Alex

I just want to buy home automation gadgets that don’t need a bloody cloud account to work.

I think car automation peaked at adaptive cruise control. It’s a simple tractable problem that’s generally well confined and improves the drivers ability to concentrate on other road risks.

For portability Vulkan is the way (it also gets you GPU compute for free without needing vendor libraries). That said the ruttabaga encapsulation is useful for things like Wayland over virtio-gpu which is useful for some use cases.

I should note for even closer to native performance you want virtio-gpu with native context. Patches for that are currently being reviewed on the mailing list: https://patchew.org/QEMU/20241024233355.136867-1-dmitry.osipenko@collabora.com/

It depends what they want to do. They can fork and take on the burden of maintaining the whole tree in which case good luck with that, linux is too much of a fire hose to enable a 3rd party to assemble something similar making different choices about what they merge. Otherwise they can maintain a re-based fork that tracks the Torvalds tree and then congratulations you’ve just invented a feature tree that can do contribution with extra steps.

I don’t think algorithms themselves are to blame but what they are tuned for. While engagement/eyeball hours for the adserver is the prime metric the quality of experience will be subservient to it. If the algorithms could better measure your mood and stimulation levels and maximise for that the effect would be less toxic. Ideally if it realised you were just mindlessly consuming it could suggest maybe you’ve done enough today and to try something else. But that I fear that is not something the owners of the various ecosystems want.

I do pretty much everything in Firefox but during the week I keep a Chrome window up for Hangouts and Jira.

I don’t quite follow what this is. Is it a from scratch implementation of the vscode experience or a fork which has removed propriety bits and telemetry?

Is it worth raising an issue with the project? Also enable logging to see if there are any clues as to why a rescan is being done?

Syncthing should have inotify support which allows it to watch for changes rather than polling. Does that help?

How can Google vet an app store without vetting everything it could serve?

What do people expect? Those servers aren’t free to run and they’re is only so much VC money to burn. That said I wouldn’t pay the various subscription levels that are currently being asked for. I pay for API use which is basically pay as you go. It also makes you think “does this task really need the non-free tier to complete?”.

I assume that is too cover the intelligence officers monitoring the Russian milbloggers.

I work for a company that makes money supporting FLOSS. Our members pay fairly hefty membership fees because they have a vested interest in their chips being well supported by Linux and the wider ecosystem. That money funds common projects they all benefit from all well as numerous maintainers in projects keeping those projects ticking.

The engineers on the project I mostly work on are predominantly paid to work on it. We value our hobbyist itch scratchers (~10% off contributors) but it’s commercial money that keeps those patches reviewed and flowing.

Quite. Go to the big services that know how to moderate and maintain (and importantly pay for) a public square. But also encourage the interesting ones enable federation for wider coverage.

There are some advantages to algorithms for discovery - it’s certainly is more user friendly. It’s just a shame they tend to enshitify or become toxic. Bluesky seem to offer an API of sorts to plug in feeds you create. Perhaps open algorithms are more accountable?

QEMU is always going to focus on emulation fidelity first and there are few shortcuts. With floating point the differences aren’t generally in the numbers but in how the NaNs and other edge cases are handled. If you want to execute FP heavy code you should be cross compiling anyway.

QEMU absolutely will use hardware floating point where it can but only when it will give the correct results. FEX and Box64 are user mode emulators which achieve their speed by avoiding emulation where they can buy thunking at API boundaries.

They won’t directly support it because in their view the Google Play process is a more secure way of verifying they supplied the binaries than is possible of f-droid. If reproducible builds were possible maybe there could be some mechanism to verify a given binary is built from a given commit of the source tree.

Btrfs never really worked out for me (I think default COW doesn’t play nice with VM images) and ext4 works great.