tinkers with pulseaudio
“Why does my audio not work?”
tinkers more
“Okay I think it kinda works now?”
it breaks again
“fml”
I found the docs for pulseaudio and particularly for pipewire to be rather hard to use, personally. RTFM works if the manual is readable, but in these cases, the learning curve was very steep for me (and I still don’t know that I properly understood what’s going on, but it’s working, so I’ve stopped tinkering for now).
What else do you suggest?
I’d argue a different approach: Teach critical thinking and scepticism to children. Banning things makes it a race to keep up with whatever new thing comes up; it’s not a sustainable solution so much as a constant fixing of new holes without tackling why these things are so destructive.
Eh, between the financial expense, the human reluctance to change and the still very real barrier of “We can’t migrate where there’s nowhere to go” with respect to the software landscape, I think we need to compare our definitions of could. It’s not just a business culture issue either. All change brings friction, but trying to replace the entire infrastructure of a company (and it has to be pretty much everything - one selling point of MS is how thoroughly integrated its products are) is basically ripping out most of the internal organs and replacing them with transplants, but also trying to keep the patient alive somehow… and you need to sell the people with the money on the idea.
Throwing away and starting over is costly, no matter the context. So no, I don’t think larger companies can even make that choice at this point.
Smaller companies without the same inertia, in industries where there are Linux-compatible tools? Yeah, they can, provided the software they need is there too.
I use Linux privately, and haven’t had a Windows OS on my PC in years except for a VM I needed for a university project. I’m all for hoping that specialised apps get developed for Linux too. I like mine and would probably enjoy using it for private purposes too, but it won’t work with wine and learning different tools is obviously an additional time investment in my free time compared to the one I get paid for learning.
But I’m both quick and happy to learn. Many people are not (and I see that daily with my users). The cost of switching and disruption in productivity would probably be disastrous enough to ruin the company even before considering the fact that “industry giant unable to fulfill contractual obligations because they have to rebuild half their infrastructure from nothing” would be a crippling blow to its professional reputation in an industry where IT is still considered second-class at best, the ideological gain of no longer depending on Microsoft would net them nothing and in an economic system where short-term profitability is more important than long-term independence.
And that’s not considering the difficulty of convincing company leadership that Windows really is that bad and Linux really is much better and that we only need to provide the financial incentive and invest the time and money to have someone port already expensive software to a different platform. FFS, we’re still struggling to get people to see IT as a service rather than an expense.
Finally, even if they were to switch out their entire IT infrastructure, they’d start asking whether it would be cheaper to outsource our internal IT to a company that already knows the new stuff than to retrain all of us. I’d very much like to keep my permanent position, even if it means using Windows.
Ours is. Last I heard, our Client Management team is already looking for different ways to disable it and make triple sure it stays off.
(inb4 “Switch to Linux”: several thousand users, specialised software and a technologically conservative company would already make that a non-starter)
taints in its history
Ooh, let’s play “find the dark history”! What better way to distract from today’s issues and avoid talking about solutions for tomorrow’s problem!
This is me agreeing with you, to be clear. The description “taints in its history” is so ubiquitous as to be useless. Yes, acknowledging the errors of the past is important to learn from them and improve, but the focus needs to be on that learning and improving.
The NATO has potential to be a force of security. In a modern world, conflict between peers is more destructive than ever and the returns on aggressive action are more strongly affected by the strength of the defense, such a union of forces can discourage attack by making it too unprofitable.
Of course, that requires the union to actually stand united and the potential aggressor to be reasonable and motivated by the state’s prosperity. Neither of those seem entirely guaranteed right now…
No, but the point is that posting “Stalin executes people” jokes in .ml-run communities would not go over well.
So if YouTube provided an RSS feed for its channels, all videos would be podcasts because they can be processed as audio-only and are distributed via RSS?
What exactly makes a podcast then?
Probably because there are no sanctions against them that his government is cracking down on? I don’t think he wants to get involved in politics so much as stay out of prison.
Yeah, you’re right. I got hit on a sore spot, responded impulsively and was a dick about it.
Sorry I was trying to match the level of insulting tone of your reply, I guess I went too mean.
Eh, I’d be a hypocrite to point fingers for that. All good.
Technology Connections actually has great CC and Transcripts as I believe Alec adds them directly after proofing an as aired script after his final edit.
I don’t know this specific creator, or many YT tech creators really, since YT isn’t really my main haunt (I’ve tried to explaing that elsewhere, but it boils down to “I rarely have the mental ability to sit and watch them”) and I genuinely prefer articles.
The video having good CC doesn’t solve most of my problems, unfortunately. It’s a good thing to have, don’t get me wrong, just doesn’t help me a whole lot.
it’s about a crappy ‘news’ site generating a two paragraph summary of a YouTube video and screencaping images from said video in order to generate ad revenue with minimal effort and dubious ethics
I’ll grant the dubious ethics point. That subtext didn’t parse for me. My focus was on the fact that the article, being a textual medium, is more useful to me.
I’m mostly upset at the prevalence of video content and the tendency to push people away from text, like “This guy has a great video” is a useful response to “I’m looking for an article”. This topic set me off, but my frustration is independent of the specific context. I’ve had it happen often enough to make it a sore spot, but that isn’t strictly the original comment’s fault.
