Neat, I didn’t know that. I currently use Joplin this way, synced across my devices with Syncthing. Joplin also supports directly syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox (with optional encryption).

I’m sure there will be workarounds.

I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you’re savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won’t stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.

DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.

China’s measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It’s still possible to VPN out, but it’s a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I’ve lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.

I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn’t banned it…

Oh nice! I did a quick search for forks but didn’t find that, so thanks for linking. I’ll check it out!

This assumes a legitimate need to prove who you are outside the context of that specific site, rather than just within it. Sometimes that need is real, sometimes it is not.

When it’s not, and you only need to prove you are the same person who created the account, then a simple username and password is sufficient. Use 2FA (via authenticator app or key, NOT via SMS or email) on top of that. This allows users to prove to a sufficient degree that they are the owner of that account.

This is how most Lemmy instances work, for example. I can sign up by creating a username and password, with optional 2FA. They do not need my email. They do not need my phone number. They do not need my name, or my contacts, or anything else that is not related to my identity within their server.

I realize that this is untenable at large scales for any communications platform. Spam (and worse) is a problem wherever there are easy and anonymous signups. I’m honestly not sure how Lemmy is as clean as it is. I guess it’s just not popular enough to attract spammers.

Looks like the open source version was axed, and the cheapest subscription plan is $36.67 per month per user. Yikes.

I’d kill for a modern HyperCard.

I think it’s just for enterprise contracts, yeah.

Fedora seems like a good general-purpose pick to me, because it is modern, it has a large community, and it’s easy enough to install and use. It has similar advantages as Ubuntu — that is, a large community and broad commercial third-party support — without the downsides of having a lot of outdated software and lacking support for new hardware. I think Fedora is less likely to have show-stopping limitations than a lot of other distros, even beginner-friendly ones like Mint.

But that’s just one opinion. There’s nothing wrong with Ubuntu or derivatives. I’ve heard good things about Pop_OS as well, though I’ve never tried it myself.

LOL, I forgot about that. Fair point.

So sad for Microsoft that as soon as they decided to copy another one of Apple’s worst ideas, Apple moved up to 11 instead of 10.16.

That’s when Windows 10 stops getting security updates. Expect most software vendors to drop support for Windows 10 this year if they haven’t already. That doesn’t necessarily mean things will stop working, but it will not be tested and they won’t spend time fixing Win10-specific problems.

In enterprise, you can get an additional three years of “extended security updates”. That’s your grace period to get everyone in your org upgraded.

While I strongly relate to anyone who hates Windows 11, “continue using Windows 10 forever” was never a viable long-term strategy.

Windows 10 was released in 2015. Ten years of support for an OS is industry-leading, on par with Red Hat or Ubuntu’s enterprise offerings and far ahead of any competing consumer OS. Apple generally only offers three years of security updates. Google provides 3-4 years of security updates. Debian gets 5 years.

There has never been a time in the history of personal computing when using an OS for over 10 years without a major upgrade was realistic. That would be like using Windows 3.1 after XP was released. Windows 10 is dead, and it’s been a long time coming.

Now go download Fedora.

Half the movies released in 3D during the last wave were poorly done conversions not even shot for 3D.

Only half? -_-

I’ve only seen a few movies that were actually filmed in 3D. Even Gravity was filmed in 2D.

The problem is that actually filming in 3D requires using different (and expensive) hardware, and different creative direction all across the board. You can’t just upgrade to a 3D camera and call it a day. Not many studios will put in that kind of effort for something that is not proven in the market. And not many filmmakers are actually skilled at working in 3D, simply due to lack of direct experience.

I saw the Hobbit movies in high framerate 3D in the theater, and while they were not good movies, they looked absolutely amazing because they were committed 100% to the format from start to finish — not just with the hardware, but with the lighting, makeup, set design, everything. It’s a shame the movies sucked, and it’s a shame that there has never been a way to watch them in HFR 3D outside of select theaters.

