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bebb commented on KDE onboarding is good now   rabbitictranslator.com/kd... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
shevy-java · a month ago
I just can not take KDE seriously anymore ever since the donation-daemon waylaying users Robin Hood style via pop-ups (no, not even a single use of this is "acceptable", just as "acceptable ads" by Google were never acceptable to begin with; there is a reason Google went to destroy ublock origin lateron. The reason is simple: greed aka more money via ad pop ups. Why does the current KDE dev team think that pop-ups are acceptable? The python homepage also has a pop-in slider asking for money. I also think this is not acceptable. Why does my browser allow for this, unless ublock origin hero-blocks those vile spam attempts?).

This has been a paradigm shift in KDE for the worse. I am also hardly the only one to notice this going downhill:

https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...

It was a huge mistake to try to make KDE a political entity. Then again by deprecating the xorg-server, the current KDE team already showed that they don't quite care about the users.

> It was around that same time when I made the “Contributing to KDE is easier than you think” series of blog posts.

I think contributing to KDE has become much harder. Now you have people be involved in KDE whom you may not be able to relate or cooperate with. How could I ever cooperate with someone who thinks Robin Hood daemon-widgets coercing people for money is acceptable? To me this is not acceptable. I have absolutely nothing against donations, mind you - the issue has never been about donations. The issue has always been about what software should be about. Software should not be about putting pressure on people - it should be about enabling people. This is what Mr. Nate does not understand, but arguably the problem with KDE go much deeper than just Nate; all the "systemd-only folks" like David. It feels like some strange kind of people took over KDE. We also saw this some years ago with GNOME and GTK, though admittedly GNOME has always been more fedora/red-hat controlled, even way before systemd. (And here, the issue is not so much about GNOME, but that GTK is now factually a GNOMEy-toolkit only.)

> Moving on, 2020 was pretty active. I started contributing to KDE web, while still being a Reddit mod

Ah yes, the old conflict-of-interest. People can not be critical of #kde because these KDE devs will ruthlessly censor and ban people with another opinion. Been there, done that; though this is also heavily a problem specific to reddit in general, not just for KDE alone.

> All that just to say that I’m finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform.

Ok, patting yourself on the shoulder here. I don't know how well his contributions have been so I am not judging prematurely one way or the other, but in general I dislike self-promo. I believe the only ones able to judge that are unaffiliated people aka users of that documentation. In general I find the documentation in open source projects to be horrible, but perhaps KDE docs are better than average, and improvements to documentation (if they are real improvements) are always a good thing. But just get ebassi to talk about how epic the GTK documentation is - then you check it out, and it is beyond imagination how abysmal it is. So in general I find those self-promo statements hugely problematic. They don't match reality. The best documentation in general, oddly enough, I found when people wrote working examples with explanations; learning from these has almost always been better than looking at official documentation and noticing how so many things are missing or lacking or of low quality. A wonderful example can be seen with regard to python + GTK3 and GTK4. Barely anyone wrote GTK4-specific parts, neither documentation; yes I know laszka tutorials for GTK3 and now compare it to GTK4 while also using google search. You notice such a huge discrepancy here, almost as if nobody switched to GTK4 even years after. And the documentation is also different in quality (it has gotten better in the last 2 years, but it is very strange how external contributors do more work here than the GTK devs, but that's a question you can ask the GTK dev team since they are also responsible for any drop in adoption when they constantly willy-nilly deprecate everything - soon to get another deprecation cycle with GTK5. Oh boy.).

bebb · a month ago
I've not used KDE for a very long time, are you saying that they now have shareware-style nag dialogs in KDE itself? Or is this just something on the KDE website, like Wikipedia does?
bebb commented on Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.   exopriors.com/scry... · Posted by u/Xyra
nottorp · a month ago
> most people would probably say AGI has been achieved

Most people who took a look at a carefully crafted demo. I.e. the CEOs who keep pouring money down this hole.

If you actually use it you'll realize it's a tool, and not a particularly dependable tool unless you want to code what amounts to the React tutorial.

bebb · a month ago
Depending on the task, the tool can, in effect, demonstrate more intelligence than most people.

