I’ve been using LosslessCut for a few years now. It’s really easy and smooth. It does exactly what I want and what the name says, and I couldn’t ask for more.

This is the first I’ve heard of “a couple of devs are shutting out large numbers of contributors (frequently subject matter experts which they desperately need at this point) over relatively trivial issues” and “Lemmy has an awful reputation even among the rest of the fediverse and particularly among people who have tried to contribute”.

Can you give a summary or examples? I’m not trying to argue, but would just like to know more. I don’t follow Lemmy development more closely than reading the dev summaries they post, so wasn’t aware of any of this.

Thank you! I had had the same issue forever and this fixed it!

7500 employees

But yes, to your point, I have a somewhat controversial theory that given enough time, relatively niche proprietary software like Unity will not be able to compete with open-source software (if the latter is well-managed). Look at the growth that Blender has had over the last few years and what effect that has had in the 3D creation market. It seems that the game engine market is going to follow similar footsteps if Godot doesn’t fall into some major pitfall.

I saw a comment, probably on Mastodon, from an author saying that (I believe) ChatGPT had plagiarized some of his work verbatim. I don’t recall if it was a work of fiction or not, although for the purpose of copyright it doesn’t matter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s trained on works of fiction just as much as non-fiction though. I think that from what I’ve heard, you can ask ChatGPT to write something in the style of particular writers? If it’s possible to give a very specific prompt for it to write something with the same plot points as a Stephen King story in the style of Stephen King, I wonder just how close it would look like the original?

I had heard some mentions of this before too, but didn’t recall the exact references. I went searching and found this recent study.

There are lawsuits everywhere

It’s not just style. From what I understand (I’ve never used any of the generative AI tools), they supposedly can and do output chunks of text verbatim from copyrighted works.

For sure. The growing pains haven’t been too bad for me either. I think that things will definitely get better with Lemmy.

You’re welcome.

Does anyone know if this is not just some sort of preliminary step before federating between the two?

Yeah, unfortunately that is a thing. Example:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/collapse@lemmy.ml (lemmy.sdf.org’s local view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 22 subscribers. In effect, this is the number of people on lemmy.sdf.org who have subscribed to this remote community.

https://lemmy.ml/c/collapse (the original/direct view of Collapse @ lemmy.ml) shows 2.11k subscribers. I don’t know whether this number shows only subscribers from lemmy.ml or an aggregate of all subscribers across the fediverse.

Unfortunately, another issue even if the count on the direct link to the community is an aggregate, is that it’s probably not counting people who are stuck in a “subscribe pending” state. A ton of the communities I subscribed to weeks ago still show in this state on my communities page. I understand that what this means is that I’m subscribed on my end so that everything works for me, but the original community hasn’t acknowledged my subscription, so I expect that this means it also doesn’t count me as a subscriber.

Good point. I had forgotten that I had briefly looked at the 3rd party keyboards on iOS, but I think I either decided to give the built-in keyboard for a while and then forgot to try the others, or if I didn’t see any caught my eye. Gboard would be out since I’m trying to degoogle, but I need to look into this again. Thanks for reminding me.

I see, thanks. I’m letting iCloud do it, but I want to have a local copy on my PC as well. I remember that on Android I had heard of apps that would automatically transfer to PC over WiFi as soon as it connected to the network, so I wonder if there are apps like that for iOS too.

Thanks. I’m not trying to fight either, but just relate my experience with the switch so far. I would be happy if I could feel that iPhones were all around superior to Android like some people do because my general views on Google have become very negative, but I’ve run into too many silly issues that prevent me from feeling that way. I presume that the people that post that iPhones are great and Android is terrible either haven’t run into any similar issues (limited uses of the phones?), haven’t used Android at least in the last few years, or are trolling, or are brainwashed. I think anyone giving an honest comparison (like I think you’re doing) would say that they are both completely mixed bags.

Just to add some clarifications and new points:

My keyboard usage is very basic. I don’t use swipe gestures, didn’t use any custom keyboard apps on Android, and don’t do anything out of the ordinary. I continue to struggle with editing functionality on iPhone, like once it highlights a partially written word and gives a wrong auto-correct suggestion, I have a super hard time undoing that selection. I have to tap all over the place to get it to unhighlight. Could be user error though. I also continue to hit those app bar buttons at the top of the keyboard in the middle of typing, causing a big interruption in the process.

AMR files are or at least used to be what Google uses for audio files embedded in SMS/MMS messages. I found out that iOS dropped support for the format years ago. Seems like a big interoperability issue to me.

How do you do the Wi-Fi photos transfer from your phone to computer? I would like to do something similar.

Your experience with PDFs may have used an internet connection when it came time to open them, if one was available. When I tried to do the same by using I think the Apple Books app (for the first time, which may have been my issue) it said it needed a connection. Maybe the connection was only required to set up that app. Maybe siri would actually be useful in getting things properly set up. I’ve avoided doing anything with that so far.

