Posts by davidlars

Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade

Meanwhile when you purchase the excellent video editor NLE Blackmagic Design's Davinci Resolve, you get new updates for free.

I don't mind proprietary as long as the software is great and the business model fair. Here's hoping that Blackmagic Design stays privately owned and keeps it's sound business model.

Krita and Gimp are my go-tos for open source photo/image editing.

Not sure if people still use the last non-subscription Photoshop and Premiere but presumably newer image formats are not supported.

Microsoft boots 3% of staff in latest cull, middle managers first in line

Re: Renameing it, that is funny!

Ugh, a presentation about AI (yes, the presentation was only called "AI" but was really about generative AI in the enterprise) at work a few months ago described automation as something included in what generative AI enables. And this in front of a crowd of sysadmins and developers. Ok, thanks, are you saying that we should throw away our Ansible playbooks, PowerShell, AWK and bash scripts and Kubernetes configurations for ChatGPT prompts now? What automation exactly do LLMs enable except conversational UI?

Now, IT folks (well, most of them) see this and scoff, moving on. The problem lies with middle management listening to this stuff and pushing for "AI projects" which will take up time from the important automation work.

KDE 3 lives to fight another day as Trinity Desktop 14.1.4 hits the shelves

KDE Plasma/Wayland has been my daily driver for a year (on Rocky Linux 9.x) and it's been mostly good but with enough quirks and bugs (I've been too lazy to report them sadly) that I'm going to switch back to X11 and KDE 3.x or something like it. I'm thankful for having the choice.

DeepSeek's R1 curiously tells El Reg reader: 'My guidelines are set by OpenAI'

I tricked it into to start figuring out a satirical story about Chinese politicians having a fight with Trump yesterday. I could read it's reasoning where it states that it should avoid controversial ideas that might be sensitive in China. It said quite a few things but I wasn't quick enough to screenshot. And then it started to output a response beginning with: "Let's spice things up!"

But in the middle of it's second sentence the response and reasoning disappeared to be replaced with "That is out of my current scope." Or something on those lines. And when trying to ask what was out of it's scope, it answered as it had never seen my question and only referenced my previous questions.

It's fascinating to like around with this.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Re: Happy Birthday (Happy Birthday-yay-yay)

That part about not obfuscating networking configuration might actually be reason enough to try Slackware.

It was the first Linux I saw someone using but I wasn't ready to learn anything other than DOS/Windows in elementary school sadly.

It was nice to learn that this is a modern distro in many ways that tries to automate some churn away. I did try Arch briefly but landed on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (also a rolling distro like Arch) for a chance to learn something a little different since running Ubuntu and it's derivatives all these years.