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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • GitHub is a great platform, which has championed open-source for decades, now. I don’t think anybody has anything to blame them for (except people not liking the idea that AI is trained on their code, like sibling mentioned), it’s more about fears it may go bad. Because basically, it’s where most of the code of the world is hosted, it’s a single point of failure. People also have questioned the pertinence of having all open-source code hosted on a proprietary platform. And the acquisition by Microsoft also had a chilling effect on those of us who remember Internet Explorer 6’s Microsoft more than VSCode’s Microsoft.

    For those reasons, it is desirable for those who love the idea of decentralization to look up for alternatives. But even there, it’s perfectly fine to stay on GitHub, “decentralizing” doesn’t require everybody to leave. :) Plus, even when using an other forge, it’s still good to keep publishing mirrors on GitHub for visibility and discoverability, currently.





  • This. Also, anybody who can identify you as the owner of the host (be it through Whois or through hosting service records) can associate your name to everything posted on that instance, thus profiling you, your tastes and your opinions easily (it’s insane the amount of personal information we can leak on social media, even when thinking we’re not). Clearly not something to do in countries where you can be harassed or worse for your opinions, and probably best avoided everywhere, if privacy is a concern for you. There is some virtue in being immersed in the masses (that’s actually a common anonymisation strategy, from merging streams comes plausible deniability).


  • Solving it the unix way:

    ls -1 | sort -R | sxiv -f -s f -S 5 -
    

    So it’s ls -1 to list the content of current directory (presumably where your pictures are), with one file per line, so we can then pipe it to sort, with the -R option to sort randomly, then piping the result to sxiv, a lightweight image viewer available on most distro (I just checked, it’s available on Debian). For its options : -f means it’s fullscreen, -s f makes it scale to fit the image on screen as well as possible, -S 5 tells it to start in slideshow mode and change picture every 5 seconds, and - is to tell it to take the files list from stdin (thus from the ls and sort commands).

    This won’t work for videos, though, only pictures.