You should check out Pinta then, I find it easier to use than Paint.net, yet reasonably feature-packed (obviously nowhere near GIMP/Photoshop).

That’s going to change in the future with NPUs (neural processing units). They’re already being bundled with both regular CPUs (such as the Ryzen 8000 series) and mobile SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3). The NPU included with the the SD8Gen3 for instance can run models like Llama 2 - something an average desktop would normally struggle with. Now this is only the 7B model mind you, so it’s a far cry from more powerful models like the 70B, but this will only improve in the future. Over the next few years, NPUs - and applications that take advantage of them - will be a completely normal thing, and it won’t require a household’s worth of energy. I mean, we’re already seeing various applications of it, eg in smartphone cameras, photo editing apps, digital assistants etc. The next would be I guess autocorrect and word prediction, and I for one can’t wait to ditch our current, crappy markov keyboards.

• Summarising articles / extracting information / transforming it according to my needs. Everyone knows LLM-bssed summaries are great, but not many folks utilise them to their full extent. For instance, yesterday, Sony published a blog piece on how a bunch of games were discounted on the PlayStation store. This was like a really long list that I couldn’t be bothered reading, so I asked ChatGPT to display just the genres that I’m interested in, and sort them according to popularity. Another example is parsing changelogs for software releases, sometimes some of them are really long (and not sorted properly - maybe just a dump of commit messages), so I’d ask it to summarise the changes, maybe only show me new feature additions, or any breaking changes etc.

• Translations. I find ChatGPT excellent at translating Asian languages - expecially all the esoteric terms used in badly-translated Chinese webcomics. I feed in the pinyin word and provide context, and ChatGPT tells me what it means in that context, and also provides alternate translations. This is a 100 times better than just using Google Translate or whatever dumb dictionary-based translator, because context is everything in Asian languages.

Bear necessities you say? All that a modern bear needs is a pic-a-nic basket and a trusty sidekick.

It’s not in the opposite order, it’s just flipped around in the photo lol.

Looks like this might work: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005094002506.html

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If you’re interested, there’s a patch for it that makes it look and behave more like Photoshop.

[Meta] I don’t think there’s a need to cross-post this within Beehaw. Beehaw is low-activity as it is (in terms of new posts) so most people here would be just browsing new/local so they’d be seeing this post in their feed twice.

Even if you’re not browsing by local, most people in this community would likely also be subscribed to the Technology community as well, so again, there’s a double-up.

To be fair, that’s the case with Linux and laptops in general right? Unless you’ve got a mainstream/popular model (or a brand known to work well with, or officially supports Linux), issues like sound, battery life and even suspend, wifi etc are fairly common. Which is why one of the most common Linux questions (besides “which distro”) is “which laptop”.

Depends on the hardware. If it’s an x86 then that’s most certainly a yes, if it’s an ARM then YMMV.

The thing is though, with traditional forums you get a LOT of controls for filtering out the kind of users who post such content. For instance, most forums won’t even let you post until you complete an interactive tutorial first (reading the rules and replying to a bot indicating you’ve understood them etc).

And then, you can have various levels of restrictions, eg, someone with less than 100 posts, or an account less than a month old may not be able to post any links or images etc. Also, you can have a trust system on some forums, where a mod can mark your account as trusted or verified, granting you further rights. You can even make it so that a manual moderator approval is required, before image posting rights are granted. In this instance, a mod would review your posting history and ensure that your posts genuinely contributed to the community and you’re unlikely to be a troll/karma farmer account etc.

So, short of accounts getting compromised/hacked, it’s very difficult to have this sort of stuff happen on a traditional forum.

I used to be a mod on a couple of popular forums back in the day, and I even ran my own community for a few years (using Invision Power Board), and never once have I had to deal with such content.

The fact is Lemmy is woefully inadequate in it’s current state to deal with such content, and there are definitely better options out there. My heart goes out to @Chris and the staff for having to deal with this stuff, and I really hope that this drives the Beehaw team to move away from Lemmy ASAP.

