TootSweet

It bugs me when people say "the thing is is that" (if you listen for it, you'll start hearing it... or maybe that's something that people only do in my area.) ("What the thing is is that..." is fine. But "the thing is is that..." bugs me.)

Also, "just because doesn't mean ." That sentence structure invites one to take "just because " as a noun phrase which my brain really doesn't want to do. Just doesn't seem right. But that sentence structure is very common.

And I'm not saying there's anything objectively wrong with either of these. Language is weird and complex and beautiful. It's just fascinating that some commonly-used linguistic constructions just hit some people wrong sometimes.

I've got a pretty severe sensitivity to -- of all things -- sugar. (I know, "sugar" isn't very precise, but I'm pretty sure it's either glucose, fructose, or sucrose.) I virtually never eat anything with added sugar or anything with any significant amount of natural sugar. And I've eaten that way for like 20 years now. I'm practically blind to half the produce department (any "sweet" fruits like apples, pears, cherries, grapes, oranges, etc) at the grocery store, let alone the candy isle.

I've got a bit of a conundrum. I've got a 10 pound chihuahua whose entire world is a very specific 1.75 inch diameter rubber ball. (And when I say "entire world", I'm understating.) She's gone through a handful of this specific brand and model of rubber ball as old ones have gotten to the point of being too damaged to be safe.

But now the manufacturer has discontinued that line of ball and we're on our last one.

The few other models of rubber balls the same size that I've been able to find have been summarily rejected by the dog. I'm not sure quite what her criteria are for rejecting a ball, even. But I know she'd be a very sad dog indeed if we didn't manage to procure a suitable substitute.

So, at this point, I (and the dog too) am desperate enough to start thinking in terms of maybe crafting a ball as much like the one this dog currently loves to play with.

Of course my primary concern is safety. I wouldn't want pieces of rubber coming off of the final product to be ingested and cause blockages or anything. Nor any danger of blocking an airway.

The ball I'd be apeing is composed of natural rubber. I know you can get liquid latex like this stuff that air dries. Anyone have any idea if that would be suitable for this application? (Or would it be insufficiently durable after drying?)

I've got at my disposal a 3d printer and the skill to design 3d-printable molds. Hopefully the process of molding a ball could avoid heating the mold enough to deform it. I don't have any experience with printing anything but PLA and TPU. But I might be convinced to branch out into ABS or some such if necessary.

I'm just hoping to get some pointers and suggestions. I and my chihuahua thank you all in advance!

This is a weird one.

I'm running Arch Linux ARM on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Sway if any of that matters. (I've also got fcitx enabled if that helps any.)

The issue I'm running into is that randomly Firefox will freeze while I'm typing. Like, while I've got the address bar or some text area in the page focused and I'm typing something into it. This frequently happens multiple times a day even with the coping strategy I use. (See below.)

It never freezes that I've noticed when I'm doing something other than typing into a text input or textbox or address bar. (I don't recall ever seeing it freeze while I was typing into a password input, but I wouldn't say that's reason to think the issue is limited to not password boxes.)

It will usually freeze in the middle of a word somewhere. I type pretty fast. But it'll freeze for instance 3 letters into a 7 letter word which is the third word I've typed into the box or some such. (Or sometimes it'll freeze on the first letter. Or sometimes it'll freeze two paragraphs in.)

When it freezes, I usually open a shell and ps aux | grep firefox to get the PID of the parent Firefox process and then kill $pid to kill Firefox. I don't usually have to use -9 or anything. But just closing the window (with a super+shift+q) doesn't do the trick.

Mostly how I deal with this is to vi /tmp/t, type a post, and then wl-copy < /tmp/t so I can paste the post into Lemmy or whatever. When typing a url, I usually just risk a freeze since it usually doesn't take a lot of keystrokes to load the url I'm going for. ("lemmy.wo", and then enter to accept the type-ahead suggestion, for instance.) I think basically every keystroke has a small-ish chance of causing a freeze, so something that only takes 10 keystrokes is low-enough risk to go for it. But a post like what I'm posting here would be almost guaranteed to freeze before I finished composing it.

I'm posting here in the Firefox community because I haven't seen this happen with any application other than Firefox. (Though to be fair, I rarely use any graphical applications on this Raspberry Pi other than Firefox, st, and OpenSCAD on this Raspberry Pi 4. I used to use Cura occasionally on this machine occasionally as well. Chromium is way too resource hungry to try to use as a daily driver on a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm not sure I even have it installed right now.) I suppose this could be more of a GTK issue or Sway issue than a Firefox issue, but again it seems like it only happens with Firefox.

And I realize this is a weird enough issue that it might be pretty difficult to diagnose.

