davoneus

I wouldn't believe any missionaries statements of fact. After all, their history is as bad or worse than Columbus wrt the treatment of the native peoples in the Americas.

LOL... yea, I suffer the same problem. Case in point: I've been trialing Luculent for a week or so after seeing it here.

Iosevka is a great font, but it has SO MANY options, that I doubt one person's Iosevka is super comparable to anothers. =) I know I certainly customized the heck out of mine.

Nature relayed one from the British Dental Journal (2023) on the acid protection granted by BioMin F. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41415-024-7876-8)

Here's another from 2022 that compares Colgate fluoride toothpaste against BioMin F(https://shorturl.at/M4hiQ).

From the article: "Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves. "We don't invent anything, really," Laufer said. "We take things that are on the shelf and hijack them. We like to take something established, and be like 'This works, but you can't get it.' Well, here's a way to get it."

Wow.... I mean I can measure like anyone, but to make my own pharmaceuticals?.

Link:http://archive.today/lgsdN

What petty BS; it's a rounding error of a press release! If you want numerical precision, go read American Mathematical Society papers.

"It's potentially the first time anyone can download a GPT-4-class large language model (LLM) for free and run it on their own hardware. You'll still need some beefy hardware: Meta says it can run on a "single server node," which isn't desktop PC-grade equipment. But it's a provocative shot across the bow of "closed" AI model vendors such as OpenAI and Anthropic."

I love that Ars-Technica calls out BS on the title of the article: "Open source AI is the path forward," says Mark Zuckerberg, misusing the term.

The author Edwards states correctly "...undermining your competitors using a model subsidized by a social media war chest is also an efficient way to play spoiler in a market where you might not always win with the most cutting-edge tech."

Let's not forget Charles Lindbergh in that group either. He was wildly anti-semitic, and spoke glowingly of Hitler frequently, even into the 40s. Maybe it was due to that medal he received from Hermann Gohering.

Typical; someone with only half of a story pushing an agenda. You can look at the data yourself(*) No state pays more outright than California. Followed closely by NY, Mass, Ct, NJ. Look at per-capita income, and California is receives less than 44 other states. Lets see how does that compare some of those "red" states?MS(#8), Al(#7), La(#11), Ar(#15), Ky(#2), SC(#13), Tn(#16), Wv (#5), Oh(#21), Tx(#36), Mt(#19), NC(#20)?

Don't know about you, but the data sure tells another story doesn't it? I damn well don't live in CA (midwest), but don't believe anything on the 'net until you verify it yourself. Too many people pushing an agenda.

(*) https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...

Home Assistant: The State of Matter (Jan, 2024) "We believe in Matter: it’s open source, and most importantly, it’s fully local by default... Matter launched only one year ago, compared to twenty years for a standard like Zigbee, so it’s important to account for that in your expectations."

I've got a lot of respect for Oki. Granted they've left the US market but still in the EU and Asia. Heck, we were getting security firmware updates 7 years after initial purchase. Of the 10 we had at work, still rocking 9 of them 9 years after purchase. The only loss was due to a power spike after a power loss restoral.

I'd throw all our worthless Xerox in the trash if I could still get Oki.

Yeah, a creator who gets money from the very entity he complains about.

I unsubscribed from his channel the very day I saw that video. As a YT premium subscriber, I'll support creators who have at least some self honesty

For goodness sake, YT isn't close to perfect, but it's leagues ahead of the craptastic TikTok.

If you shove a bunch of $100 dollar bills on a thorn tree, it doesn't make it any less dangerous or change it's fundamental nature.

Yeah, DDG in my personal experience stinks. I've tried it several times over the past couple of years, and it always gives midgrade results (at best).

Maybe I've just trained myself to phrase questions that return better results on Google than other sites, I don't know.

I do know that I have never, ever gotten a result from DDG that meets or exceeds the same Google search.

The idea that knowledge didn't disappear during the "dark ages" is blatantly wrong. Entire swaths of knowledge disappeared simply because the Christian monks only preserved matter favorable to Christianity.

If the Roman (pagan) material dared to suggest something different than accepted church teaching, it wasn't copied or preserved.

Hell, that's why the capture of libraries in Spain in the 15th century was still important to the renaissance. Muslim scholars preserved a bunch of Greek and Roman material that had COMPLETELY disappeared during the European dark ages.

No, the terms of service (TOS) mandates how and what you can do on their site.

A snippet: " Permissions and Restrictions You may access and use the Service as made available to you, as long as you comply with this Agreement and applicable law."

Not a dang thing in there about "free". Now, you can argue whether or not your saw those terms, or agreed to them, but the TOS are legally binding.

Don't like those TOS, fine, makes no difference to me. But calling those videos "free" is not only naive, but wrong.

Absolutely, and I agree. I am a YouTube premium subscriber, and while nothing is perfect, YT does a fairly good job. Heck, they actually publish how much they pay their creators (45% - 55% of ad revenue). Sure, it could be more, it could be less. At least it's light years ahead of what TikTok even pretends to do.