One other issue that I forgot to mention in my previous post: serious overheating issues on iPhones. Like my phone has shutdown in the middle of maps navigation (while charging and also playing music), and also in the middle of a video call. I have a TPU case on it, which apparently is a problem? But this never happened with my Moto X4. Admittedly that was a mid-range phone at the time it was released, while these iPhones are near the top of the range if not at the top. Maybe top range phones run hot because of faster CPUs. It still seems odd though.

I recently switched myself, my wife, and my mom from old Moto X4 Android phones to slightly newer, but not current iPhones (X, XS, and 11 Pro). It’s been a few months now (maybe 3 or so?). Honestly, I’m not that happy with them. I think I’ll stick to it mainly for privacy, security, and environmental reasons - iPhones are supported with security updates for way, way, way longer than the vast majority of Android phones. Like two or three times as long, in some cases. This offsets the price factor, maintains security for longer, and reduces electronic waste by making the phones viable for longer. By my calculations, I actually come out ahead with iPhones with regard to price. I like that iPhones let you remove most, maybe even all the built-in apps that come pre-installed. I also like that they give you an actual indication of your battery health.

Having said that, many other aspects of iPhones have been a hassle or just plain sucked:

The keyboard sucks. Poor editing, poor layout without a number row, not able to turn off the stupid app bar or whatever they call it on the top row.

The messaging app sucks. First, don’t forget that it’s Apple’s intransigence now that’s preventing iMessage from being interoperable with Android, and I say this as someone who has come to dislike and avoid Google as much as possible. I hope that the EU forcing them to make messaging interoperable will yield some real improvements with this. Second, the messaging app doesn’t show dates and times on messages by default. I have to pull each message to the side to see this info. Third, there appears to be no search function within a message thread, what a pain. Finally, I also found out that iPhones aren’t able to do anything whatsoever with certain common attachments from text messages. I had messages received from Android phones with AMR files in them (audio recording files). The iPhone was completely unable to open them, I couldn’t find even an app that could open them, and the damn phone wouldn’t let me forward the text message to an email! I ended up having to go back to the Android and forward the text to email in order to be able to open the attachments. Completely unacceptable.

The connectivity with PCs sucks. They allow you to see your photos (only the photos and videos, nothing else) when connected through USB, but it barely works. My photo transfers fail most of the time, and it seems to be impossible to let my photo manager delete the photos from the phone after transferring them. Yeah, iTunes is supposed to work, but you can’t manage two different phones with different iCloud accounts on one Windows login. Besides, iTunes itself sucks. Their replacement app for this, Apple Mobile Devices I think it was called, only supports Windows 11, not Windows 10.

The offline PDF storage and reading sucks. I was going to an event that I knew was going to be away from mobile networks and prepared for this by jumping through all the hoops (I’m not kidding) that it took to actually download PDFs locally to the phone so that they were available offline. These PDFs held the map and event guides. I get there, offline, and try to open the PDFs that I painstakingly had downloaded offline. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the damn built-in app for reading the PDFs needed internet connectivity! Thankfully it wasn’t a life or death situation, but still, how frustrating and disappointing.

The official community support site sucks. The impression I’ve had in researching the issues above is that someone will give some incredibly lame answer that doesn’t really resolve the issue and instead papers it over, that answer will be marked as the correct answer, and it’s end of story. You need to find discussions on other unofficial forums for real discussions of technical issues.

This is all I can think of for now. There’s probably more, but you get the idea.

It takes some effort to build up and shape your Home feed on Mastodon. One good starting point is to search for hashtags that you’re interested in, like #sports or #gamedev or whatever. It may take some trial and error to find the most popular hashtags being used in your topics of interest. Once you find the hashtags with stuff that’s interest to you, follow those hashtags so you will continue to discover new people and posts in those topics in your Home feed. Once you find interesting people posting in those hashtags, follow them. The name of the game on Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. I’ve heard it said that your feed will get pretty good when you follow around 200 people or so.

It sounds like he’s trying to copy zombo.com (listen to the audio for at least 30 seconds to a minute - the animation is a little broken by now)

Search for hashtags first, like #TopicOfInterestToMe. Follow those. Then, look for people who post interesting stuff in the hashtags you follow. Follow them. The trick to Mastodon is to follow, follow, follow. This may also be a good starting point to find interesting people to follow: https://fedi.directory/

Yes, follow lots of hashtags of interest, and follow lots of people that post stuff you’re interested in. I’ve seen it said before that once you have about 200 accounts you’re following you will have a nice volume of interesting posts in your home feed.

Saving this post because it’s right up my alley so now I have many new games to check out. Project Zomboid is still going strong for us, but here are some others that our group has enjoyed:

Heave Ho: super crude 2D graphics, but absolutely hilarious gameplay

The Ascent: beautiful cyberpunk-themed isometric shooter

Broforce: very entertaining pixel-art 2D platformer/shooter - we played this through to the end, which is rare for us

Overcooked: very entertaining 3D game, not sure what I would even call the genre - a “work” game?

Unrailed: similar to uncooked, but a different kind of “work”

SWAT 4: old 3D FPS, but still good