SunlitCat

Especially Samsung.

I’m still very salty about Samsung never officially releasing their Samsung Odyssey VR headset in Europe. It was the best VR headset among the Windows Mixed Reality headsets at the time of their release.

Of course, the HP Reverb was better, but it came out much later, too late for WMR to really take off.

I still believe that if Microsoft had forced Samsung to release the Odyssey VR headset worldwide, WMR could have been a success.

And I’m pretty sure Samsung won’t release this one (the Galaxy VR) worldwide either, which will be the reason it fails and Google will probably take that as an excuse to shut down the project as well.

Since when became XMPP "the internet standard for chat"? What about IRC[0]? :(

[0]: RFCs 1459, 2810 - 2813, 7194.

Which is kinda sad. Way back in the mid-2000s, I was playing World of Warcraft with a few people I had met in the game itself. Later on, we chipped in to rent a TeamSpeak server from a company that offered ready-made servers and we had a lot of fun. You didn’t even have to do much admin work. :(

There’s something else I notice in my daily work with all kinds of different people, which I like to call “tech avoidance.”

For example, this week I helped someone set up an account on an online library platform we use. I had to tell them multiple times not to tap the buttons in the email, website, or app right away, but to read them first. They were clearly nervous, and you could tell they just wanted to finish as quickly as possible and get out of “that very techie situation” to simply use the apps.

I mean, yeah, I get it. Technology isn’t for everyone. But the (sad) fact is that we live in a world largely dominated by it. And although it has created many problems we now need to solve with even more technology, it also helps us solve many of the problems we had before.

My hope is that AI will evolve to the point where it can become a kind of companion for those people, guiding them through situations involving technology that they find difficult or intimidating.

As always, there’s a well-fitting xkcd for that one: https://xkcd.com/978/ :D

Oh no. :(

I really liked his series about modern c++ and learned a lot from it. It even made me understand some of the more complex topics of it and kinda rekindled my will to keep on learning.

Something i never understood about WASM is....Why? Why the need for yet another binary format. I mean we have java bytecode and .net bytecode already, why was there a need for yet another bytecode? Or was it an case of https://xkcd.com/927/ or similar? :D

Quite the opposite! There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here to give people a simple toggle that manages to circumvent such geoblocks. ;)

I wonder if AI would have been a huge help to that.

Another rewording:

"...to upload your photos (on your IDs)..." :D

Recently, i found lots of fun with codex-cli of openai, which even works as a mere ChatGPT Plus subscriber. :)

> a public alternative with private transactions

This is exactly why governments should step in and regulate Visa and MasterCard, to prevent them from banning porn or other adult services.

If this kind of banning goes too far, there will come a point when even Joe Blow and his dog start using cryptocurrency. And once (truly private and anonymous) cryptocurrency becomes widely circulated, people will no longer need to exchange it back into fiat currency. Joe might start paying other people directly with crypto and eventually, perhaps even his rent, utilities, groceries...?

And then what? How will governments collect tax revenue?

Funny that you mention Apple Stores. There's a widely circulated video showing a masked man walking into an Apple Store, yanking all the display units off the tables, and walking right out, without anyone trying to stop him. No intervention. No security. Just quiet compliance from staff and onlookers.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AcUU9snHMe4

To really delve into the technical side of things: I’m fairly certain that large parts of Windows, especially when it comes to DRM, rely on third-party technologies, components that Microsoft licenses and integrates but doesn't necessarily have full visibility into or control over. That could very well include parts of the DRM stack itself.

So while Microsoft controls the platform, that doesn’t automatically mean they can trivially extract plaintext content from DRMed streams, especially not without compromising the integrity of systems they themselves may not fully own.

That's maybe one of the biggest helping things. Having the right audience and even if it is only one or two people (or kids). This can make a lot of difference.

Ideally, the entire path from source to display is secure and inaccessible (even for the operating system), that is the core promise of DRM. Of course the device must render the content somehow, but DRM is specifically designed to ensure that this path can't be intercepted or exploited.

What happens outside of that path, before it's decrypted or after it's displayed, is beyond what DRM is meant to control.

Coworkers convinced me to switch to whatsapp a few years ago (like 2023 or so). The reason, tho was as old as the internet is! They wanted to see the pictures of our cats we have at our workplace, which I liked to take with my phone. Later on WhatsApp became (sadly) handy for other tasks as well but also as a good way to stay in contact with friends, living further away! :D

Although those apps are still out there, i really miss those days were all you needed was some kind of unique identifier like a nickname, username or something like that an email address and some fancy password (and you weren't even pestered about to provide a phone number anywhere!).

Those were simpler times. :')

Although being too young to be really have seen gopher, i can still remember the (comparatively) simple "Internet" from mid to late 90s.

IRC for chatting, ICQ for instant messaging (which didn't work because my ISP at that time used a strange firewall / proxy setup and IRQ wasn't able to get through), newsgroups as a kind of discussion board, picture viewers for all kind of image formats (like wise video players), real player (Buffering...:D) for streaming....and most importantly web browser(s) when you want to grab information from all around the world (but dang having only a 33.6kbit modem, was really a test of patience sometimes).

Oh! I forgot! WinAmp which can whip the llama's...yeah you surely know what it does whip! ;)

But the larger issue is, if Microsoft Windows is able to grab DRMed content, there is some path to grab DRMed content at all. Which means that if someone with lots of time, passion and talent on their hand might be able to exploit that path to get more then just a screenshot without audio every 0.2 fps.

The promise of DRMed content at the moment is that (technically) no one is able to do so as there are no backdoors into it, for nobody.

Nice ad slogan!

One AI per person

One voice. One vision. One AI - for you.

Not that the bomb answers: "I am sorry Dave, i can't do that!"

Wow, it was like forever ago that i've seen that movie. Didn't realize it was meant as a comedy!

Three.js is no game engine, tho.

It can be used to create one and being all Javascript / HTML makes it totally approachable for a task like this.

Well, yes. I totally agree with you on that one!

The original comment was about (mis)using the browser as some kind of platform independent runtime environment for apps.

Admittedly, at my workplace, I created a few (very simple) html/javascript based apps to get some tasks done quickly (like sorting some tables, or a little task planer tool) as it is convenient, because a browser is something you have everywhere.

Especially what does it have to do with that "these models are getting more powerful"?

Was about to say "If we only have some kind of runtime system, which could run an app exactly the same on every supported operating system without needing to port that app, that would be awesome!". :D

The opposite would be something like the bug reporting system in Second Life by Linden Labs (an online world where you can be with a virtual avatar, doing stuff) (at least way back, i dunno if they still have that open).

They had a public facing jira open, where people could file bugs and what not about the viewer (the client) and the world (the server).

You didn't need some special account or something like that, just your normal Second Life account was enough to get access to that one.

Drawback was, you were able to see what happens when filing bugs is easy. Of course, many people used it to file real bugs but also complained about stuff not working like they expected (or how it should work according to them, which brought other people up against them and so on...in the end you were able to read the latest drama here and there, right in the jira entries).

Although, to be honest, i thought it was an awesome idea, but you when you open up an easy way for people to report bugs, you need an easy way to explain what bugs are and what not. :)

Now! The real exercise would be to run wine for linux in that one (and of course, having FreeBSD running in a Hyper-V VM under Windows :D).

Thank you for your response! This makes personal branded software kinda awesome.

Actually if it is some software providing value, i wouldn't mind getting it regardless who is selling it.

Of course a company name in the background looks more serious, but to be honest, i've bought lots of apps for my Android phone which are getting sold under some company name, but just having a single developer behind them (at least i suppose).