Bull. I don't open up my browser and get fed YouTube videos. I choose to go to YouTube and watch videos. At no point did they "send me" a YouTube video for free.

I'd blame the prevailing economic mantra that "profits are the only things that matter" more than any set of UD presidents.

Also aggregating the entire situation is Wall Streets unhealthy laser focus on each Quarter's profits.

Because we all know if a company needs to spend 100mill and a year to bring up a new supply source, their stock price will plummet due to analysts negative ratings.

Yeah, I'm not convinced, given GM's (and most automakers) reaction to Covid and the continuing chip shortage.

Maybe things have changed; I'd certainly be glad to hear it. But we all know of Wall Street's long history of hatred towards physical inventory.

Up front: I don't play the game, nor have I bought it.

The brouhaha over it in the non-technical, broad journalistic sites was both generally lazy and biased. I browse a couple dozen 'news' sites each day, and I know my news feed was full of major press sites slamming the game. Wired's review was utterly pathetic (rated 1 out of 10), and several large newspaper organizations were not too far behind in their criticism. Heck, I canceled my sub to Wired just because of that horrific review; I figure if they let that kind of crap slide onto the top of their main page, they've fallen far enough that I don't need to support them anymore.

As far as the Tech press goes, however, they mostly criticized the product for it's lack of optimization, as evidenced by the bench-marking results that were all over the place.

Anyone who presides what Musk had done at Twitter is obviously either a Musk-can-do-no-wrong acolyte, or an ignoramus who's out of touch. I'd bet the former, if for no other reason than pity.

Hell, India's democracy damn well should be; it had a chance to learn from the US and others mistakes. That said, Indian democracy is a pale imitation to post WW2 European democracies.

Recommended away, but ease of use matters. I can use, and am comfortable with keepassxc, but there is no way in he* my wife, daughter or parents would be. It was hard enough getting them used to using BitWarden.

Amen. People are amazed when I fire up SysInternals 'ProcMon' and show them how many hundreds of thousands of times their AV fires off in one single minute of monitoring. ()

I'll grant that kind of sustained checking is what you need to combat malware on Windows. But it damn well does have an effect on the overall system responsiveness.

() I did a q-n-d check; 1.3M events, and almost 300K were AV/Malware.

I half suspect the only reason Twitter had the status it did is because all the news organizations pushed it so hard. Hell, it did all the hard work of finding interesting "new/hot" topics for them to cover. Made their job easier, and it's with the journalists I see a lot of concern and fear over where Twitter is heading.

Of course others used it too, but the 'news cachet' meant a lot too, and helped convince others to use it too. I could easily see journalists fears helping to keep the ugly bastard going. Glad I never wasted my time on it.

IMHO, Bluesky is nothing more than Dorsey's attempt to clone what Matrix was set out to do. And truthfully, Matrix already has already achieved a great deal; namely passing the 60 million user mark back in June of 2022, 70 million by October. Some major names have adopted it as well, including Mozilla, KDE and several organizations in the German and French governments, including a large German Healthcare org.

Matrix's code is independently audited, and they just completed the 2nd of those earlier this year. They did have some Cryptographic issue several months ago, but it was fixed quickly, and was on an old code base. The replacement is apparently close to completion, at which point that system will be submitted for an independent cryptographic audit.

I will admit that BlueSky does seem to incorporate the recently announced decentralized identifier (DID) spec from the W3C. The DID Method specs are still a hot mess, and there's no guarantee that the W3C is even capable of navigating that corporate 'I was here first' minefield. But I still have to tip my hat to BlueSky for doing it though. Given identity is so fundamental to these types of things, I suspect it'll be a damn mess incorporating it into existing protocols.

I tell everyone I know to check Mastodon out, but that IMHO, it's fundamentally flawed for what most people expect from Twitter. Simply because Mastodon has a NUMBER of major issues which include deep, hard to resolve issues. For example:

You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'.

Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back.

The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature.

Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.

Yeah, it's a major issue (to some at least).

Lots of fly by night servers, stood up by (probably well meaning) people that have no idea if how hard it is to run and administer a server like that. Point in fact the "Mastodon.technology"(MT) server

If you read the heartfelt post from the MT owners/op on why it had to be shutdown. How much it took of his life to run it, and the choices he made. It doesn't matter that a new "like that" MT server is being stood up as a replacement. The MT server admins post shows the burden of running a server like that. For free (unless Patreon'ed I guess).

Activity Pub is a well designed protocol, but to my eye it has some major warts(). Add in it's decentralized nature and it shows how hard it will be to institute major changes, even if the community supported it.

I'd like to find a nice, professionally run Mastodon server, with clear rules and a believable investment in infrastructure and people. Absent that, I certainly can't see myself advocating for it, it recommending it to others. Shame too.

() Lack of encryption, lack of non-server discovery, lack of consistent, user controled server migration.p