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freedsoftware

121 karma · joined January 23, 2023

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freedsoftware··on Org markup should replace Markdown
Everything you said is actually true of Org. It is a markup language that looks like plain text but is far more capable.
freedsoftware··on US teens say they have new proof for Pythagorean theorem
This talk already happened but for some reason it's not posted. Very odd.
freedsoftware··on The Future of Thunderbird
Slowness and memory bloat is the main problem of Thunderbird. I don't know what the cause is, but it is frustrating that there are no full-featured open-source mail apps that have decent performance.

Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly slow and buggy at least for me.

freedsoftware··on Bilingualism as a Deterrent for Alzheimer’s?
The original headline is sensationalistic and referencing a specific language learning product so I didn't include it. But this is some interesting research.
freedsoftware··on The weirdness of quantum mechanics forces scientists to confront philosophy
Rather overstated. How you perceive the wavefunction has no bearing on how it works.

But it is a valid to be concerned about quantum woo which deliberately misapplies quantum mechanics to macroscopic ones and even the idea of consciousness, all of which is total bullshit.

I have a distant relative who is a religious fundamentalist who thinks that quantum mechanics means that his belief about the veracity of a faith claim is in fact the determinant of its truth. No surprise he likes Jordan Peterson.

freedsoftware··on Twitter introduces 4k character tweets for subscribers
This defeats the entire original appeal of Twitter, which was to avoid the ginormous walls of text that Uncle Rico would put on his wall talking about his love for Jesus.
freedsoftware··on Record $3.8B stolen in crypto hacks last year, report says
Wallets do not have to have 2fa. A currency could force them to have it.

Interestingly enough, one of crypto's biggest critics, Elizabeth Warren, has also been after Wells Fargo for Zelle scams.

freedsoftware··on Record $3.8B stolen in crypto hacks last year, report says
Coins could be made to require two different keys to perform operations.

Social engineering attacks getting people to divulge their private single keys are a huge method of crypto theft.

freedsoftware··on Record $3.8B stolen in crypto hacks last year, report says
Coins should have 2FA themselves. Without it, theft is obviously far easier.
freedsoftware··on Record $3.8B stolen in crypto hacks last year, report says
Even the most rinky-dink banks have 2FA. Crypto is eventually going to consume itself once enough marks realize they will never make money from it.
freedsoftware··on Deep Learning Is Not as Impressive as You Think, It's Mere Interpolation
I largely agree with this. But one thing that better AI has revealed is that a lot of human performance is also bullshit. If ChatGPT can pass an MBA final exam, then this would suggest that MBA exams are not good at determining business aptitude.

And I think many people here have seen first-hand that this is true.

freedsoftware··on Tech's Elite Hates Labor
I've seen this as well. VCs are actually terrible at their investments by and large. They mostly use gut instinct or personal networking as their determiner of whether to invest in stuff.

That's a poor heuristic and it is why so many people continue to fail upward.

freedsoftware··on Tech's Elite Hates Labor
It's also that good marketing of a product is probably more integral to its success than its engineering. There are so many stories of superior technologies failing because of bad marketing.
freedsoftware··on Embarrassment as US cyber ambassador's Twitter account is hacked
"Nate Fick, the inaugural US ambassador at large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, on Saturday announced the hack of his personal account (not the government agency one) with - of course - a tweet. "
freedsoftware··on Neo-Nazi leader and girlfriend accused of targeting Md. power stations
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is going to become a lot more common.
freedsoftware··on We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
You can criticize LLMs all you want, they will still be a huge thing in our economy and civilization.
freedsoftware··on Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
This article really needed to be longer and have some illustrations. What's the point of publishing an essay about interface design without including any graphics?

I'm sympathetic to the points made, but as someone who has not used Flutter, I really do not have a sense of what the tooling and output is like based on this short piece.

freedsoftware··on Elon Musk's right-wing turn is tanking Tesla's reputation
"Currently, just 13.4% of U.S. adults have a favorable view of Tesla, compared with 16% last month and 28.4% in January 2022, according to survey data released on Thursday by Morning Consult Brand Intelligence. That’s a 15% drop year over year. Driving the decline is Tesla’s loss of popularity with people who identify as Democrats. Just 3% of those adults view Musk’s EV company favorably, down from 10.3% in December 2022."
freedsoftware··on The Breadth of the Fediverse
An interesting look at how the open protocol of ActivityPub has built a much bigger network than it may seem.

I still think Mastodon needs to be made easier for people who aren't techies, but it has a lot of potential since that is only a UX challenge.

freedsoftware··on Elon Musk Cuts Off the Best Tool for Finding Your Twitter Followers on Mastadon
He is absolutely scared of Mastodon. Can't let the proles decide where to microblog for themselves!
freedsoftware··on The failed promises of tech liberation
Got a link with a discussion of his theories? I would find that interesting to see.
freedsoftware··on The failed promises of tech liberation
Here's a link to "The Californian Ideology" if you haven't read it:

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...

freedsoftware··on The failed promises of tech liberation
This is a long-form podcast with Richard Barbrook, the co-author of "The Californian Ideology," a 1995 critique of what later became the dominant ethos of the tech industry.

Lots of interesting history, including a discussion of how Minitel, the French precursor to the web, created a more sustainable form of techno-capitalism even though it was created by the state-owned phone company.

freedsoftware··on TikTok's Enshittification
That info is vastly counteracted by scores of academic studies showing that the algorithms promote right wing content.

Whatever actions were manually taken against a few individual accounts are absolutely dwarfed by the algorithms' promotion of right-wing bilge. Twitter itself admitted this long before Musk, but others have as well.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740703/twitter-algorit...