cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17012596

> While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take your desktop to a new level. > > In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer. > > These features and more are being built directly into Plasma's Wayland version natively, avoiding the need for third party software and hacky extensions required by similar solutions implemented in X. > > Things will only get more interesting from here. But meanwhile enjoy what will land on your desktop with your next update. > > Some of the new features: > - Improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server > - Overhauled desktop edit mode > - Restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland > - Synchronization of > keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color > - Making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it > - Edge barriers (a sticky > area for mouse cursor near the edge between screens) > - Explicit support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland > - Triple Buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17012596

> While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take your desktop to a new level. > > In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer. > > These features and more are being built directly into Plasma's Wayland version natively, avoiding the need for third party software and hacky extensions required by similar solutions implemented in X. > > Things will only get more interesting from here. But meanwhile enjoy what will land on your desktop with your next update. > > Some of the new features: > - Improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server > - Overhauled desktop edit mode > - Restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland > - Synchronization of > keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color > - Making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it > - Edge barriers (a sticky > area for mouse cursor near the edge between screens) > - Explicit support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland > - Triple Buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering

While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take you desktop to a new level.

In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too), as you delve into interacting with desktops on remote machines, become more productive with usability and accessibility enhancements galore, and discover customizations that will even affect the hardware of your computer.

These features and more are being built directly into Plasma's Wayland version natively, avoiding the need for third party software and hacky extensions required by similar solutions implemented in X.

Things will only get more interesting from here. But meanwhile enjoy what will land on your desktop with your next update.

Some of the new features:

• Improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server
• Overhauled desktop edit mode
• Restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland
• Synchronization of keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color
• Making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it
• Edge barriers (a sticky area for mouse cursor near the edge between screens)
• Explicit support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland
• Triple Buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering

Sorry for the interruption last week; I was on vacation. While I was vacating, my colleagues were in full-on fix-everything mode in preparation for the upcoming Plasma 6.1 release in a little over a week. And what a release it promises to be! I think this is going to be a good one, folks. Lots of great features, improved performance and smoothness, and oodles of fixes for all kinds of strange bugs with your wild and wacky hardware devices!

Amazon’s use of AI and robotics in its warehouses isolates workers and negatively impacts union organizing drives, a new report finds.

The report, conducted by Oxford University research team Fairwork and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, aimed to explain how AI impacts warehouse workers by interviewing employees at robotic Amazon warehouses in the U.K.

In the wake of the pandemic, schools in the European Union have increasingly begun to implement digital services for online learning. While these modernisation efforts are a welcome development, a small number of big tech companies immediately tried to dominate the space – often with the intention of getting children used to their systems and creating a new generation of future “loyal” customers. One of them is Microsoft, whose 365 Education services violate children’s data protection rights. When pupils wanted to exercise their GDPR rights, Microsoft said schools were the “controller” for their data. However, the schools have no control over the systems.

In this article, I aim to take a different approach. We will begin by defining a laptop according to my understanding. The I will share my personal history and journey to this point, as well as my current situation with my home and work laptops. Using this perspective, we will explore the current dysfunctionality of the standby function in modern laptops, followed by a discussion of why this feature still has relevance and right to exist. Finally, we will draw conclusions on what we can learn and take away from this.

The Israeli military wanted to kill more Palestinians faster. They unleashed powerful technology to do it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16307984

> Executive summary > > The purpose of this primer is to publicly expose Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide against the people of Palestine, and to connect technology workers to the No Azure for Apartheid campaign. > Introduction > > We are No Azure for Apartheid, a group of technology workers within Microsoft and its subsidiaries seeking to expose and condemn the specific technologies complicit in the ongoing apartheid and genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine as a whole. We are part of the broader No Tech for Apartheid movement, which began with opposing Project Nimbus at Google and Amazon. With Microsoft leading advances in AI technology, we, as Microsoft employees, are morally obligated to guide the ethics and lasting ramifications of these technologies for the future.

Multiple groups are working to keep Amazon, Google, and Microsoft from doubling the number of centers in the country, fearing environmental devastation.

• Over the past 12 years, 16 data centers have been approved in Santiago’s metropolitan area. Most use millions of liters of water annually to keep computers from overheating.
• Chile is in the midst of a drought, expected to last until 2040.
• The government has said it will launch a national data center plan to regulate the industry.

Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.

I’m announcing a new initiative to improve our applications ecosystem. The goal is to improve the quality and quantity of KDE applications and the number of application contributors. For anybody who knows me, it is not that surprising. Inside KDE, I have been mainly involved in apps for many years. I worked on all areas, from development (maintaining or co-maintaining many apps like NeoChat, Kontrast, MarkNote, Tokodon, and Arianna, and contributing to numerous other apps, but also design, promotion, websites (e.g., apps.kde.org) and even a bit of packaging (Flatpak and to a lesser extent Windows). Hopefully, making this a bit more public and making this an initiative with a bit more coordination will encourage more people to help :)

Executive summary

The purpose of this primer is to publicly expose Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide against the people of Palestine, and to connect technology workers to the No Azure for Apartheid campaign. Introduction

We are No Azure for Apartheid, a group of technology workers within Microsoft and its subsidiaries seeking to expose and condemn the specific technologies complicit in the ongoing apartheid and genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine as a whole. We are part of the broader No Tech for Apartheid movement, which began with opposing Project Nimbus at Google and Amazon. With Microsoft leading advances in AI technology, we, as Microsoft employees, are morally obligated to guide the ethics and lasting ramifications of these technologies for the future.

The team is happy to announce Kdenlive 24.05, this update reimplements the Audio Capture feature and focuses on enhancing stability while introducing a few exciting new features like Group Effects and Automatic Subtitle Translations. This version comes with a huge performance boost and the usual batch of quality of life, user interface and usability improvements.

This release comes with several performance enhancements, significantly boosting efficiency and responsiveness. Highlights include a massive speed improvement when moving clips with the spacer tool, faster sequence switching, improved AV1 NVENC support, and quicker timeline operations. These optimizations are part of the ongoing performance improvement efforts funded by our recent fundraiser.

When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.

Since we first announced it last year, our Vulkan wrapper KDGpu has been busy evolving to meet customer needs and our own. Our last post announced the public release of v0.1.0, and version 0.5.0 is available today. It’s never been easier to interact with modern graphics technologies, enabling you to focus on the big picture instead of hassling with the intricacies and nuances of Vulkan.

In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one or more of Facebook’s Family products who visited at least one of these products on a particular day.”

This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.

Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people that you choose to follow.

Conversely, those running Facebook groups routinely find that their content isn’t even being shown to those who choose to follow them thanks to Meta’s outright abusive approach to social media where the customer is not only wrong, but should ideally have little control over what they see.

Over the next two newsletters, I’m going to walk you through the decline of Facebook and Instagram, starting with the events that led to its decay and those I believe are responsible for turning the world’s most popular consumer apps into skinner boxes for advertising agencies.