I've tried running Firefox from a terminal emulator and reproducing the issue to see if there's any outut to STDOUT/STDERR when it reproduces the issue, but ther'es no useful output. I thought to try strace-ing Firefox, but strac-ing Firefox gives a veritable Niagara Falls of output when nothing's happening, so it seems pretty untenable to try to comb through that to get anything useful.

Any ideas a) what the issue might possibly be or b) how I might go about trying to get a diagnosis? This has been an issue on this particular machine (and only this particular machine, though I haven't tried Firefox on other Raspberry Pis) for probably over a year now. I've been alternately trying to debug it and just ignoring it. I figured maybe it's finally time to see if anyone else has any ideas.

Thanks in advance!

Is it just me or is passing off things that aren't FOSS as FOSS a much bigger thing lately than it was previously.

Don't get me wrong. I remember Microsoft's "shared source" thing from back in the day. So I know it's not a new thing per se. But it still seems like it's suddenly a bigger problem than it was previously.

LLaMa, the large language model, is billed by Meta as "Open Source", but isn't.

I just learned today about "Grayjay," a video streaming service client app created by Louis Rossmann. Various aticles out there are billing it as "Open Source" or "FOSS". It's not. Grayjay's license doesn't allow commercial redistribution or derivative works. Its source code is available to the general public, but that's far from sufficient to qualify as "Open Source." (That article even claims "GrayJay is an open-source app, which means that users are free to alter it to meet their specific needs," but Grayjay's license grants no license to create modified versions at all.) FUTO, the parent project of Grayjay pledges on its site that "All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so." I hope that means that they'll be making Grayjay properly Open Source at some point. (Maybe once it's sufficiently mature/tested?) But I worry that they're just conflating "source available" and "Open Source."

I've also seen some sentiment around that "whatever, doesn't matter if it doesn't match the OSI's definition of Open Source. Source available is just as good and OSI doesn't get a monopoly on the term 'Open Source' anyway and you're being pedantic for refusing to use the term 'Open Source' for this program that won't let you use it commercially or make modifications."

It just makes me nervous. I don't want to see these terms muddied. If that ultimately happens and these terms end up not really being meaningful/helpful, maybe the next best thing is to only speak in terms of concrete license names. We all know the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, Mozilla, etc kind of licenses are unambiguously FOSS licenses in the strictest sense of the term. If a piece of software is under something that doesn't have a specific name, then the best we'd be able to do is just read it and see if it matches the OSI definition or Free Software definition.

Until then, I guess I'll keep doing my best to tell folks when something's called FOSS that isn't FOSS. I'm not sure what else to do about this issue, really.

I love the idea of a privacy-focused fronend for YouTube, but every time I visit a piped link, it just spins forever. Both on my Linux desktop and my Android phone.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Here is the latest one I tried and failed to load.

I hate that I always compare Lemmy to Reddit, but Reddit used to have (not sure if they still do) guidelines called "Reddiquette" that included guidelines about upvoting and downvoting. I don't remember the specifics (and sending too much of my browser traffic to Reddit makes me feel dirty) but one of the guidelines was not to upvote/downvote on the basis of agreement/disagreement with the content.

On Lemmy, I'm honestly a bit lax about upvoting and downvoting at all. (I'm trying to be better about it.) Buy when I do upvote/downvote, I try to do so on the basis of whether the comment/post "adds to" or "subtracts from" the community or conversation. I can disagree with one comment's take on some subject but still upvote them if they've given me a more nuanced perspective on the issue. If they're just parrotting well-known talking points and not being thoughtful with their posts, I may downvote them evren if I agree with their ultimate stance.

I'm just mostly wondering how folks on Lemmy think about upvotes/downvotes and what implications that has for the content here.

This post is somewhat inspired by a recent post in this same community called "Is anyone else having trouble giving up Reddit due to content?"

I imagine "Reddit" will be a common answer. (And it's one of my answers.)

Another of my answers is "Hasbro." First Wizards of the Coast (a Hasbro subsidiary) tried to revoke an irrevokable license and screw over basically all 3rd-party publishers of D&D content, then they sent literal mercinaries to threaten one of their customers over an order mixup that wasn't even the customer's fault. D&D: Honor Among Thieves and the latest Transformers look really good, but those are within the scope of my boycott, so I won't be seeing those any time soon.

Third, Microsoft. (Apple too, but then I've never bought any Apple devices in my life, so it hardly qualifies as a boycott.) Just because of their penchant for using devices I own against me in every way they can imagine. And for really predatory business practices.

One boycott that I've ended was a boycott of Nintendo. I was pissed that they started marketing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (though it didn't have a name at the time) before the WiiU came out, prompting me to be an early adopter of the WiiU, and then when they actually released BotW, they dual-released it on WiiU and Switch. I slightly eased my boycott when the unpatchable Fusee Gilee vulnerability for the first batch of Switches was discovered. I wanted to get one of the ones I could hack and run homebrew on before they came out with a model that lacked the vulnerability.