zaptheimpaler

I don't like ACR at all.. but after reading all the raging about ads on TVs I thought they would be terrible. Then I got one recently - the ads are literally just links to watch movies & TV series I might be interested in, on my TV? Like yes I do want my TV to show me some things I might be interested in watching, the same way Youtube does. I don't like the increasing privacy violations like ACR being used to tune those "ads", but seeing recommendations on my TV is a feature I like..

Heck if I had strong guarantees that the data generated by ACR was used only to tune recommendations/ads using an anonymous advertising ID like IDFA and not linked to any personally identifying information, I would want that too. But sadly there is no privacy and no way of ensuring that now.

ugh, I don't know why copying files and basic I/O is so fucked on Windows. Recently I was trying to copy some large movie files between 2 folders on an NVME SSD formatted to ExFAT in a good USB-C enclosure connected over 20Gbps USB-C port and explorer would literally just freeze & crash doing that. I had to copy one file at a time to make it not crash, and then it would have this weird I/O pattern where the transfer would do almost nothing for 1-2 minutes, then the speed eventually picked up.

This isn't even going into WSL. I specifically stopped using WSL and moved to a separate linux devbox because of all the weirdness and slowness with filesystem access across the WSL boundary. Something like listing a lot of files would be very slow IIRC. Slightly tangentially, the whole situation around sharing files across OSes is pretty frustrating. The only one that works without 3rd party paid drivers on all 3 major OSes is ExFAT and that is limited in many other ways compared to ext4 or NTFS.

Making something 2x cheaper is just a difference in quantity, but 100x cheaper and easier becomes a difference in kind as well.

The business sociopaths need to be able to shit out code and logos and voices and ads for their SaaS crypto casino social media feed fake therapy dating gig worker app, and AI makes it much cheaper to do so. The social value is there, AI lets us do more with less but it's always captured by the few people on top.

I use pseudonyms and post weird shit online, but I still feel very reluctant to post anything on large public channels inside a company. Everything is tied to your real name and all of us are hyper aware now that every single fucking thing on the internet is monitored, and will be used against you if necessary. I am 99% confident a tool already exists that a manager can use to get all messages from employee X over the last N months and summarize the content and surface any "red flags", which in a corporate setting would be incredibly broad.

I would love to set this up, I really want all my chats to be on one platform. The problem is, the AI companies seem to want the opposite.

My main concern is how well do all the extra features work compared to the native versions? Like web search, RAG on a document, or deep research, adding images, voice chats - my understanding is the models providers don't provide any API's for any of this stuff, so you have your own implementations of all the extra stuff right? Usually I find the open source versions of all these features aren't up to par with the corporate versions and they lag behind in development.

This should be a criticism of the kinds of bloated firms that take on large government projects, the kinds of people they hire, the incentives at play, the bidding processes, the corruption and all the rest. It has very little to do with software and more just organizations that don't face any pressure to deliver.

Nokia has a legal complaint [1] against HP related to H.264 and H.265 filed October 2023. It even mentions H.265 on consumer devices being an infringement. I sort of doubt this is about paying $0.04 more per laptop - there must be some uncertainty or legal risk maybe in certain chipsets or something.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67928650/1/nokia-techno...

Yeah this is a really good question. I'd love to know more about that too. There's some good history on the website here [1].

The creator apparently was selling it as freemium software in 1998, and then the bubble burst and the corp shutdown in 2002. But the creator created a non-profit called the Blender Foundation, launched a Free Blender campaign [2] (the forum post is still up!) to raise money from its users and bought out the rights to the software from the investors.

[1] https://www.blender.org/about/history/

[2] https://blenderartists.org/t/free-blender-campaign-launched/...

These are the same scumbags that scraped the entire internet including copyrighted books and private code without any regard for legality or ownership, now trying to spin them being sued for theft as a privacy issue.

Even if your google account is deleted, the email address is NOT recycled because it can be used to impersonate people - maybe the previous owner still has physical/digital accounts linked to that old email. As far as I know most services do this - an email address once registered is never released again.

After lots of hand-wringing and research and trying Kindle & Kobo, I decided to read on my iPad and iPhone. They have accessibility features like low light mode to make it easy on the eyes, I can always read on the go with my phone and they can handle large full color books and PDFs too. The iPad has basically all notifications disabled and no distractions installed so it feels like a reader.

It may sound simplistic but its the truth and there are plenty of other examples and history around this - Starbucks recently. 30 employees unionizing may not have any significant impact on their profits, but if they let that union grow it would have a lot more members demanding better working hours or wages over time. A strong union also generally leads to a loss of control by management where they have to negotiate more with workers which they don't like. Why do you think they were fired?

Because no amount of profit is ever enough for the stock market, everything must perpetually grow.

Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.

I got a new Samsung TV recently, i don't get the huge hatred for their software. It has some free TV channels, it has apps for the streaming services, even a decent web browser and overall good features. It supports Airplay, Google Cast, bluetooth etc. The OS has some annoyances and rough edges, but its mostly fine. I let it connect to the internet but not any of my other LAN devices so it cant' snoop too much.

