There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

I say go ahead and ban them. This notion of pervasive, constant, surveillance is a pernicious one. While they are at it, ban chinese CCTV equipment too.

If the cost of surveilling is higher, police departments will be incentivized to use it more sparingly, and with cause. I mean they used to use manned helicopters all the time. Remember when TV stations would show live video of chases?

Besides that, putting public money into local tech companies to make police drones isn't all that bad. Sure import Chinese motors, speed controllers, and batteries. But there's plenty of American know how for making quad copters with flight controllers.

AppImage has proven itself to be a huge disappointment, and I suspect the same holds true for the others as well. I was running Kdenlive on Kubuntu 20.04, and there were must-have features in a newer Kdenlive that required a newer Kubuntu, so I downloaded the last AppImage of the Kdenlive I needed.

When I tried to run the AppImage, it failed with a GLIBC dependency error. That, for me, completely killed the whole notion of AppImage, SNAP, and all the others. They need the entire dependency chain (essentially the entire operating) included in each package, or something will fail.

We can thank Red Hat for this entire packaging clusterfuck, naturally. If they had just adopted the Debian format, 99% of current packaging issues would never have existed. But they saw a good think and thought, "I wonder how we can destroy this awesome user-centric advance. Ooh! I know!" Hence, RPM was born, and the Linux world became a decidedly worse place.

He obviously is an AI. Not actual person could be that full of shit, so he must be. The self hatred means he's a bit more advanced than most, sure, but everything that comes from his is still slop.

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

is less work than building the house.

The odd general fascination with cosmetics is not utilitarian, but piddling with cosmetics gives the illusion of accomplishment as if change were progress.

Sounds like a program perfectly suited to kicking welfare in the direction of preferred corporate allies(both in terms of what tech gets adopted for federal use; and who gets to use the government payroll as an internship/evaluation program) and for ensuring that none of the departments with significant technical requirements who had their own internal expertise DOGEd to ribbons will get to regain it; instead periodically getting the Accenture Experience from a free-floating layer of loyalists who don't give a fuck because they'll be off to the private sector in 18 months anyway.

When that predictably turns out well; we can presumably grab some folksy Reagan line about how the government can't do anything right; and just directly farm out the contract to palantir or whoever.

If you think theater is a 'sacred space' perhaps you should get on theater management about that. Outside of some very atypical or heavily stage-managed cases the movie theatre experience is typically fucking dire. Paid admittance to a half hour of commercials; seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

It certainly remains very possible for a proper large scale theatre install to handily outgun anything you'd get at home, and definitely the 'whatever is cheap and 65in' best buy experience; but there doesn't appear to be much interest in making the overall experience a compelling sell.

If all you do is attend directorial release screenings with your colleagues I assume that isn't a you problem; but if you genuinely care about the viability, and survival, of the theater experience maybe you should care more; because it's not like people are staying away from theaters just because they are philistines who hate art and desire aggressively mediocre experiences; it's because the theater is an aggressively mediocre experience that squanders much of its remaining technical edge to apathy and cost cutting that can definitely make it more miserable than staying home; but will never make it a better value.

That's not even the problem, the biggest problem is it doesn't reach its own goals. You should be able to use Rust without using Unsafe, otherwise it doesn't solve the problem it claims to solve (or rather, it solves them in a "good enough" fashion, the same as smart pointers in C++ and there's no reason to switch from one to the other).

It's pretty clear you're lying.

Sadly shade doesn't work current with kwin on Wayland. It's very annoying. Also focus follows mouse is quirky on Wayland. Other than that KDE on Wayland is pretty fantastic.

Been using the Claude CLI the last few weeks and it has definitely been a great assistant in working with Qt 6, C++, and QML. The CLI interface is one of the best interfaces I have evey seen, and it's native use of markdown is ideal. I am still writing 90% of the code but Claude's a great way to get information on some aspects of the library that I'm not as familiar with. I'm not ready to set it loose with nothing but a specifications document yet.

I've had it port some code from OpenGL to QRhi (similar to vulkan), and I had it fix some issues in another QtQuick project relating to Android permissions. And it was also able to fix some QML layout issues I was having. I'm not ready to vibe code anything, nor am I ready to let it do anything to my code it wants without reviewing it, but it sure is a good assistant coder and researcher. At least for my hobby programming.