danielquinn

Evelyn Woods (aka eevee) has posted some venerable takes over the years (she also wrote my personal favourite rant of all time: "PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design"), but this one, where she connects industry's generic idea of "content" to what she refers to as a "Whatever machine" is really quite excellent.

I think a lot of people out there are fundamentally misunderstanding the reasoning behind the big tech companies (and their investors) pushing AI into everything. We want to believe that it's just tech bros trying to woo idiot investor cash into their systems — and it is that, a little bit anyway — but the big players: Microsoft, Google, Meta, and even Visa know exactly what they're doing and it's not good news for the rest of us.

Anyway, I wrote this a few days ago to break down the problem as I see it. I'm hoping it proves helpful.

It seems like a great initiative, and I'd be happy to help out, but I don't have a venue myself.

I've been a Steam customer for a very long time, having spent a few thousand dollars over the years with them. Like many of you, I've got a (small?) group of games that I bought and barely-if-ever played, and I'm cool with that. As they say, piracy is a service problem, and Steam is just... easy.

That was until I bought my Deck. Suddenly, I had two devices on which I could play my games: my proper gaming rig upstairs and my Deck plugged into the TV downstairs.

I also however, have a kid that likes video games, so sometimes I let her play a few games on the TV... and that's where everything breaks down. If she's playing Lego Marvel on the Deck, my copy of Dyson Sphere Program flakes out upstairs with a warning that "someone else is playing a game, so this game will have to shut off" or some nonsense like that.

I'm suddenly face to face with the fact that I don't actually own my games and those few thousand dollars weren't spent on what I expected. It's... enraging to put it gently.

I can appreciate that there would be an attempt to prevent me from playing the same game on two devices (though I think that's bullshit too), but to prevent me from playing two different games on two different machines when both are legally purchased running on my own hardware is not ok.

This is what I see in both Firefox and Chromium

I'm a web developer, mostly with Python and have close to zero Java or Kotlin experience, but I want to build a bunch of tools for my phone where I can Share a URL (for example) to an app that simply takes that URL string and sends an HTTP POST request to a pre-arranged URL with some pre-arranged headers or POST data.

So basically I'm looking for an app that:

• Lets you define a series of endpoints
• Accepts share intents from other apps to then bring up a selector asking "Which endpoint do you want to send this to?", sends it, and exits.

It seems a little nuts that I should have to develop a separate app for each endpoint, when the app experience isn't really something I'm interested in. Can someone here point me to an app that already does something like this? I'd prefer a FOSS option if possible, but at this point I don't even know what to search for.

Example use-cases:

• Send a YouTube URL to a service that downloads said video and stores it on a share on my VPN
• Send a text snippet to a service that stores that snippet as a Markdown file for use as ideas for future blog posts
• Send an article URL to a service that strips the ads and images out and saves a Markdown file for future reading.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/33126960

From time to time, often after I've restored from sleep or finished playing a Steam game, one of my CPU cores is pinned at 100% with no indication of what might be doing it. Running htop, btop, or GNOME system monitor all show the same thing: CPU0 at 100% while the rest are doing near-nothing, and no process in particular seems to be using those resources.

If I restart, it's back to normal, and sometimes I can play a game in Steam or let the computer go to sleep and it doesn't do this, but it happens often enough that's annoying/confusing so I'd like to know if there's a way to either (a) diagnose which processes are using which CPU cores, or (b) somehow "reset" the checking of these values to make sure that something's not just being misreported.

This is a desktop system running Arch & GNOME.

I've been writing code professionally for 24 years, 15 of which has been Python and 9 years of that with Docker. I got tired of running into the same complications every time I started a new job, so I wrote this. Maybe you'll find it useful, or it could even start a conversation, but this post has been a long time coming.

Update: I had a few requests for a demo repo as a companion to this post, so I wrote one today. It includes a very small Django demo user Docker, Compose, and GitLab CI.

...so I found out how to fix it