I just don't see the problem, and don't see how connecting a different box to watch the same things is much better than just using the OS to do that. If they did have ads on it that would definitely be a problem though.

How do you connect your diary to an LLM? I've been struggling with getting an MCP for Evernote setup.

Arguing with people who believe in alternative facts is usually futile. Can you provide any trustworthy evidence of even one government program that provides free housing, education or medical care to H1Bs but not to citizens as you claimed before? Because i don’t think there are any such programs. Those sound like things refugees might get, not people on work visas.

That's a good clarification. I read through some of that link, and it does look relatively benign - Meta & Google pixels might see when you buy a kit but nothing more, but on page 21 they directly leaked genetic information to Microsoft via their Clarity tracker. Not intentionally maybe, questionable if it can be linked to a person specifically instead of just an advertising ID but they did leak that. I think the lawsuit says that even disclosing whether a person has undergone genetic testing is in violation of GIPA, so the information they sent to all 3 is enough to violate that.

I don't have any evidence they're selling anything but that lawsuit shows pretty sloppy behaviour for a company that should be thinking very deeply about privacy. I guess that's about what you said though :)

If you watch Twitch, you can see that all instances of the same emote in chat animate together. Then I tested this more generally in a web page, and the same thing happens - if the same gif is placed multiple times in a page, all instances of that gif will play in sync even if loaded at different times. I guess there's a similar idea in browsers then, where maybe there's only one memory representation of the gif across the page or the browser.

I wanted to try this, but I looked into Nebula a bit more.

Nebula is facing a class action for apparently disclosing detailed genomic data to Meta, Microsoft & Google. The subreddit is also full of reports of people who never received their results years after sending their kits back. There are also concerns about the quality of sequencing and false positives in all DTC genomics testing. Given what happened with 23andme as well and all of this stuff, I'm wary of sending my genetic data to any private company.

Some books are available to buy DRM-free if you search a little - sometimes from the publisher or the Kobo store. It's also just possible to buy a book and also download a pirated copy. You're not just hurting Amazon, you're hurting the author and I don't think we want to encourage a world where no one writes books because its impossible to get paid for them.

I don't see him endorsing the guy somewhere else and all i see in this post is:

> So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country. That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson's march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, ...

That doesn't sound like an endorsement to me.

I'm one of the immigrant groups people don't seem to like very much these days, but even I recognize some degree of ethnonationalism or desire to restrict immigration is NOT bigotry. I can empathize how jarring it must be to begin to feel like a minority in your own country - even if they aren't minorities nationally, they may be in local urban pockets. Unfettered immigration IS causing problems in many places, is often supported by businesses looking for cheap labor and it's absolutely reasonable to be opposed to it.

Moreover, the false equivalence you're drawing between opposition to immigration and bigotry is part of what let the problem fester in the first place. I think people should be allowed to oppose immigration without being called racist, its not the same thing. The open bigotry and racism by the right in many countries is partly a reaction to this false equivalence. They saw immigration in some cases as causing social disorder, as a tool to suppress wages, as causing increased crime etc. and they were forcefed a message of "all immigration is good and any opposition is racist" to reasonable objections. No one is obligated to accept every person who wants to come in.

That's nice, I think Linux/XDG has some standards around this too, but they too are not enforced - and many people have no idea these standards even exist unless the OS warns or enforces these things. I think there might also be some gap between "these files are only internally needed by this software" vs. "these files are created by this software, but may be good to show them to the user". It's nice the OSes are making efforts to do that though!

Flash is kind of dead now, i don't think the tools to create new Flash software are even released anymore. I would recommend learning Godot to make a game. There's some great tutorials like here - https://www.gdquest.com/library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire...

> And game devs throwing random shit into My Documents was also fun.

I hate this problem with all OSes. We have folders that started out being places for users to put things like Pictures, Documents & home, but over time they get filled with crap from software and it's difficult to find your own files. We should have had a "program-files" subfolder or something by default in all these places to separate things that applications put there vs. things that you put there.

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Do you make this argument in any other scenario? I'm sure all merchants who accept credit cards combined make WAY more than Visa/MC, but I think most would agree Visa has much more leverage over a corner shop that accepts Visa than the other way around.

There are 5 or 6 big insurance companies, maybe 2000 if we count all of the small ones and 400K medical practices. So even by this very simple money=leverage argument, each individual practice has far less money than the insurance company they are dealing with. So if more money = more leverage then these same numbers prove the opposite claim.

So its probably fair to say that the picture isn't as simple as money=leverage.

If a medical practice and an insurance company get into a dispute and one of them decides to not work together, the practice loses say 1/5th-1/10th of its customers, the insurance company loses 1/100000th of its revenue. I call that leverage.

And yet this has absolutely nothing to do with the claim that "Insurance companies hold tremendous leverage over care providers, up to and including the power to effectively put them out of business on a whim.", you're not even engaging with the argument at all.