We've just become accustomed to it now, and tend to focus more on the flaws than the progress.

bebb commented on I wish people were more public   borretti.me/article/i-wis... · Posted by u/swah
squigz · 2 months ago
It's really not coming to an end. People still look silly for talking about things like "the gender identity viewpoint" as if it's just a matter of opinion.
bebb · 2 months ago
It is in the UK. Perhaps it's different in other parts of the world.
bebb commented on Programming languages used for music   timthompson.com/plum/cgi/... · Posted by u/ofalkaed
bebb · 2 months ago
There was one on HN a few weeks ago, tailored towards loops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46072280

One interesting feature is it has built-in vibe coding, to produce an LLM-generated loop program to start one's creative journey.

bebb commented on I wish people were more public   borretti.me/article/i-wis... · Posted by u/swah
znpy · 2 months ago
A recent thing is also that you cannot predict what will be controversial tomorrow. This that are basic common sense today might be controversial tomorrow.

Dumb example: gender. As early as twenty years ago it wasn’t controversial to say that women don’t have a penis. Today it is (i know I’m getting downvoted just for making this example).

So yeah, being public is a dangerous game with huge margins for losing.

bebb · 2 months ago
It's a good example. People have been fired, reprimanded, blacklisted from their field, harassed and stalked for publicly objecting to the gender identity viewpoint. It somewhat reminds me of the tactics scientologists used to suppress dissent. I'm glad that era is starting to come to an end now.
bebb commented on If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)   gregmckeown.com/if-you-do... · Posted by u/TheAlchemist
ErigmolCt · 2 months ago
This reads a bit like classic self-help, but there's a solid point hiding underneath the platitudes. Most careers do get shaped by inertia: the projects you say yes to, the skills you accidentally accumulate, the expectations other people quietly set for you
bebb · 2 months ago
I find that's a good reason, other than looking for an increase in salary, to seek out new employment opportunities every few years, while nudging your resume more towards the career you want rather than the career you've experienced.
bebb commented on John Varley has died   floggingbabel.blogspot.co... · Posted by u/decimalenough
yieldcrv · 2 months ago
gender identity and sexual orientation are different concepts, that have been married by European Christian dogma. harmonization in missionary work included harmonizing into a binary gender paradigm alongside a binary sex. many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems, before the swell of representation seen in the last decade or so.

although gender and sex is used interchangeably - even in the most progressive circles - gender is a reference to a set of cultural behaviors and roles, a form of expression, while sex is functional and 99.9999% chromosomal and binary in humans

you are familiar with this, for example, when someone says "be a man" in response to someone's lack of assertiveness, this has nothing to do with whether they have a penis and the binary male contributions to reproduction, it is referring to a behavior expression that is indeed arbitrary but shared

swapping genders therefore has nothing to do with what sex you are attracted to, when adopting that paradigm, especially when adding genders outside of the binary cultural behaviors

hence being "straight" doesn't change and is only a problem for someone else

bebb · 2 months ago
> many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems,

As I understand it, this is because these cultures had deeply sexist ideas about how women and men should behave, so they created additional categories to shovel everyone who didn't conform into. In practice this tended to mean that gay men would be placed in some sort of "non-man" male category. So while sexuality and gender are different things, in practice they end up linked through this mechanism of othering.

bebb commented on Ticker: Don't die of heart disease   myticker.com/... · Posted by u/colelyman
bebb · 3 months ago
Read the article, felt worried.

Came back here and read all the cynical and critical comments, felt a lot better.

Thanks guys.

bebb commented on Could the root of Alzheimer's be magnetic?   1393.xyz/blog/could-the-r... · Posted by u/rdgthree
bebb · 3 months ago
What about the amyloid plaques, tau aggregation and neuronal cell death?
bebb commented on Tim Bray on Grokipedia   tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
tptacek · 3 months ago
Why give it oxygen?
bebb · 3 months ago
Because it's a genuinely good idea, and hopefully one for which the execution will be improved upon over time.

In theory, using LLMs to summarize knowledge could produce a less biased and more comprehensive output than human-written encyclopedias.

Whether Grokipedia will meet that challenge remains to be seen. But even if it doesn't, there's opportunity for other prospective encyclopedia generators to do so.

u/bebb

KarmaCake day6October 31, 2025View Original