brie

@brie@beehaw.org

Kbin • GitLab

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

brie,

As a reminder, you can always just uninstall OneDrive and call it a day.

Until Microsoft takes that option away as well…

brie,

Not PeerTube, but he is on Odysee/LBRY.

brie,

On the one hand, having an AI generated alt-text on the client side would be much better than not having any alt-text at all. On the other hand, the pessemist in me thinks that if it becomes widely available, website makers will feel less of a need to add proper alt-text to their content.

brie,

Increasing capacitance (how much charge is stored to reach a certain voltage) or the voltage it is charged to would indeed increase the capacity. Putting several in parallel would work, as would making a bigger capacitor. The main problem as far as I can tell is that the energy density of even supercapacitors is low, so you’d need a much larger volume to have the same capacity (and thus a much thicker phone).

brie,

The original research was regarding supercapacitors, not Lithium-ion. Based on the PNAS preview it seems it has to do with changing the design of a supercapacitor to increase charge rate.

brie,

Alexandria and Stract use their own open source crawlers. Brave is also independent, if I recall correctly.

brie,

Are there any search engines other than perplexity that tie the sources to sections rather than just popping them all at the bottom? That always felt like the most practical layout for being able to easily cross-check information against their supposed sources.

brie,

DDG’s AI chat isn’t a search engine. It’s just a chat interface for GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude, without any search access. It’s also not very up to date.

GPT-3.5 Turbo:

Who is the PM of the UK?

As of my last update, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is Boris Johnson. Please note that political positions can change, so I recommend checking the latest news sources for the most up-to-date information.

Is Queen Elizabeth still alive?

Yes, as of my last update, Queen Elizabeth II is still alive.

The Claude version doesn’t fare any better:

Is Queen Elizabeth still alive?

Yes, Queen Elizabeth II is still alive. She is the current and longest-reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, having ascended to the throne in 1952. As of 2023, she is 96 years old.

brie,

Also, superior depends on the user and use case. One person might find that GIMP has all the tools they actually use in Photoshop, and another might find that the ones they use are missing from GIMP. Without knowing the audience, it’s hard to know what they want to hear.

The free Delta game emulator for iPhones is live on Apple’s App Store (www.theverge.com)

Caveat: It isn’t available in the app store in the EU, and is instead only available via the developer’s marketplace, AltStore¹. As far as I can tell, this genuinely isn’t because of greed, but because of a little detail in Apple’s EU rules (possibly wrong):...

brie,

It’s more the other way around. Both distribution on the App Store and through third parties will incur the fee. However, if you don’t distribute on third parties, you can stay under Apple’s old terms, avoiding the fee. It’s a way of monetarily punishing third party app distribution.

brie,

Email subscriptions also sometimes have that, with bonus points for several vague and similar sounding categories, and emails not mentioning what category they’re in.

brie,

IIRC the main reason it isn’t enabled by default is because >=1080p is only available via DASH. Normally Invidious can just point the client to fetch videos from Google’s servers, but for technical reasons DASH requires the Invidious instance to act as a proxy (the client asks the instance for video data, then the instance fetches it from Google and sends it to the client). The net result is that watching 1080p streams requires much more bandwidth from the server.

brie,

Thanks, edited this into the post (along with the distros listed by LWN)

brie,

As far as I can tell running xz directly should be fine, but for the extra paranoid check the version of the xz-utils package. If it is safe, it will be either less than 5.6.0, or it should be 5.6.1+really5.4.5-1 (xz 5.4.5 with a spoof version number to ensure compromised systems get the update).

brie,

Amarok has support for managing music on iPods. Rockbox is an alternate operating system which doesn’t use the iPod’s database, and instead does its own indexing.

Apple will require notarization for apps from third party app stores, and will disable updates for apps installed via third party app stores if staying outside EU (support.apple.com)

As far as I can tell this basically means that all apps must be approved by Apple to follow their “platform policies for security and privacy” even if publishing on a third party app store. They will also disable updating apps from third party app stores if you stay outside the EU for too long (even if you are a citizen of...

brie,

Yeah, that’s the more thorough version. My interpretation of the quote was to first search for stupidity, if only to confirm it is not in fact stupidity (but malice).

brie,

The problem is that Apple doesn’t accept the responsibility. it’s the DMA that’s doing this to their customers, not Apple. By vilifying the DMA as harmful to privacy and security, Apple gets to make themselves out to be the good guy. When things get worse, Apple can just blame the DMA again.

brie,

Is there a picture of what this actually looks / would look like? Honestly, although it is going down a bad path, it isn’t actually all that surprising. Firefox already has sponsored address bar suggestions by default.

brie,

(Not the person you replied to)

Windows has issues, but so does Linux. My personal experience with Fedora (Silverblue) has been fairly good with minimal hassle (Gnome Software breaks sometimes with auto updates, but is leaps and bounds ahead of the Synaptic days). However, someone using other hardware, another distro, or using other software might have a lot more problems to contend with.

There’s a lot of case-by-case nuance that in my opinion makes broad switch from A to B recommendations less meaningful than discussing the pros and cons and letting people decide on their own whether Linux could be useful for them.

brie,

When going from Windows to Linux, all of the tradeoffs are involved. For me what I don’t like about Windows outweighs the pain points of my choice of Linux distro, but for some they’d weigh the sides and Windows still comes out on top.

