TIL about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. From Wikipedia:

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

Oddly enough, this guy Wolfram Weimer is a die-hard right-winger. So I was quite flabbergasted when I first read the headline, and still am doubting whether he really intends to follow through with this or rather is only floating this idea in order to introduce another bargaining chip in the trade negotiations with Trump.

For a simple distraction-free control via Linux’s command line, you can install mpg123 and add the following script files to /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin/:

/usr/local/bin/soma:

#! /usr/bin/bash
kill $(pgrep mpg123)
mpg123 -@ http://somafm.com/nossl/$1.pls

/usr/local/bin/somaoff:

#! /usr/bin/bash
kill $(pgrep mpg123)

Make them executable for everyone by running sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/soma /usr/local/bin/somaoff.

You can now run from your console (or from KRunner on KDE, or via :sh from within helix):

# Tune into station "Lush"
soma lush 
# Turn Soma off
somaoff

Works fine from a tty as well, even with bluetooth on my OpenSUSE at least.

The specific station names to enter after soma are the ones in the URL of each station’s webpage, e.g. “folkfwd” for Folk Forward, as its URL is https://somafm.com/folkfwd/.

This (e.g. on DuckDuckGo) only excludes the results for that one search, by adding the option “-site:example.com” to the query. When one conducts an entirely new search, the domain is included again. (Also, one will probably quickly reach a limit if one were to append a growing number of domain exclusion options to the search string.)

I have little knowledge of Romanian politics, but it does seem that in this presidential race, Nicușor Dan does have some serious track record from his time as mayor of Bucharest.

THIS IS AWESOME, THANK YOU!

(Apologies for my capslock, but I really am stoked.)

Link to FreeTube.io download page

I bought a T5xx-Thinkpad from nbwn.de (=notebookswieneu.eu) many years ago. It was an extremely good purchase. They ship to the entire EU for free if your order is above 200€. They specialize in selling demonstration laptops, i.e. devices that companies tried out and then returned, so they are essentially new.

However, I highly recommend to wait for the Windows 10 EOL to really hit around winter time, because then thousands if not millions of used and unused laptops that are sorted out for not supporting Windows 11 will flood the market. (Even if you’re aiming to buy a laptop so new that it will probably also support Windows 11, the flood of older devices could well bring down the prices for such newer devices also.)

See other comments: Got bought up by some company and then enshittified.

Look into PhotoGIMP, afaik it precisely delivers Photoshop-like symbols, maybe even layout, and shortcuts

Browser is nice. On Linux though, Okular is superb (except for its occasional problems with forms).

What’s your opinion on Affinity (Designer/Photo)?

Apparently Audacity has been bougth by a company which subsequently did crap with it. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/s9isqj/help_tenacity_a_fork_of_audacity_after_its/

Not sure how good Tenacity currently is

Well, on the other hand, it’s by far not always the case that the program one person is currently using is already the best choice for their use case. For example, in the process of degoogling, I’ve begun using a lot of programs that are actually better for me than the ones I previously used (e.g. Notesnook > Google notes). Of course there’s friction/effort involved in finding the best replacement, but there’s just no way around that if the goal is to get away from the defacto standards.

This is a huge opportunity. All of us Linux geeks now need to be on mainstream social media platforms and actively seek out and help everyone who expresses an interest in switching from Windows to Linux.

Ich glaub die Downvotes kommen einfach, weil in dieser Community hier (auf lemmy.ml) die allermeisten Leute Englisch erwarten.

Well, shit. But at least there’s this:

It’s also far from clear that the tech industry will prove to be as hungry for fossil fuel power as some predict. First, advances in AI technology could drive energy consumption down. Concerns are emerging that the technology may not fully live up to the hype, at least from investors’ standpoints, with Alibaba Group chairman Joe Tsai telling a Hong Kong investment summit in March that data construction may have already reached “the beginning of some kind of bubble.” Plus, the Trump tariffs have injected extraordinary levels of uncertainty into global markets, leaving some experts wondering if the upheaval could derail an AI boom.

People with your attitude are a significant reason why people decide against Linux. It’s doing Microsoft a service.

I can’t help with personal experience unfortunately. I think some (a lot?) of people are satisfied, but one does need some tech skills to get it up and running.

Instructions are out there in various github repos, some of them also link to volunteer support channels.

Or instructions in German here: https://linux-content.org/so-installierst-du-affinity-photo-designer-und-publisher-unter-linux/

Worth noting: Affinity, while not open-source, can be brought to run under Linux. This may be helpful for people wanting to ditch Windows.

Yeah, the Android alternatives I have in mind are LineageOS, GrapheneOS and /e/OS, but I’m not sure on how good their privacy is. Most importantly though, they’re often not available for older/non-mainstream smartphones.

So policy-wise, a useful step could be to get wider standardization of smartphone hardware, to reduce the efforts needed to port alternative OSs there.