If you’re so interested in the subject and want to learn more about the subject why not look for one, or even just ask?
It’s not a deep interest so much as a passing “stumble across something interesting”, so I wouldn’t necessarily seek out content on the topic. But if I were offered an essily digestible format, I’d be curious enough to consume it.
I agree that it would be better not to post cheap ripoffs, but they fill a market gap that I’m the audience for. The solution isn’t to complain about the moochers filling the gap, but to fill the gap yourself. I’m not defending sloppy AI text specifically, but the concept of converting content to a different medium.
If the content creators don’t want to cater to those who prefer that other medium - perfectly fine, that’s their prerogative. But to then complain if someone else adapts your content to a medium you didn’t want to, that’s what rubs me the wrong way.
Also, you’re a dingus.
Fair enough. My phrasing was harsh and born of a frustration that I didn’t really convey.
In my experience, YT would still end up loading a section of the video along with previews of suggestion. Maybe that has changed.
If it can make accurate transcriptions, sure. I’d enjoy the option of sending a link to an autotranscriber and get a conveniently readable version out of it.
And a good day to you too. Not sure why you felt the need to be insulting, but anyway.
A transcript of the video
Would you happen to have one handy? Or are these autogenerated these days. Are they better than the autogenerated CCs?
Also there’s a source listed in the description, guess what it is? An article.
Yeah, which would require me to click on YT in the first place, which is already what I want to avoid due to a limited mobile data plan and YT being a wonderful drain on that.
I’m just trying to push the point that “just watch the original video instead” isn’t as great a solution for everyone as some people make it out to be.
No, it’s about me not being able to arbitrarily sit down and watch a video due to various issues like attention span, hearing issues*, limited mobile data and being at work, where an article or summary is much easier and faster to read and can be interrupted at a moment’s notice unlike a video which I’ll have to pause, scrub back through if I missed a detail and wait for it to get to the right point, and I can more easily search for stuff.
My point is that there seems to be a habit of dismissing the value of textual summaries in favour of “just watch the video” in much of the online world, where I’ll be looking for a quick explanation and get presented with some video instead. Some people don’t do so well with videos so it’s not “just” watching the video.
There are advantages to text that I hate seeing people ignore.
(Besides, how would you know I’m incapable rather than just unwilling; or why would you assume either in the first place instead of considering inability?)
* That issue applies to voice messages and phone calls too. While videos occasionally have good CC, I haven’t found them to be reliable or ubiquitous enough. Additionally, they present the speech in fragments and usually are just as hard to search through. Either way, videos are a “sometimes” thing for me.
EDIT: That was an undeservedly harsh phrasing. The matter touched a nerve, but that’s not OPs fault. I’ll clarify, but leave the original comment at the end for transparency.
I’m not a fan of videos and much prefer having texts to read. I find them more comfortable to process, interrupt, resume, search for a specific section and consume while not on WiFi (due to a limited data plan, which YT tends to eat through).
Both professionally and privately, I have been frustrated by the number of tutorials and guides that are presented as videos where articles would work well enough. They seem to be more popular too, to the point that useful articles are buried deeper in the results.
I like textual summaries of interesting videos, because I’m curious, but often not enough to warrant clicking a YouTube link. I understand people’s frustration with AI ripoffs stealing content, but if the original content creator doesn’t cater to a textual medium, then someone else steps into that gap, I don’t feel like it’s so much ripping off as adapting to a different medium.
If the original creator offered a textual summary, and someone stole that to sell it as their own, I’d share the frustration. But if they didn’t, you can’t really steal what never existed.
Not that I’m a fan of AI slop specifically, but it’s better than nothing. If I can’t have a human one, I’d rather have an AI transcription than be excluded.
Sorry about my rudeness. This is a sore spot, but being snarky doesn’t help anyone.
Original comment below
Does someone have a content description so I can read instead of having to watch it?
Oh wait, here’s an article, nevermind.
I’ve had to grapple with pipewire. My old pulseaudio config didn’t seem to work and I wanted to migrate to the pw config file format anyway, but I found the pw docs to be highly opaque. You get a thousand solutions for commands online, or tools you can do it visually in, but to apply that config you need to start the tool…
I’m a noob, granted, but there seemed to be a lot of assumed common knowledge that I just don’t have. And if I don’t even know what I’m missing, it’s hard to google for it.
One of my two major projects is a long-term reporting system on a sustainability initiative to help managers figure out whether their unit is compliant (definitely not for control, of course, nooo… though they are expected to talk to their respective subordinates if their results deviate too much, which probably filters up the chain when a given higher level breaks down their subordinate units’ figures).
Probably a PR push (I swear, if I ever see a figure calculated by my model in the newspaper, my impostor syndrome is gonna thoroughly shit my pants for me), maybe a move to get ahead of competitors in the face of legal stuff I’m not in the loop about, but doing the right thing for selfish reasons is still the right thing.
The other project… Well, I’m trying to push for measures that prevent user-level evaluations, but it’s a kind of corporate limbo right now. I’m doing my best, but that’s not a whole lot in this case.