Anyway my take is that Linux is better ideologically, but for the average consumer who justs want to use their favorite apps, Windows works fine and they’re not really going to care until Windows piles on enough garbage to make switching worthwhile.

brie,

I guess it kind of depends. Not really sure what most people actually use, but for those who use MS’s services, Office web isn’t great, and Skype for Linux is rather temperamental. A lot of games work under Proton, but not all.

My perception of “average user” is probably skewed towards being not technical enough to troubleshoot on their own, but skilled enough to run through a tutorial of what keys to press. For someone used to Windows, patching things up is simpler than learning all the ins and outs of a new OS.

I don’t disagree that most people would be fine using Linux, but there needs to be a compelling reason why Linux would be significantly better, or else the switching cost makes it not worthwhile.

brie,

Another thing that they do that should make the process less vulnerable is they try to get developers involved in packaging their own applications (and have a verified badge, though I’m not sure how rigorous their verification is).

brie,

Another way is through DNS (eg. noads.libredns.gr).

brie,

The main downside is that there is a lot less customization of filters short of using a different DNS. There is also the potential for logging DNS (present with normal DNS servers as well). LibreOps claims they don’t log requests, and personally I don’t think they have much reason to lie, but there is still that element of trust. Many of the more well known DNS servers don’t offer ad blocking DNS, so you’ll most likely be switching to a different provider.

brie, (edited )

Some useful services:

brie,

I think some kind of anti-HTML measure yeeted my angle bracketed link :(. Fixed.

Google's Chrome Browser Analyzing Your Browsing History with so-called "Privacy Sandbox" Feature

For nearly two years now, Google has been gradually rolling out a feature to all Chrome users that analyzes their browsing history within the browser itself. This feature aims to replace third-party cookies and individual tracking by categorizing you into an interest category and sharing that category with advertisers. It’s...

brie,

There’s a similar “feature” in Android that replaced the old Android ad ID. Android rolling out new Ad privacy settings

Microsoft stole my Chrome tabs, and it wants yours, too (www.theverge.com)

Last week, I turned on my PC, installed a Windows update, and rebooted to find Microsoft Edge automatically open with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I don’t use Microsoft Edge regularly, and I have Google Chrome set as my default browser. Bleary-eyed at 9AM, it took me a moment to realize that Microsoft...

brie,

It’s so easy to switch to Edge, you don’t even have to try! Literally!

Microsoft Edge is actually good, so I sure hope the team building it isn’t about to resort to more tricks to get Chrome users to use it.

Given Microsoft’s track record…

brie,

It will probably depend on distro. Some distros might get more bloated, but I think most won’t do anything that makes them unusable on lower-spec hardware, especially those that specifically have low system requirements as one of their core tenets.

brie,

It depends on the use case, but for what it’s worth on a 4GB Android tablet, I can run VSCode + Chromium/Firefox via Termux without too much trouble. ~2GB of memory is taken by Android, so 8GB on a proper Linux system is more like 3x more memory available. It would take a massive amount of bloat to make an impact. My main concern would like with websites being wasteful with both memory and CPU usage via JS, rather than the browser itself becoming bloated.

brie,

That would depend largely on the use-case and specific software. I’m fairly confident that Lyx isn’t going to become bloated any time soon, but I can see that happening especially with proprietary alternatives like Word (ignoring for a moment Word isn’t on Linux). It all really depends on whether or not a less bloated alternative exists.

brie,

F-Droid doesn’t usually remove apps that aren’t maintained, as far as I can tell. There are apps that haven’t been updated in over a decade (Quill). Since F-Droid sorts by recency of release, they tend to just sink to the bottom of searches anyway.

brie,

The study is from 2018, and I wasn’t able to locate the original source from searching. Also, from the author’s bio:

Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte

The Hacker News discussion also does not inspire confidence…

brie,

By that I meant from the perspective that the initial allegations still felt like it could all just be a misunderstanding. Now that it has been donated, it seems to be more a matter of who at Open Hand was actually in the know (since it is possible that Jirard geniunely was being misled himself), and why the money wasn’t being donated. The golf tournament stuff definitely feels much more circumstantial since it is based on extrapolation. Overall it does seem like the IRS getting involved is going be the only way definitive evidence of what was actually going on will come out.

brie,

“Open source is free if you don’t value your time.” (forgot who that quote is from)

Sometimes the time investment is small, but especially for complex software, the friction of switching from one imperfect (proprietary) software to another imperfect (open) software makes it not really make much sense unless the issue is severe (house is half destroyed).

brie,

In the EEA, much more is on the way:

Bing’s web search from the Start menu and the Edge browser can be uninstalled Third parties can add to the Windows Widgets Board feeds Third parties, like Google or DuckDuckGo, can provide the built-in web search results that Bing once had exclusively Windows users who choose to sync their Microsoft accounts will have their pinned apps and preferences synced, seemingly keeping their EEA-enabled choices Windows will now “always use customers’ configured app default settings for link and file types”

Good to see Microsoft just blatantly confirming that these are anti-competitive measures rather than any sort of technical limitation.

brie,

WINE and Proton are great, but it really depnds on what programs in particular are needed. Even one unsupported application can be a dealbreaker when no alternatives exist or are acceptable substitutes.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines
    •