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🚨 Leaving Reddit & Salvaging My Posts! 🚨

I’ve decided to leave Reddit, but before I go, I’m rescuing some of my best posts and comments! 📝

I’ll be reposting them here on my blog & sharing updates as I continue digging through my history. 🔎

If you’ve read r/firefox over the years, stay tuned for some tech talks! 👨‍💻💻

👉 Check out the first update here: quippd.com/social/posts/2024/1

🔄 I’ll keep adding more as I go!

Asif Youssuff · Leaving Reddit and Salvaging My PostsIt has been a while since the unsuccessful Reddit protests, whereupon I argued that Reddit ought to pay posters, lest they leave. Reddit crushed the protests, and unsurprisingly, they aren’t paying posters for enriching the corpus of posts and comments that helped Reddit cash in to the tune of $203M in LLM training license fees.

Moving on, I wrote about my thoughts of 's prospects after the demise of XUL-based extensions post version 57.

I revisited this topic over time, but in 2017 we were deep in the middle of discussion around whether this would be the death of Firefox for a significant portion of the "power user" base.

Did you lose extensions? Did Firefox die for you then?

Do you agree with me that Firefox post-57 is still a good browser? Read on:

quippd.com/social/comments/201

Asif Youssuff · Post 57, what is Firefox’s unique selling proposition?After version 57, what will be Firefox’s USP?

I'm one of those people that still has a non-streaming music library stored locally, so I had set up to manage my library and manage conversion from and other music formats for playback on mobile.

To scratch my own itch, I configured Airsonic to convert my FLAC music transparently to on download, and shared my config.

Hope it scratches your itch too!

quippd.com/social/comments/201

Asif Youssuff · Does Airsonic support Opus?I’m having trouble trancoding from flac to opus, my command is the following: Name flac > opus Convert from flac Convert to ogg Step 1 flac --silent --decode --stdout %s Step 2 opusenc --quiet --bitrate %b - -

I saw @hipsterelectron mention that is pushing Bing excerpts of pages.

I'm still looking for a engine when looking for information on the web, not an oracle, so I tend to try to actively ignore AI results.

Still, it reminded me that other options exist, like @StartpageSearch. After I talked about them on Twitter, their account actually followed me!

Read the post: quippd.com/social/comments/201

Asif Youssuff · What search engine do you use?What search engine do you use?

Here's one for the users -- specifically those who run or derivative distributions like and

If you put a web browser binary somewhere on your filesystem (like inside of $HOME), the rest of your OS doesn't know that you can use that app to open links.

I pointed someone over to a resource on how to teach Debian that your manually-installed browser can open links: quippd.com/social/comments/201

Hope it continues to help people!

Asif Youssuff · How can I set a manually installed browser as the default on Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu and Mint?Original Post

Something more interesting for the former fans now using -- you may wonder why Linux users try to run apps when they can't find a Linux native app rather than a app - aren't Linux and MacOS more similar, given that they are both systems?

Unfortunately, it isn't easy to run Mac apps on Linux, even years later: quippd.com/social/comments/201

Asif Youssuff · When Linux native software isn’t available, why do we “emulate” the Windows version? Aren’t Mac and Linux more similar?Original Post

Think back to your upgrade to Mojave - did you notice that Apple dropped font smoothing on non-high DPI displays?

Well, a lot of people did when they were using , because it arrived with a bug that coincided with the macOS release that made fonts too blurry.

Mozilla eventually released a fix matching the platform behavior: quippd.com/social/comments/201

Asif Youssuff · Text in fonts too bold or blurry in Firefox on macOS Mojave?Original Post

Sometimes, you just gotta have fun with your devices.

Every once in a while, I decide to try to spruce up my application UIs by using themes. While a lot of people tend to go cutesy, I end up playing with themes - UIs that were used in the past but aren't anymore, or sometimes, themes that were unreleased.

While playing with color, I put together a theme resembling the unreleased Drawing Board theme for Mac OS 8.

Hope you enjoy it!

quippd.com/social/comments/201

Asif Youssuff · A Firefox Color theme inspired by the Classic Mac OS “Drawing Board” themeFirefox Color showing the Classic Mac OS Drawing Board theme

Every once in awhile, people switching from to realize that their won't work in Firefox.

People often wonder why simply doesn't pay people to implement support in Firefox.

I've written up some thoughts as to why doing this really ought to be up to -- they produce the proprietary product intended to promote Chrome usage:

quippd.com/social/comments/202

PS: Nothing stops people from keeping a Chromium browser installed to "cast" videos.

Asif Youssuff · Does Firefox support Chromecast and Accelerated Mobile Pages?Original Post

@yoasif There is the Darling emulator, but it doesn't appear to be easy to setup. Full disclosure I haven't tried to use Darling.

darlinghq.org/

www.darlinghq.orgDarling |Darling — macOS translation layer for Linux

@z3rOR0ne I mention that in my post, unfortunately it only works for CLI apps, and running GUI apps remains experimental.

@yoasif i m comparing linux and macos on macbookair 2013 and crazy how macos is more difficult to find compatible apps than linux

@freechelmi Are you running an unsupported macOS? That can be annoying. There's always OpenCore Legacy Patcher: dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Le for those machines.

I think that support is going to vary based on the hardware, but Linux can definitely be an option for older Mac hardware, if hardware is supported.

dortania.github.ioOpenCore Legacy PatcherExperience macOS just like before

@yoasif well almost , i run the latest supported on mba 2013 which is big sur

Running unsupported macos might be against my religion 😀

@freechelmi Unfortunately Big Sur is unsupported as of September 26, 2023.

If your software isn't supported on that OS, I would look at other options for your OS.

Web browsers in particular seem to require Catalina (both Chrome and Firefox), so I hope you aren't browsing the web on that machine in .

@yoasif thx i know :-) this is why i provide linux in this machines , keeping people on mac os is a dead end

@yoasif yes ubuntu 24.04 is really great on mba2013 even with 4bB ram
Although i have to say big sur feels also really snappy

@yoasif in the end , it s a bit sad but i feel the best way to beat vendors that don t release linux apps is to seamlessly virtualize with windows 10 machine

@yoasif @hipsterelectron @StartpageSearch I mean, if LLMs are actually good at something, it's modelling large amounts of language data. Summarisation is one of the few valid use case for LLMs.

@yoasif @hipsterelectron @StartpageSearch Yes. I work in the field.

I said "large amounts of language data". A few one-sentence (if at all) notifications are not enough data to reliably summarise, especially when context or cultural knowledge like irony or metaphors are required to understand large parts of the content.

@yoasif @hipsterelectron @StartpageSearch Do you even know anything about how the technology works or are you just googling "AI fail bbc"?

@lianna @hipsterelectron @StartpageSearch I don't claim to be an expert in any way, I just know that the products don't work, no matter how the technology is designed to work.

Why should I believe a summary with lies in it? Why should I waste my time consuming content that the vendor disclaims?

Getting fake knowledge isn't a goal for me even if technologists and business want me to rely on it.

@lianna @yoasif @StartpageSearch "i work in the field" so you're doing propaganda for your employer got it