You can also look at Japan, where railroad isn’t even the main moneymaker for the companies that operate them (pretty sure some even run at a loss). Instead, it’s the hubs that those railroads create (ie all the real state connected to the stations which is owned by the railroad companies and can be rented out to businesses).

In essence, railroads shouldn’t be built because they’re profitable. They should be built because they’re a basic necessity for unifying a country/region. The profit comes from the increased mobility and the new hubs and opportunity that mobility can create. But most politicians are too short-sighted for this.

Modern versions of Photoshop are deeply integrated with another software called Adobe Cloud. As in, you can’t even install Photoshop by itself, it needs to be installed and managed via Adobe cloud, which has to constantly be running in the background for Photoshop to work (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s some kernel level BS, knowing Adobe). They are also reliant on other Adobe online services for some tools and services, and not just the generative AI ones.

That’s usually what causes a lot of hangups I believe. For example, if you need to connect your Photoshop to your client’s Adobe cloud or share files through it, or maybe connect Photoshop to other Adobe products like Indesign or After Effects, that may not work properly. This even applies to pirated versions of Photoshops on windows, where a lot of the patching comes from blocking Adobe’s constant interference with the program as it’s running, but as a result several tools may end up not working.

As for stuff people want from Photoshop, this is anectodical from me but I primary use Photoshop to letter things and literally no other program that runs on Linux even comes close to the simplicity and versatility Photoshop gives me for lettering with its type tool. It is just so simple to configure text the way I want to and there are so many ways to modify it. Clip Studio Paint is the second best contender (makes sense since it used to be primarily a comic creation software) but, shocker, it doesn’t run on Linux either.

Every open source tool I tried, Gimp and Krita included, is so many miles behind in this department that I thought I had returned to the stone age when I tried using them for this purpose earlier this year. Krita didn’t even have a live preview of the text I was writing. It was completely unusable for my more advanced needs.

This is legit the opposite of my experience. I am a relatively tech savvy user, I like to fiddle with all the settings and an ugly UI doesn’t inherently deter me as long as the experience is good, so when I first installed jellyfin I was ready to have a clunky experience fighting the UI.

Despite that, I was legitimately surprised at how Jellyfin was far less confusing for me to use out of the box than plex ever was. I found Plex’s UI very confusing to navigate on my TV and my family did not like using it either. I remember especially hating all the extra categories and freemium content plex added that I wasn’t interested in viewing but couldn’t remove (or at least did not find a way to remove). In Jellyfin all of my content is just there and very easily categorized and there’s no superfluous elements in the UI, just my stuff that I want to watch.

I remember plex also gave me more trouble during installation than jellyfin did. I actually found jellyfin very pleasant and intuitive to setup. Plex sent me down a Google rabbit hole to diagnose why it wouldn’t boot at all.

It was genuinely such an awful experience as a first-time user that it made me wonder why anyone would use plex.

The reality is you and others are afraid of change. There is no windows-only program I can’t run.

Well I’m glad you represent everybody.

People who need to use software like the Adobe suite professionally? They should just abandon their whole career and not use Adobe. Because being unemployed will really show em.

It was heavily criticized due to the severe drop in animation quality after the first episode. It’s like they spent 95% of the budget in episode 1, which got everybody hyped (and it is legitimately good), and then left the rest of the budget to pay a couple of overworked interns to haphazardly put together the rest of the animation.

The events of the story are all there, and the art style is the closest you can probably get to the original, but it does fail to capture a lot of the magic of the manga due to shoddy animation. I wouldn’t recommend it, personally.

If you want to enable the setting, it’s under

Settings > Profile > Advanced Settings > Mark this account as a cat

(wording/location may vary if you’re using a misskey fork but it should be under the profile settings somewhere)

This will give your icon cat ears in public timelines and any text you write will be converted to catspeak. Works better in Japanese, which is the language it was designed for, but in English words like “now” get converted to “meow” for example.

Best way I can describe misskey as a user of it is that it’s like mastodon but if they implemented every feature request possible. I mean it literally has a toggle to convert your text into cat speak for no other reason other than the dev felt like it. It even has its own markdown language to give your text crazy effects because who wouldn’t want an emoji amplified 4 times that spins and changes color?

It uses activitypub as well so it’s entirely interoperable with mastodon instances (although some functions like quote posts or the custom markdown language aren’t formatted as nicely when viewed from a mastodon instance)

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Plus all this stuff can be disabled in discord too, if you want to be that serious. There are per-role and per-channel settings that let you disable images, link embedding, external emojis, etc.

It gives you choice. I have no choice in Element, it’s always unfun all the time.

Just to add on to this, in those unfortunate cases where there really is only Fandom, you can use an extension like LibRedirect which will redirect any Fandom pages to a breezewiki instance, which is a stripped down, privacy respecting, no BS front end for Fandom.

Agree with you, OsmAnd is practically unusable for me due to the ancient UI. I hated it every time I used it.

I found Organic Maps to be a decent modern alternative. It’s open source and uses data from openstreetmaps as well, but it’s a million times less cluttered.

