I like to point out to folks that pre-google Youtube was built on ffmpeg. You can set up streaming servers on it and all kinds of stuff. So who is stealing from whom… the pattern is theft from open source, not the other way around.

yes, I hear you. I have dreams of a publicly funded linux distro with accessibility and security (for elderly dudes and the like) the main design focus. My rebuilt federal government would develop this.

These features come from maintained modules or scripts that can be added if desired. There is a tiny bit of animation support in plain GIMP, mostly for working with animated gifs.

true that it wasn’t good for mac. I gave up apple/mac and their increasingly shitty overpriced products 10 years ago. Since then Linux has come a long way and so has GIMP. Good enough to kill Photoshop? Not any time soon, but good enough for professional use certainly and good enough for new artists to start on. Install G’MIC and it’s so much better.

some open source projects have very unpleasant communities around them, GIMP is not one of them. very easy to get into and everyone is extremely helpful and friendly.

Linux comes (at least on Mint and Ubuntu) with the poppler-utils suite of tools. you can merge, extract pages, even rip all the images out of a pdf in source quality. very useful.

Maybe you mean a more “brush and canvas” interface without complexity and distraction. I’m an artist that uses gimp. They are both great, Krita is just made with ease of use and emulation of irl tools in mind. GIMP can do emulation stuff too, but it can also do tons of other things, even video fx and animation.

I have been using “social software” for decades now. In the early 90s I ran a single line BBS networked across Canada and USA (every modem in the network called the nearest modem and we shared posts this way). I went to friendster (before that “makeoutclub”, if anyone remembers that thing), myspace, then piled onto facebook like everyone else.

The only thing that seems to make a social media tool relevant is when a critical mass of young people, in that 15-30 demo, decides that it’s time to adopt a new social media platform. This has been because they want a place away from their families, but there’s also all kinds of memetic reasons behind it that have nothing to do with function.

Young people need to flood to open source, distributed networks like Lemmy. I don’t mean to be a token old guy and speak poorly of an entire generation, but I’m not impressed with the embracing of Tiktok, Facebook and reddit. I find it hard to take anyone with a cause who inhabits these spaces seriously. I told my niece about why Facebook sucks, and she said “that’s so boomer.” Like, wtf?

So yeah. Young people, stop using twitter and all that junk. I promise if you come here I’ll go somewhere else.

Firefox doesn’t really need to make money so long as Google has to worry about being broken up by the Fed for antitrust reasons… Obviously so long as there is a national socialist/Trump regime in place that’s not really something they have to worry about. Why, Goog even donated $5m to Trump’s little Whitehouse evisceration/ballroom project, and will get their very own plaque in the ballroom that all the ballpeople can look at.

Google has donated over $USD 1B to Mozilla. The standard conspiracy fud is so that it can sink its claws into its open source competition, corrupting it with its omniscient googliness, but FIrefox barely blips on the radar of browser use, not even including Tor, Waterfox, Librewolf (which I’m currently using), and other forks. It’s just not going to threaten any of the megas any time soon.

The actual motive for giving Mozilla so much money is simply to deflect any accusations that they’re a monopoly that hurts market competition.

Humility? Is that possible with the new conservative movement? I remember good old Richard Nixon, he stepped down, apologized, and disappeared.

The author has 4 other pieces written, and before that she wrote for Gawker, New York Magazine (like not even the Times) and GQ. I’m going to venture that there’s some nepotism going on somewhere.

Just wait till copper goes up in value a little bit. In the 00’s gangsters were melting pennies down by the ton for the small amount of copper in them. Wouldn’t call them “trash” exactly…

The “left” in the United States is much further right on the global median. The Democrats are barely a center-left party on the global political spectrum.

Traditionally, at least since the Reagan Coalition was formed, the Democrats have functioned as a Republican-regulation party, the safety valve of rightwing ideas. The Republicans have put all of their chips on the Reagan Coalition, which they know is a tent with limited accommodations for the non-white non-rightwing. Both of these strategies have weaknesses that we can see cracking open in real time.

The Democrats, by comparison, are a much bigger tent of a party, and regional pressures and interests make it much harder for them to break the mold. There are still Democrats that identify as “conservative,” if you can believe that, and a substantial amount of them, too. There used to be “liberal Republicans,” but that number has dwindled into near-zero %.

I’m not in any way forgiving these dissenting senators for destroying what little health care Americans have. If there were any time in history where any one senator could choose to go rogue and still get re-elected, it’s now.

I didn’t mean Trump was a black swan in a historical sense, that nobody could have predicted him. And yes, Trumps have nearly taken over before.

I meant it as a black swan in the sense that nobody could actually predict how such a takeover would change “the Overton window” the OP was talking about. Even though we’ve always known Trump-style rhetoric was simmering just below the surface-- as in whenever some conservative would make a half-assed argument about racism from the perspective that they actually cared, not out of any concern for race or the damage of racism, but as a kind of jokey game, self-referencing just how much they didn’t give a shit or think that it was an issue.

For example, when King County, Washington changed the inspiration for the county name to Martin Luther King. Originally it was named for William King, the VP under Franklin Pierce. Popular opinion has it that the latter King was probably in a gay relationship with James Buchanan, and conservatives launched a campaign against the name change, citing it was “homophobic” to do so, as if they actually gave a shit about MLK or homophobia. They no longer have to play these little games, it’s totally fine for a popular conservative to say more or less whatever the hell they feel like saying about race, gender, sexuality, science, religion.

And now, apparently, it’s suddenly okay to use the “socialist” word. It certainly wasn’t before Trump.

Whatever happened to the 12 Jasons? They used to stop things like this. I imagine they were disbanded by the regime.

Overton Window

I like the concept of the Overton Window (thanks for teaching it to me). However, I don’t think anything quite fits in any predictable threshold of acceptable ideas right now. Trump is such a black swan, it’s almost like we’re defining the window in real time… If things weren’t so horrible, it would be an exciting time to be alive.

Cuban-Americans are very split politically. Actually, every Latino nationality has varying political belief patterns when it comes to voting in the USA.

Older Cubans tend to be conservative because they were driven out by Castro and the Republicans were more aggressive toward Castro, also, some were rightwingers in Cuba and many of them rather terrible people and they naturally like to carry their ideology over from their homeland.

Their children do not vote the same way as much, their grandchildren are majority on the other end.

Sparks agrees.

MacOS has more than sandboxed… they are basically removing the ability of a user to do anything to their computers. I can’t fix my dad’s imac (I used to fix my own macs), they are impenetrable… They’ve more than “sandboxed” apps, they’re forcing all but previously established powerusers to take their dying overpriced lumps to the Apple store. This, they say, is “good for you.” I loved Apple for 8 or so years. Hate them to death now.

My 9-year-old quad-core running Mint MATE 22 boots up faster than both my dad’s 2-year old iMac and my 6-core PC running Win11. And I can tell you what every process running is doing… bonus.

again, if you think osx is free you are deeply, cripplingly ignorant of how Apple makes money.