There are only AI renders and photos of the first prototype works, but I’m working on the actual schematics and renderings that I’ll publish once the hardware open source repo is ready.
Our small group uses The Lounge web client for IRC which is a very good PWA, acts as a bouncer, has history search (not unlimited, but pretty long), supports image upload, and basically builds a modern group chat on top of IRC as a backend. We have a few folks who still use traditional IRC clients, but almost everyone just uses the web app. It's not a bad middle ground.
Personally I see that as a feature. Chat is ephemeral, discussions/texts that aren't should be saved elsewhere anyways, otherwise it gets lost with all the other ephemeral stuff.
That’s what I thought until I learned that history really seems to refer to persistence. So if you’re not connected, you won’t get messages, even after you reconnect? For many that’s not very useful.
> So if you’re not connected, you won’t get messages
That's true, if you're not connected, you don't receive messages.
> even after you reconnect?
That's not true, once you're connected, you start receiving messages again.
> For many that’s not very useful.
Yeah, I understand it isn't useful if your perspective is that you should be able to read what happened when you were away. But I guess my previous point is that people shouldn't have to do that, there should be another resource for catching up what happened when you were away, and instead it should be OK to return without having to read through all the messages.
I think this is the number one reason more people don't end up using IRC nowadays. The flow for newer, younger users is:
- Use some software project, want to ask a question, see they have an "IRC channel"
- Hopefully it's a hyperlink to an IRC web chat, or else they'll have to do a lot of research to find out what IRC is
- Join the web chat link, see a room with a list of names
- See no messages
- Ask a question
- Wait ten minutes, get no reply
- Assume it's just dead and leave
The ability to see older messages would be a huge boon, and to see messages between connections as well. I've seen it happen that a user joins a channel, they leave because nobody talked to them, somebody answers their question after they leave, they rejoin, they ask the question again, then disconnect.
IRCv3 has "chathistory" extension. It basically involves combining an IRC network and a bouncer. There are at least two server implementations using it: ergo, which is more or less production ready, but does not have support for multi-server networks, and Libera's sable, which is under (very slow) development.
I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.
I guess that because of the "we don't need that here" attitude that ran a lot through the first generation(s) of Internet population.
And it's a shame because with a more dynamic IRC development we wouldn't be in the Slack/Discord silos situation.
Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all.
But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...
I was looking for a player that had this functionality when I switched to Linux. Finally settled on Clementine which has both a library & "file browser" mode.
In the browser mode you can just right click and add the folder to your playlist. Just like in foobar2000.
Consider switching to strawberry, it's a fork of Clementine. Clementine hasn't really been updated in many years (aside from auto translation merges and a typo here and there).
I don’t have a deep understanding of how these language models work, but what do I know makes think that saying “It is basically a lookup table” is sort of like saying “A car is basically a bike”.
Sure, there are some very vague similarities, but they are also incredibly different.
A bike and a car both take you places. But the kinds of places they can take you and how effectively they do so differs vastly.
Likewise, both lookup tables and LLMs take an input and then spit something out. But the similarities basically stop there.
Unfortunately there is not. Many will argue for whatever file explorer is their favourite, but all of them miss the mark by a wide margin. DirectoryOpus is a veritable Swiss Army Knife (with a freshly sharpened blade) of functionality. I've been using it on all of my Windows machines for many years, and it is one of those pieces of software that whenever I switch over to my Linux machine I very much miss. As a sidenote, PathFinder on macOS is a good Finder replacement, but again, lacks much of the functionality that DirectoryOpus provides.
Hi, author of gentoo (the file manager, not the Linux distro [*]) here.
I'm really low on time for maintaining gentoo now, which is why it no longer even has a web site, which is annoying and a bit sad.
I haven't used DOpus since my Amiga days back in the 80s and 90s, but obviously it was a big inspiration for gentoo. Probably DOpus has evolved a great deal since I used it; I've never touched it on Windows.
Just for fun/inspiration/reference, I would appreciate hearing what you find most lacking in gentoo, if you have experience using it. When it was first released, around 2000, I feel it was a pretty decent file manager for Linux and also some BSD systems, and it did so much* to help me improve my C and portability skills.
[*] I have actual e-mail from Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux, about the name clash. The e-mail is dated 2000-01-22, so it's almost 22 years since the question was semi-relevant. :) Now off to comb my beard and chase people off the lawn.
Thanks, I used gentoo quite a bit back in the day! Today I don't do enough file management to bother going outside emacs dired :)
Just to add some context, as far as I remember, gentoo was pretty similar to how DOpus worked on the Amiga until version 5, when it went from being a classic "one window, two pane, rows of buttons" thing, to arbitrary numbers of independent windows. DOpus 5 was really neat and powerful but also quite a different experience, more like its own desktop environment really. I hope I still have the ring bound manual somewhere...
Thank you for your contribution to the ecosystem of open source software and the monumental and often unsung effort it takes to develop and maintain something like a file explorer across a diverse set of platforms for an ungrateful audience.
Given a month of time, I don't think I could express the vast differences between Directory Opus 12 and Gentoo or many other file explorers that are available. Even PathFinder on macOS is a pale shadow of what Directory Opus achieves, and I happen to love PathFinder.
From file type support, to file renaming, image sizing, meta data options, scripting, macro recording, tabbed directories, filtering, finding in files, finding files in diretories, directory navigation, bookmarking, stability, speed, virtual directories, directory browsing, file system search, ftp, sftp, one and two way syncing, filename copying (e.g. copy filenames, copy full pathnames, copy short names, copy short pathnames, copy URLs, copy MD5 checksums, copy SHA-1 checksums, copy full pathnames with double backslashes, copy folder path, copy complete folder listing), file copying & file moving, queued file copying, unattended file copying, speed of file copying, prioritized file copying, pausable file copying, file deduping, renaming of dupes, unzipping and zipping in different archive formats, encoding files and decoding files. And I've only scratched the surface. And then just general spit and polish. And compatibility with all the different versions of Windows. And everything on a hotkey. And everything with configurable & saveable preferences.
I know that "but <favourite file explorer> also does that!" is a common refrain, but on Directory Opus, whatever feature you are comparing against, Directory Opus basically took the amplifier knob, turned it up to 11, then snapped it off to make sure you couldn't fuck with it. I know that "there is a utility in Linux that does that" or "well, that's easy, you just have to open a terminal and..." but again, it's built-in to Directory Opus. It just works.
I know I am singing high praises of this software, but it is like comparing Photoshop and GIMP, they both push pixels, but we know deep down, there really is no competition.
I really wish GPSoft would consider a Linux port, but they have emphatically stated that they have no intention of doing so, for business reasons, and I can kind of see their point.
There's nothing bad about Gentoo, but it isn't Directory Opus.
We are comparing what we used 20 years ago on the Amiga. What I think we all fell in love with was the configurability and speed. What Gentoo showed me was that the configurability and UI of the old DirOpus will only get you so far. I did a filededupe plugin for Gentoo, the UI for that made me cry getting that right takes time. I'm glad that DirOpus has gotten better and solve all these things in a good way!
