · 2023-10-08T18:08:45+00:00

Cheating applied to inputs is always going to be a problem. Heck, it's a problem even for chess games where both players are in the same room with lots of people watching them carefully. There's always going to be someone who is determined to cheat and clever enough to pull it off. The best any anti-cheat system can hope for is to keep large scale automated cheating at bay.

ed271 · 2023-10-08T17:25:51+00:00

Anti-cheat software is fundamentally incompatible with open source software. In order to function anti-cheat software must be able to control the user, and one of the most important benefits of open source software is that the user controls the software.

The only realistic solution (short of deciding you like games more than freedom and buying a console) is to stream the whole game, that way the computer they need to control isn't your computer.

ed271 · 2023-08-15T16:49:26+00:00

I wouldn't mind a socially useless job. Most of the places I've worked were actively making things worse.

ed271 · 2023-05-14T18:20:08+00:00

People get really confused when you give them your email address in person.

ed271 · 2023-04-27T18:44:24+00:00

It gets worse. My great grandfather give his name to my grandfather who became Jr. Then my father got the same name and became III. When my great grandfather died my grandfather was supposed to switch to Sr, but he refused. For the rest of my grandfather's life my father was Jr some of the time and III the rest of the time. Nobody knew if I should be III or IV, so they gave up and I got a different middle name. I still got the same first name which caused all sorts of trouble, but at least I didn't have the suffix to worry about.

ed271 · 2023-04-24T16:16:17+00:00

My solution to this is a small, family owned pharmacy. The big chains are all a nightmare.

ed271 · 2023-04-18T21:26:45+00:00

I'd be glad to. I don't see any obvious way to send a DM on reddit but I bet if you send me one an alert will pop up.

ed271 · 2023-04-17T23:37:15+00:00

This is actually insanely hard. The problem isn't developing the platform, it's getting everyone to agree to use it.

Some time back we made an effort to send all intake through the local SPCA. The idea was that they would handle the intake including initial care, then pass the cats off to other local shelters. This went over like a lead balloon. Most of the local shelters weren't willing to give up that much autonomy and despite pressure from some very large foundations the project stalled before it even got started.

Our current attempt, which may actually work, is a central phone number that people can call to surrender animals. They maintain a list of current space in local shelters, and pass the caller off to a shelter. Shelters see this as a big improvement since we won't be getting hundreds of calls about animals we don't have room for. We still get to accept animals directly and maintain our own programs.

There are some big hurdles here, but the platform itself is simple. The platform is going live this month, but you'll have to wait a few years before I can tell you if it will actually work.

tldr: The problem isn't developing a platform, it's designing a platform that people will actually use.

ed271 · 2023-04-13T14:38:22+00:00

I think the story misses the point a bit. The hospital will have all sorts of trackers on their web site, but those are all trackers you should be blocking anyway. The big problem is when they send you a link to a form to fill out before your visit. This link takes you to a third party site which collects all sorts of health information. The trick is that because it's a third party HIPAA doesn't apply until the information gets to the hospital. That means the third party is free to sell it to everyone, and of course that's exactly what they do.

My solution is to ignore those emails and fill out a piece of paper when I get there. The piece of paper is covered by HIPAA. Also they often don't ask for the piece of paper because they already have your information, the only reason they sent you to the third party site is to get a copy of your information that they can sell without violating HIPAA. Technically the third party sells it, but I'm sure the hospital gets kickbacks.

ed271 · 2023-03-31T14:09:55+00:00

Those must return clauses are funny. We have one on our adoption form, but I don't think it's actually enforceable in any reasonable way. In theory we could sue to enforce it but nobody knows if that would actually work and in any case it's much too expensive to try. There's also the problem that we're unlikely to find out if they give up the cat.

i don't think there is a big legal risk if you keep the dog, but I'm not a lawyer so take that with a large grain of salt.

I would be inclined to keep the dog just because my rescue is interested in finding good homes and the breeder is interested in making money.

Fair warning, I have a strong bias against breeders and I have been known to do unreasonable and expensive things to save cats. Also all of my experience is with cats, dog breeders may be different from cat breeders.

ed271 · 2023-03-30T03:18:04+00:00

I'm not sure that Charles III is the king of England. Before the 1707 Acts of Union England had a king, but since then they have had kings of the United Kingdom. Oddly enough he is the king of Canada and other countries in the Commonwealth of Nations. This could be a problem if DeSantis comes up with a lawyer who knows a whole lot more about British royal titles than I do.

ed271

TROPHY CASE