You might not have heard of the formats but you’ve definitely listened to them. For example, Youtube has only served audio in aac and opus for years now. Most instant messaging apps also use opus during calls to reduce bandwidth usage. And those are just some big examples. Basically almost any online service has dumped mp3 in favor of aac and opus since they’re better in every way (in the sense that they have better quality at the same bitrate as mp3, so you can reduce the filesize by a lot and still preserve the same audio quality)

I watched it for the first time last year without knowing anything about it and, as someone who loves to nerd out about anything linguistics related (am translator, for context), I cannot describe how gleeful I was that such subjects had center focus in a big blockbuster like that. Obviously the other aspects of the movie were amazing as well and the story got me very emotional by the end, but I will never shut up about how interesting and important that translation/communication aspect of the movie was.

As someone who owns a digital audio player I can give some reasons:

• Since most phones don’t come with headphone jacks anymore, it’s nice to have a device you can just plug your wired headphones into. It also means headphone jack inclusion is no longer a factor when choosing a smartphone.
• Better audio quality depending on the DAC inside the device.
• Expandable storage. Most DAPs let you insert one, some even two micro sd cards. No need to stream anything, plus you have space for lossless files.
• No need to worry about data/wifi, your music is always there ready to listen offline.
• Some DAPs are really small (Shanling M0 for example), making them more portable than a phone for a lot of use cases.
• More headphone compatibility. A lot of higher end DAPs support more than a 3.5 mm jack. The Fiio m11 plus for example has a 4.4 and 2.5 balanced output jacks in addition to the standard 3.5 mm.
• Higher power amps to power hungry headphones. A smartphone can’t power say a pair of Sennheiser HD 600s, a DAP can because it comes with a preamp (not all though, depends on the specs).
• Dedicated physical buttons. A touchscreen will never compare to controlling playback with physical buttons.

Though I will say, even as someone who owns one, unless you’re really into carrying your music library with you it’s generally not worth it. But they are nifty little gadgets and new ones come out every year to innovate the space.

It’s similar to an e-reader as others pointed out. Sure, you can read on a phone/tablet as well but it’s nice to have a device that’s purpose built for one thing and does it really well. The same applies to a digital audio player. Yeah you can (and most people are fine with) play music on your smartphone, but a dedicated device does add some nice QoL to the experience.

Doesn’t Twitter directly suppress such links? I remember there was a crackdown on people linking their mastodon accounts a while back.

And external links in general get a huge suppression in the algorithm because Twitter does not want to recommend tweets that take you off the site.

The platform actively fights you if you want to move elsewhere (which should really be a telltale sign for you to move), so I get why some orgs struggle with that decision. Doubly so if your job relies on the platform’s outreach.

This is to me one of the major reasons Twitter discourse is completely ruined and the platform is mostly useless for seeing what people think now.

When the only people who get to be at the top of discussions are people who pay for twitter, the only opinions that get shared are those that are pro Twitter, pro Elon, etc. Because they have a direct stake in the game.

And that’s if the accounts posting aren’t all bots that pay for a checkmark to boost engagement, which is almost all I see when I occasionally have to check Twitter these days.

So glad more people are leaving it. There’s nothing to gain from it anymore.

You actually tricked yourself into believing this isn’t all about shutting down competition to American companies or stopping people’s (especially young people’s) power to disseminate even remotely left leaning views that could gain traction and threaten the oligarchs.

I mean even the politicians who back this bill state as much, so I’m not sure why you think this is about national defense. American citizens are just under as much threat as before, but now they have one less way to express themselves. Ain’t that great. /s

Over simplified, because Romani are usually nomad, they live in moving settlements and don’t typically integrate much wherever they settle in. A lot of the hatred they receive also stems from these settlements being illegally set up in private/public property, as well as how they result in a lot of trash being dumped everywhere. There is also an issue with Romani criminality (stealing, damaging property, and sometimes there are even shootouts between different Romani families which result in casualties).

There is also a perceived notion that governments do not want to deal with these problems, which further fuels the hatred against the Romani as they’re seen as criminals who get away with everything.

The truth of course lies somewhere in the middle. Most Romani are not bad people if you take the time to know them, but there is definitely a lot of toxic cultural norms being perpetuated by leaders of many Romani families, which doesn’t help with clearing the stereotypes, and with very little to no integration between the Romani and the cultures they are in, it’s hard to get rid of the animosity.

Wow, you’ve really succinctly put it best! Being a European myself, this is how I constantly feel when I hear racist shit in my daily life (mainly from family).

It’s like, people here just can’t even fathom that what they’re saying is racist, that they’re racist, because to them what they’re saying is just a simple fact of life that everybody accepts. They don’t show open animosity towards minorities or throw racial slurs like you’d see more in America (though there is definitely some of that here too don’t get me wrong), but it’s a very casual, low-key form of racism where folks comment on X group of people all being one way and no one batting an eye for example.

And if you so much as suggest they’re racist, or the country they’re in has or had issues with racism and other issues of oppression, a lot will legit fight you tooth and nail over it because they can’t handle the notion of it.

It’s really freaking weird and took me a lot of time to be conscious of it myself, since I grew up surrounded by this sort of attitude.

And it’s not just right-leaning people doing this. Some minorities like the Romani are openly discriminated by just about everyone across the political spectrum, the degree just varies. And then based on the country you’ll typically see a lot of Xenophobia towards the bigger migrant groups.

As a European myself, never mention the Romani people to anyone here unless you want to hear the most degenerate, racist diatribe you can conjure up in your mind. (half hyperbole half not)