In the meantime, I reckon some drastic actions would need to be taken, such as disabling new user registrations and stopping all federation completely, until the new community is ready.

From @[email protected]:

If the PoS supports tokens, it’ll use unique tokens for each payment. If the PoS doesn’t support tokens, the phone has a virtual credit card number linked to the real one, so if it does get stolen, you can just remove the card from your Google Wallet to deactivate it. Your real card number is never exposed.

Even then, credit card numbers on their own aren’t that useful anymore. Any online payment needs the CVC and PoS devices usually require chip or tap cards, which don’t use the number. On top of that, credit card companies have purchase price restrictions when using swipe because of the security risks vs chip (which is why most PoS devices don’t support swipe anymore).

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There are plenty of HDMI switches or splitters out there that support audio extraction, just use one of them to sit between your monitor. Like this one: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00XJITK7E

??? The output is provided by whatever box you’re connecting to the monitor - set-top box, Android TV, Apple TV etc.

As I mentioned earlier, use a soundbar or dedicated speakers (most TV speakers suck anyways). Also, for a reasonably priced monitors, look for monitors marketed as “commercial displays” - they’re generally the same price or even cheaper than a similar spec’d TV.

Yes, Viewsonic for instance is one company that makes them. Although, they’re typically advertised as a “commercial LED display” or something like that. Basically look for “display” instead of “TV”.

Just get a monitor. The only real difference between a monitor and a TV these says is the lack of a speaker, and “smart” stuff. But TV speakers suck anyways so you’d be better off using a soundbar regardless.

The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn’t really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time. The Reddit-style works for following current events and posting links to new things etc, but as a result, old topics - topics even a couple of days old - falls off the engagement radar. Once it’s gone from the front page, it’s gone from people’s consciousness. This is bad for a small community with few posts that value quality of discussions over blind sharing of links. For instance, say I create a topic called “share your favorite vegan recipes” - I may get some replies in the first couple of days, but then the topic will fall off the frontpage and completely die. This is further exacerbated by the voting system. On Reddit/Lemmy, topics and comments which have a higher number of votes get more visibility, and this creates two issues - one is it encourages group think and creates an echo chamber, the other is that it drowns out less popular topics or comments. This sort of intentional drowning of posts and comments actually may be a good thing - and even necessary - on high-userbase systems like Reddit, where a single thread could have thousands of comments - but it works against low-traffic communities like Beehaw, where every comment is valuable (unless it’s off-topic/spam etc of course).

Whereas in a traditional forum:

• A topic gets bumped to the top when someone posts a comment, which encourages threads to live longer
• There’s not as much importance given to the “newness” of a post
• The lack of votes on a topic would give equal importance to all topics
• The lack of votes on comments would encourage people to actually chime in if they agree or disagree with a comment, instead of just blindly voting
• Forums also allow you to show a categorized homepage, where you can have several sub-forums appear on the homepage all at once. This is a better approach than blindly unifying the entire feed in one page, because this allows threads in low-traffic subs to keep their visibility and compete against high-traffic subs. For instance, consider a current news sub which may get a lot of posts ever single day, vs a niche sub such as gardening. With a unified feed, you’d almost never see posts from a gardening sub, unless you went into that sub.

With all the above reasons, forums are therefore more conducive for encouraging discussions, over a place which simply acts like a feed aggregator. Traditional forums are the solution to the doomscrolling issues that plague modern social media. Plus, they offer better moderation tools, with better granular permissions granted to mods, so you could grant various levels of access. Also, you can place several restrictions on users to reduce spam, for instance, you could grant a user rights to post a topic only after they’ve read all the rules, and maybe participated in a quiz or something. You could grant additional rights to people who’ve gotten a certain number posts in their bag. You could have a “trusted poster” system where a user could have mod-like abilities. There’s so many ways a forum is a lot more flexible than a system like Lemmy.

So overall, I think Beehaw’s ethos and vision would align better with a traditional forum, over a feed-aggregator style forum like Lemmy.