They’re like 20 years too late to start copying Apple here. Apple had their shit together with their product line for a good while after Steve Jobs returned and eliminated the absolute insanity of Apple’s mid-90s lineup, which had at least three times more models than any sane person would find useful.

But recently, Apple went off the deep end. Boggles the mind that “Pro Max” ever made it past the brain-mouth barrier in a boardroom, let alone into an official product lineup.

Yep. AGI is still science fiction. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just trying to fool investors. Ignore anyone who is less than three degrees of separation away from a marketing department.

The low-hanging fruit is quickly getting picked, so we’re bound to see a slowdown in advancement. And that’s a good thing. We don’t really need better language models at this point; we need better applications that use them.

The limiting factor is not so much hardware as it is our knowledge and competence in software architecture. As a historical example, 10 short years ago, computers were nowhere near top-level at Go. Then DeepMind developed AlphaGo, which was a huge leap forward and could beat a top pro. It ran on a supercomputer cluster. Thanks to the research breakthroughs around AlphaGo, within a few years had similar AI that could run on any smartphone and could beat any human player. It’s not because consumer hardware got that much faster; it’s because we learned how to make better software. Modern Go engines are a fraction of the size of AlphaGo, and generate similar or better quality results with a tiny fraction of the operations. And it seems like we’re pretty close to the limit now. A supercomputer can’t play all that much better than my laptop.

Similarly, a few years ago something like ChatGPT 3 needed a supercomputer. Now you can run a model with similar performance on a high-end phone, or a low-end laptop. Again, it’s not because hardware has improved; the difference is the software. My current laptop (2021 model) is older than ChatGPT 3 (publicly launched in 2022) and it can easily run superior models.

But the returns inevitably diminish. There’s a limit somewhere. It’s hard to say exactly where, but entropy’s gonna getcha sooner or later. You simply cannot fit more than 16GB of information in a 16GB model; you can only inch closer to that theoretical limit, and specialize into smaller scopes. At some point the world will realize that trying to encode everything into a model is a dumb idea. We already have better tools for that.

I know this is from 2015, but even then, it was a bit late to make this argument. This was already mainstream enough in the 90s to be the punchline in syndicated comic strips. By 2015, we already had “customer experience engineers” (i.e. tier-1 helpdesk). The ship has not only sailed, it has sunk.

Anyway, the phrase originated in an era when programming was very different from what it is today, when most programmers came from a background in electrical engineering or something along those lines.

Apple’s monitors have an entire OS in them. They have much of the same internals as an iPad. Honestly, I have no idea why, because they don’t do anything especially fancy.

Samsung makes “smart monitors” with Tizen or some shit like that.

DBAs think everything is a database.

My guess is that this is a teenager, and this is probably their first experience with git and version control in general. Just a hunch.

Anyway, it is reasonable to expect a mainstream GUI app from one of the largest companies in the world to be approachable for people who do not know all the inner workings of the command line tools that are used behind the scenes. And it is reasonable to expect any destructive action to have clear and bold warnings. “Changes will be discarded” is not clear. What changes? From the user’s perspective, the only changes were regarding version control, so “discarding” that should leave them where they started — with their files intact but not in version control.

Have mercy on the poor noobs. We were all there once.

I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it’s going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that’s good design needs a break.

Half the replies are basically “This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn’t then get fucked.” Just adding insult to injury.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.

This is how Arc behaves by default, and it drove me crazy. The cons of it appearing when I don’t want it far outweigh the pros of saving me a single click when I do want it.

A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube

It replaces thumbnails with stills from the video. You can select between beginning, middle, and end.

It doesn’t change titles but it lets you force capitalization to lowercase, titlecase, or sentence-case. Keep in mind that this has no logic to retain capitalization of proper nouns no matter which option you choose. I set mine to lowercase just to have some kind of consistency, because I got sick of random ALL CAPS TITLES.

I haven’t used DeArrow myself. Crowdsourcing titles sounds interesting but I appreciate that Clickbait Remover behaves exactly the same way with 100% of videos.